001there's someone else here if you can hear me i've got one affirmation from someone else on zoom that you are inaudible and hw cam is not working um [Music] no we do thank you to those answering me to helping me affirm that it's not just me you can only have we can i think your microphone is the live one yes it was a lot better when we just unzoomed some of those silver linings to coven so we don't go on to hw cam on cable we go right onto the computer and just go on hw cam.org and we can't get it in at all so let me let's oh so your mic is at work okay can you just type in the chat for her to speak because we can hear her hi pam so
002we're going to put the mic on the computer so we should be able to hear you so you are ready to share your public comments thanks superintendent banjos i appreciate it also be really helpful if someone can affirm that there is actual um you know we can't this should be somewhat of an ability to see i can't see anybody and you don't have your camera on um generally i would have been there i couldn't and hw kim's still not working via hwcam.org nonetheless i'll begin do you have confidence i'm proud that it is working this is one of the things you've heard from me multiple times i've spoken at school committee yes my name is pamela millman i live at 135 lives in peabody massachusetts and i have spoken to this school committee multiple times
003i have sent emails this is fun can you hear me yep we can hear you keep going okay okay um i sent emails at least about uh two actions at my um that happened with my family but it seems like you still have yet to address the multitude of issues and since you haven't addressed the multitude of issues of the past um and i'm hoping that you would continue the further but since you haven't i want to draw your attention to the calendar that you put up as an exhibit since you've minimized the impact of the implicit bias and the outward blatant disregard to the multiple victims of the school district's exclusivity and lack of its understanding of its impact on top of latent actions of addressing the multitude of issues surrounding diversity equity inclusion
004i would like to draw your attention to the calendar that you have put on for exhibit for the 21 22 school year there is no time like the present to begin to recognize and address the implicit bias issues that you have within the district and some of them are fairly simple while while others are not that calendar is still incredibly biased and problematic i the the issue here is so in your face to us and our family and you know and you have yet to look at this and see it when you could still consider a christian religious non-federal holiday a vacation day and state it as such i know you voted on this earlier although i also know that you've recognized the importance on revisiting votes this is a good time to make that
005recognition you don't need to wait to for your expert facilitator to recognize these kinds of issues you don't need to wait to address these issues when they're brought to your attention you don't need to wait for someone to tell you what you're doing is hurtful you don't need to wait to address the issues of understanding that that exclusivity that bias is problematic i implore you to take this great opportunity and make a change and make a change tonight when you visit that calendar once again it'll be an opportunity lost i have yet to hear from multitude of members and maybe you will not ever respond but about how my family was a victim of your implicit of your outward and your open bias and exclusivity that you have yet to address i have not much
006more to say but i hope you consider that and if you can please make sure that your hw cam programming is working there so that your open meeting is really open that would be very helpful thank you if she wants to go to eight counter regional schools on youtube if there's a live stream up right now and that's where it's great thank you just for clarification for anybody on zoom if you want to go to the hamilton regional school district the live youtube channel is up and running and you can access the meeting at that location as well great hello live audience most of you are here to be recognized oh okay great kristen crockett you are up and ready to speak great can you hear me we can yep okay great um i do
007typically try to go to the meetings but i have been working at a coven vaccination clinic it was great to see a lot of hamilton wedding students come so i'm looking forward to getting back to normal i just want to take a moment i was really disappointed in the vote to not bring foreign language back to the sixth grade and going into the last meeting i we are a mandarin family disappointed that the recommendation is to get rid of them but it did make sense and um kevin sano's presentation was very well done um i wish that you guys did bring in foreign language but since you haven't done that i am asking and begging you to look at what has taken place in lieu of sixth grade foreign language my daughter was fully remote
008she has been in three different sixth grade academies she watches movies while doing class work this is such a missed opportunity i've checked with other students other families who have different teachers there's no curriculum being provided if we're not going to give our students the benefit of a world language we at least need to give them something that's educational i don't know how sitting and having another free period to do homework even counts of minutes and learning but this is an opportunity to teach our kids how to organize to teach our kids how to take notes on a cornell method something along those lines or do projects teamwork be team building you know work on current events just sitting in a classroom and doing paperwork isn't enough that's all i have to say on it
009i hope you guys look at that for next year in the absolute foreign language thank you kristen is that it i don't see any other hands raised on zoom zipper great just checking studio audience here okay so that would be the end of public comment and um so at this point we are going to close down the zoom link again this is available on hw cam and live on hamilton one of regional school district youtube for folks that want to continue watching in the virtual environment thank you for those folks that logged in for zoom and again we're going to redirect you to those two options okay so first order of business is to remind everyone of your civic opportunity tomorrow to vote there is an election in both towns and included in that would
010be the election for members of the school committee and this year um peter wolzick has decided that his retirement would be eminent and he's giving the opportunity for other people to run and be on the committee so we wanted to thank him for his time this is from the committee did you want an opportunity to say anything no no i really i i really didn't want to draw any attention to you know my rather undistinguished career on the school committee where i felt like i was a largely ignored voice that failed on all accounts to convince people of my vision for the district i really did try to work hard for students for teachers for taxpayers i had a vision i do have a vision for the district to break out of this 100 year
011old model of education to bring in a learning management system that would help students and teachers to thrive i wanted to bring language k through 12. i just feel like i failed on all accounts and i think my time is best served rallying parents because i notice parents the school committee listens to parents they so if i can rally parents to convince the school committee to listen i think my time is best served doing that so yeah i didn't want to draw any attention to a rather undistinguished career on the school committee well we look forward to seeing you on that next thing we have is the history it says history projects but it's the um do we put i think anna i don't know what oh here so if you don't push oh it
012works it works when you push and the green light goes off you're muted yeah okay i think anna had her hand raised sorry i just wanted to say to peter thank you for your service and as a newer member of the committee i applaud anyone who has the stamina to do this for years upon years and i guess i just before we move on having heard your somewhat heartbreaking comments i feel like it's appropriate for us to give peter a round of applause and say thank you honest to god i did this for my daughter and i found at the end of three years also did was take hundreds of hours away from my daughter i have heard that from school committee members before peter i just wanted to add real quickly that you know
013i think that you took on an extremely tough job during an incredibly challenging time and while i understand where your sentiment is coming from that you feel that you know you haven't done much because you have so many visions for the district you know i want to say that i really hope in the next couple years you start seeing the seeds you planted start to bloom because i really do think you made a tremendous difference on this committee of the past three years and it was an honor serving with you so i appreciate that i really do hope as a committee and as a community we can have a we can start creating a vision for our district i just think we lack a vision right now we don't it it's hard to go anywhere
014if we don't have a vision of where we want to be what what we want for our students and our teachers and i said one last quick thing i remember when we had first moved here and you were going getting um signatures and you came to our house and i thought why would anyone want to do that what so you've served as an inspiration to me and i really believe you served as inspiration to your daughter and our whole street our neighborhood um anytime you lend your voice and anytime you speak up for what you believe in you can't you can't think that it went into a void and you can't think that it didn't make a difference i mean people heard you people respect you i think that um you probably made a bigger
015difference than you realized so thank you it's kind thank you i could just also echo some of the sentiments that have been heard three years of service is significant you you know you have been at every meeting at subcommittee meetings and i would reinforce what i've heard others say that i would not sell yourself short in terms of the impact that you've had on this district and thank you for your service to the folks of hamilton and wynnum thank you i just set high standards for myself and i found i failed on all accounts well when you set your standards high you always reach higher so so hamilton one of them has a long history of participating in the history fair we have a long history of doing well in the history fair and um
016this year we are not alone and is ms borges here okay so i thought that was you but i wasn't and um so this has been going on for a long time kevin o'reilly mrs borges stepped in you know people were concerned wow will we be able to still be great and it truth is is it's not about the person who's leading it it's about the team effort and she's going to present all of the wonderful projects that have placed with the state and also some of our students that are going on to nationals thank you very much um on behalf of the social studies department we too would like to thank peter for his service to our district and also his continued support of the regional school district's history fair program so you've always
017been one of our biggest advocates and you've also been one of our judges at our at a number of our public showcases national history day is a year-long academic program focused on historical research interpretation and creative expression for 6th through 12th grade students and by participating in national history day students become writers filmmakers web designers playwrights and artists as they create unique contemporary expressions of history every year more than half a million students nationwide participate in national history day in massachusetts alone over 6 000 students participate from districts across the commonwealth the experience culminates in a series of contests at the local and affiliate levels and an annual national competition in the nation's capital in june our students began their journey in last september by choosing a research topic that connected to this year's theme
018communication and history in a typical year the regional high school social studies department hosts a public showcase of all the participants projects in december where community members provide feedback for students students use this feedback to ready their projects for the next level in the massachusetts state competition and due to the uniqueness of the school year we were unable to host this community-wide event this year and we would like to thank the many community judges who have also included school committee members of the past who come out year after year to help us evaluate the projects and we hope to return to that next fall for the second year our students have been asked to conduct research in the middle of a global pandemic and faced restricted access to historical archives and libraries including social distancing
019requirements forced them to be creative in ways that they communicate their findings with each other and collaborated with their groups all participants truly embraced this year's national history day theme communication and history as they navigated these obstacles this year students prepared their projects for two rounds at the state competition and the top two projects in each category will represent the state of massachusetts at the national contest this june traditionally this contest is held annual at the university of maryland at college park and it's usually the second week of june where students from around the world and i mean around the world they compete against students from american schools that are abroad as well as students in the american territories they come to washington dc to gather and present their historical research projects due to the
020pandemic the 2021 contest will again be held virtually june 13th through the 19th this um this coming uh summer the social studies department is proud to announce that we have three projects representing massachusetts and advancing to the national contest and i'm happy to present our national finalists to you tonight in the individual website category 10th grader olivia swillman earned a second place medal with her project strength and silence how persistent non-violent protests won women's suffrage olivia could you come forward please i've asked each project to just give you a quick overview of their research yeah thank you for inviting me here tonight um so ms borges just said the title of my project it's focused on the peaceful yet confrontational and determined communication strategies of the national women's party during their 1917 and 1918 silent
021sentinel protest outside the white house these protests ultimately led to the passage of the 19th amendment my website also goes into detail about the early suffrage movement in the 1800s the anti-suffrage movement alice paul world war one the imprisonment of suffragists and the lasting effects of the suffrage movement that are still present today thank you olivia and um the school committee has as well as the public has access to be able to view these projects because i've linked them on the exhibit in the group documentary category we have 11th graders seamus haney leo kagan micah katz colin leary and eli malloy who earned a second place medal with their project anti-japanese propaganda during world war ii hi um i'm leo this is colin and uh eli micah and shamus were not able to be here
022tonight um our project is called brainwashing america it's about world war ii propaganda specifically anti-japanese propaganda our project was focused on the impact that propaganda had on the american public really mostly about how it intensified the existing anti-japanese sentiment that was in the united states following the attack on pearl harbor and how that resulted in the incarceration of over 120 000 japanese-american citizens and the long-term economic and psychological effects of that incarceration thank you excellent [Applause] and then our last national finalist group these young women ended up placing first in the group documentary category 11th graders maggie ferricano gianna randazzo in bridget rorstall in their project the greensboro in standing up by sitting down come on up gianna hi everyone my name is gianna randazzo this is maggie and bridget first i'd just like to
023thank the school committee for inviting us all to come and talk about our projects tonight i also like to thank miss borges along with the entire history department especially our teacher mr kenneth for helping to guide us through the entire process of creating an nhd project our group decided to do a group documentary which was about four african-american college students that helped to kick start student students during the civil rights movement and these students demonstrated the power and impact that nonverbal and symbolic communication can have as their use of nonviolent protests helped to communicate a powerful message of courage while exposing racism and this subsequently impacted the entire civil rights movement as students throughout the south and later in the north helped to join their fight to communicate their dissent towards racism and segregation in
024southern society thank you and i know that these are history projects but as you can tell they are so relevant still today i also need to recognize the many special prizes earned by the state comp at the state competition by students who are not present tonight but certainly deserve our recognition two of our projects were chosen to be part of the massachusetts historical society juneteenth exhibit this summer j mcguire riley clark jesse cooper jackie chapterlane they should be recognized for their website little rock nine the face of racism nationally exposed and again another honor for maggie gianna and bridget their greensboro documentary will also be part of that exhibit for best project in indigenous history awarded by the plymouth patuxet museums went to meena gurley for her website unbreakable how the navajo code talkers answered
025their nation's call to win the war for best project in stem history awarded by the metropolitan water works museum that went to ariel greenberg for her website website code girls of world war ii communicating secret codes and for best use of primary sources awarded by the peabody museum of archaeology and ethnology at harvard university lily glass for her website roosevelt emir in yosemite the camping trip that changed conservation i must also recognize one last group this year hamilton wenham students swept the group documentary category not only did our students earn first and second prize and they were advanced to the national contest but the honorable mention in that category was also earned by hamilton wenham's um high school students as well eleventh graders ian castro castro kane leo greco ryan lore and luke mcmahon received
026honorable mention for their documentary untying the knot of war the cuban missile crisis and i especially want to recognize this group because last year as sophomores they too were national finalists and they placed third in the nation for their documentary about president nixon's 1972 visit to china quite an accomplishment and i think with all that was going on at the end of the year last year with the pandemic we didn't give them the recognition that they need finally a very special thank you to all of the teachers who have guided our students throughout the entire research process brett burnett johann knates and ann page their professionalism and commitment to our students is an asset to our district and the reason that this program is so successful thank you for having us tonight all right um
027dana do you want to take c or do you just yeah no i can hear that um if i may i just since i got to speak i just want to say thank you so much miss borges and to all of you thank you so much and i loved that they were all on the exhibit and we did get to see them and appreciate them and the work is at a professional level it's it's just stunning and and so impressive and thank you all for doing it and sharing it with us so and we should say you are all welcome to stay and watch history in the making however it probably will not make the same impact that your projects have and if you need to leave feel free thank you so um i don't
028know if you want me to make the motion or just explain where we are with the calendar i can make the motion and then explain yep okay um okay check me on this if i get the motion right um so i move that the hamilton wenham regional school committee amend the approved 2021-2020 school calendar so that the first student day of school would be september 1st 2021 is there a second for that a second second by michelle horgan point of order if i want to make a motion to a men should i do that now or should i do that later i think you should let dana explain why we're doing this okay first yeah because i think they're going to be for different purposes i think okay so before we do i just want
029i i would like to make a motion to amend okay so i my what i'd like to just bring forward is why i'm bringing this forward to you this calendar was originally approved on december 18 2019 so typically calendars are approved you know well in advance so in we have heard um we have met with the hwea with the union and we have heard they have shared with us a concern regarding the early start date if you look on the calendar right now the early the date the teachers would actually be returning on this calendar is the 23rd of august and uh we listened to them and they um shared with us how important it was to um and it is true that that's quite early that's much earlier than many years part of it
030just has to do with the way the calendar falls and so after listening carefully to them we agreed to bring that to you for your consideration the one thing that you should know is that if you look at the end of the school year so june 20 june 2022 if you look right now on the calendar the last day with no snow days is current would currently be the 10th of june with in this new revised calendar the last day with no snow days would be the 17th of june if there were five snow days you need to be mindful of the id of the fact that due to the new juneteenth holiday the final possible day is actually monday june 27th um the so that's i don't know if i need to say more
031but that is that that's the that's how we got to be in this place and it is um out of listening to our teachers that that is what they are hoping for this change and i think we need to mention the mou is necessary oh yes i'm sorry yes so um i don't know how much that if we uh maybe you say it so you guys don't say it so if we were to make this change it will cause the teaching staff not to be paid for one week their week they would be one week delayed so many teachers choose to get paid on a regular basis throughout the school year but because moving this back their contract only allows them to be paid on the first friday after school starts so there will be
032a pay period then there will be three weeks until the next pay period so every teacher will miss a pay check essentially they won't lose the money it's just that because of the way the weeks fall they won't get a paycheck in that week so we will need if if we make this change we will need to have an agreement with the teachers union that they understand that that will happen and i i think it's important to know that they're not losing a check they're not losing pay pay periods are realigning correct and there's a longer distance between the last page period of one year in the first pay period of another exactly and can i just add one more thing which is we would we would need to create a formal mou with the
033teachers however in an informal way the teachers are aware that it would just be the sh and just to clarify what david just said it's really just a shifting nobody is losing any overall they're going to make this they're not losing salary but it is a shifting and the teachers are aware and they they have so there would need to be an mou but yeah they are aware of that so and vinnie can you clarify for us if there's cost to the extra payroll that would be run for yep that's what i was going to mention so this also changes the payroll for all fiscal year employees as well so because the teachers will skip a week we have to then divide all the fiscal year employees by 27 payrolls instead of their normal 26.
034so if the way you look at it from one year to the next day their bi-weekly pay might actually decrease a little bit but it's just because it's spread over one extra payroll so that will affect all administrators all fiscal year office personnel and all custodians pretty much anyone that works the entire fiscal year but but again everyone still is going to get the same amount of money it's just end of the end of the year everyone is still getting the same salary it's just exactly so all right yeah okay can we say and we should reiterate this was approached to us by the union we this is not us correct forcing it on anybody correct it was brought to us yes it's us listening to the request that the teachers are making exactly yes
035okay anna i would like to make a motion uh to amend the prior emotion i would like to remove the distinction of good friday as a vacation day to treat it as a regular school day thereby changing the last possible date from the 185 instead of being june 27th to move it back to june 24th so i am going to say if if we do that and this motion passes we will not be able to vote on this calendar tonight because one of the reasons we are considering this is that the union needs to be consulted prior to a calendar change so if that is the will of the committee to accept that motion i will need to ask that we lay it on the table tonight so i i second the motion great i
036think we've discussed it enough with regards to you know i'd like to think our new focus on you know diversity inclusion in our district we can't stop kicking this can down the road as well as the fact that you know the simple math is vacations are placed where they are so you can use the minimum amount of days they're always put after a holiday right so you're only using four days in the week instead of five the fact that we're putting a vacation day before the holiday makes absolutely no sense like why it's gone on this long just from a logistical standpoint makes no sense so okay this might be a point of order i don't i don't now that there's a motion and a second yep that now it's it's just one thing up
037or down now i'm going to suggest that we lay it on the table because as you are aware calendar needs to be consulted with the union so that is not debatable so i'm going to ask that we vote on whether or not to lay this on the table so there's three there's three things three things that are happening now right so right now promotion the amendment and you're asking to lay it on the table correct and we're talking about april 15th right motion that we don't make it label it a vacation day we it doesn't go into what happens if we say yes we still have to go to the union right we still have to the union could file a grievance because they were not consulted prior to a setting of the schedule you
038could file a grievance because they're not consulted correct so there is no debate on a motion to table so we should vote to whether or not to table i i have a point of voter just clarifying question if we lay it on the table without determining how the committee overall feels about it is there any merit to taking a vote on the amended motion with the understanding that it is not binding until we hear back from the teachers and we vote again because right now we haven't taken the pulse of the committee at all as to whether or not people actually support the abandoned motion i also feel like it is somewhat in violation of our whatever i don't want to use the word duty because it's not a duty but it isn't transparent to
039the public that that was something we would be voting on tonight so if someone did not agree with this decision they didn't have the opportunity to come and speak i i'm actually going to i'm going to disagree with you on that only because we actually had a comment from the public unsolicited about this very topic right so it's it's something that we've spoken about before and pushed on the road and we're sort of doing that again and i think that sort of it's just time to time to you know talk that have that discussion i would say on the agenda it says vote on the calendar right but it doesn't say that we are going to vote on a calendar that's different than what's in the exhibits okay so if someone had an opinion that
040that was not what they wanted they did not have the opportunity to come and speak because they had were unaware that that was a possibility so i'm happy for us to now vote on whether or not to table this until such time as we can one give the public notice and two have a consultation with the union so um all in favor raise your hand i couldn't hear i'm sorry so we are now voting on whether or not to table this motion to the next meeting go ahead ask a question well i just is there i guess i just procedurally is there there's no way for me to make a motion to separate these two items you could absolutely do that oh well i thought i asked that already i mean but can can i
041can i do that i guess i will rescind my motion to the table right i move that we separate the two calendar questions and vote on them separately is there a second for that i'll second that second by michelle horrigan i can see the value in this especially when we have to go back and ask the teachers right the the hwea the fact that we're actually agreeing to what they asked us i think is to sign a good fit so and i would also say that i do think there's merit and of the committee taking a position understanding that i would also say to david's point we've heard from not only members of the public but i myself have raced this at least two or three times i think every time we talked about the
042calendar i have raised the good friday element is it's discriminatory on its face so i don't think this is totally unsurprising but i do see michelle's point that it's a change that the public wasn't necessarily aware of but i do think the committee should make a decision and express an opinion about whether or not we want to keep going friday's a vacation day or not i think i know how to do that okay so let's vote on whether or not we want to change the first day of school i think we actually think we didn't vote on whether to split yes so let's vote on whether or not we're going to vote tonight so if we've passed this then we will be voting on two motions potentially so if you would like to vote separately
043the change in the first day of school and the change from the change uh regarding april something 15 15. um if you are in favor of that raise your hand there's no need to call for a post because it is unanimous okay so uh dana which motion would you like to take up first uh i'd like to take up the first day of school vote and i move to vote great so if you vote yes you are moving the first day of school for staff members to august 30th and the first day for students to september first if you are in favor of that raise your hand okay there's no need to call for opposed because that is unanimous okay so then we were separating two votes we have a motion to [Music] remove the
044vacation day on april the 15th and then there is a motion to table that motion so we are going to move we are going to vote on whether or not to table that motion that is not debatable if you are in favor of tabling the motion to our next meeting raise your hand that is four if you are opposed to tabling the motion to our next meeting raise your hand that is three so we will table that motion to our next meeting can you write that down somewhere okay michelle yep but is there an ins is there i don't know how to ask this but is there was there in that an instruction to the committee to con to to between now and then consult with the teachers union that was my question that is
045the superintendent's responsibility but i just wanted but that's a direction from the committee that we would yeah okay and they watch so just give us a call oh yeah i would just say if people have comment about that either in support of or against they should yeah they should public comment at the next minute come to public comment or send us an email because we do read your emails even if they sometimes come in at 6 30 at night or we shall just yeah then will we take thursday night a final vote on my original motion to undesignate good friday at the meeting on the 19th once everyone's had a chance to be consulted and probably my ex that's my expectation yeah yeah and what i'll be able to do is to share the perspective
046of the hwea when you bring this back for a vote at your next meeting yep okay great um okay so not too far off or five minutes late uh we are now going to discuss district goals um one of the things that is challenging is having a shared vision when we have shared vision it allows us to focus on those things it also allows us to know what kinds of things we should be looking out for so um mary beth is you know been here some time seeing some of the things that are going on and is i guess going to propose some ideas to see if this is the direction that we want to go in before she develops full goals for that thank you michelle and the draft district goals are linked on
047the agenda and i am just going to try to enter full screen here and i will talk these through so as you indicated um we've been working on the draft district goals these goals um have been um crafted at with work with the leadership team so that is principal eric tracy assistant principal brian mannigoni craig covey liz lovell jen clifford carolyn stediak ben sherston stacy busick who is our special ed director kristen lazaro who is our k-12 counseling director tom geary and vinnie leone so we have now spent two meetings really trying to work through these and to bring to you where we see the next level of work needing to be done in the district these goals have a lot of significance in the sense that they they help inform the work plan for
048the board going forward where we would be coming back to you and reporting progress on these goals so that's an important piece they helped to also drive budget decisions so that is another reason for this work and what we would also envision is that these district goals lead to the formation of the superintendent's goals and administrators goals and teacher goals so it has a big impact in terms of where the district is headed in the next year so with that let me just kind of scroll down the first goal is following up on a goal that exists for this year continuing our efforts to build a strong district district vision for student outcomes when they graduate and we we have been referring to that as a portrait of a graduate so that visioning process you
049have voted to support and will begin this fall and so that is the first part of this goal is to build out that portrait of a graduate you can see in our action steps that we are targeting december 2021 to bring forward a consensus portrait of a graduate to the committee for a formal vote and once that portrait of a graduate is finalized we have a north star in terms of the the vision for the district then the district would immediately move into strategic planning mapping out the the critical steps to realize that vision and a five-year plan one of the things that is noted in terms of launching the strategic plan and appreciate anna cedzek for reminding and recognizing that we need to be sure that the strategic planning is done in collaboration with
050and in alignment with the town town master planning efforts so that all three entities hamilton wenham and the school district are planning strategically together so that that is something that we would be sure to be looking at and that again the target date here is june 2022 to bring a strategic plan a final strategic plan to the full board so that is the the first goal that we are bringing forward to you would it be helpful for me to go through all four or do you want to stop after each one and ask questions do they do you feel like they fit together there are a lot of things that do fit together um so with your permission i'll go through so the next goal we we really gave a lot of thought to how
051to best structure this and we ended up with a model that we have to teach improvement of teaching and learning goals one that's related to the elementary level one that's related to the secondary level one of the reasons that we felt that it made sense to break this out is in june we will formalize and bring together a professional development committee which is a collaboration between administrators and teachers to design professional development in this district and we anticipate that those groups will oftentimes break out to elementary and secondary so this gives clarity for each group the focus at the elementary level and this has been something that we talked about in our district goals this year goal number four this has been a point of conversation with previous superintendents but designing a robust mtss system
052for folks that are not aware of what that stands for that's multi-tiered systems of support but basically a system of intervention ensuring that all students are able to grasp the key academic and also related to students that may have social emotional issues what is the process that we go to how does the system respond if a student is struggling in a particular area so we we are looking to focus on that one of the things that we know is that we have classroom teachers who are doing excellent work in terms of reading instruction but they are doing so without an agreed upon reading curriculum across the district in k through 5 we do not have a laid out curriculum for grade 1 gate 2 grade 3 grade 4 grade 5. that really needs to happen
053and so that is a goal for next year and and then the the other pieces that we see here as part of that getting that all up and running is getting our instructional coaches trained getting our literacy tutors trained and then looking at a large number of professional development for for faculty and staff and first part of this work in terms of reading curriculum and instructional resources in the fall we're going to take a snapshot of what is the current state in all of our classrooms and then taking that information consolidating that discussing and ending up with this in the spring with a uh with essential agreements at each grade level that clarify the instructional goals for reading at each elementary grade level so that's that's that piece there at the secondary level we have
054four areas of focus and fourth one added after today's conversation at leadership team a couple of these things in particular relate back to the portrait of a graduate and are connected with the knee ass visit for folks that are not familiar with neoass that is the accreditation system for all high schools nias comes and visits and looks at our programs looks at our documents they have had their first visit and next either fall or spring we are awaiting final confirmation they will be coming in and looking to see the progress that was made on agreed upon upon goals from their last visit one of the things that they had recommended and put forth as a goal was portrait of a graduate work so that that will be something that feeds into that first goal another
055area where there was room for growth in the initial consultation was around our curriculum documents right so you see a goal in terms of getting the curriculum documents development done for all of our content areas at the the middle school and high school in preparation for that knee ass visit we there has been a fair amount of work done on inclusionary practices helping classroom teachers have an agreed upon set of strategies that help students access learning there there was a lot of progress being made on that prior to the pandemic pandemic happened and so what we're hearing from our secondary folks is we need to revisit those practices get them back into place so that we don't lose the work that was done previously we have at the school committee level had a conversation about
056world language so you'll see that in november that the advisory committee would be coming to the committee to give a report on its work and its recommendations around how to best proceed in this district and then the the other piece that was was added today after conversation was related to the mtss multi-tiered systems of support also at the secondary level so we we want to begin that work as well at the secondary level and then finally on gold goal four a commitment to diversity equity and inclusion and what we see there is a book club over the summer we've talked about a joint meeting between the school committee and the leadership team pd and we are also recommending a dei audit within our goals for next year so that is what the leadership team has
057felt is the critical work for next year we have outlined timelines for when this work would be done and when you could anticipate hearing presentations about the work as an accountability measure and at this point i'd be happy to take any questions and any feedback that you might have to offer on our first draft of the goals i just want to go around yeah yeah yeah to school okay peter are you ready or do you want to have anna go first and no she can go first okay thank you okay great uh thank you mary beth um so i have sort of five high-level comments um i tried not to get too far into the weeds because i know that this was a first draft so the first comment i'd say is i as i
058reflect on these i think it would be helpful and i think it would be a little bit more digestible if it took the form of a goal to an objective to a deliverable the reason i say that is i think there's a little bit of conflation of a goal with the deliverable or even just sort of a task or a to-do list like some of the things strike me as more task oriented as opposed to a higher level goal so i think for me i would like to see sort of a step back from the action items and reframe it as a prioritization and as i thought about that and looked at other districts and other plans and just thought about you know what are the what are the topics that we have goals for
059understanding we can't do all things at all time but i kind of feel like there's a few things that we're just not addressing at all that are really high level goals so in terms of like overall priorities i think the district vision and strategic plan definitely is something that's a high level goal i think i would reframe the teaching and learning as sort of academic success and achievement one of the things i think is missing that our public expects action on is facilities and infrastructure i think the turf field and a plan for the elementary schools even outside of the msba process which i know we didn't i think the public is expecting some kind of measurable progress on those topics so i think professional development and teacher investment is a high level goal dei
060is a goal i love to see that one peter's going to love this one i think we should have an explicit technology goal i think that there needs to be a communication and engagement goal and a financial sustainability and responsibility goal so when i was first looking at that my high level comment was these feel like tasks and not goals and i kind of want us to take a step back and say what do we need to do in these there so that's one high-level comment another thing that struck me is that some of the things mentioned feel like they're sort of default like regular best practices so for example like the ones that struck really struck me one of the goals under teaching and learning says that the instructional coaches are to be trained
061in my mind i'm thinking that doesn't really feel like a goal like that's just your job like they have of course they have to be trained so it felt weird to see it identified as something we would evaluate because to me that's that's not a goal that's a requirement similarly there's a line item that talks about preparing the curriculum documents needed by the accreditation process that's not really a goal that's a requirement so like i would i would kind of strip out the things that feel like if our staff is just doing their basic practice i don't think we should get credit for that as a goal if that makes sense so it feels a little again like too basic the last comment and i'm glad you added another one there's an awful lot of
062subgroups like there's a lot of planning to plan to plan so just in this document alone there's a professional development kitty committee a portrait of a graduate design committee a strategic plan design team and a world language advisory committee it feels a little bit like death by committee like we're going to make a committee to develop a plan to develop recommendations and all of that is sort of taking all of next year so while i feel like those are all worthy i feel like there's a way that we could leverage existing knowledge and leadership and on some things i feel like the leadership team and you as the superintendent and we as the school committee we just need to lead you know so i think there's a lot of subcommittees that feels like you know
063won 27 meetings for everyone and i feel like it's going to slow the process down the next thing that struck me i would like to see some actual measurable criteria so for example things like x percentage of students will see improvement in their proficiency on reading you know something measurable x percentage of students will improve their performance in x number of classes percentage of students will take an honors or ap class for the first time x percentage of district staff will increase in diversity by the year 2030. you know something around diversity a timeline and funding strategy for the turf field project will be complete by 2022 2023 like i think the public is looking for something concrete here so that's i think some deliverables would be helpful in that um and then the last
064one i obviously i love the beginning of goal number four i think everyone in this room knows that um i'm i'm validated but also frustrated that some of the things i suggested in december are now here you know you're talking about pg which is great you're talking about an audit and i i had to stifle a laugh because that was one of the first things i suggested we do so this is all great my concern is that those things actually cost money and we didn't budget for them so i'm curious to know this i guess is my only real question to you is those are items that i think we should have accounted for in our budget and i'm not sure that we did unless you're saying they're going to come out of pd which
065was a suggestion i'd made so that's a question and then the other thing i just want to sort of draw upon is i don't know that i love the framing of this as some sort of new initiative because that implies a beginning and an end to me this is the first part of a permanent holistic integration of dei into our district like this is the beginning of a new way of looking at this topic so i feel like i'd want to reframe it as like how are we going to get started but then from a budget perspective and a sustainability like how are we going to do this forever like this isn't year 2021 is the year of dei great check you know like i want to see the integration but i think there's a
066budget component so i'd be curious to know how we're going to actually pay for an audit when it comes time to do that because that will cost us money yeah it just you know i can respond to that as as we've talked about there are there is stimulus money available we are still awaiting categories for how that money can be used but we believe that that we will be able to work the budget given those additional funds coming in to pay for an audit and currently we are we are starting the brainstorming process of how do we best utilize that money well um still very initial brainstorming because we have neither the allocation nor the the kind of the spending rules but we have a high level of confidence that we will have the funding
067necessary to complete the audit i think that's great because i think as i've said from the beginning we can't really develop a comprehensive solution to some of these problems if we don't understand the problems and that's where the audit comes in so i'm really happy that you put that in there again it feels a little bit like a task as opposed to a goal but that's more of a structural thing so um those are all of my comments i think it's a fine starting point but i would i would reframe it along some of the ways that i've described and i would add in some other goals that i think the community after especially after this last week i think for us to not address on what's the goal around the turf field like we've
068created a committee which is great i think people applaud that but none of these goals talk about what that committee is going to deliver back to us and the elementary school problem with the msba is i know we've applied like i know tom puts in the work we've done the application and we've been denied what three or four years in a row now at some point we as a community and as a district have to address the infrastructure and it might mean we have to do it without the msba i mean like we just we can't we can't go on without a plan so i feel like we need to actually really call that out because i think the public is growing increasingly frustrated with us not doing that so those are all my comments
069thank you here no you can keep going we're going around the table right yep i'm still taking some notes so if you could come back to me i'm happy to all right i'm going to jump in um thank you for this and i have a lot of notes because you can't ask um a strategic consultant to look at goals without getting a lot of notes so i i did a lot of research also i wanted to see what other school districts were using for their goals because i honestly just didn't know district goals or superintendent goals versus school community goals so my comments i have some specific ones and some overall ones one is that when i looked at the masc guidance especially because we're doing the summative evaluation what is a goal and they
070said the questions that the goals need to answer are what is the outcome expected from the implementation of this goal and how will the district be different a year from now if this goal is accomplished so i want to just read an example from lewiston because i think this goal is i think this is this goal is what i'm looking for i'm not sure if that's what everyone's looking for so this says lewiston public schools this is their their vision has created an environment of collaboration and transparency with families of students and with our community as a whole families of students are actively involved in their children's education the community is highly engaged in helping provide the best education possible for our children as a result of our communities and families commitment to public education
071we have established a collaborative approach to solving public education issues that includes our local legislators so to me i feel like a goal is more of a high level vision and then um so that's the masc and the listing example okay so then i also looked at penfield school i don't know where penfield school is but what i like that they did is they laid out these big goals but then they qualified them so they wrote you know this this big goal but then they wrote to a sure achievement of this goal schools will create action plans that target which is basically this the action tasks and then to assure achievement of the school the board of education will monitor so it almost gives us guidance as to what to monitor but it also separates
072like anna said what is the goal and what are the action steps and i also agree i think that there need to be academic criteria like i mean i've got a million examples here but one example you know increasing the percentage of students scoring above the state and local standards um the you know number of students taking ap classes um you know those kinds of things i think because this is a draft like we just need to work through what we want to prioritize if i could have one thought there one of the the pieces around that is the idea of having clear starting benchmarks yeah and part of the work that we will be engaging in this summer for building out the intervention system and those types of pieces is to establish the assessments
073that would actually give us that first round of benchmarks where are we starting from because it's hard to say you know what's your goal where are you going to get to if you don't have clarity around a starting point so one way we could address that is to talk about developing benchmarks for next year and then the following year you could say okay this is where we were and for this year we want to raise that level of performance up to this level but we first have to be able to identify kind of the starting point exactly does that make sense yeah yeah i love that it's developing benchmarks um and a couple other things i i think that and hannah is exactly what i wanted to say putting improving teaching and learning into an
074overall academic success and achievement goal i mean these are of course just my suggestions and then i know we probably only want four goals but i really strongly believe that family parent community engagement needs to be a goal and i i just i think that i just really strongly believe that and the only and the other thing the one last little nitpicky thing is that i always think of an audit as providing direction so i wonder if the audit should come earlier than creating the plan because i feel like if we're going to create a plan and then the audit comes back and tells us ten thousand other things that we need to look at it might it's like it just seems like a wasted opportunity so i i wonder if we can move that
075around a little bit but we did actually have that conversation in our meeting and we we felt that we could target january february so that we would have that information as we're developing the strategic plan so exactly oh yeah you can't do the strategic plan without right right so having that data in advance will help us to know where the the work is needed okay yep those are my my my comments oh i did have a question actually what are what is a current state document so capturing like i said one of the challenges that folks have been unpacking as this issue has been looked at for several years and that there is not consistency and instructional resources that are being used in pacing guides in an actual curriculum at all the grade levels so
076the very first piece is to say what do we have like what are people using what are the different curriculums that are out there so that we know our our starting state right that would be the first step and then okay here's what we're doing let's start having conversations about how we pull this together how you know what are the different resources that are being used what's people's experiences with them what are the outcomes of different resources and to start to consolidate things into what i would call an essential agreements document so in grade one you know this is how much time we spend on phonics development with foundations you know this and um this is the amount of time that we are going to dedicate to this particular unit of study all those types
077of things need to to get unpacked and articulated but step one is figuring out what we've actually got is that did that answer your question yeah okay i knew it was something like an education term i didn't know all right thank you david sure um but i guess i'll start i'll move backwards let's start just echoing something julia said where you know i think the idea of dei audit is something that should be really pushed up front like arguably to the end of this year so we have an action plan moving into next year having been through a few at different places i've been i think you're going to be surprised at the results and the the depth and breadth of the results and that being said and not to do any disservice to anybody
078in this district we most likely don't have the correct personnel to create the the action plan needed to identify all those problem areas again this is just as a result of living through them it's no sort of ill intent to anyone uh within our district excuse me um and i do think that will sort of end up being a budget item that we will be discussing next fall and winter um excuse me for probably some sort of onboarding or consulting um you know so so that's you know i'll sort of fly at 30 000 feet here um the next step you know in goal three the taking aside the very very important discussion in much larger discussion that is a long-term view of world language in our district right how to make it financially viable
079and everything else all the facets that go into that i'm pretty shocked at the low benchmarks at most of these um most of these bullet points right um you know to be a teacher in massachusetts you need to be sei endorsed that inclusive practices are the basic tenets of that sci endorsement right and the fact that we're actually not you know that we need to call that out as a district goal is a little disappointing but what i do appreciate is the fact that we realize that it is something hey you know what we need to readdress this right the same thing uh about um you know the learning walks and things of that nature right this is common practice is that something that's not happening is this the result of you know let's do
080a hard look at ourselves and realize this is something that's just sort of falling by the wayside living through a pandemic you know just we want to get back on task right which i could appreciate or you know is that something we need to address at a higher level like why why have this you know not happen david just quickly respond to that one of the things that has come out of our conversation is that there was a lot of work that was getting launched right before the pandemic and what the what folks were reporting is as the pandemic occurred that work just kind of fell by the late wayside so we want to reinvigorate that work make sure that that's solid before we start taking on additional things again i can appreciate that you
081know but i think for it's also important for me to sort of address so people see and say like you know some of this stuff is us needing to catch up and i don't think that's a bad thing because i also think that you know in true transparency um to let people know that you know we realize that there is catching up to do now after you know as we look at a more normal school year excuse me uh that being said you know i skipped back to the end uh or the last two um you know in the idea of uh i know i'm sorry the last one and um one prior one earlier uh just about the documentation of our curriculum we've known that something that's been missing for years now that it
082has been addressed in past nest visits um and you know i know i like seeing that on there because i really i think that's a much higher priority than it's sort of getting lost in the shuffle here um you know the goal number two i think is really good i think that's um i think we need as a as a committee you know and as a leadership team need to make sure that we are again letting the public know how important this is the fact that we are realizing that as great as our district is we have you know areas that need really drastic improvement and this is we have the data backing up that this is you know part of that and we see it we're addressing it they're hard decisions to be made
083to be making but we're working towards you know fixing those excuse me district vision strategic plan there's a lot of committees on there you know i i'd like to see more action but i like the idea of this uh i do i am afraid you know like um anna said that sort of death by committee right we've had this turf field committee coming around i you know me i'm always on the fields right i i see it i live it every day and i hear it from everybody you know um so let's not get lost in making the plans i know i know todd's with me he's looking at me right now i'm not saying anything about utah uh the one last thing i do want to mention is just the timing of this is
084coming out i really think this whole initial process should have happened in our next meeting we do have dr carr here joining us tonight but to be talking about the this year's goals before our new board is actually you know voted in a little premature um so thank you for being here tonight jen but uh you know that it just sort of puts her a little bit behind the eight ball coming and having to catch up so i appreciate it because it's such an important issue i wanted to be sure that we left enough time for dialogue so i i appreciate that you are here jankar to listen in and get yourself caught up around that but i didn't i wanted to ensure that we had enough time so first draft first pass feedback's been
085really helpful so we come back next time we'll have some revisions for you um but i appreciate that it's going to be important that the the next board that gets voted in is the board that votes this right thank you dana did you have anything yeah i am i i actually think it's helpful to go after several other people because i don't think i'll have as much to say i wanted to i think julia said um one thing that i would have um julian does and i do similar work in different very different ways but um but similarly i like and i i don't actually not sure if that's normal how a district but it seems more of a strategic plan kind of a statement that julia read but that was my first initial feeling
086too is that these for me i felt pretty good about these as kind of they did feel underneath a big goal and i and i wondered if um even like the comment i think it was julia or maybe david said about including sort of family engagement i sort of see that like there's a way to include that in that big goal because i think certainly part of the district vision and strategic plan really can speak to that and so um i don't i don't i didn't i guess i'm not as as worried as maybe some other people are but i did on an echo that that spoke to me that i would have liked to have kind of a big big 30 000 foot vision for the goals um and i also know that that's
087what we are creating in the strategic plan is the big picture but i did have one thing that i to be honest i hadn't written down but a couple of people have mentioned it anna mentioned about do we need some sort of a facilities infrastructure goal i i actually didn't write that down and i wrote it down when you were talking i wonder and i'm just curious about whether there is a way like it's on maybe all one thing like infrastructure technology modernization kind of a goal might be and i don't know that's just i'm just talking um and then i just had a quick question about i i know a little bit about the professional development group that you are developing but you kind of mentioned it so i don't know i don't know
088if i need to know too much more about that but that's something that it seems like it's going to be involved in all of the goal and goal two and three would that be correct that would be correct that the one of the things that we are moving forward with is a professional development committee that will have a partnership between teachers and administrators to design our in-service days in our early release wednesdays and so this goal document becomes a critical piece for them when they're they're looking at okay how are we going to use those er days what do what do we do in those full and service days if this is the outcome that we're looking for as a district so they will be handed this document as they begin their work over the
089summer to prep that time for the school year just two quick clarifying questions so the professional development group is made up of teachers teachers and administrators together okay so teachers and administrators and this document i guess this is just a question this document was created by a large number of people because you listed them all at the beginning yes um so [Music] and now you've got a whole other large group of people who are giving you info on it so how and i don't need a long-winded but just like how does it get tweaked like how do you what's your next step what i intend to do is to take the feedback that i'm receiving this evening bring it back to the leadership team okay say okay are there things here that make sense to
090incorporate if there are things that folks say you know we hear that but we really can't do that and this is the reason why then i can bring that back to you so i'm taking notes and we'll bring this back to the leadership team so the next version will reflect you know what you're asking for and what the leadership team feels like that could look like or or an explanation as to why the leadership team thinks that that would be problematic does that make sense thank you i guess i'm just going to reinforce what others said but the one thing is how can we weave parents voices into the goals without adding to the advisory committees because i think what people said the you know the death by committee sometimes puts the brakes on things
091so how can we get their voices in this without complicating it i know this is an early draft but i do would like to see some measurable items um you know how to capture that what data are we looking for how can we track how our students are doing i love the collaboration between the administrators and the teachers i think everything we've heard this year talks about or we've heard talks about you know the disconnect whether that's real you know or not we don't know but we need we need to come to a round table and and and know that we're all working towards the same goal which is great and you know talking about facilities and technology so but my question is what's the right amount of goals what what's what's enough what's too
092much you know especially coming off of the pandemic you know is it best for us to really focus on let's just say the four goals that are here to really get us out of where we were this last you know 16 months to a better place so yeah i would caution and that's part of what i want to talk with the leadership team about is sometimes when you try to do everything you end up doing nothing well right and so they're you know what's the sweet spot where you're challenging yourself and moving as forward as best you know as best and as fast as you can but not so stretched that there's not focus right and people are offering some good thoughts i really want to go back to the team and say all right
093what's feasible what do you feel like we can accomplish um you know i would say typically you see three or four major goals um you know there are some that may be targeted the other thing that i think we have to have a discussion about is if the same person has a critical role and for these goals that becomes really difficult but if there are ways to break out the goals that say this group of people can be focused on this and that's really not going to impede this group getting this done so that's those are the kinds of conversations i want to have to try to straighten that out okay great thank you peter uh sure thank you i've been saying for a long time i've been saying what my vision is for the
094district and i don't disagree with any of these i i do think we need a vision for the district i do think we need to approve elementary and secondary education we do need to have a commitment to diversity equity and inclusion i just worry about the timing i just think i'm concerned you know that the portrait of a graduate we know that this is a national movement we know what the visionary visioning process is going to teach us we do it's not going to look much different across the country and i just think we should start implementing um some of it now not waiting two or three years to implement you know parts of a district vision i i just don't think we should wait and it's funny i hear people talk about diversity equity
095inclusion modernization being data driven and i come back to a learning management system time and time again i've been researching these for a few years now actually probably more than four years now if we want a data-driven district we should have a learning management system if we want to improve diversity equity and inclusion we should have a learning a learning management system because it will help identify equity issues it will create that baseball card snapshot of statistics for every student so parents and teachers will know exactly where their students are at where every cohort is at where every classroom's at where every teacher is at and they'll know what work is do they'll know how they're doing learning management systems are adaptive adaptive so they can see it will it will recognize a student's strengths
096and their preferred learning style and it will direct them in their formative assessments down that path hey this student learns best through video this student meth best through text or and so it'll it'll direct them down that pass a path of preferred learning style so by the time they get to a summative assessment they crush it there's no chance of them not you know not passing it'll horizontally and vertically align the curriculum it so it will it will help us break out of this hundred-year-old model of education that we're stuck in the model of education we're using today was created a hundred years ago where subjects are taught in isolation there's very little you know collaborative cross curriculum learning project-based learning i just and so this will ensure you know also it's ensure students are
097getting the same information across across each teachers you know across each class it'll help modernize our education it's the same system they'll be using when they get to university so my big concerns are that i i hope this will include a serious study of a learning management system i hope you'll have an expert come in and and respectfully listen to and pay attention to that person i concerned that i don't i want to make sure that there's within these goals that there is a plan to stop losing programs i don't i've been saying it from my my big awakening being on the school committee is we do not have a budget spending problem we have a revenue problem even at level services budget it's hard not to get into an override situation which just means
098we're going to keep losing programs we've already lost ap classes we've lost language reading specialists were redirected the turf field as the last year the football field was deemed unsafe the track can only be used for practice but not competition the tennis courts are unusable we're not bringing language back to um right one of my big visions was to bring language k through 12. and i don't see i'm hoping i guess i'm hoping these goals of improving teaching in elementary and middle school will include a serious look at bringing language from k through 12. if we really want to be an innovative district we should not be a lot one language school seven through twelve and i just i i think we're just going to keep losing language but we need to look at language
099be innovative be a k through 12 learning district we need to be out of this 100 year old model of education we want to be a go-to district where parents seek us out like parents seek out milton they don't i don't know um uh yeah so those are my big concerns death by committee keeps coming up and i agree we've we've had three superintendents in three years i have no idea what the future entails but i hope if you're committed to do something now that if a new superintendent comes in we stick with it and not have a new superintendent with a new vision and we have to go through committee again and again and again i just um yeah so i hope we can establish a vision a big picture that we can stick
100with regardless of who's at the helm and no matter who's on the committee that we have a the legacy is we have established a vision we stick with it and and you know let it be our north star i just right now i haven't seen that in three years that's my frustration so let's let's let's start implementing some of the things we know what the portrait of a graduate visionary process is going to show let's do a serious study of learning management let's figure out how we're going to stop losing ap programs language sports those are my my big picture particularly so thank you for listening thank you um i would echo just a couple of things one i think the portrait of a graduate's purpose is to engage the community so somehow we should
101weave that in there i think one thing i've heard michelle i'm having trouble here thank you same i'm never told that people can't hear me it's like so amazing okay so the first thing is that i think the portrait the purpose of the portrait of the graduate is to engage the community so somehow that can get rolled into here one thing that i've heard the hwea is about the transfer goals that they had created and i think that the portrait of the graduate is not about what the teachers believe it's what the community and all the stakeholders believe so it's the the parents the students the people who live in the community the teachers the administrators so that'll be a good a good thing and i want to commend you actually on the formation of
102all these committees because it's not this it's not the same people on these committees being worked to death it's engaging everybody in their part and it allows everybody to be heard and i am concerned about getting too many goals so if we can figure out really what the most important things are and stick with that and then when it comes to the facilities the turf and the stuff like that i'm not sure if that's a district goal or a school committee's goal because the turf thing while tom is helping to make this group is really about the school committee engaging that group and the school committee using that group and the gale study being done and then the school committee evaluating that so i'm not sure if it's a district goal or if it's a
103school committee goal so we'll have to sort of suss that out a little bit so all right so we'll be seeing goals again because this is never done all right so now we are on to we have a presentation tonight um hi by e.j everett and you can now do you have something that you are air playing or are you wanting us to yeah tom thomas like your slides what do you want us to do yeah michelle we already talked about it tom's gonna broadcast and great michelle can i give a moment of introduction about how we came to be here no he ej's here to present to us we like what would your introduction be you just mean introducing the speaker correct yeah then absolutely go ahead well uh thank you all for having
104me uh this is a presentation from a club at the high school the hamswam social justice club thank you for having me again uh happy to be here and this is about uh something that we're advocating for which is a land acknowledgement policy and i know that's not familiar with everybody so i want to begin by giving an example we all live on indigenous land we would like to begin by acknowledging the massachusetts tribe the tribe of indigenous peoples from whom the colony province and commonwealth of massachusetts have taken their name we would like to pay our respect to the ancestral bloodline of the massachusetts tribe and to their descendants who still inhabit historical massachusetts tribe territories to this day as a statement from vice president of the tribe so that is our proposal and
105the reason i began with i began with it is because the idea of atlantic acknowledgement policy is to read that before you begin your activities a more formal definition is here on the screen from the massachusetts center of native american awareness and it's the idea to read the statement acknowledging the history of the land and next slide something that i liked about that quote is that it gets into one of the reasons that this is so important which is that it's very easy to think that this is all in the past when in reality you know for example for example the massachusetts tribe is still around they're still here and this is not all historical it's still very current even though indigenous people are rarely in history books unless their land is being taken away
106so there isn't very much telling of this story but they are still around and we don't want to erase that or the tragedy that has happened in the history of our country with so many people dying so many families being separated so much culture being erased just like with other historical tragedies we don't want to forget and let it happen again this kind of reflection can also inspire action both in the person who's reading it because when you take a minute of your day at the start of a meeting you can reflect on your own connection to the land and it can also inform people because so many people don't even know about these policies existing and is also a direct connection to local history since masculine is buried in hamilton i'm not going to
107read all of these but these are a few of the just within our state places that have adopted this there are a few local municipalities and uh it's already spreading among educational institutions we are kind of a you know boston's a college town and it's also very widespread in like canada australia and new zealand since they have similar history to us and it's in its beginning in the united states to spread as well next slide so this is the here are the requests it seems like a lot but not all of these are relevant to this specific school committee essentially we would be asking for physical markers on the school campuses and also on the websites so that if people are here on our campus or if they want to learn or they want to
108learn about us on the website they know where we are in more ways than one and they know about our history and we would also want to read the statement before important community gathering events so that would be like think of a play production or an open house something that has a lot of people coming together for gathering and this would also include virtual events since we are probably going to be zooming in from massachusetts from massachusett land and it is where we conduct our business even if people are not all in the same room together and the funding would be provided by our club are there any questions another question peter um is the land acknowledgment fairly standard or is it different from state to state from tribe to tribe area oh yeah it's
109very different depending on where you are is individual based on the like in canada they've got treaties that they have to that they're talking about where yeah the history is so different so it's very personal peter oh thank you thank you for doing this in fact i have two students on who are doing this two of my students for their action civics project they're working on land acknowledgement and they're trying to figure out what that could look like i saw that you had plaques different places some their research showed that some district websites had it on their website as an acknowledgement as well and and there and then they also had the idea of having an announcement either once a week once a month once a year acknowledging that the school is on land traditionally
110inhabited by the indigenous people um i'm just wondering if you if you found a solution like can announce do announcements have to go through the school committee or the superintendent because they've been done at schools plaques obviously have a school committee policy right so i'm selfishly asking for them because you're the resident expert here on this and i'm just wondering what you've run into like what's possible like a plaque with obviously school committee announcements maybe that can just be done through the principal website might have to be done to the superintendent i wonder what you've come across in your research i am more of an expert well you flatter me with expert um i'm more knowledgeable about the kind of reason behind us and why it's important not as much the mechanics of um whose
111authority it is to put things on the website versus on the campus um so that's not actually something that i'm really knowledgeable about so i guess my question is what are what are what are you hoping the school committee will do will do for land acknowledgement is it a plaque is it a website putting it on our website is it an announcement in the schools for the for the things that you do have control over ideally implementing that and if you don't have control over it like the website you can also like put a vote of support showing that you know the school committee is behind that thank you good job nice work dana oh sorry edie can you can you get a little closer to the mic i'm i mean i am hearing you
112but it's a um so first of all i i like i really appreciated your answer just now to peter because i think i want to give you really positive feedback that what you said is you were really more communicating what this was about and why rather than the logistics of how of how it's going to play out and i think you did an excellent job of that like i i really feel like that's what you relate like why and and and i think unfortunately a lot of our questions are going to be about the logistics about um and so i appreciate your answer because because i think you did give a great overview of how and of why it's important um so i'm gonna i might be still asking the same thing but is your
113vision or in your dream if you will would it be at like the opening of every school committee meeting that someone would read this land acknowledgment is that am i reading that card one example like if we do the pledge of allegiance that's another kind of thing that we would do to begin the meeting and the land the example that you gave the i don't know the you know that you gave of an acknowledgement um this one here so you gave this example from is this that is what we would like to i'm sorry say it again that is the statement that we would like to read right so this is the this is that was my question there's not it's not that there are several examples this is the massachusetts tribe example that you
114that would be used yes okay we would it would probably be slightly modified like it mentions i would like to begin by so we wouldn't have that if we're if it's like a physical statement or but that's the statement for beginning an event but we could slightly tweak it for yeah if it's a plaque or what have you but that's the general gist thank you thank you i appreciate that michelle hi ej it's nice to see you thank you for this so my question is now as a senior do you feel that your education in hamilton went um led you to this positively or negatively or is it maybe it's not fair because it's where education is right now and hopefully it's changing but can you add give us any insight to maybe how you
115came up came to this [Music] i'm trying to think of where i first heard of it i think it could have i think it was probably through my work i think that was it um i think is that my job at the food project i think i've done kind of outside research like reading reading books about indigenous history in the united states overall like hamilton wenham schooling didn't teach me very much i although i think you'd make a good point that it's also not like relatively it wasn't especially lacking but yeah i definitely remember like elementary school some stuff about thanksgiving and how it was really just like it was really uh brushing over the hard parts and kind of acting like they're just like oh you know welcome and they're just like feeding each
116other instead of all the serious stuff that happens and beyond that kind of elementary school stuff i don't remember hearing much else there was one book there was a choice book in ninth grade so so maybe this is a start hopefully for things to change and you know just a step in the right direction for more culturally appropriate uh the right word is culturally appropriate representation i guess so thank you for this um so i've been hearing at meetings you've had recently and then afterwards from some people that there's controversy maybe it's just me or maybe it's my corner but i'm having trouble hearing you and i'm actually having trouble hearing you also yeah yeah all right i will speak i have been hearing um at various meetings where you've been speaking and then after
117that having people speak to me that there's some controversy around this and i was wondering if you could explain to me what the controversy is so there are some questions because this history is pretty murky because there were most of the sources were colonists so they weren't necessarily paying the closest to attention to the indigenous peoples government structures of that sort of thing i think there have been some questions about if this means that we are like giving up our right to this land which it is legally the united states territory and i think in the schools it doesn't matter that much since it's like me reading this reading it before this committee isn't the same as like legally giving up the land so i think that was one concern but i think the united
118nations has uh talked about that because again like there are countries where this is pretty commonplace and there are a lot of organizations doing it like you know it even happened at the oscars and you know harvard university and they aren't like trying to give up their land so that was one concern and i think there was also questions about whether about the so some of the sources again some of the resources i listed which are more of like they're less citations and more uh guides for further research so there's like lands.ca which is a world map and instead of having countries it's mapped by indigenous territories which was really cool to look at because when i look at a world map it's like you know the united states canada you can take a single
119step and suddenly you're in canada versus like in the indigenous view of the world it's like people you know one person occupies the lands during the winter another group occupies it during the summer so basically it is a very complicated so basically a lot of the land bots there's like a text about you can say your address and they will tell you whose land you're on but the massachusetts tribe after contacting them is the i trust them because i think they probably know more than i do after a little bit of googling i think they know their history best and they are saying that the massachusetts tribe is the most accurate way of of of honoring the people who lives in this area because there were other people who were bands of the massachusetts they
120were but they were within them which is a little bit like saying like how there's you know hamilton um there's essex county there's the state of massachusetts there's like the united states and it's simplest and most accurate to just mention the massachusetts tribe does that make sense yeah um so thank you everett uh for awesome presentation um i wanted to answer a question from peter and dana a little bit um about some of the logistics of how this could look can i just say it must be me like i literally i'm having logistics i i just so you got to talk right into that all right i'm right i'm right into the mic um and what i was going to say by way of introduction is that everett and the students of the social justice
121club reached out to me mostly as a municipal navigator i would say is the best role i could play here but some of the research that i ended up doing were some of those conceptual questions of like who else is doing this what does it look like in a school district and had a really interesting conversation with a school committee member of the mashpee public schools who have probably taken this the farthest so there are other districts that are doing it and to everett's point you know there's no perfect way of doing it we would have some discretion um you know for example the lexington public schools do have it right on their website like some districts have built it into their equity part of the website that's true in mashpee in mashpee they also
122have the statement so that that statement from the massachusetts tribe for them is for the mashpee because that's their jurisdiction but it's right on the wall like you know instead of the exit sign you'd have the land acknowledgement just up you know in the building so there's a lot of of ways that it could be done there's not a universal truth on that so it's really it's really a matter of how the district would want to implement something like this which is where everett and the students you know their requests are fairly straightforward and i could go into tremendous painful detail about how the massachusetts tribe has substantiated their claim to the land it's it's been fascinating to journey with everett uh to sort of understand how those hierarchies work so if people do have
123further questions about why the massachusetts and not the pawtucket or the agawam or the wampanoag or the nipmuck or any of the other tribes here i think everett and i are both pretty well versed to answer those questions at this point so thank you everett for presenting again peter just quickly i want thank you and i want you to know that you were inspire inspired two of my students because when messick brought it up i looked into it and we were work our students are working on our action civics project i told them about it they immediately were inspired by your work and are doing that in our school as well so thank you for that and i just wanted to maybe we can ask the superintendent like i guess you know we know plaques
124require school committee approval i don't know about can a principal make a decision about announcements on the speaker occasionally or a poster in a painting on the wall like i guess where i guess what could this look like in our schools and what level of approvals are needed i would say that this would be something that the school committee would want to vote on as as something to acknowledge in our school district and then we would move from there in terms of whether it would be a plaque or a announcement at meetings but i would say that this would be the body that would indicate if the the district would engage in this this practice so it could look it could take many forms it could be on the wall it could be on our
125website it could be at meetings it could be a plaque it could be announcements on the speaker so we need to see the recognition on our calendar that we recognize indigenous people's day on indigenous people yeah so there's lots of different forms i could take all right good on you thank you thank you thank you thank you so much everybody thank you thank you yeah no the only thing i was going to say really did i mean it just doesn't speak to i mean this can be added to our curriculum right i mean it's really easy you're just throwing it you know like teaching it at the elementary level like hey where do you think this comes from and have it be a service project like that um you know and just to just touch
126base on the fact that like where the controversy is around is a lot of people like immediately go to like oh well if we acknowledge that the land belongs to them then they have they can come back and take our that's not what this is saying at all so you know this language is actually very uh comfortable um you know so i do think it's something that we as a community should take up and move forward all right i'm great thank you all right can i say one thing i think the distinction is it's a it's a land acknowledgement you know that's where the distinction is it's not a land claim it's sort of so that's that's what i think the distinction is it's more of an acknowledgement right super michelle may sorry one other
127thing what i was going to say david to your point in terms of curriculum on the last slide that everett prepared there were a number of resources and one of the conversations that's been had is the massachusetts tribe is working on secondary and elementary curriculum there's another boston-based group called the upstander project that also has done a lot of curriculum development and they actually have mary beth in terms of professional development they actually have a professional development series that's targeted for teachers so part of the reason i wanted to bring this to us now but i'm making good on my promise to dana no force to vote right no voting but i think that it's important to put this in because i do think david to your point this is a curriculum piece it's a
128dei component of recognizing something in our community there's a lot of professional development starting to happen around these issues so if you look at the resource page that ever prepared there's a lot of resources and some of them are very specifically geared around curriculum so as you digest it in preparation for our next conversations there's a there's a lot of research and self-learning that we can all do thank you anybody have anything new to say okay great so now we're going to move on to um so there's been some well especially this year um there's a logo out there with the um okay it's not a logo the hamilton wentham school district has a logo yes we have a logo we have a mascot as well and there are different versions of the mascot floating
129around out there this year in the spirit of being modern uh jerry the general wears a mask in times past it has looked like this black and white logo which um it has you know something that looks like general patton from the movie um and then in other times we see general patton it looks almost exactly the same except for some of the like regalia has been removed and the weapons have been removed so there's been a discussion about which one of these is really the representation of our mascot um and so that is the question and i had mentioned this to katherine harrison she had some recollection that this had been discussed before which is how this other one came into being but nobody has actually any proof of that i would say um
130so it's one of those things where there's legend but there's you know sometimes legends are based on fact and sometimes legends are not based on fact so i guess that's our discussion and i will say that anna provided some examples of where this is on school ground and back in the spring i had asked dr kuckenberger about the issue of a logo and you know like other entities printing it and she basically said well unless you have copyrighted it anybody can print it so if you don't copyright it you don't have control over what it looks like so we don't have control over where this gets printed because we don't own it so that's another sort of like side issue so yeah but that was part of the was brought up in the whole conversation
131is the fact that it's such a mess because it hasn't been controlled by the district right um so so what do we want to what exactly do we want to talk about or do we want to hear from tom do i hear tom's report first sure okay um i recite what i included as an exhibit uh so on april 24th it was brought to my attention through the superintendent uh there was a uh concern brought forward by a school committee member massic about um the appearance of jerry the general with a weapon um you know after being alerted that there was legend that the school committee had taken action in the past to kind of restrict the use of that version of the logo i went out to the signs that i could reach from
132the ground um took out my artist set and gave it a temporary cover up until further information could be presented to you the banner is in the gymnasium there's a banner outside of the gymnasium some of the locations on the stadium field that would need to be changed out so mr genualdo and i are coming up with an inventory and we'll present back to the school committee on the order of magnitude of how far this reaches do you know what you have on do you have both of these logos on digital file do you know um so over the summer as we were [Music] our team was printing up signs as you can see by the door yeah um there wasn't a high resolution image of the general uh so working with a graphics team
133through a printing company we were able to come up with a high resolution image to use for that so we do have the image on the right even though that's low resolution in this photo here we do have a copy of a high resolution file without the weapon so so if someone were to come to the district and say you know whatever principle whatever that we want that you would provide them with the one on the right that's correct okay okay do somebody have a question i would caution though that there are so many copies floating around the internet um you can't control just do a google image search they pull the first one they see it ends up on t-shirts masks whatever you right you can't control them so yeah anna um so just
134as a point of clarification a little bit of point of order um my email with the pictures of the weapons was in direct response to your request for i thought the weapons were gone have you seen it and i thought i've definitely seen it let me remind myself where however um my interest in bringing this forward to the committee i think has been a little bit misrepresented here the weapons are a problem i think we all can agree to that my interest is that i would actually like to discuss the retirement entirely of using this cartoon representation of a general and i do think that that falls both into a dei conversation as well as a strategic planning conversation a branding conversation so what i wanted to have the committee talk about is does that
135cartoon character accurately represent present day hamilton went up generals and my concern with it were the weapons are a no-brainer that's obvious my other issue with it is that it's not gender-neutral it is gender-specific it is dated it is cartoonish it is an adult male that looks not represent i mean it looks like a representation of general patton which i understand but present-day hamilton when i'm generals are of many genders and non-binary so i have a gender issue i have a design issue i have a weapons issue i have a dated issue i would actually argue we already and tom i'm really glad you put this agenda together we already have another logo in the star motif that exists that is gender neutral that plays off of the general's motif so again i don't think
136we're in a position to make a decision tonight and i know that the community has very strong feelings about this so i'm not rushing to say this is the end but i think we need to evaluate whether or not the general is a cartoon is the right look for our district and if it's really sending the messages of modern and inclusive design for the district so i just i wanted to make sure everyone knows that that was my motivation to put it on the agenda it wasn't about take the weapons off the general everywhere tom can reach it with a paint can which i'm personally really excited to go see how that worked out it's not my greatest work so was it a paint can or was it a sharpie because i had recommended a
137sharpie i'm sort of curious to hear if anyone else in the committee is bothered by this in the slightest at all but it bothers me because i don't feel like that general represents the generals that i know and that's why i want to have conversation okay i just want to say that this is a community issue it's not a school issue because this cherry the general has been around since the mid 60s there's a lot of people in town that were in the high school when it was developed they feel pride in that we have a strong contingency of veterans in the town that are really connected with this personally you know my four children two daughters graduated in 14 and 17. they competed as a general for 24 varsity seasons with multiple all-state eastern
138mass cape and league championships i checked in with them as 24 and 22 year old women very strong women and they said keep cherry the general it's who we are it's who the town is and it's it's what they want so and i did hear that in the 90s and david you speak you spoke to this they were called the ladybugs and the athletes the women that young girl athletes in the 90s refused to be called the ladybugs and wanted to be called gerry generals under and jerry general as their mascot so i hear what you're saying but i don't think it's fair for us as a seven board member with only one person that competed in hamilton one i mean grew up in hamilton one to make a decision that's really rooted in this
139community and to echo what we said at the two meetings ago we have bigger issues to deal with um jerry the general is the least of our issues right now and i think you know something down once we get out of this if we want to tighten him up um if we want and the thing too is that i've used him as a booster parent i've taken the guns off of him if if the girl's team wants to make jerry the general jerry with the j or with the g they can do that because it's versatile it is it is easy to do that but i think i i just i just don't think this is worth our time to do right now i don't and i think it's it's a community issue and again
140i listen to my daughters so yeah um i actually a very linear thinker again i kind of want to split the difference here between anna and michelle which is that i think that it's it's really important you know if you've done any i'm sure and i'm sure you have and probably other people had looked at other districts and read about how they went about changing the mascot if if that was a thing and i think i actually am willing to do this work but i would really support what michelle's saying about that it needs to be full-on engaged with the community and that it needs to be done um like i think it's going to take time i think it can't feel like we didn't engage with the community i i am willing to engage
141and i am actually open i don't have a decision about how in other words i could i would want to listen and hear what the community has to say and i think that that i don't feel a pressing sense of urgency like that we have to do it right this second i feel like it could take time but i i guess my biggest concern was i would want the whole community to feel like they had a say and felt heard that's and and i think that that can that needs to take some time in order to do that so everything oh my turn well you know linearly you would be nice um what you guys probably don't know is for the past 30 years having this discussion with other people from hamilton want them and
142the fact that i hate this logo has been like a just a hobby of mine um because i was like it's jerry like it's still a lousy logo um but i think one thing that bothers me the most this has to be a community discussion i'm not saying this uh that you know i'm not gonna make up the mind of anybody i'm happy to talk about why it's a lousy mascot though but um i do think that we need to be rebranded as a district right it's just it's 20 21. it's something that has to happen right um and there's something to be said where jerry's you know not he's just not at the forefront right he's throwback jerseys that type of deal but one thing that needs to happen and i'm happy to do
143this with you tom is i know whether or not people realize it one reason they hate using this logo without the weapons is because whoever got rid of the weapons just erased the weapons and put him in his underwear right so i am happy to go take the two minutes to fix that and alleviate so much of that problem and again we put it on the website clears day for people to see and then it makes it nice and easy for people to grab and at least we know we're doing that right our website gets so much traffic that the uh sei right should push our logos right to the top of any google image search so i mean it's like seriously 10 minutes worth of work and you're taking away half the problem right
144and then we just push that as we like look into like the larger uh district planning stuff right when that all comes out then we can have that larger conversation um because there there is way too many people that love this logo but that's all i got to say julia so um yeah i i actually want to say something else before i talk about this logo i am like so embarrassed about the way we treated everett tonight i'm like i'm completely horrified and i have i just have to say like you would not even allow him to have an introduction he stands up there he puts his heart on the line he the scholars and the athletes and we can't even give everett the proper respect that he deserves for putting today's representation they deserve
145they deserve they deserve it he i just mean the way he was treated i feel like was i'm just horrified i'm horrified and embarrassed to be a part of a group that would basically grill him and ask him questions that he i don't feel like was what did what are you saying i just i just oh i'm so sorry i'm so sorry so then i'm being an too sorry for people at home but i think that yeah because there's no bleep on this i just i i know what it's like to be in like the social justice club and i know what it's like to be on the other end like advocating for issues that are not popular that are very controversial so i just i don't know i feel like we should have given
146him more respect i don't feel like we should have grilled him i feel like i felt like he was being attacked and that's just how i feel so i had to say it i'm sorry that i lost my composure i also can't breathe this mask so i'm sorry that's all i wanted to say do you want a second opportunity to say something about the logo in a minute i hate it okay i hate it and but i'm not from hamilton so i guess i'm from beverly is that why you hate it what i would say it's totally outdated time for rebranding i don't think it's the most pressing issue of the day but i'm on board with the rebranding and i'm sorry that i cried at a school committee meeting i said i wouldn't i
147thought i said in my head i'm not going to do it julia it's completely fine it means that you have passion and and that you care and it's completely fine peter do you have something pressing i have something else to say but go ahead um no i just want to about to about the logo i agree with everything anna says her evaluation of the logo i also agree with everything michelle says that this should be a community-wide discussion i also believe we can do this and be respectful to our veterans i david made a sent a powerful email out showing other you know we're a 35 million dollar brand and we should have a logo that reflects it and he showed examples of other schools and juxtaposed it next to hours and hours is cartoonish
148it's it's outdated i do believe we can involve the community get the community buy-in and and be respectful to veterans and make it 21st century gender neutral gender free i i i always just i just think it's cartoonish and outdated and you know when we look we have two over 230 generals in the u.s military more a third of them are females generals and admirals so it should be up to date we don't we don't have to lose the word general because you know that's that's that's gender neutral we can be respectful to our veterans and lose the yeah lose the single sex yeah no i think that's something i want to be really clear doesn't get misconstrued i am in no way proposing that we cease to be the hamilton wenom generals full stop
149generals are great it's that particular logo and i do i do feel like as much as so so i think everything that has been said is true however i also think that as we become a forward thinking district this is why i wanted to introduce it now as we start to think about who we are there's been a lot of talk tonight about the future the vision where are we going we're going i think that we have to focus on that part of it and i'm not i am not making a fair complete decision i'm simply saying we need to talk about it i agree completely the community has to weigh in but at some point i think it's okay for us to say you know what that logo was born of a different time
150and we have become a different society and that's okay if we evolve with that i also want to take just a point to say even if we weren't born here we didn't go to school here we didn't have kids here we're all here now and we all have an equal voice so i feel like that's actually kind of important that no i didn't graduate from hamilton wenham but i'm i bleed blue and white now i'm i'm all in you know we're all in it together so i think that every voice needs to be valid in every perspective and for all the people that love jerry the general i've also heard from people who not only have the sort of feelings they do they really don't feel like it represents them they're students and they don't
151have any attachment in some cases feel like it negates who they are which is worrisome if we have any aspect of our district that is actually negating the identity of students in our district which gets us to the point about neutrality and julia i'm sorry i wasn't clear i was simply trying to say everett's pronouns are they and no so these these little things matter like we have to know they have to try it i know that you do it's my just my assumption so i and i want you know i personally appreciate you saying that um because this this clearly has been six months in the making and tonight was the night wherever it finally got to present and i do i not only regret the lack of introduction which i would have liked
152to give i would also like to publicly state we should have moved the agenda up so that they were ahead of the goals i feel really bad that we made everett and their mother wait for our goal discussion so again we need to do better and i look forward to this conversation as part of the next rounds of who who is the hamilton wedding regional school district like who are we and this is part of it so h on top prior to the meeting we received several several emails that sort of echo some of what was said over here which is this isn't really the time to be doing this because we have apparently you know more than four goals for next year so that's where i would feel on that and and being someone
153who was in a high school who was told that they had to change their logo because it violated copyright laws and we went through a process of deciding if we were going to change our mascot and all of that and in the end we didn't because people had a huge affinity to it and what we did was change our logo so that we could keep our mascot you have to understand that there is attachment to things like this and right now i don't think the community is in a place to take on controversy about something that could be very very divisive so i don't know how we go about that but i think as we go through this engagement we can sort of figure that out like we're going to be talking to a lot
154of people on this strategic plan so we'll see what the community has to say because at this point we've only heard from people who say don't change the logo so all right my whole life i'm just saying okay there's nothing under finance and operations but is there anything you wanted to say tom are you is there anything you had that you wanted to say there's nothing here that's why it's just not necessarily i get i i'll present to the committee the the full inventory and budget associated with uh changing listed in the exhibit i don't see this as a high need but i appreciate it you know like i'm rolling out get some stickers and stick it over the old one you don't have to replace the sign just put a sticker on it with
155the new layer stickers are tacky it should be ignored but it's just some dot i don't think anyone's arguing that right um then we're on to policy it's the second reading and vote of a policy on executive sessions so it's a second reading yep um so the first policy back to you again tonight is executive sessions bec there were no comments coming out of the first reading so policy has not changed it it is as presented the first time around does anybody have a question why don't we go through the discussion on all three and then we'll vote in a minute when everybody's here okay um the second one is uh community resources and speakers and that is also as originally presented there have been no changes the last one is ijoa field trips this
156is the one that the full committee did send back to policy and we did discuss it at our last meeting so if you look at this new version of ijoa there are two places where some red appears one of them is at the top of page two so there was a question about the approval schedule and whether or not participation in tournaments and competitions needed to have the 30 days i think michelle had said you don't always have 30 days before that so what you see at the top of that is that we modified it and made clear that the 30-day requirement does not apply to those types of tournaments that was one change the other piece of feedback that the full committee had we're talking about exceptions to the transportation policy and wanting to
157standardize it a little bit with what goes on with the sports team so the very bottom of page two you'll notice a just a small typo we corrected automobile singular to automobiles plural because it made more sense and then at the very end of it we added a new sentence that says rare exceptions for individual students may be granted with the written permission of the appropriate administrator e.g athletic director or principal during our policy meeting mary beth pulled up the sports policy that i believe was in the athletic handbook does that sound right yeah and so we made sure that this statement um might necessitate a little bit of a change to that but not necessarily there was still a notion that written permission was necessary that the administrator needed to approve it and that
158it was really for individual students i think those were the high level takeaways so we added that sentence there and i believe those are the only changes between the first and second readings of this policy i don't know if this is the last one okay so i do i still don't believe that this 30-day requirement does not apply this still reads to me like if you're within the 30 days you don't need to seek approval which is i don't think what you're trying to say i think what you're trying to say is if you're within the 30 days still apply right we actually talked about that if you go up to the bottom of page one the very first line says all field trips must receive the prior recommendation the chairperson and approval when we
159talked it out with dorothy she felt as though since the beginning of the part about approval says everything must be applied must be approved these are subject to the approval of these people these are subject to the approval of these people and then the next sentence is about the timeliness of the approval but she did not read it as negating the need for approval in and of itself it was a statement about timeliness not overall necessity so i would get then i would get rid of that sentence because what it says is final approval should be spot sought no less than 30 days prior to the scheduled trip date period but i think that that last slide is yeah it's not must it's not permitting if you know the fight if you go up to
160a regional you win a regional and then two weeks later it's the final inside of you obviously for 30 days right right so i i just think that um when i don't know maybe it is like you know you know when the scheduled contest isn't allowed right yeah so i it doesn't matter what it says as long as there's an understanding of what it says and that's what's the most important thing and so it's you know as long as the people who are running the trips understand what it means that's fine yeah i think in the policy meeting we were pretty clear that what this is saying is that all out-of-state and overnight trips must be approved by the school committee field trips must be approved by the high school principal or department person and
161they should be approved 30 days in advance but in those situations in which that is not possible given tournaments and that type of thing that 30-day requirement is way but the approval is not waived right i think that that's the understanding that we're left with and then so david and i i remember if you were in policy at the time when we had to do the thing about students in cars you need to be closer to the mic so we had a huge discussion about students being transported in cars because of the bus problem that's happening now because of the bus problems that happen now so anyways um my whole when i was bringing this up it was because of that experience and the rare exception of an individual student may be granted with the
162written permission of the appropriate administrator is only part of my problem i also want to be sure the parent knows so it's not to me okay for whatever um craig to say oh you're supposed to go to the rotary club breakfast today you can go with miss frost over to the tea house the parent should know that that's how that student is getting there so that's kind of my what i'm trying to get to here so i guess if the administrator is under the understanding that they're supposed to get prayer and approval that's fine but somebody somewhere along the line has to get the parent approval in writing right well i think so we talked about adding a clause at the beginning after the use of private vans and automobiles comma including parent vehicles but
163we decided not to do that that's that's not maybe that's not what you're talking about you're talking about making sure the parents no so my reading of all this and michelle or peter marybeth please jump in is that the parents are the ones seeking the permission therefore they would have to know that the request is made because the only way that craig or the principal or anyone would give written permission is if the parents are requesting it so i'm not sure how the parents wouldn't know if the students are the ones making the request so at the time when we were originally discussing it it was coaches who were making that decision yeah i think that this would change that we just need to be sure that we understand who has the authority to delegate
164transportation in one of these manners so that's fine as long as people understand their responsibility to get parent permission i i think we really we didn't really discuss this and i think because of the the athletic policy uh which it protocols you know specifically states what you're saying yeah and this being field trips it was you know a bit more um specific to the administrator whomever it is in charge how did we can i'm vaguely recommending sub i'm sorry vaguely reckoning remembering a situation like this happened um with that two-week notice that we didn't have a regular like a meeting it sort of fell in between two meetings i'm trying to remember how we figured that out we we were going to meet at seven o'clock but the superintendent was able to give uh it
165was before covid last year and i think julie koopenberger was able to give a special um we allowed julie to give the approval yes we did we did yeah that's it i just want to make it that's also where my concerns are rare but it happens but that's also where my concern around this comes from because on that specific trip there were students riding in students cars out of state so at night so so do you feel that this covers it though if if because we went over pretty we we went back and forth a lot and i think isn't there you know as long as who everybody because one of the things that is when you get to the finance policy you're going to find that there's this requirement that all of the people
166who run a club are given cert sorts of training and stuff and it's never been clear if that actually happens so i'm not actually sure if people will know that this is their responsibility if they're delegating so we just need to be sure that happens that's all yeah i got the sense mary beth i mean you we went i think my memory is that this policy written this way would force craig to go back and tighten up the sports policy ever so slightly but in reading them there was still the provision that if parents wanted to take their students home they had to get written they had to get permission from the athletic director in advance and it was a case-by-case basis i remember asking michelle horgan about that and then there was a written
167sign out log and whatnot so in theory if that's actually happening at the team level at the athletic director level and then we have this and then what we were trying to avoid was writing something here that would contradict all of the sports practice but mary beth i think you felt you felt comfortable with yeah yeah with that and what we had also discussed in policy is that if we do a form of adoption of the things that have been voted for next september then over the summer early september i can task our principles our athletic director with looking at these policies and ensuring that handbooks are aligned with the new policies that have been voted okay any questions about any of the other ones anybody you need a motion yes is the motion going
168to be for all three why don't we do them as well okay um anna help me out are these informed yeah these will be in form and then at the meeting on the 19th we're going to do a big bulk massive approval so right now inform would be the right way to do it i move that the hamiltonian regional school committee approve inform the [Music] policies presented on the agenda on executive sessions community resources and speakers and field trips is there a second should we say sections bec ijob and ijoa does that help yes thank you can you put that in the motion mahalo when you write about the minutes okay i'll second that motion great is there any other discussion right all in favor no need to call for opposed the vote was unanimous
169it did anna just thank you uh michelle it's a lot really going through all of this and having been on the policy committee before i i know how faithful and tedious a job it is it is bad um okay all right so just falling apart for the open meeting law we are supposed to periodically review our minutes an executive session to see if any of them can be released so we have reviewed the minutes the minutes have gone to our lawyer to see which ones need to be redacted we will be getting you [Music] those whatever the redacted ones i mean you have access to the full story but we're going to show you what the public can see and then we'll vote um that as our periodic review um at the next meeting what
170can i just add yep so my i believe these the minutes that you'll be seeing are actually the minutes that you guys have already approved for accuracy this will be the question when we bring them to you will be for release to the public so that now that they've been redacted and yeah so you know they look like you know an sbi file or something like that so the next thing is in the reading of the minutes uh the naomi recommended that we take open meeting law training just to refresh ourselves around the purposes for executive sessions and just that stuff in general so we can discuss do you want to do that individually meaning you know go and sign up for a webinar can can i just say if we're going to do it
171i want someone here that can actually answer questions because the generic training doesn't get it like the email i sent you today right like you know like hey i really still think that you know in the middle i don't know and i didn't get a chance to read all of that so yeah no it was just that like you know we had a disagreement about whether or not something was an lml violation i still think that it was pertinent to the overall discussion even though it wasn't like it's a pretty specific question that you're not going to get from watching a 45-minute video right you know and that's the real that's the stuff that we need more help with right it's not the general stuff we got we get the general stuff it's those sort
172of one-off instances right that like okay are we you know crossing the line here okay we'll move back then yeah so i know that the town recently offered something like that um so i can see but i think they were using themselves as experts like so when i argued whether or not it was right or not so you know so i don't so um we could ask we can ask dorothy dorothy yeah or that's a good idea or naomi i mean yeah well i'll just say naomi's done opening a lot of training first before and yeah can i ask a question about what she took what she gave us yep um was there something whether was she concerned about specific instances and i mean i think it would be helpful for me to understand the
173specific instances that she is concerned about and why although i will say i feel like when we go to executive session like it's not we never really debate the reason or purpose like i often feel like i'm i'm sort of trusting blindly that we're going into it for the right reasons stated so i it would be helpful for me to understand which example she's concerned about and why as a teachable i think we have that yeah i don't know what the best method is whether you want me to or speak to it or is there a way to share her i don't i'm happy to i'm speaking as the secretary so i think you can would you like me to share so and i don't know whether it would be appropriate at some point i
174guess i could share the documents with her comments with all of you necessarily they can't be put onto the exhibit because her comments are about executive session minutes but i will say they were off they were she was looking at several you know several different executive sessions and they were questions about um sometimes sometimes it would say that like we were discussing something that was appropriate for executive session but we weren't in the appropriate reason for the executive session so like sometimes we would have called executive session under you know there's ten particular numbers so maybe she would say this is actually number two when you've said it's number three there were some instances there were there really i i mean other people that saw it i don't know if you saw that there were
175some instances of very things that um were also discussed in open session so in other words like for exam as an example there was a conversation regarding scheduling that really shouldn't take place in executive session because that can be handled in open session in that instance we also had the conversation in open session but you know she's really doing a careful thoughtful job and really outlining um and then there were other instances so those are the there were kind of things and then there were some things that she sort of highlighted but i i'm hard-pressed to say like this you know this could have been an open session i don't know did that you feel like i captured it so how do people like us who i'm not i'm not i mean i'm not at
176the level of detail that you guys have that information how does the committee as a poll know as much as you guys know i think i can share with the committee the comments that naomi made and i in all honesty what she said to me was i'm gonna don't do anything i'm gonna send you a letter and so that's why i sort of just waited so at this point i when we i mean certainly when we have the um i mean it would be appropriate when we have the exhibits to improve i can share them with you um so that it's a learning tool right that we can all learn to make sure that we're you know doing the i just think we need to she's really just saying we need to tighten things up
177and make sure that everything that we talk about is under the correct category and but yeah i think i think we stay focused that was her video would that feel good if we shared that before we before we reprove them yeah we need to anyway right we need you anyway but i mean hers are sort of comments right they're not neces they're not her comments wouldn't be part of what was really eventually released but you know you could look at the comments and sort of see whether and in one case for example she asked me i know exactly the question was like she highlighted a paragraph and she said did everything here relate to collective bargaining and i said yes so it was like but she wasn't she's doing a very careful job part of
178yeah part of the problem is since executive session minutes are written pretty vaguely it doesn't give the full context so she had a question on what you know like what the context was behind it because i i know the the uh you know what michelle and i were just sort of discussing which i'm happy to fill you in on a little bit further but like the you know it just said like there was uh a disagreement i think she put the halo put like there was a disagreement surrounding such and such and like really gave no context to what it was just that there was a disagreement um in that you know michelle didn't feel like it was appropriate to be uh say in there so it just you know automatically flagged today on me
179that hey all right we gotta watch this so right and i just want to say i think it's i actually think it's terrific that we're having this conversation in open session as it should be and i will share the you know the documents so you can see naomi's in her comments in real time or in you know their you know it's a google doc where she's got the comments so yeah i mean so right because right now everything you're saying it sounds lovely but it's still at such a lover of cryptic that for me to understand my takeaway is like oh we have to tighten that up but for me and maybe it's because i am newer and i know you know jen is coming on and julian is a lot of new here it
180would be really helpful to break down an example that she cited as a teachable moment because right now it's sort of like i hear we have a little bit of a problem but i can't really tell you what the problem is but we have a problem but it's not that big of a like i'm like so because i i i i feel like you're saying that i didn't answer your question so tell me what i could because i feel like i tried to i'm going to share the documents maybe maybe let's just whenever whenever the next level of detail comes out that would be very helpful for me because i think i need an example more so than what you're saying right now i need an example are you okay not right this minute but
181like i i i thought would help that would help me understand what we're talking about i think she says she wants to see the documents which is our plan yeah yeah i'm going to share them okay all right and then late breaking news [Music] so joe had invited me to go to a meeting that was going to be this like kickoff of their master plan and then so i thought it was going to go to get information but then it's that's not what it is it's like the kickoff of the group and so they would like for the school committee to offer up as tribute a member to be on their master plan so um committee so i personally feel like that should be a hamilton person which you know takes me out of the
182list um so i didn't know if somebody wanted to be on the master plan steering committee um and we're supposed to turn this in other people on the committee are well it looks like planning board and the um what do they call it the hamilton development corp and people like that because those are the names that are also on here you're interested i am very interested in doing it okay i'm also interested dana's also interested wow two people that's awesome all right so there are two people who are interested um okay um all right well why don't we vote on that like um anna why don't you tell us why you want to be on this community so i i um i think i mentioned this early in the year when there was i think
183there was an email back and forth of what they were talking about getting this going and needing school participation so um for me my interest is i've long felt as though the school district in terms of master planning facilities use land use basically like the schools are such a huge part of the overall town revenue stream and budget and all of it and um i think it's crucial that one of us is there to really sort of have an eye on what hamilton is doing in a master planning sense understanding that the school and properties are a major source of town on property really and so um you know i think most people know but i'll state it explicitly like i am i part of the reason i ran for school committee i'm going to
184take a a nod from peter part of the reason i ran for school committee was to sort of look holistically at how the district relates to the towns how do the town's properties relate to each other so for me this is right in the area of interest i have in terms of space and smart growth and the interrelationship between revenue and land use and what we're doing so i i feel very strongly about wanting to have a role in the master planning process in the town of hamilton as a school committee member and as a town of hamilton resident and i mean i've been wanting i've been wanting to take part in master planning in hamilton since we moved to hamilton and realized that there were these structural issues i'm really interested in being part
185of the structural solution to those problems dana why would you want to be on this wow okay well always difficult to follow anna so so uh i you know my interest is is actually a two-way street i i feel really confident that i can bring the hat of the school committee and be fully in that mindset on this i'm willing to do that is to be there in the mindset of the school committee and bring that perspective to the master planning which i think is hugely important i also really like and love that kind of thing like really creating a vision and and planning for it um but i guess the other thing is i think it would be a two-way street i see that there would be a lot of benefit i believe for
186me that i could bring back to the school committee building those relationships really getting to know all of the various players in hamilton i feel like that that will really benefit me myself as a school committee member and hopefully benefit the committee whoever is on the committee i think it would benefit the committee i think it's both ways and to anna's statement it is critical that a school committee member be actively involved um in fact on the little blurb on the website one of the first things it says is why did you move to hamilton windham and we all know the answer to that question so i moved here for the trash collection just for the record it was like it was the train station but all right um so why don't we vote on
187um who would like for anna to start the master plan in hamilton i mean i don't care i want them i don't want them i don't think they'll take two okay and who would like data and peter's abstaining and peter's abstaining so that's a three to three vote so you know what i should have voted for peter rock paper scissors i don't think that would have helped if you'd voted for peter um flip a coin flip a coin do you want well i need to ask joe if we can have two yeah i mean what yeah why don't we see if we can send it to joe right because i think they they wear very different hats are in the town too so they can actually contribute in multiple ways i will tell joe i
188agree both katniss and i can't remember her sister's name are coming and right i mean i think well yeah we'll see what joe says and we can figure it out it doesn't we'll let joe figure it out it doesn't need to be all right um so apparently there was a town meeting this weekend yesterday would you like to tell us about it absolutely um so as folks know there was a town meeting both in hamilton and wenham the the end result for the school committee is that both budgets past town meeting so that and you know that was something that is good news for the the districts and for the towns in terms of no override and i want to let you know kind of where we're going as that vote has been approved the
189cutler principal search which is going to be the replacement for jen clifford as she moves into the elementary director of teaching learning role that is well on its way tomorrow thursday and friday we have two candidates engaging in site visits over at cutler and on thursday evening both candidates will have a meeting with parents through a zoom and then one candidate will meet on site meeting with with our leadership team with our teachers with myself they'll have an opportunity to speak to jen clifford as the the outgoing principal we will be collecting evaluations as this these individuals engage and then we are continuing to hope that we will have an appointment by monday so that process is well on its way um next i wanted to share that we know that there's been conversations that
190that's that some teachers have some hesitation about the new model so myself and jen are visiting all the elementary schools to talk about the model to answer questions about the model make sure that everybody has accurate information about what that's going to look like and really try to work together because it's critical that that we we all pull together to make this happen so we're taking the show on the road visiting schools talking with faculties to answer questions talk through concerns and to ensure that we have a strong launch to the model similarly at the secondary level myself and eric tracy will be visiting the middle school and high school faculties to talk about the shifts that we have in the curriculum coordinators doing supervision evaluation talking about the new pdc model so that's upcoming
191in the next couple of weeks we've met just this when this monday continuing to work with our curriculum coordinators talking about what the new structure is going to look like we've made monday we made a couple adjustments to the model based on feedback that we heard and we are posting the new positions that have been created as a result of the shift instructional coaches are being have already gone out and the other couple of jobs will go out either this week or next week so we are working to get this up and running pre-planning thought discussion is going to be critical in terms of making this model work and i want to let you know that we are we are we have started that work and we are moving forward um so that that's an
192update regarding where we are with the teaching and learning structure based on the positive outcome of the town vote yep um thank you for that i think i just want to put in a plug and it's sort of stating the obvious but i think the fact that so many teachers need reassurance is something i think it's good to address but i think we as a body have to address the level of public frustration and confusion to some degree too and i think we all saw that spill over to the point where the budget almost did fail in hamilton it was an incredibly close vote so as you're launching the restructuring i might advocate that you also reach out and have some parent reassurance as well to explain because as you said you think there's a
193lot of misinformation or misunderstanding out in the in the community right and clearly that is true and clearly the public is not assured not not everyone but a significant number of voters don't support this as it's been presented so i think now that it has passed i think um in terms of sort of healing like my takeaway from town meeting was really this thought of how are we going to heal from this process where there's still so much dissent and dissatisfaction whether you agree with it or think it's justified or it's understandable like suspend judgment of why it's happening but just address like we have a reality where it's like it's like we've had a bad breakup and yet we still are in the same circle of friends you know there's a lot of parents
194that are really bothered still i think outreach on your part to those parents in some sort of listening session or meeting or something where you allow people to really understand how is this going to affect my first grader you know at cutler who has been dependent on this reading specialist in this way i think there's a lot of parents that really still don't understand how it's going to work and they're worried about their kids and they're still i'm still getting calls of people saying well that's it i'm done i'm pulling my kids there's no way my kids like the parent dissatisfaction is there so i think that i think that that would be an important healing step as you try to launch it to get more parent understanding and buy-in i just want to offer
195that as a piece of advice to help move it forward yeah a couple of thoughts on that one is next week i'm actually attending the middle school high school friends meeting to answer any questions that folks might have and we'll have a joint elementary meeting principal principal superintendent coffee out with all the elementary group together before the end of the year so we'll we'll certainly continue to answer questions there'll be more conversations about it at the school level i do know that there was a lot of confusion and some some misinformation that was out there around that so i would agree that it's important to clear that up so that people understand the vision for the model and what they can expect for their students next year and to understand why we believe that this
196will provide actually a better level of service for students than was provided in the past and to channel david it's that's also our responsibility you say it better so disappointed in this board right now i no one got up to speak to support our budget on saturday that is your job right so i drove from out of state with my family to come down and support our budget right you're there we're there to help the community dispel the truth from rumors right and there was a lot of stuff being said and a lot of virtual being spit that was untrue and we had the opportunity to go up defend our budget being the experts in the room and we had crickets there was nothing to expect the superintendent to do all that sure she's a
197responsible part of it but that's part of your job to be here on this board right that is your job to get up and defend it is your job to get out there and make sure people know the truth right i can't believe nobody got up to school julie and i already already spoke about to this after that but no one was there supporting right this was our budget this is our budget right the fact that we had a budget that wasn't going to raise the levy to go to an override is incredible and it almost didn't pass because we couldn't support our own budget that is why you're here right that's why you're here it's one of the three main reasons why we're here that budget right so i just have to put that
198out there in a week we're going to be voting on a new leader for this board right so think about think about that who stepped up to a leadership role when we needed one over the weekend michelle i'd like to respond to that is it going to be factual or is it to debate what david said um probably both okay so can we do it after the executive session when it's just talking to people um it sounds to me like it's an interpersonal thing no it's a statement about the role of us as individual board members that are voting blocks at town meeting and i guess yeah can we talk about it after the executive session because it's getting late and i want to be sure we get to that um well i think anna
199should have a right to respond to i mean that was basically i mean that was a lecture so i not that i necessarily disagree or don't agree i need to formulate my thoughts but i do think that was kind of a shot across the bow that would allow that we should allow responses to it but that's what i think which is why i feel like we can talk about it but i don't think that talking about it and responding in the moment is the right time and if we give a little bit of space between the comment and the time that we talk about it we'll have a better deliberation and we have business to do and i want to be sure we get to it because we're getting on 10 o'clock and i know
200what needs to happen down here and it ain't going to be sure right are we going to have that back in open session though i mean i just i do take i see your point but i think all right let's vote on whether or not we want to have a discussion about the role of the committee at the town meeting do we want to have a motion on that sure i move that we designate six minutes to discuss the role of the school committee members at town meeting six second second okay all in favor great six minutes so how many people want to speak on this topic i just have a question okay that's two minutes a piece go anna okay i appreciate david's comments my only i guess rebuttal is that i think once
201it gets to the town meeting that that's the moment where we as individuals have some sort of a voting status i take a little bit of issue that we have some sort of fealty pledge to support any and all things that come forward i mean i i didn't support the budget i didn't support it at the committee i didn't support it at town meeting but i did nothing to actively hurt it but i also didn't support it you're right because for me to have supported it would have been a lie to my own position and to my own moral compass so i think it's a little bit unfair to say i am somehow they're obligated to basically say things that i didn't actually think were true and this is where we all have differences of
202opinion so i quietly said nothing i didn't hurt it but i didn't support it and i feel like to ask individual members once it's to the town meeting level that we sort of have to swear allegiance to something i can respect not shooting it down you know i think it would have been really inappropriate for someone to get up on the committee and trash it publicly at town meeting i agree with you that would have been terrible but that's not what anyone on this committee did so i just i don't think it's fair to expect or really demand that we support it if me personally i i didn't you know i was not in support i had not been and i don't think that is the role of us to do the marketing at town
203meeting frankly i think that is mary beth's job she's our professional staff she's our ceo she's the superintendent it's i think that is her job and at that point it's for the public to decide so i can understand a desire for support if you're in support of it but if you're not i don't think it's fair to ask those people who are not in support that they have to essentially contradict their own position on something out of some sort of sense of blind loyalty to the committee peter i want to say david i actually agree 100 with what you said and i heard it and i had something written and i hear you now and in the moment it felt i'm not even going to make an excuse in the moment it didn't feel like
204it was going to be the right message and hit and i didn't stand up and i am i feel like you're 100 right that i should have and i take you and um take your criticism and i accept it thank you constructive criticism i'm accepting it thank you you're taking back two minutes right you know to be that i i'm sorry that sort of came out negative but it's just like you know that we're there that was a tough fight but i also did want to say that both michelle and michelle did speak at their respective meetings so i i will say too that i think um i think peter's i'm sorry i'm just looking this way and only if there's two minutes left i withdraw i yield my minutes i just wanted to say
205it was brought to my attention today that what we did last year we did host meetings with the um friends groups cove it didn't happen and this year it fell off the radar so that's all on us too so um so something to remember for next year that is something to remember and we have a community engagement working group peter you got two minutes nope i'm done thank you okay great next update on teaching learning and restructuring we did that what about ezra yeah just very very quickly we actually i actually talked a little bit about this at tom meeting as well sr2 funds are in but we are we had an option of spending them in fiscal year 21 or 22 we are holding those funds to 22 to deal with any coveted related
206expenses we're just we're just not sure what those are going to be yet they're not in the operating budget so that's what's in sr2 we are still awaiting sr-3 elect allocations and kind of the rules for spending so as as soon as we get that um we will we will get you those numbers and the the guidelines around that um and come to you with recommendations from the leadership team but i i fully anticipated that we would have this number you know several weeks ago but it they have still not been released from the states so i i wanted to give you that update as well vinnie have anything you want to add to that i know i think you got it covered okay um i don't other than negotiations i don't think any of
207these subcommittees have met since the last time so we're going to update we're going to update you on negotiations in executive session in open session we can just say our next meeting is on the 17th tentatively um right and only tentatively due to there's potentially some scheduling issues but um yeah i think that's all i have yeah and we met yesterday all right was that yesterday yeah yesterday oh was that just yesterday was that only yesterday and um i can say the capital um planning finance committee will meeting on the 10th at four o'clock and then um on the 20th and then also at 7 p.m on the 10th there will be the turf committee staring the turf staring committee meeting so things are moving forward is there someone on our committee on that i
208can't remember me okay great super i know what it is you can report back later great okay um there are several items on the consent agenda including the warrants the minutes of april 7th and april 14th and donations from the friends of one through brookhand farm and hamilton winning little league would anybody like to pull those off i would like to hold the minutes from the 14th okay i'd like to hold all the donations please thank you perfect great um i know i swear whatever it's tradition i can't sing so i won't sing it for you okay go ahead and make i move that the hamiltonian regional school committee approved the consent agenda with the exception of the minutes from april 14th and the donations as listed on the agenda no changes shall be made
209yeah those are the things we're pulling i second the motion second by anna uh there can be no discussion so all in favor great the that passes um minutes of april 14th anna so i just have a very minor factual correction um at the beginning it said all members in attendance rose for the pledge of allegiance allegiance that is not true i would like to amend the record to show that i did not stand for the pledge of allegiance okay okay mahala will make that note and then you can forward approved minutes yeah so then okay um i can ask my halogen then do i just bring them back to the next meeting for approval is that no let's just approve them as amended okay yeah um okay so uh so you need a motion
210for that yep uh i move that we approve the minutes for april 14th 2021 with the uh as amended is there a second second by david anything else great all in favor that's unanimous so there are no no votes we have several donations one from the friends of winthrop for playground toys you know during coven and stuff you can't share stuff and also we were out of school for a long time so a lot of playground equipment was missing so the friends of winthrop has provided some of that um brickian farms has provided some compost to sort of spruce up the outside of winthrop right outside of winthrop and the hamilton went on little league provided clay and some services and was that only at cutler or was it also the middle school and the
211middle school at color and the middle school so we are very grateful for that we couldn't provide these things on our own and this clearly improves the quality of joy and at the schools for the children so shall we accept them thank you thank you i move that we accept the donations from the friends of winthrop for the playground toys for fifteen hundred dollars the brick and farms uh compost for 175 dollars and the hamilton went in little league services and goods for 22 thousand dollars their second on those a second oh i gotta go with anna on that one anna seconded all those in favor that is unanimous no need to determine the no votes uh topics for future meetings we just had something that i said could you write that down [Music] a
212work plan i can go back and look at it but it was early on did i write it down oh discussion about the vacation day in april yes let me add that into our our work plan i will do that yeah um can i think you mean the the calendar vote right michelle yes and the whole thing yeah yeah well we voted the one part so that's the that's the part yep yep what is it so i think this is probably in the works i'm not concerned about when it needs to be but and i i'm hoping not to also break into tears because that was i'm not going to say that was really hard to hear because i really felt like i appreciated everett's and i presentation and i asked questions because i thought
213of them as a professional adult giving a presentation and that was my i thought that they presented themselves that way and so anyway i'm sorry that beside the point but i do want to make sure that at some point maybe it's part of the dei discussion but i do think we want to come back and have a discussion about the land acknowledgement i don't i i don't feel like that has to be on the next week but i don't so i don't know how to phrase that exactly but yeah so we should put that like on a june thing oh and that's something else we have to talk about is the meeting in june for the workshop on the next agenda yeah so just as an fyi the there's supposed to be a meeting on
214the last day of school and we just we're like that's probably not a good time to do that i think we talked about this at the last meeting so just an fyi okay anna um peter just drew my attention and it's all in our email now um and since it's obviously going to be a topic of conversation apparently during our meeting today i'm assuming in response to the presentation about indigenous atlantic acknowledgement based on the comments and based on the presenter there are a number of students in our district who feel like it's appropriate to offer homophobic violent racial intolerance slurs it is all in the email that the school committee has just received i cannot beg the district committee enough to address diversity equity inclusion and discuss the climate and culture of our schools
215that leads to this happening i am i share julius for this i hate crying first of all it takes a lot to make me cry this is unacceptable behavior and i am going to be the first person and i'm thankful for peter for checking his email during the meeting the chat that was going on in the hamilton wedding cam live chat is unacceptable deplorable and i hereby condemn it and i expect a full response from the superintendent from principal tracy the students are named there are screen shots this is unacceptable behavior and i will not let this go unattended there has to be some sort of action and we cannot let this stand in our community full stop i'm also concerned that there's threats of weapons in their body counts what are what are what
216are we looking at i think can we just say comments hw cam can we just we need to think about this quickly let me figure it out i wouldn't even say anything if you look at that email yeah what i would say is we will look at this email and address it appropriately great perfect i also would like to say i'm a teeny bit concerned that people are checking their email during a meeting because there could be communications going on in there that are not evil whatever i'm just not okay great in this case i'm glad that peter did thank you peter there's one more i'm not okay peter you're fired yeah thank you this uh one thing that i want to bring up that i had actually mentioned in the email earlier but i'd
217like to move the um consent agenda back to the top of the meeting and i actually just had a really good reason why is the fact that since we do keep separating those donations we should be putting it right up front when actually everybody's here to hear them to hear how much stuff we're actually getting done um like it really just clicked right there yeah it's in the policy and i don't remember what the order is it used to be we used to start with a consent agenda yeah i'll look i'll look at it and i would like to i don't know if it's move or what but anytime there are citizens or students here they need to go first so like full stop that needs to be a policy absolutely um we can do
218that but if if you ever feel that way during a meeting just feel free to bring it i did and i didn't say anything but that's absolutely and sometimes i have no problem butting in and saying that most of the time so um yeah i i don't mean to be contentious but we did have a meeting a couple of weeks ago where i actually did move to push somebody up and it didn't happen so i do and i'm not even unfortunately remembering the whole because you know but i don't remember that okay i do think we're working did we vote on it i don't know i don't know we currently do not have any students scheduled for the next meeting the 6-2 meeting we do have a recognition of retiring staff so i would anticipate
219that we'll have that group up early yep sounds good okay so let's [Music] so i feel like we should make a motion to go into executive session but i think we should say that we'll return to open session just in case we need any sort of discussion about anything else that's transpired do you feel like that might be possible i don't know what we're talking about i'm not reading my email i doubt it okay so let's try it let's not let's not come back into open session if we need to talk okay wait can i because i think is it possible that might this might help both that might help is when we move into executive session would it be helpful to do purpose number three but also maybe purpose number seven which i thought
220let's do seven for security right which is and then we could if we had executive session minutes to discuss we could discuss them yep does that solve the problem you think are we doing seven for to comply with another law are we doing seven to talk about security well i don't know i mean we don't know what the numbers are the numbers are in the policy the numbers are in the policy that we just approved let me find the numbers all right okay do you wanna well i guess number seven i believe is security which is potentially a topic that could come up yeah security is a different one i thought they were the same i thought it was four because they were the same four you know what we're going into executive session now
221and we're going to discuss the negotiation strategy with the hamilton wyoming regional school committee for the hamilton wentham education association we also may potentially discuss the deployment of security personnel and devices and we may also talk about executive session minutes in which case we will need to meet we will need to meet under number seven to comply with the open meeting law and that specific law is 30 a how's that and any and all of those things could have a detrimental effect on the community's ability to negotiate um is there a second to that second by david um this is by roll call julia yes david yes dana yes michelle yes michelle bailey yes anna yes peter yes yes great i'm taking this thank you yeah yeah thank you for sticking it out to the
222end come back in two weeks thank you very much thank you and thank you for the keys for the 1916. you