School Committee Retreat 7 19 2022

001so i'm going to call the meeting to order at 906. [Music] and then if anybody has a public comment feel free to raise your hands we're gonna move right to neander for the teaching and learning updates good morning um i appreciate sarah being able to um squeak on the agenda i appreciate you putting me on there um in my former districts we would often use the retreat as an opportunity to um share out strategic initiatives happening in departments um just so that we knew the year coming forward what was some of that that work that was going to be happening so i have two of those um overarching 2022-2023 initiatives for you the the first one that i want to talk a little bit about is the strategic pandemic pandemic recovery and um perhaps it

002was me not articulating throughout the year all of the intentional and purposeful work going on around that but that has ever since 2020 been um partnered with every decision that has been made in teaching and learning so here's a decision we're making how does that partner with our work around pandemic recovery so what we're finding is the national conversation two years ago was really escalated worry and concern about learning loss and actually two years out now what we're finding is communities like marblehead um are actually not in dire straits like anticipated and if i had a data warehouse i would be able to match the current data that we're getting with the data from 2019 1817 but prior to john and i coming there was no data warehouse so i don't have that option to

003go back and check but the the data that we have collected that standard space k through eight is showing that our students are getting what they need to make progress so what um i have a meeting scheduled with i ready to compare our data which is standards-based and levels of proficiency with national norms so i have to request that data that doesn't come to me without a meeting with i ready so i'm going to meet with them and they are going to provide parallels for me in terms of where marblehead is in pandemic recovery as opposed to other districts you can also get that on the state level and now yes because massachusetts is so high nationally i want to make sure i can get that compared to other districts using i ready okay so

004i absolutely will that will definitely be part of the conversation but i was asking um john and i just came back from our our week at the superintendent's work professional learning and i was checking in with other assistant superintendents and superintendents and um they're finding in like communities like ours they're finding the same thing that their level of proficiency is pretty strong and so i'm happy to be able to say that to you um so in some of that intentional work we'll continue next year and deepen but i had shared with some of you some of the things that we're doing we have purchased a standards-based assessment tool that iready tool again that's our data warehouse that's the inf that's informing us and so we where we know um not only averages of kids at

005proficiency but what specific students need more and how we get to those kids that's a really important part is tracking and monitoring data and now we're able to do that so that i would say is one of the biggest parts of the um of our work in terms of bringing us out of a pandemic is having a centralized data system um is that all in the i ready system or is it something additional it's it's all in the i ready system so i can look as a as a district administrator i can look at all second graders and i can see who is at and above not only in a specific specific standard but overall um and so teachers are able to now and this will bring me to my second part which is that

006very intentional that very intentional work around the elementary schedule although we hit i hit a lot of bumps in how that was rolled out that was also very intentional in terms of how are we getting kids what they need in core and core learning and then where do we provide opportunities like the wind block for kids to get what they need if they're either behind on a standard or advanced in this year so um so that data is teachers can sit around in their professional learning because that was another piece that was embedded intentionally in the master schedules time for people to talk with each other about kids and they can use that data and say we've got you know this many kids that are below on this standard let's use wind block i'm going

007to run a you know refresher course for six weeks during the wind block and i'll take those kids and we're going to do a double dip on that um and then we'll measure again um with i ready the next assessment cycle to see how the kids have done that's really interesting so that wind block then it sounds like teachers are sharing students right it's not cost specific that's the intention okay so i don't want to say that's how it's working right now just like everything you have to go slow getting it in the master schedule was a big initiative then the next initiative is getting teachers using it well and so last year they got professional development what does a win block look like how could a wind block be set up what could kids

008be doing during that time so next year and i did hear from parents that they don't want to see the eye ready pathways which is a personalized program for advancement used during the wind block and i agree with that and teachers agree with that but the better we get at using the wind lock and teaching the systems to kids of how to work independently we'll get to that point so um where teachers can be running a small group and there could be another small group working on something independently together um on a skill that they're looking to develop but we're getting there that takes time the real win was getting it in the master schedule i will say from a parental standpoint i requested all the i-ready scores yeah and you can see whether they're

009throughout the year where areas of growth or regression um it's very it's very data filled information if you're requesting we're not giving it out readily to parents you have to request it at this point and i did and if you're uh if you're looking at it there is a lot of data that you can glean from it as a parent yeah so we were given the iranian data in my son's class which was great because it is full chock full of information so i really am excited and happy to hear that kids from different classes eventually understands the process together absolutely right will be combined that have the same you know needs additional needs etc i think that's wonderful and i think that's a huge win for us not to use that term is there

010on for children that are advanced will there be eventually opportunities to combine them apps as well 100 so what i'd like to get to is when there are students exceeding on standards that we're going into a more project based direction with those kids so maybe they're given a task and it might take them four weeks to complete the task collaboratively but that you know that would be something that they would work through together um that that actually is happening my son not to do my own home because he certainly does not get his map abilities from me but he was identified as having to move forward this year um so that is happening yeah so that's all the intentional work behind pandemic learning that was and just best practices in education um and the win

011block again that master schedule hit so many bumps that i don't think all of the assets shined um but that wind block all at the same time for grade levels so that we can have kids working together at the same grade level that have the same skill set do you have any professional development at any point planned that may show how we can take some of these students and offer them the the project-based learning for the teacher almost like a train the trainer model for the teachers that are doing it that might incorporate the teachers who are looking for ways to do that yes okay so for the first time um our lead teachers in the district that we post those positions and they the teachers apply to principals in the past those lead teachers

012were used very differently in schools some would be administrative they order the the department supplies or they you know relay the principal's message back out to the teams this year when you apply there'll be a two-day institute that you go to um it's a leadership institute that my department is running and we are going to talk about adult learning and how do we give kids differentiated options and how do we talk to our teams about kids that are in different places and making sure they're getting what they need so that would be one of the places where we'll talk about how do we use wind block magic block advisory blocks to push kids to elevate bricker and these blocks although they may have different names depending on the grade level you're at are essentially the

013same concept essentially yeah they're more intense yeah targeted at the elementary levels yeah yeah but um you know the fact that we have a magic block at the high school is very impressive very impressive okay yep um and so i had just jotted down some of the things for you um other like the explicit professional development opportunities um k-6 for the professional conversations around best practices and looking at student work sometimes you know what's happening in your classroom but you don't know what kids are doing in other classrooms and so now your teachers are all bringing a sample bring a writing sample that shows a struggling writer and bring a writing sample from your class that shows a advanced writer and then you share it with each other and you're like wow what did you

014do to get emily to be able to do this and you can start having those kinds of conversations um do you want to just talk a little bit more about the instructional coaches yeah sometimes people think is it student-facing you hear student-facing and the work that they're doing with teachers in classrooms yeah using the data and sharing that like modeling lessons in the classroom i'm i'm so glad you brought that up because i i couldn't be talking and putting a spotlight on this work without my without rebecca brand mary leblanc a lot of the people in schools that are doing the work on the ground with teachers um again another thing that john and i did is we started talking about how do we elevate what's happening in schools because there wasn't really anybody kind

015of doing the work in schools so i was able to find really strong teachers in marblehead and and they applied for positions and what we do is we meet once a week and we talk about professional development what's coming up on the scope and sequence where do teachers need direction what what what assessments can we develop to help teachers so they don't have to develop the assessment but the coaches are developing the assessments and then they take the data and they put the data in a spreadsheet and hand it to teachers so teachers aren't having to do all of that themselves if we didn't have that coaching support in schools we would be nowhere near where we are right now um and i was so sad because the we had really um you know i

016had that math specialist in the budget and so that person would have been able to lila um dixon who's currently um just moving our math instruction tremendously and that person would have been able to kind of help our secondary school but um you know we'll we'll make it work um another year with lilo kind of leading that work but it's just impossible to get to all those teachers when you're just one person um but that that would be an area um through the strategic plan that i will identify as the need for more instructional coaches um and i think man just from the conversations about the teachers and being in sac that modeling piece that came up a lot of times because you know they kind of know in theory what they're supposed to do

017but then in practice it's a very different situation so i think that modeling and having that you know that time together their ideas and see it in practice is they're not evaluators um that's very intentional they go in and support teachers and so if somebody is struggling we're also getting to the point where um we cover each other's classrooms so there was a model where we had somebody modeling a lesson i covered a room john covered a room so we covered classrooms so all those teachers could go in and watch the model lesson and then debrief with the coach and then go back to their classrooms so um we're getting to really that's the the student-facing and adult-facing work that's going to just accelerate um outcomes here it's really great um and then the data

018from the that we're using is also reviewed consistently to target our tutoring support so it's not just going blanketed out to the classrooms and students but you're identified based on your data and you're provided the supports on that um we also are going to continue with the multi-tiered system of support conversations it's not um we're trying to get to that all means all so your one lesson might work with eight for eighty percent of your students what do you do differently for the twenty percent and getting teachers to think about um how do they change their instruction for those kids it's not that another tutor is going to come in and scoop those kids up it's how do i change my instruction as a teacher to reach all of my students um we provided for

019the first time um and worked with michelle on this the um high school summer academy which i went yesterday um dan reported that attendance is much better than it was last summer it's only been two summers we've been strategic in how we used our money to again to support kids with the learning loss and attendance has increased this year and then also this summer all schools have um access to school counseling so if you're struggling at home if you have a student issue you're not alone we have staff in buildings on site to support you the elementary schools don't have a counselor at their school but they have communicated out the schedule of the counselors in the district and where you can go and when so that's been another really progressive way to address the

020sel piece um we didn't just drop families off on in june um but we put that support in for them to be continue to be successful and supported throughout the year just on that piece the communication that is it's probably in some spring blocks okay so just making sure that parents are really getting about that because i think it's really helpful especially in the summer yeah families are still kind of doing their day-to-day stuff and in some cases the kids are yeah yeah themselves so okay how do we communicate that in a very proactive way that is available so like some principles i was sending it out um i will say having multiple principal emails it's more clear in some than others okay and so maybe just from a district stand sure yep we can

021do that i can i can collect that um from each principal and send it out to the community and i was just thrilled to see that because it's so difficult to find someone right now and especially a lot of kids don't you know especially the younger you get uh yeah lengthy stay in a counselor's office is not exactly what they need and so sort of just summer support so that they enter the next grade kind of more ready psychologically to learn right i was thrilled to see that yeah and they are um being used right so we're excited about that so it's nice that families are taking advantage of that how can we and i'm sorry i don't want to get us too far off track we've been probably coming in six minutes but um

022at a future meeting can we talk about how we or would we look at a freshman academy model at the high school i don't know if you did this in nantucket um i know some well-performing districts it's it's you know something they really embrace is it something we want to look at it talk to you sure i've seen it go really well and not well at all so with everything yeah but certainly it's just a question that's been thrown out there it's a model and then the other update i just wanted to let the committee know that we are transitioning to a standard space report card k-6 um i have um met with the parent advisories at the village at the glover and at the brown so those groups are aware that that transition is

023coming there were some cases um where the report card wasn't even reflective of what was being taught so i think it had been 10 to 12 years since a revision and so lots of standards have changed since then so we have a teacher created standard space report card every teacher k-6 had a voice and had feedback and we did it we took a lot of time to do it and they're very happy i think the as a committee the it's important to know that the indicator performance indicators have changed so we no longer have an advanced indicator one of my questions was what was the perceptiveness to that decision so meeting um meeting the standards that's what the framework expects is meeting so for example a standard in kindergarten or first grade might be numeric

024edition single digit numeric addition one plus one is two there's no advanced there's no advance to that standard you can add a single digit in a single digit so that um a lot of the standards are clear in that way either you're meeting or there's you're approaching it you're able to do it you know 80 of the time but if you can do it um you know 100 of the time with consistency and then then you're meeting there is no really exceeding if you can articulate and define verbs adjectives and nouns there's no advance to that you can articulate that um so the one area that i felt was extremely important if we took the advanced indicator away is to include um a common area okay so i've never been in the district where an

025elementary report card did not this the expectation wasn't that you communicated to a parent about in a personal narrative so the narrative box um is delineated terms one term two and term three but after term one that will be archived and term two comments will show up all of it will be archived but you'll be looking right at what that term is and it frees up space so the teacher needs to write more about what's happened that's where they can say you know we're moving towards project-based assignments where a student is excelling in english language and that's not going to be a click drop menu pre-determined that was a conversation and i felt very strongly as a parent yeah and as a teacher that your voice needs to be heard and parents need to hear

026from um and so that's going to be you know for some teachers that was a really difficult transition that that you know there's a lot of time that goes into comments and so as a principal i would always encourage teachers to just go ahead before even you do the report card you can start writing some of your comments in there so it's not such an overwhelming practice use some of that professional planning time that you have during the weeks to do a little bit at a time so it doesn't overwhelm you when it comes time to do reports so that comment section will be one section for the whole report card yes okay and when you said it gets archived does that mean the parent will be able to get back to you no it's

027in your aspen account that will be in your ask an account okay it's just this clears out it just clears out to provide more space for the teacher for term two okay for something like reading where someone could be exceeding expectations i would imagine that would be a critical exactly so that would be where the teacher would highlight yeah you know um i was i called it the oreo cookie effect when i was a teacher you kind of start with like what's going really well the strengths something to work on and then you you know sarah's a pleasure to have in class i look forward to term two so you know hopefully there'll be some highlights and then you'll be able to look and see where your student is going the next term is that

028gonna be um so yeah name has done so many wonderful things here but this is a highlight for me because the road to comments on report cards was not easy and i appreciate sarah's comment about the drop down menu not being good because as a former high school principal we had that drop down menu and it would be pleasure to have in class yes you know it just drove parents to distraction because they knew there was no thought that went into that and so the work yeah that man has done to get really anecdotal comments on your child's performance should be celebrated no i think that's huge right because sometimes i don't get comments at all and sometimes it's like you can tell it's the same comment yeah so i think this is all great

029yeah but i want to make sure that it's communicate like parents know this is coming and yeah like just give them a heads up and some type of like hey guys just so you know there's going to be a new report card we're going to go through it in detail in the open house or whatever but just so you know it's coming yeah so the the the open house will have a copy of it and i'm going to do a screencastify with my coaching staff so we will have a video with the presentation that i gave um the the schools um and then we'll we'll continue to measure message it out so when we as a district rolled out pbis on parent on um parent cider or conference or whatever we told it um you

030know you were in that conference from 5 to 5 45 but then at 5 45 just whatever 6 15 there was an option that this other thing presentation was happening so everybody that went to parents night got told by the teacher and this year we will have because they i think they listen to the teacher presents yeah more so than they may be doing yeah we don't have a standard space report card yeah if you'd like to learn more there's a presentation going on great idea do that okay for sure okay for sure um nan do you mind if we hop on to colby and then that's perfect that was perfect timing thank you so much that was really informative thank you and then colby had given us a present uh some information in our

031packet everyone should have gotten and we have a new member on the screen your prep our table it's heavy most of us had an opportunity to hire we have a new member allison taylor this is our council right here excellent well thank you so much for having me um for today's drive was just gorgeous coming up here but driving by all the beaches yeah it was beautiful i was like i'm kind of jealous um so today i just wanted to kind of i put together some materials and i also realized like looking through i can send you all some other like just educational materials um you know allison i think one of the things as a new member there's some requirements and whatnot so if we haven't hit on those we can certainly hit on

032those with open meeting law and ethics and whatnot so um you know just uh let me know okay it's for open meeting law for ethics for instance okay so we've got a little open meeting law one too that we're gonna just we'll handle that as well so it's kind of perfect timing um so what i wanted to do was really kind of give you all an overview of the open baby lobster we're well aware of it um public records and then a splash of ethics um so kind of hitting on all three of those um the materials are dense and normally i try to do a more splashy um powerpoint but it's not that splashy so i just thought i would just kind of run through this and um and kind of and walk through

033i mean the the big issue here is there's a lot that like you know we have the law and how it's interpreted and whatnot but then it's also i also always i take a very conservative approach um with respect to open meeting law public records so i always go from this assumption of okay let's just assume you know open meeting law let's assume public records and let's go from there um so it just kind of keeps you all in a better spot because the purpose of the open meeting law is really to to allow public participation in our meetings and to see in that transparency and then there's a few areas where we have to have it in executive session which i'm going to talk a little bit about that and when those when those

034times apply so i mean basically you know it's it's the intent is i'm looking at my my very boring black and white um written written pages here but it's really talking about you know kind of that open discussion of governmental action so the people are part of the government are involved in that um and um you know the law does recognize the public officials might be unduly hampered if all discussions are required to take place in public hence why you have reasons to go into executive session um and those those exemptions are narrow and limited so i want to talk a little bit about that i think gone are the days i remember back i've been doing this for 20 years now um time flies um back in the day a lot of times what

035school committees would do is they would have their agenda for open meeting and then they would always have like executive session at the end you know tbd i think people have gone away from that thankfully um where it's like if you're gonna have an executive session you've got to clearly state the reasons for your executive session and don't just tack it on just well in case we have something that's executive session worthy um the good news is like i said i feel like most people have gone away from that so basically what entities are covered school committees covered we all know that you know as far as public entities subcommittees are covered so keep in mind when you're working with say a personnel subcommittee a policy subcommittee those are still covered under open meeting law

036and so you have to be mindful of that and how we're uh tracking the information and maintaining minutes and whatnot so keep keep all that in mind yes i'll just um ask you to clarify there because we do have a number of subcommittees right budget policy whatever but sometimes two members are going to work on something it's not a subcommittee it's whatever if they're going to get together and i don't know because they both have the same time open to meet with john they meet with john at the same time can you just kind of talk about those differences i mean that you know a subcommittee is really appointed by the public body so if you're talking about two people meeting that's not really a subcommittee that's appointed by the public body however i'm just

037gonna say again totally conservative approach is be mindful of that you know i mean be mindful of when more than one of you is at a meeting um you know or is is to get because we also want to be mindful of we're trying to avoid the appearance as well of you know any kind of impropriety um and this is it's marblehead's not a huge town i get that you know it's like you might run into each other whole foods or or whatnot but you know to be mindful of kind of what is what's a meeting and what's not so i'd be very careful i you know two but definitely not three you know um and and i understand in the efficiency of business and whatnot but a subcommittee is really a subcommittee that's appointed

038by the public body even if we don't call the subcommittee though like if we're if we're about to do something and it's not going to be you know a multi-year even a year-long thing even if it's a month-long activity and we decide as a board um emily and megan can you just work this out and report back to us in our next meeting if we decide as a committee that more than one person is going to have a task whether we call it a school a subcommittee or not if we designate the people that more than one person that will be attending to school committee business that needs to be posted i would i think it's the safest approach to take to be quite honest if you are doing something like that you know that

039the agency's office might disagree with me and that's fine i'd rather they disagree with me and tell me oh no colby don't worry that's not a subcommittee as colby you messed up that is a subcommittee so i think that is the smartest way to do it especially if you're going to have people reporting them back out to the committee of the whole right so you know that's where we should be keeping records we should be keeping notes and whatnot so that it's it's again that error like the idea of transparency that's the key thing here so just keep in mind when you do you know appoint these kind of quasi subcommittees i would still take a very conservative approach of um you know of considering those a a subcommittee of the of the public body

040of the whole um you know especially especially in light of where things are written there's a lot of open meeting law complaints there's a lot of public records requests and whatnot so the error on the side of caution and air for transparency purposes i think is is actually best um single members cannot comprise a subcommittee of the of the gov of the body and then you also have administrative meetings you know and that is like staff meetings called by administrative personnel um so typically like meetings with john you know as you pointed out but again i would be very cautious about how many members at the same time are meeting with john in his capacity as superintendent so uh so that kind of covers the bodies now what constitutes a meeting really defined as deliberation

041okay we're going to talk a lot about we're going to talk a lot about deliberation can i answer yeah um so if myself as chair and emily's vice chair were to meet weekly or bi-weekly with john to talk about the agenda um would that would should be aaron's head apostation and post-seven i wouldn't that's and also that's very ministerial you're you're sitting there you're walking through what are we gonna put in the agenda and whatnot so i just don't think that that would need to be that it needs to be i just want to make sure we're airing on the side of position i'd love to err on the side of caution i do i do um so meeting deliberation of the public body with respect to any matter within its jurisdiction okay so you

042know matters within your jurisdiction are um policy budget and the superintendent are really the main matters that are within the jurisdiction of the school committee um and quorum is defined as a simple majority and i believe i'm so sorry i'm all over the place are you guys five okay good that was going to be i'm like trying to think back so you know uh i'm not a math major but three more than three uh would constitute a quorum we talked a little bit about that subcommittee um and deliberation by the public body subcommittee which itself is a public body is subject to law if a quorum of the subcommittee is present okay so typically on subcommittees you normally have two people especially when you have a committee of five i have some committees that are

043as large as 12. um so yeah that's a regional school district so normally you know normally they go five is on the smaller side you know i have a lot that are in the ballpark of seven and what not remote participation okay so where we are right now in the land of the zoo um is you know we there's been a lot of stuff out there about remote participation on zoom so we of course have the governor's order which he extended if any i didn't include that in the materials because it's like nailing jello to the wall always subjects change right um i'm happy to send that i can send that to you 2023 correct that yeah just got extended exactly um but i'm happy to share that with you you can um send it

044out to the committee no one comment and deliberate on that we'll get to that in a minute but um we can send all that out to the committee um about this i mean one of the key things was zoom um and i think this is i i do think that zoom and we keep on using zoom it's like you know it's like ziplock uh they they point a good name uh i think that zoom is gonna be something that's gonna stay with us in some capacity for for forever i really do i think that it's it has made um it has made life easier in in a lot of respects um you know one of the key things that we have to keep in mind is if you have members participating remotely um all the

045votes have to be roll call votes okay when you're when you're in zoom so that's going to be one of the bigger changes we have to do roll call of course when we are in executive session which we're going to get to but certainly on the zoom it has to be real cough now the other thing that i've been seeing lately come on i'm working on this in another um in another town so it's not you also take a breath on that is um the world of technology isn't perfect right and um anyone who knows me i always joke around you know i my sister works for nasa i can barely work an iphone so technology is not my my best friend but we do have if you're gonna have technology and allow for people

046to participate remotely we need to have that technology working we need to because that is one of our access points now what's happening is what i'm dealing with in another jurisdiction is the issue here where the school kind of hit was like firing on all levels with access right so we had in person we had remote we had cable access i mean if anyone remembers the good old days like march 13th of 2020 um we basically had in person and then you had it on cable access and that was really about it but now you know what we're kind of opening up the zoom doors which you know i know we zoom right here is that we have to make sure though that if we're going to have access via zoom it's it's got to

047be working now there's going to be technology glitches so my advice is if you do have a technology glitch that the chair should make that known we're having an issue with our zoom um but just keep in mind if you i truly believe that the spirit of the law is if we are providing access then we'll see if the aeg agrees with me but if we are providing access by it in person and via um you know cable access and our zoom might have some issues i would still say we've met the um we've met access to the meeting um but it'll be interesting to see what they say because the other thing too is that if you have on your agenda which i believe you all do which is um public comment oh we

048also put on the bottom um this meeting will not be suspended or terminated technology problems interrupt the room the blah blah blah blah and then we put math general law that's why everything at the bottom okay i like that i wish my other client might just have to steal that one um yeah so i mean what i would do though is um you know we just have to make sure that we we notify people for having those technology issues and whatnot provide people with the access but the issue really comes up is if you have public comments right so where i've seen the access issues there's people on remote that are trying to public comment and if there's issues going on there now stuff happens i don't know what to do about that with them

049like just thinking about that and how we post on it like if we're making it available in person right would we not just post the location as the in person and then on the agenda but here's the zoom here's the youtube link and so that way because i feel like if we have it as a location and it goes down then we then we do get ourselves into trouble yeah i think it's i think it is sufficient but like tbd when i hear from open meeting law um the ag's office if that is sufficient i mean that's the thing is we are dealing in a little bit of an unknown with just kind of how all this interplays and so you know what i would say is and there's a couple cases somewhat on point

050that are starting to come out but if you are doing in person then your location is in person but you can also access it via public you know via um cable access and by his name and put those links there too okay but it's just something that we're seeing who knows where it's going to go you know with what the ag's office is going to do on it but that's kind of where we're at so then i just asked him the question so would we take it said the room is zoom so can we take that off and just provide it underneath so it's not i think that you can because if you're if your mini conduit has access again tbd if it changes with what we get your main access point is in fact

051the location 40 baldwin and that that's where we're going then i think you can also say you can access it via zoom on this link via cable access here okay i think that is more of our clerk we'll only accept it in certain formats a template and if you don't she wants you to use her specific template we get more information than we need to but it's it's kind of like any law where you kind of are stuck with the most stringent governing body and if her rule gets us from more than the ags we have to go with the stricter but they're not requiring that we do it via zoom but no but if we do the requirements they posted that way so what i'm saying is we just leave this blank and at

052the bottom just like you've done your little note here yeah you add in the zoom link the youtube link and whatever other way we're going to do it it's because having it in the posting means that if we do have a technology issue we then can't have the meeting because well the additional no no not not totally not necessarily um you know i i'm saying that basically if you are allowing access in person and you're also running cable access you know if your zoom goes down it goes now and that exactly that note at the bottom covers us yeah that's that's my that's my two cents you know but i think again it's it's we're living we're like kind of in this limbo lands right we've got like one foot in in person one foot

053in you know zoom land and until we really get a very clear understanding by the state as to how they're viewing this um i take a very conservative approach on it and just kind of try to say i love your statement about technology you know our primary location is the brown is the brown elementary school right but you know our secondary ways of access are via zoom or via cable access yeah and i talked to the ag's office three times on thursday when i was posting this um and essentially the way they explained this to me is you can always do more mm-hmm exactly exactly and that's why i think like like no good deed goes unpunished to a little extent like i feel like people are doing a lot more and then when a

054person's like well my zoom did it work so that's another thing too is it's like well i can't fix comcast in your house right so you know and that's kind of something that we're just kind of still like navigating through is like it really wasn't because i hours i will not get back i had to go through the zoom meeting i had to go through the meeting itself to see where that technology glitch was and it wasn't it wasn't my client it was the participants so one question i have for you are there more legal coverages right now we have a zoom account through the district but it's zoomed for education they know zoom does have zoom for municipal government are there more provisions and mark no one in marblehead uses the zoom for municipal

055government are there more provisions that are cover is it better to go with that one as far as sir i thought i'd explain to you i know nothing about technology okay um so i don't know i really truly don't you know as far as kind of what the difference is for zoom for education versus zoom for municipality maybe i'll just follow one of the towns using it now yeah i mean it could be it could be just a cost differential to be that honest you know it could be that i believe it is i believe it's the cost of pricing yeah and you could probably i would assume with municipalities they could have a bigger you know based on the size of the municipality a bigger room if you will bigger amount of participants you

056could have but that's my guess is that it's there's i don't i i would be shocked if there's any different legality kind of protections okay but again i do not do technology so uh speaking right now okay good that's good that's good so they can see you naked um so the next thing i have on here is serial discussions and this is where people can really get in trouble okay so this comes up where i've seen it and again i'm i'm fairly new to marblehead so i haven't seen you know a lot knock on wood let's keep it that way um but where i've seen it in other communities where it can be a little bit sticky is facebook you know facebook can be a big issue is that and it's very hard sometimes and

057i just say this as like my word of caution is it's very hard and this goes into ethics at the end for people to see you not see you as say sarah school committee member sarah parent sarah community member right and so you always have to i always keep in mind um you know that i'm always i will always be viewed with my lawyer hat on i can never take my lawyer hat on i can't take off my lawyer hat you know especially with schools like i've you know two two kids in public school and i have to be exceptionally careful and like disclose this like i've disclosed to schools this is who i am this is what i do because it's very hard to take off that hat and so i just encourage people

058to think about this um you know with your social media presence i'm not trying to bridge anyone's first amendment rights let me be very clear about that i'm just trying to give a word of caution about it and certainly where i've seen it is where i've had some districts that have had like kind of the you know an upset i'm going to use boston as an example just because they're big this is not boston you know boston public schools school committee web facebook group and then people will start commenting on comments and that can become serial discussion so you have to be very careful about that i see that with email the other thing too and i know i'm like debbie downer nervous nelly text messages on your own cell phone too those can be

059reachable okay i mean i think again you know one of the more public ones that we've seen out there was boston public schools um you know that there is text messages between members um and the problem it was i believe it was during a school committee meeting and so that's another thing i did deal with this in another district not bps and another district where members were on a zoom this was in the height of the closure and people could see them looking down and it and then you would see someone looking down and see another person looking down now does that mean they communicated with each other no they might have impressions in the impression a hundred percent and so and and people do we're communicating with each other you know hey so and

060so make the make the motion okay so that's something that you know people i think that was a real eye opener to people is that idea of like the reach of text messages and i had to turn over text messages off of people's private cell phones to the uh to the ag's office for in-camera review um to basically say here's here's what we have um and it can be really tricky so also you know there were a lot of people that were like yeah my daughter's texting me because she doesn't know where the milk is you know and like yeah just like the milk is in the fridge where it always is but um it just didn't look good so you also had that appearance piece there too where you can say it to your

061blue in the face we weren't communicating people were not communicating but it doesn't look good when people see it i mean i yelled at my husband the other day we were on his meeting and with with another person and he just kept on looking down and i said i could see you and it seemed like you were not engaged and you weren't right so don't jump now i'm self-conscious and feel need to tell i let everybody know one of my kids is in boston children's right now and i keep checking my phone to make because she's alone for like a two a couple hour period to make sure she doesn't need something so if you see that's what i'm doing i totally get it now my husband i'm not being a bad school committee partner

062not a bad parent no no no my husband was just looking at cnn okay i'm like nothing's happening let's focus um serial communication for instance if i was on the phone with emily and i know we're gonna vote on um lunch fees lunch fees and i'm like you know blah blah blah but then later that day i talked to sarah and i say oh well i was talking to emily and like that is now serial community yeah i mean you just got to be really careful about it you know and that's why again it's within your jurisdiction your chat among others and there's i believe there's a case that we included in here um down below that talks about yeah on page nine there's a case that talks about you know even one-way email can

063contact you yes just can't sleep at night you can go read all these cases um they're pretty interesting and they i do i do kind of dig them um basically noted that deliberation is defined as an oral written communication through any medium including an electronic male i mean clearly this is you know 2012. um between a quorum of the public body and public business within its jurisdiction provided however that deliberations should not include the distribution meeting gen agenda schedule information distribution of other procedural uh material um and basically the ag stated that the expression of an opinion on matters within the public body's jurisdiction to a quorum of the public body is deliberation even if no one responds okay so keep that in mind the only time that i'm wicked cautious about this issue so

064i had like let's use my text message example so i'm answering that that text message piece i need to send out an email to the committee of the whole which i did it's not this is not i don't look at this as totally protected under attorney-client privilege it probably is but i still take a very conservative approach i send out the text to the committee the whole saying if you have we're answering this complaint if you have any text messages you are to send the following to me and me only meaning just me not to the committee the whole because i really try to avoid anything with you know with anything that looks like serial deliberation there's something going out to the from the chair to the committee the whole um again shouldn't be like

065hey guys let's vote x-ray on this or i think we should vote xy on this very kind of non very basic kind of stuff and it could be um people colby needs the following emails please send them directly to colby do not cc or include anyone else i'm very careful about kind of how we put that out so that we avoid any look of serial deliberation and what especially when you see you know an open meeting line complaint determination that basically says yeah just blasting out your opinion even though absolutely no one chimed in is considered that deliberation piece would you recommend whenever i send anything out of share that i blind cc so that no one can hit reply all just even if it's a clarifying question accidentally i mean the thing is i

066don't like blind cc too because i feel like it shows that we have something to okay to hide i'm a big fan of put everyone out there honestly no one has replied and and also make sure you're not putting out an opinion um you know it's it's like base you know it's it's really the way i look at it email is for like basic informational purposes only you're going to hear me really go tee off on this in public records because people overuse email beyond belief and it really is email when you are in the public sphere consider it writing things on marblehead public schools letterhead period you know so that's that's the thing that we have to be very mindful of and sometimes people will be like yeah but i'm using my aol account

067first of all aol no don't use that um but second i even know that but i'm like but even if you're using your private it's still touchable it's still good oh sorry sorry i thought my mom was out of it with yahoo but we've got her a little bit over to gmail now but yeah so i just i really look at it like email is very much so scheduling a kind of uh dissemination of info like document information kind of thing what happens if someone from the public replies to all of us showing us the deliberation they had with someone that meant a lot yes yeah i mean but that's not that's not one of you all blasting out your opinion right so it could be i mean it could be tied to someone saying

068this is what so-and-so sent to me i think the ag's would have a hard time saying because that was then sent to all of you from an outside member from a non-member of the body that that would constitute deliberation because that case the one in the materials is it's a member of the public body that blasted out his opinion to the group but if someone blasts out then if you've got a member of the public that says hey i was talking to sarah and she said x or i was talking to emily she said x that to me is blasting out to the group and what i would probably do if i was a chair i would say you know i would say i would email the whole group and say you know to that

069person thank you for your email but i'm requesting that no one responds to this exactly constitutes a liberation like really kind of clarify that in the pub in the record that we got it that's not our fault and we are just going to you know and just put this off to the side so you have something that says we got your email but please no one respond to this email inside the constitute deliberation i just want to clarify though because um we have for instance essential email addresses like school committee at marblehead public schools or whatever and when members of the public have a question comment or concern they're often email all of us you're not telling us not to respond when we get emails from the public are you or acknowledge well i think

070you have to be very careful when you get an email from a public person to from like a member of the public to the e to the committee of the whole because then if you respond back to that person and see see everyone no no just to the person just respond just john smith emails the whole school committee but then any one of us can reply to john and it only comes from us from what yep from one of you yes i think that's okay that's fine but then sometimes what john does is reply it happens a lot especially when john's feeling a little confrontational um imaginary john um they'll they'll hit reply to that person but then put everybody back on committee again right and that one you just have to kind of again

071say you know thank you for your email but you know i'm gonna ask the committee because you know you responded to the committee the whole and that's why you could also find a way to when you're looking at how your committee is responding to public you know public emails i have i have some committees that they rotate a person through that it you know it might be you know the the chair or the vice chair or you rotate through on a monthly basis as to who kind of you know sends off the thank you for your email but you know we can't we can't respond you know and i'm telling everyone not to respond you know not to cc back to everyone else um and people can of course in your capacity can individually respond

072to constituent concerns okay so we can individually respond we don't engage in a with everything with everyone and if they send it back to everybody and you respond back just you respond only to that individual not to everybody correct as long as everyone knows everybody yeah just don't do the everybody thing that's that's the key you're going to take anything away don't cease don't you know reply off it's the opposite of a first grade birthday party do not include not exactly it does not include everybody in that email response that could be problematic and then you know that's when it really comes back where it's like again no good deed goes unpunished where you're just trying to respond to a constituent and then the constituents like oh and then they deliberated it because i succeed

073everyone that they replied all and everyone's chiming in it's just you know to try to avoid that okay okay um and then that's the question back on the text messaging so obviously it's not okay when we're texting each other if we're texting each other during a meeting what about when you know a community member or like you know a family member texts us and you know and we do glance down at our phone yeah and say it's a family member we need to respond like what how do we handle that you know that's really hard because um i think that there's like a view out there that you are corresponding with others and so let's just say you're remote okay and you know you can apply you can say i apologize i have a family

074member who is you know you can put it dump it in the chat you know you can say something um because i don't want members i don't want constituents to think that we are texting each other within the meeting um you know and it's hard because we we all have lives and stuff happens where you need to see your phone and make sure that everything's okay um and you know to the extent that you're comfortable not that you have to disclose all of your information but you might just say i apologize you know i i'm you know monitoring a situation that's you know but that that's my situation that actual text message from my daughter is not male public record oh god no it's just that perception of i could be texting emily correct yeah

075perception can be far worse than reality yeah exactly yeah preconceived for whatever reason right wrong and different appreciation you know i experienced marblehead like if i got that forgot my daughter someone would say that that is right public record sure well it is not it is nice that's a great question what triggers that then so let's say emily kept looking down at her phone somebody raised the complaint and then she was texting sarah i want to see her text messages i don't believe that she was communicating with her son about milk yeah so it really so you've got two things kind of colliding right you've got open meeting laws so you've got the issue of deliberations two members that's not deliberation right but are they creating a public record because they're talking about public business

076therein lies the argument um so we could it might not be touchable under the open meeting law and the fact that it might not constitute deliberation but it could be touchable under public records a la i believe in boston because they were talking about things within the jurisdiction of the school committee and creating those doc that document so it is again all of this is still getting fleshed out as far as what's what and what is viewed as a public record and not i mean look at how long it took for us to get to emails kind of being of public records it did take in student records that has taken some time of like kind of how that is nuanced in the law so i take a conservative approach and look at it and

077say like listen you really shouldn't even be text messaging stuff that is of substance like it's one thing to say are we meeting on thursday okay that's you know that is administrative but to talk about something within the jurisdiction of the school committee via text i think is treading on the nice with public records so if a community member was texting one of us during the meeting about something that was going on in the meeting that isn't an open meeting law but it could be a public record it could possibly be a public records issue you know i don't know without seeing the document itself as to whether it would be something that we wouldn't we wouldn't have to turn over because keep in mind like the public records law really starts out so broad

078and then narrows down with what we can exclude under the exceptions so you know i just you know i my best advice to be quite honest is avoid texting and avoid unnecessary emails because you know with things within your jurisdiction because that that can that could just lead to unwanted you know time that you have to spend with me frankly you know looking through things and going through things and discussing things so um because we're just like technology is just moving faster than the law to be quite honest and so we're just kind of trying to you know keep up a little bit and so that's why some of these things like you might have a judge say one thing on on one case and another judge say something else on another and it's you

079know it's all a matter of you know kind of what their viewpoint is but i just try to take a conservative approach to be quite honest very helpful i hope so that's not so funny oh it is it is okay so now i'm on page um page three you know talking about exceptions to what is not a meeting you know an on-site inspection of a project or program you know like let's i think this is your newest school here correct so if you guys come and tour the school and whatnot you know that that doesn't constitute constitute meeting attendance um by form of the public body at a pri public or private event including a conference or a training program um or other events and you but you don't deliberate so you know like just

080keep this in mind and and then again it goes back to also that appearance um of you know if you're all at a meeting if you're all standing in the corner and you're all talking but maybe you're just talking about this gorgeous beach day let's go okay but no one is hearing what you're saying again you can look at kind of does it have this appearance and so we would have to explain someone follow the no community law complaint no they were actually deliberating about we wish we were down at the beach right now and no one was talking about any kind of uh any things within your jurisdiction um medium quasi judicial border commission held for the sole purpose of making a decision required uh in adjudicatory proceeding brought before it um it's limited

081state agencies that one we never really see section of town meeting we see that a lot uh you know another thing to keep in mind too is you know when you're maybe attending like if you go to the um joint conference for school committees and you know uh in november just kind of keep it in mind you really of course should be discussing you know matters within your jurisdiction um you're all down there it's a training conference yeah if you're all go down and whatnot just keep that keep that in mind okay okay everything that happens at the conference really though in our jurisdiction to be perfectly honest because like it's a training having like a round table and people are like well oh well in marshfield we do this and this works really well

082and oh well marblehead we do like just be careful what i would recommend is like you're going to some of these round tables that you're not all going together okay you know you're going to have a lot of opportunities and that's where you divide and conquer and be like okay you're going to go to ethics you're going to go to open meeting law you're going to public records budget you know kind of separate out and i think that the conference i've been to the conference quite a few times i think the conference does a good job in kind of helping to to facilitate that but it's just something to have on your radar just to keep in mind okay supposed to the meetings 48 hours in advance excluding um sundays uh saturday sundays and legal

083holidays prior to um 2010 saturdays were included um your notices are great i don't really need to to go down this road you're doing a great job with those but you know we must be printed easy to read i guess this was back in the day when people like i'm gonna write the notice i have no idea um but uh you know so we have to we have to post some um file with the clerk sounds like you all you're you're working well in that emergency meetings when there's a need for an emergency meeting making the 48-hour um post you know it's impossible think of the time i've really seen this in like full force and effect was like march 12th march 13th you know it was like jesus uh and so that's where you

084saw like people kind of doing the emergencies um but these are you know i had a district that they had a fire in one of their in one of their schools and one of their buildings and that you know yeah that's check check that'll equal it um but there's just not a ton they kind of fall into this exception so i'd be very um cautious about it and then executive session um basically uh exemption number one is to discuss a reputation character physical condition or mental health rather than professional competence of an individual or to discuss the discipline dismissal or complaints or charges brought against a public officer employee staff member or individual when you do that we have to give the person the notice an opportunity to be present the right to have it

085in open session the right to have counsel presence right to be present during deliberations that involve that individual um cause for an independent record to allow them to speak on their own behalf uh basically here's my two cents on this if you ever have a reason to have executive session under exemption one the first call you should make is to our office and talk to us and kind of have us step you through how this works you know again 20 some odd years of doing this i've probably maybe been to five of these it's it's a rare occurrence um and it's it's it's it's serious so but my best advice is if this comes out you know comes up just pick a phone and call our office um number two to discuss strategy sessions in

086preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or conduct collective bargaining um sessions or contract negotiations with non-union personnel the key thing there and i think we cite to it is there's um there's a gallenius versus the town of south hadley but there's also an oml decision um and i believe it's one of mine it was a lexington public schools one basically so if you're going into negotiations with non-union personnel you gotta say superintendent assistant superintendent you know you gotta you gotta list out who the people are back in the day you could kind of just say non-union personnel and that was just fine they want more specificity on that so just keep in mind that if you're to go into that you've got it you've got to actually list who the individual is that you are

087negotiating with to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation open meeting would have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigation position of the public body and the chair so declares um you know this is one we see and what i also advise is you know a lot of times we use this with collective bargaining uh and whatnot with our unions with teachers unions and whatnot if you have multiple units which i believe you all do you know i normally would put unit a you know your teachers or whatnot so it's very clear who it is litigation is interesting i typically you know i look at what the level of public the litigation is and kind of mirror that if someone's filed something in superior court and it's out there and it's within

088the public domain i will say exactly what it is you know when you have student cases a lot of times that is like you know john doe versus marblehead public schools so you kind of have to be careful about that but again you know i i try to give as much specificity as to what we're discussing in that um executive session as possible um and it has to be it has to be litigation like active litigation or like reasonably anticipated coming soon like not like they may sue us in a few years like that's not gonna cut it like we have to reasonably believe that this is pretty imminent um litigation that's coming at us again when in doubt on this one give us a call because i also think like two heads are always

089better than one and you know our firm you primarily work with me but there's like eight of us you know in the school law side and ranging in age from like 82 to like 32 we've seen it so you know for the most part we've seen some kind of iteration of a lot of these things so we can take a look and say okay i remember this you know desktop of the cobwebs i remember that one and you know it kind of helped navigate through on some of these ocr cases do you write the case something i mean ocr cases they do do a good job of um kind of redacting information for their four-year request so you can say like you can say what the ocr case number is and then someone could request

090that through um i would not list a complainant i take a conservative approach on that i would not list a complaint because nine times out of ten the complainant involves a child and so i'm very mindful of trying to kind of marry child privacy rights with um open meeting laws if it's an adult like an employee or something would you write it or let ocr reject i would like i would let us your taxes i would push it off of my plate and let ocr make those determinations because i do know ocr takes a pretty conservative approach on these issues as well um so i'm very mindful of that but you know if these come up where you do need to post just let us know we can take a look at it kind of

091look at what the situation is sometimes you do have ocr class action kind of things as well um so i take a look at that and kind of say okay where where are we with that because i'm also mindful of personnel records and student records when we have the the intersection of open meeting lawn public records okay um other we i hope we never have to use some of these other ones to discuss the deployment of security personnel um and devices i've never used that on my years um to investigate charges of criminal misconduct or to consider the for the filing of criminal misconduct i have um done that uh the purchase in exchange at least by real property again you have to declare if the open meeting law would have a detrimental effect okay

092so if you're really kind of trying to negotiate the purchase of a price i don't think you want to be out there and be like listen we're going to come in at 1.2 million you know have it all out there so again you got to declare what the um that it would have a detrimental effect comply with any any um act under the authority of general or special education or special law or federal grant requirements i've never done that consider interview applicants for employment or appointment by a preliminary screening committee we see this with superintendent searches right so your screening committee that is within um executive session then we you know we declare the finalists then that goes to open session um so that's uh pretty well defined uh meet with a mediator um and

093then to discuss trade secrets again the ones i primarily see are collective bargaining i've seen the complaints the screening committee and whatnot those are kind of the ones that we see we see the most um in our in our practice so notice um no executive session may be held unless and until an open meeting uh of the uh government body was first convened so we convened we then go into executive session um also the other thing too that a lot of people a lot of chairs forget is you you know you make the motion to go into executive session but also say if you're going to come back into public session um because you know i've had um i've sat there where we've i've seen them convene we're into executive session and then they'll they'll

094um exit executive session to go back into public section to only close public session i'm like no you can actually oh boy that's them you can say if you're not coming back and that it's that this is it and then we're done especially when everyone's exhausted an executive session which i've had in other districts which i'm just in fy i'm just going to say this for my own self-interest i go to bed between 9 30 and 10. when i get an executive session and i've had it where i've been on executive session at 10 30 11 11 30 at night um god help and everyone's exhausted so it's just an easier it's an easier step so you don't have to possibly even go back into the room or whatnot so just a little fyi on

095that but if you forget to donate that we do have to go back you do [Music] so if i were the chair i'd have a little cheat sheet basically like noting say no no no open session so you just kind of you know it kind of comes up so that you say plus the other thing too is that you can have people sitting there thinking oh they're coming back so i'm gonna hang here you know and wait and then they you come back at 11 15 at night and be like and we're done you know it's it doesn't it's just not good so you know i just kind of put a little mental note to note that um the you also must cite the record for the purpose and again we have all that language

096which i'm sure you have about you know going into executive session under exemption two to discuss negotiations with the superintendent um and uh and say that you know to do it in open session would have a detrimental effect again state whether you're going to reconvene and we have to keep minutes of all executive sessions so going into minutes basically so content they must set at a minimum they must set forth the following the date the time the place members present or absent summary of the discussions on all subjects but a verbatim record of discussions is not required what i find is i called the goldilocks conundrum with you know executives with a lot of minutes right it's like either like colby brunt was there their box was there and that's it you know and they

097discuss budget that is not going to cut it right there's a happy medium where you kind of so that someone so that think about it like this the best way to keep minutes is to think about your attorney picking up the minutes like you guys saying oh yeah we we discussed you know we had a we had a meeting there's some issues with us discussing the budget and if i can pick up those minutes and basically without having to look at anything have a general understanding of what was discussed what was voted on who was present all that kind of stuff by reading your minutes that is sufficient so just saying to someone who would not be there being able to pick those up get a sense of what occurred at that meeting than those

098should be sufficient i have seen like the verbatim ones and here's a problem with the verbatim ones they're never verbatim okay so you know it's always if they look verbatim and then so but i didn't say that that you know so keep that in mind too because that will also make when you approve minutes and then release minutes you know it could make your approval process rather tedious if you have somewhat verbatim minutes that aren't actually verbatim minutes and everyone always has a little bit of revisionist history you know like i thought i said yes and it's like rewind the tape let's go back um and so that's the other thing too is that people might not have realized they might have said something the way they said it what not so again think about

099the goldilocks too little too much right in the middle right just right now as far as minutes for executive session goes my understanding is executive session minutes are not locked down forever no once the need for executive session is passed like once if it's if it's to settle a lawsuit and that lawsuit is settled those minutes now need to be made public if it is to hire or fire or whatever and that action has been completed maybe okay and that's where it's like because now you're gonna have the intersection two of personnel law okay and personnel documents and kind of what what is disclosed so the thing is with you're right with executive session minutes those can be released when the need to keep them executive right that is gone where you know one of

100the things that you might you might never truly fully release say your executive session minutes talking about negotiations with teachers there might be sections of that that you don't release because that can be certainly can impact your next round of negotiations just like they would that you know teachers union wouldn't want their minutes you know if they keep them released to us because it does kind of give a little bit maybe of those trade secrets and kind of how we might be looking at things and i want to sound uber secretive but that is that's something that you know something i rarely see those minutes get really simple okay lawsuits and things should lawsuits again it depends right so it could be that they might be released in a redacted form so we might still

101have to release information within those minutes because of other things that would prevent us from releasing them in full right so if you've got say we're talking which we should really never talk about but let's just have an extreme example of it's an appeal case of a special education kiddo and that kid was mentioned i would take a very conservative approach and i'd be redacting any information on that would the school committee ever be involved in that you sometimes have appeal cases where you have to decide if you are going to appeal something that that could come up that way you wouldn't be involved in like the lower level kind of stuff but i have seen some that have gone up on appeal um you could have some personnel litigation that might go up on

102appeal that you're there and i would be very mindful i take a very conservative approach on releasing information that could be a student record a personnel record something along those lines i would rather have that i would rather say to the ag's office why don't we do an in-camera review i'm happy to show you what's in those but i also don't just want to turn those over just blankly so we should be regularly reviewing our executive session minutes okay you need to improve them review them for what can be released you know so that we are kind of maintaining that and staying up with that so would we book an executive session to have that review no there's no exemption to go into executive session to review executive session minutes a lot of times by

103the secretary and the chair and if there's questions then it normally comes to me but we have to be constantly kind of reviewing and seeing okay do we have new minutes that could be released so i have all the minutes from last year's executive sessions so what do i do with those um i mean i would say that those should be reviewed by the secretary and the chair okay to see if you know what then secretary it doesn't matter i mean i would do the current secretary or the then it's your call as to how you all want to do it but i think you should do that and i would assume that a lot of these have been approved correct like okay okay sorry it's so good you should in you know a lot

104of times there will be the approval of executive session minutes um a lot of times people will approve those when they're in executive session for another reason um and you can put it on your agenda as well i believe that that is okay to do um and then you know as far as the release thing you all don't have to vote on it it's like you can look at it and say is this should be released or not and you can confer with us if you have any questions about that okay but let me know because i can double check some of this stuff if you guys are going to be doing like a massive review and a massive approval just to make sure um let me just write that down my swiss cheese brain

105um uh so you're going to look to do a review and approval process of a lot of these executive session minutes from last year they don't have too many but definitely some okay of those like i have not traditionally done the executive session minutes um but i just know as each year positions change and things like that like um just trying to i mean a lot of times there's this school committee secretary or administrative assistant that does some of the administrative tasks within the district so what i would recommend is that that's kind of where they they should be housed at the district because you know committee members change so it should as a keeper as the keeper of the public records it should be housed at the district and so however you all are

106comfortable doing that i'm happy to to discuss um you know but that's you know i have some districts where they have leather bound books that's like all the minutes i mean you can look and you can see minutes back to the 50s um so you know there's some oh just their executive session they're they're just in general school committee minutes so um but again it's it's you gotta find a way that you're keeping them you're maintaining them and people can access them when everyone here might be gone okay yeah okay all right um and we've talked a little bit about the release um and um now the other thing too is it the minutes are considered a public record upon creation even if they're in draft form so just keep that in mind so once

107they're once they're created they're created um recording to public uh public participation except when a meeting's held executive session any person in attendance may record the meeting so long as there's no active interference they just have to what we say because here you can't be audio recorded without um knowledge of that um so what we say is that basically you know if anyone's recording i have some committees that say if anyone's recording they need to inform the chair prior to the start of the meeting so that we can inform the public and it's up to the chair then to inform the public um and you all have um i assume you have public participation as on your agendas is that correct okay um and again and i'm happy to share this it's a recent case

108out of native public schools about public participation um and kind of you know i think that again the expectation is that people will behave in a professional manner that they'll be speaking of matters within their jurisdiction so if matters go outside of the jurisdiction of the school committee um and someone's kind of going off the rails about you know bad-mouthing say this is what normally happens unfortunately like an employee or whatnot it's up to the chair to kind of gavel that person and to stop it and say i'm sorry that's not an appropriate topic you know it's not within the school committee's jurisdiction and i'm going to stop you right there because you know your job is also well the public has a right to participate what not we also have a job too to

109protect the um to protect employees um as well um you know from some of this stuff is of course the higher level you get you've you've got supervision oversight of say john but other other members now students people sometimes talk about students i mean and you don't have jurisdiction frankly over the day-to-day student um kind of piece that is not something that's within no but i need to like gavel to protect privacy students a hundred percent i mean that's where it's like i really get that devil out and like you know we just have to be careful of that and so you know unfortunately i've seen some some parents frankly disclose very confidential information about their own child and that's their own choice but it's you know it can be troublesome so i just always

110try to keep in mind as to what the jurisdiction is of the school committee and trying to kind of maintain how we're running public comment and it's a lot easier for me to say from here how to do it uh than to be doing it in real life and i totally get that so just let me ask the question because i imagine that it's a fine line if an employee has been non-renewed or let go and people come to public comment to speak positively about a person as opposed to people coming to say my third grade teacher is awful not giving that homework what is the chair's responsibility to mitigate her i mean technically like you know so if you've non-renewed a teacher okay um it's really not within the jurisdiction at all of the

111committee because you know a non-renewal goes it could be a building-based you know principle that non-renewed which is certainly not within the jurisdiction of the school committee it's hard because i also look at it where if we're allowing people to get up there and say all these nice things right and then we say oh wait wait you're making a bad comment so i'm going to dabble you that's problematic so i think to kind of basically say at the outset like you know we appreciate people here being in support or you know being in opposition however issues of the the hiring the non-renewal whatever is not within the jurisdiction of the committee now it gets a little messier when it's someone who's a direct report of the superintendent because then there could be argument of well

112i disagree with the superintendent's decision therefore goes to evaluation right and supervision but again i caution on that because sometimes what i would also say too is even if it's like say a principal i would say we are also here we're trying to be mindful of that individual's privacy rights and so we appreciate we know that there's some support but i can't let people talk support you you have a nice and rare standout i haven't had enough coffee but you know to basically say you know we appreciate people's support but at the you know same token we just can't be talking about individual employment actions so um we have as a standard agenda item commendations the school committee the superintendent whoever can make accommodation and we've had multiple public comments where people come in and

113bring forth comments of goodwill if you will or recognize recognition recognition of of goodwill that's been committed in our community is that something we should not be doing i don't want to be scrooge mcduck and tell you not to do it i think you know those are two different objects those are two different engines right public comment are two different ones right yeah you know i mean someone could of course argue like oh they allow them to say good stuff but they don't allow them to say bad you know but listen it's something that works here in marblehead right now and it sounds lovely don't don't don't don't mess up it don't don't throw it off just because you're supposed to have people come we do have people come to say you know i just

114want to thank you know principal smith because you know he's did this like this went really really well and i i think in some ways it is nice to kind of encourage it not to constantly be you know complaints yeah i'm good with it let's let's keep on keeping on okay yeah so is it a little different though like i feel like john's question was about a non-renewal or you know somebody being let go and someone coming in public comment to say positive things about that person but then we can't allow negative things as opposed to what you just said which is you know someone just showing up and saying this principle is amazing because of this right and that's their name i think the hard line is you know once someone has non-renewed someone

115we can no longer say thank you we cannot we can no longer say nice things about an individual yeah i mean what i would do is in public comment it's really what i would say is we're just not going to talk about personnel actions for good or for bad yeah but accommodations is something different it's a marblehead tradition uh that we have that you know allows people to come in and share good news um and share things about you know about what they've seen as good stuff in the marblehead public schools i want to thank john bucky for his years of service these have been my experiences and these are pleasant and i just want to thank you for your years of service where where's that i mean that i would love to see that

116in commendations as opposed to accommodations or school communities i mean you got to be careful that's my only thing i i just i don't know what i i again i sound like a complete scrooge but i don't think you can limit someone on one thing because it's not good for a person yeah but not limit people because it sounds good for people because i would say the line is if something is disparaging someone's comment whether that be the employee that was not renewed or whether that be the person who did the non-renewing we'll see my my concern is is that under the native case it basically talks about if you've kind of opened up that door that door is open so it really the the native case really looks at this is our jurisdiction this

117is where the school committee's jurisdiction is so if you're going to have public comment and you're going to limit it in any way you know you've got to it's got to be it's got to be in line with what our jurisdiction is i mean i can go back and look at natick and i'm happy to send that to you the the other issue too is again oh my god i'm like totally screwed mcduck today is we we are gonna you're gonna see a lot of first amendment stuff coming in this is what i'm wondering that now the chair is now becoming uh deciding what is first amendment and what is not but again it's like that's where here's my best advice i need to take a look at what if you have a policy on

118public comment we do we do i need to take a look at that okay let me take a look at that let me try to help you all with that because there's going to be challenges on certain things it just is because the supreme court is is here in all sorts of little nuggets about first amendment you know i mean they did you know they just did a big one in the last round so um i just let me take a look here i'm not trying to limit people's public comment but i'm also trying to be mindful of where what what should be said at public comment which should not be set up we're not just like a place for people to come and say whatever they want exactly exactly right exactly there's certain provisions

119for personal information right right i mean and that's a whole thing and that's why it's really hard and really tricky when you're sitting in the chair position because you are you are having to make some of these determinations so the best way to make those determinations is know what your lanes are before people even come in for public comment okay okay and we can we can work on that i'll take a look at the i'll take a look at your public comment policy and help with that but also maybe like before we start the school year every year we just have a reminder out there right yeah hey let's just remind everybody what the purpose and use of public comment is confusing to us yeah it's so confusing a community it's moving fast and you're

120you're managing many things and like it's oh you can imagine like it's like you're trying to listen you're trying to yeah i mean it's a lot that's going on so however i can try to you know help with narrowing that focus and doing that i'm having to do it i think people also will appreciate that review because i think i don't know if it's particular to marblehead it's the only school committee i've ever listened to or had a kid in childhood so but i think that people really really take to heart public comment and really appreciate even being able to have that and so i fully get the laws and staying in the lane and what's the jurisdiction yeah um but it would be nice to make sure that we can marry that while still

121allowing them i absolutely have that ability because it's it's their one outlet and i think there isn't enough of that and so they kind of cling to that one one opportunity to do it if that makes sense yeah nobody calls it i thought it makes that's a really good point but i think also we have to say like hey there are also these other forums to have those interactions the superintendent copies we've talked about having you know office hours like there's a there's other opportunities if you want to have a more detailed conversation or you know talk about things that maybe aren't necessarily appropriate for this particular for those right right i think it again does get a little so boxy you can't right but well i think it's hard because it is a space

122where people do want to come and the committee doesn't want to hear it but then we don't want to get ourselves we you know we're just trying to do the right thing right and sometimes right trying to do the right thing for this person and trying to do the right thing for these persons the exact opposite right thing and so then it gets really sticky and really difficult to communicate publicly right would that be a policy that we can amend or make more details and make it more clear yeah that's what i wanted yeah that's why i want to take your first swing of it you know to kind of help with just making sure it's in line with like the state-of-the-art blog right now sure um and then you know i can even look

123at one of the things we can look at is you have your policy but you could have an underlying procedure that goes with that policy that might be more beneficial that's yeah um not last year but the year before um and i think we maybe made one slight change but it was pretty much the nasc policy and it and you know and it's a that's a good policy and so you know i think i i was on the policy committee so i think going into it i was hopeful that we could really clarify things a lot better and then it just kind of came out of it it's like i think i don't think this was all that helpful like it just sort of is what it is yeah and so yeah so how do

124we like that procedure issue because um and procedures can change procedures can change it's not as you know seismic a change just say a policy change where you go through all your readings and whatnot um but yeah we can take a look at that and kind of help streamline it um someone just emails me again just running all of them i have to send you the policy and public comment what other things did you want just just say procedure too and just you know just all you have to do is write colby procedure and people requesting to be put into correspondence or requesting to be put into public comment as a written comment and i think our policy does say that we don't read public comment like we don't we don't accept them and then

125read them although i know some committees that's all they do right so you know i do there's there's more than one way to do this but i think all of us are certainly looking for best practice and what's going to protect and support everybody is that that needs to be included do we have a question do we have a correspondence policy i don't not that i know is there typically a correspondence policy because that is not as nicely worded normally it's just complaints is what it's called but yeah i mean we can you know i mean that's something that again you know if you if your policy subcommittee is looking at your policies overall as opposed to just dumping all the policies to us you can go look at those and you can say okay

126what other policies do we have some questions with the policy subcommittee and you know we're happy to take a look at some of these things i mean masd does a good job you know they're pretty state-of-the-art stuff i normally tweak them a little bit with some just you know like little minor things but if there's stuff like that we can take a look at but typically people don't have necessary correspondence saver complaints policy well we have a course so like on the agenda we've got a correspondence agenda item and every year at the very least every every meeting and i think there is confusion around you know does this happen a lot at the end of the year people would send correspondence and want to do you know so like there's i think we need

127to clarify on both pieces so if we don't have a policy it's either a policy or procedure around how we use correspondence as well can you send me a draft agenda yeah typical draft agenda because that's going to help me too because you all might be putting some stuff on your agenda that is misleading yeah so i think with the correspondence i think at its heart is that it's sort of something that has come into the superintendent or some something that's coming to the chair you know i'm trying to think back on other things that have gone into correspondence some some random kind of like we i know one that i think did deserve to go into correspondence with an email about stained glass windows at one of the buildings that has not been one

128of the school buildings that's not being used right now so i put that in there just to sort of give a heads up to the rest of the committee saying hey we got this request you know i responded but but this is what it was so how do we do that effectively without violating open meeting without you know without any of the foia issues coming into play and without muddying the waters on the agenda but you i would assume you put it into your packet you put it into the school committee packet i think the the issue is the correspondence to me denotes that there's going to be discussion regarding correspondence right so then that could be you know you could have something you might have at that time yeah sure but i think again

129your agenda should be what you reasonably anticipate okay um but you know if you have a general kind of correspondence thing on there if someone's picking it up they're like oh we're going to talk about all this stuff that's coming to the school i mean it's it's not it's not that clear so that's if that's if it's leading to confusion by members of the public about what is this is it are they going to read my email that i sent to you are they going to read this i think the intent was members of the public wanted their concerns which they had sent to the school committee to be formalized as part of a public record somewhere which they are i mean you're now you're putting it into the packet but as it is it

130being they wanted already i think is how they did it um but again they would they would be referenced because your packets referenced so you have to say all the materials used in the media but you've also put out that packet so it is now in the public sphere so any emails we get should they be uh directly pro in that you know if we have one every two weeks and that two-week proceeding should any emails we get become part of our packet it depends i mean that's a that's a that's a call that you all have to make if it's something that is should be brought to the committee of the whole's attention if it's been if it's been sent to the entire committee does it become part of the package it's a public

131record right that's all right that's kind of like that was always sort of however like at the moment it's emailed to us it's a public record record correct so it is you know offensively part of the record how do again how do we balance that how do we manage that of what actually goes into a packet and what gets put into immediate you know it well my concern is that if you have like say correspondence as an agenda item and people are expecting you to discuss all correspondence your meeting is going to be 18 hours yeah right so you know but you can the public should know that if you you know that technically these emails that are being created if you will sent you on your marblehead public schools or even on your private

132email which we'll get to i know we're running short on time um those can be a public record so there's it doesn't it doesn't go into the void it's out there yeah i mean there might be things that you might just want to say i want to include that in the packet i think the committee of the whole needs to have this in the packet to be aware of it and you can even say as chair i'm going to ask some people do look there was an email received from a constituent about the stained glass windows at x school um you know please make sure you do and sometimes people like oh good they got my stained glass that's in there perfect it's really kind of some judgment calls that you all have to make

133okay so can i just kind of replay what i think i'm hearing okay so i feel like there's some clarification on public comment that we need to do both looking at the policy and hopefully maybe creating that procedure that you talked about and the clarifying on correspondence so that we're all clear and then we can communicate that out to the committee but i think also looking at how we maybe the agenda as a whole just having a once-over to make sure okay like this we've got everything we need maybe there's some things that yeah don't kiss here it's good to have someone like me who doesn't go to marvel head school committee meetings on the right and so to basically say i would read this as this and so just thinking of how your constituents

134are reading some of these agenda items and you know maybe adding that point of clarity so that people aren't saying you're getting an open meeting like complaints saying they had correspondence on but they didn't talk about my correspondence why didn't they do that yeah you know so just just little things to just keep in mind you know and again it's like nail and jello to a wall sometimes you know with what where the ag's office is going to be on this because it's always evolving it's always changing people want to be heard and i think that's what this the crux this is it's caring on the side of caution if people want something to be part of a public record err on the side of caution and make it part of the public record if

135that's what's been requested and it is a part of the public record yeah yeah you know even quicker than it is yeah so someone will say i i've emailed this but i want it to be part i think people have asked me specifically please add this to yeah i think there is a confusion anything yeah to the public on when you email something that is now a public record so they don't have to then go oh there's definitely confusion yeah right this is say i i've already emailed this to the school committee but i'd like to also read it you know we're kind of just kind of they can read in public comment right um and then this is something we can work on right you know because the other thing too is is getting

136it out to people saying you know people like i want this in the minutes well the minutes are reflecting what's discussed at the meeting so it might not be appropriate that we're discussing and reading verbatim that but we could say i want to draw everyone's attention to the packet that has the following correspondence in it it could be something that we do there might be some stuff like i said that we might want to have discussion on and that could be a full-on agenda item but you know if that's if that's the case and people feeling like maybe they're dropping stuff in the void we can take a look at that so that people do feel like they're heard and the committee is aware of what they've sent i think they want other people in

137the community to hear it i feel like i'm beating a dead horse but i just want to be really cool yeah i think when you know there are certain times that people want everybody else in the community to be able to hear it and that may be a better opportunity for people to hear it because at the beginning of the meeting rather than going through looking at the package trying to find that particular piece of correspondence yeah well the other thing too is that we could maybe you know one way again i'm just trying to like think about this and how we do it so this isn't my most small legal advice what we could be doing is we could say you could look and say you know the chair will just highlight relevant correspondence

138that's in the packet and kind of blast through some of those too and just say we received an email from so and so about you know concerns with the with the brown school and the door or something you know you could we could find a way to do that because i think there is that balance right right people wanting to be heard and feeling like an other should know of my concern okay so we can we'll take a look at that and see what we can do to streamline it for y'all so is there any way that we can have kind of this procedure done before our first school community meeting so that i can work with holiday when is that first beginning of september we can do that we can absolutely do that it's

139like feel like the next week i'll be like now there's an issue i just think making sure that like we start with the school you're like and we're sticking to it yeah yeah yeah let's you know just send me this send me the email we'll get started on it right okay no problem so i'm totally not advocating this but man and i at the conference there is a school committee that the public comment is only emailed in and then the assistant superintendent has the dubious distinction of reading all of the public comments there's no live public comments it's just emailed that sounds awful the assistant superintendent hates it oh i can't imagine yeah i don't know about that piece but i think clarifying on what is relevant for public comment and what is yeah yeah

140i think we'll go a long way okay okay i'll take a look at that um and i and i apologize i have a hard stop at 11 just because i'm backed up with another with another meeting um yeah let me just say this you get a complaint get out of your hot little hands get it to me call me um you all have to consider it you have to to review it um and decide what action take i will walk you through that if you ever get an open meeting law complaint so that's that's where we're going to go with enforcement there with respect to public records how i would really look oh and you can read all the case all i know sarah will read that uh you can read all the case law

141in there um at your at your leisure public records basically how i think how everyone should look at it is if you are you know you're writing something in your capacity as a school committee member consider it a public record okay and then from there then we look and say does that need to be disclosed does it meet one of the exemptions you know i work with staff members on this all the time is that you know when you're writing basically the best way to think about it marvel head public schools email it's letterhead period and i always say if you are okay with that being on the front page of the boston globe then go ahead and press in if you are not then do not press send um and to really think about

142what you're putting out in the public sphere that that can be seen you know it people can get their hands on it now keep in mind too that people can get their hands on documents other ways as well that might not be public records through litigation process through discovery um so that's why i just really really really caution on what people put in writing and just think that one of those days they could see the light of day and are you okay with that is that okay with you um and that's why i really say you know i'm never worried about someone sitting down at their computer and typing out something on a letter and printing it out because you look at it you're cool with it email oh my god oh my god oh

143my god um so i just really have to say people have got to be exceptionally cautious as to what you put out on email and what you're saying and trust me i give the exact same discussion to staff all the time so you know where we see the biggest issues for schools is personnel records student records those are our biggest areas where we are not disclosing student records are statutorily protected under ferpa under um 603 cmr 2300 that's our student records ranks uh here in massachusetts um hippa doesn't apply to marblehead you are not providing medical services for insurance um and then we keep saying hipaa oh like every time it kills me it's like hipaa does not it drives me bananas i'm like no we like are you taking like a blue cross card

144what's that people misspelling all the time always always yeah so um what i so so basically it's student records and it's personnel personnel really is under um it's really static it's it's not structural it's case law to kind of defines um personnel records and how we look at it about substantially personal and that has that has morphed over time right where you know it used to be like email addresses were so personal like now it's like that's not even close to personnel so that is morphed over time keep that in mind um and then there are rules that we have now about our records access officer and who's that here in the district please lisa excellent good job on that um so but the so then but the keeper of the records is john um

145and so when we look at how we're doing public records we have a certain timeline that we need to to respond we can charge you guys are less than 20 people you can uh so you don't have to where you can charge for the first two hours if you're more than twenty thousand you don't you can't charge for this first two hours it's twenty 25 an hour or the lowest paid person who can do it so for the most part we charge 25 an hour because there's not someone lower you can't necessarily can appeal to have my fees paid for in part i think it's 75 bucks um but uh the uh ag's office does not like that so it's only if you really need the lawyer to come in on a couple things i

146mean there was a couple districts that they had their lawyer do the whole thing and it was like thousands of dollars and they're like see and it's like the they're like new you can't do that um and it's and the thing is is public records is very very prescribed about the 10 days and kind of how we respond and it could be that you respond and say here is our good faith estimate of fees and not necessarily providing all the records at that time saying this is what we you know it's 5 000 emails it'll take an app and take one minute to review an email um and that equals x amount of hours and you kind of come forth with this good faith estimate including copying costs and you kind of a lot of

147times what we'll do is because we've been getting some of these bigger public records requests from entities that are not marble head residents that are outside entities and they'll be saying oh and you can wave my fees because i'm a you know a public interest group and then we do a little research but i don't think so uh and you look and you create the good faith be estimate because these do now i'm going to sound like scrooge mcduck again but these do take a lot of time for staff um and that is that's taking staff away from critical let's run the school kind of stuff too so i don't feel bad about charging a reasonable fee for these so you just said public interest if someone is a registered public interest group or whatever

148then you can't charge them they will tr some will try to argue that and um you know what i do is i push back on some of these i was like no you know this is this is what we're recharging i don't believe there's you can you can waive it for those groups um but there's nothing that says if you're a fighter it's a one-off document here and they're not 5000 emails i think it would take more time to issue a fee for one it very well could and that's where you kind of look and you're kind of like okay what is the person requesting and i have some really prescribed stuff here so if we get a big public records request again not trying to drama business but the first call i would do

149is be like holy what are we doing with this because these can get complicated um and i just want to make sure we're hitting all the right timelines and whatnot for corresponding and getting back to people so that we're being responsive and then it's also very prescribed about if you're withholding documents so that's when like you know if we're going to withhold things if we're doing a request say someone is like i want x y and z we look at it might be a very small request but some of that is clearly things that they're not entitled to you can't just be like we're just going to give you our budget um but we're withholding all that stuff about you know but we're that's it that's all that's responsive to your request you can't say

150that you have to say if you're withholding documents so it's very clear why you're withholding them and whatnot so there's like a um a list that i kind of included in there about what we can and cannot and how we do those letters and so again why i say i would call up us is because we've done a lot of these and we can kind of we don't have to reinvent the wheel but we can certainly help you with making sure that everything meets those specifications including like this is you don't like my response this is where you can appeal this is where you can file that we have to be very persuaded we're saying no you can't have xyz we should be calling you to see why we're saying no yeah i mean i

151would say if you have again from a business if you have any questions on it i'd be like let's just call colby because it's better for you to spend 15 minutes of my time saying colby what about this is this me being like okay sarah i would do this this and this and then here's a sample i can even give like you know we get a lot of we get quest requests uh under subpoenas i know i know i'm a fast driver but again um we get requests for subpoenas and whatnot and how i even have form letters that basically we can send out that says we received a subpoena so certain things that we can kind of handle before the horses ran out of the barn okay one quick query clarifying if there's no

152such thing as um that's a working document or this or that and saying that like if it's a document that we have produced i'm from marblehead public schools employee like it like a budget or something like that we can't say well no that's not that's working or whatever it's it's public i i look at it where it's all public and then we look and see does that fit an exemption yeah for withholding yeah yeah um okay so my two cents on ethics take take this to do the online stuff um i mean the biggest thing that people have to really be where i see people can step in it is when in doubt like you know if you have to declare you know out there that you have a conflict of interest or whatever it

153may be the other thing too is really when in doubt i am i am the i am the the attorney for the committee of the whole i'm not your individual counsel so a lot of times you know sometimes what i'll have is a committee member might contact me to say hey colby i'm wondering if this is a conflict you know at a case building a school they are voting on it and one of the school committee members isn't a butter okay so kind of where does that you know so arguably the school could increase the person's property value so they could be voting for different things and what i said though was i think arguably we've got an issue here my recommendation is you call ethics yourself and get an opinion from ethics okay so

154be very careful about what we're doing that even has the appearance of impropriety and again the other thing too that i see with school committees it's very very very hard you all are typically parents okay but you're also always committee members to to staff and whatnot be very mindful of kind of if you're in schools and you never just like i never take off my lawyer hat you never take off your school committee hat and just be aware of that and especially you know this it's maybe not falling totally in ethics but sometimes comes up a lot is teachers might be just like oh my gosh okay she's she's on the committee please be mindful of that it's really really hard it's hard for staff but it's also hard for you all because your parents

155and your rights as parents your rights is committed you have rights as committee members you have rights as parents rights as community members but you know where i see this is where you know sometimes people could say oh they're using their position to get a better classroom for their kid or you know they're using it to get into that neighborhood school versus this neighborhood school be aware of kind of those just really it's it's more where i see people stepping into more is not the blatant ethics violations it's the appearances it really is the appearances that's where i see it so when in doubt you can call ethics you can get an opinion on things you know if there's anything you know the easy cases that are my you know my husband is a teacher

156in the school yes not you can't vote on the unit a salary increases you have to abstain that's an easy one um but you know they can get it can get murkier we have like the 50 gift thing that i've seen more with teachers um you know where we blast out the the ethics opinions for teachers about like gift cards and and whatnot and parents god bless them you know that they're you know they'll be like oh we should get her a hundred dollars she would love talbots no no no you know that we just have to be mindfulness and for teachers to accept it as well so ethics it's really the appearance what's up group gifts group gifts there's that ethics opinion that talks about group gifts and i can't like switch by the

157class if it's signed by the class but i can't exclude anybody it has to be it's really prescribed yeah so um and again like if you want if you want some good reading on this to be quite honest as a parent the teacher ethics um advisory is really good about gifts if you type in ethics teachers gifts it'll pop up it's a great advice give that booklet to every room parent thank you at the beginning of the year with all the rules and it's it's hard because like as someone who has a million kids and has been a room parent you know for for various kids it's like you you and every other parent in the class know this teacher deserves the world but like you don't want to get them in trouble right right

158right right oh i love the fact that you get that out that is yeah our ptos give it to room parents love it highlight it flag it start it there you go but it's really good for just parents in general to you know yeah because it's really hard to understand like why can't i do that i like that you mentioned always wearing that hat or i'm teaching being mindful of teachers i'm looking at you differently yeah i guess now because i've actually had i've had people now say to me are we allowed to still be friends and it's like i i think that that's a side of this that most people don't realize yeah because when someone that you've been friends with for quite a while says that to you you're like what right you

159know i didn't start out this journey to be elected to lose friend right that's right i'm right different it's hard it's you know with my step kids it's like this is my first foray into like really feeling that tight rope is like because it's like i really have to be so mindful about what i say what i do meetings i go to you know i just had to think about all that i know you're running late can you just talk a little bit about confidential information having lived on an island and now on a small community kind of the blood lust for do you know anything about this that happened at this school with this yeah no no no easier way to get yourselves in trouble than disclosing confidential information like i i say this

160uh you know when i come to a school committee meeting and i'm in executive session i am trusting everyone there to keep that information private i think the biggest way to think about it is that if you were on the other end of that disclosure how my legal term is craptastic would that feel like if that was out right and so you know it is you know it is it is hard but i think that people have got to keep in mind you know if you are disclosing information that's disclosed in executive session then you are violating the law i think there's some confusion of if someone's like right now someone said something is it but that's confidential if it doesn't happen in an executive session there's not confidentially well i mean yes the confidentiality

161is really an executive session but frankly you know we you shouldn't be privy to other confidential information on the whole right to how districts yeah you know and certainly if you are for some reason which you should not be privy to personnel actions which you know i guess if it's a personnel action not a direct report sometimes the school committee is aware of that because of the direct report aspect but again that's information that is confidential should not be disclosed should not be shared lawsuits that kind of stuff confidential information with personnel with students we just have to really keep it very close to the best um and you know when in doubt just say i'm sorry i just can't speak of it you know people can and people can say okay i'm gonna go

162request things through public records there's your avenue it's not this it's it's this um and to turn people and to say to people i'm really sorry but i just i just can't do that and it's and it's tough it's you know you're not living in a large city right you're living in a town and that is that is difficult i get it um but you gotta really be mindful of that so we're balancing all that out thank you so much okay those documents perfect thank you so much great to meet you thank you thank you republican um because everybody yeah i found out if anybody needs to know we can only use that we can only use the adult oh okay i do not know i cannot before i made that mistake but i did

163not know that i'm going to mute us but the public doesn't need thank you okay perfect um so that we're going to move to michelle on the zero-based budget presentation if everybody have um so just a little brief introduction to zero-based budgeting the term's been thrown around a lot in the past couple years um so we just wanted to talk about it a little bit and gives the pros the cons and what i think we should do and really um we probably should keep in mind that the superintendent's role is to put the budget together really the budget is the superintendent's it's then brought to the school committee and they're the ones their view is to recommend the budget um so really even when i say that i recommend it's really john's recommendations so john

164and i will be working closely together on the budget process this coming year um but we did want to bring this to your attention to to just educate everybody on xero based budgeting because the counselors are thrown around a lot so xero-based budgeting has existed since or at least the terminology has existed since the 1970s um and it basically is just it's it's a process of justifying the cost on the basis of the actual need of every item within your budget it's an extremely detailed process um it does not start with a target to me typically we say we don't receive any guidance from the town really our guidance from the town is you have level funded expenses and we will fund your contractual obligations um and we have a little bit of flexibility in

165terms of the contractual obligations because we have some retirements um savings due to attrition and whatnot but really our expense budget does not typically change historically with the town's process of their their budgeting guidance that they provide to us the zero-based budget process would essentially wipe out everything it would take everything off the table we would not look at any historical data um we wouldn't even look at prior years expenditure reports we would obviously look at our staffing lists by position i'll put dollar figures but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're even keeping the same staffing every year from year to year so it would wipe off everything and we would start without using any of the prior year spending we would set goals for what our district our individual schools or departments needs you

166know what our goals are to reach we would then prioritize those goals and we would then determine costs and quantities of all the items and personnel to meet those goals we also need to keep in mind that we need to keep certain items within the budget that are necessities while you know keeping the lights on necessarily might not be a goal of ours we have to keep the lights on we are a service industry most of our costs are within our salary budgets um that's something to definitely keep in mind but in a true zero based budget we wouldn't carry forward the salary lines that i'm not going away exactly so um the question has has marvel had been zero-based budgeting since i've been here in december of 2020 i mean december 2 of 2019

167before pandemic um we've been doing a modified version of zero-based budgeting we haven't been doing a true zero-based budgeting we've always used our historical data we look at what the prior year has cost us a lot of our contracts or agreements for software programs are not simply one year they're they're accumulative um so we we do look at what we've spent the year before and what was working and what was not we have added a little bit of detail into our budgets um we started with um the 2021 process okay what does this line item encompass or cover for costs such as i use an i example here for lover nurse supplies so while we have i believe it's a thousand dollar budget um for that line item we don't break it down into okay

168we need ten boxes of band-aids and every box of band-aid costs us you know three dollars we don't do that however zero-based budgeting will require you to do that so it's extremely time intensive something that we don't necessarily have the staffing to do or the time to do um but it would be you know it would get to that level of detail we would need to determine the number of each item the cost of each item and extrapolate that out and every single item would be listed not just a general line saying okay this is for supplies such as ace bandages and band-aids and ice packs etc we wouldn't just look up to this sort of historical spending try to get the best prices we can a lot of our purchasing is done collaboratively through

169either state agreements or collaborative purchasing agreements so it's not just we're going down the street to cvs and going to buy 10 boxes of band-aids we're trying to get the best price possible so really it then becomes a matter of weighing the pros and cons and seeing if it you know makes sense for all of this time that we would put into this time and time intensive process to see if we would really get a bang for our buck so there are plenty of pros and cons i've listed a few here um on page three so the pro is it definitely provides a greater level of confidence to the public um and to anyone who is involved in the budget process it creates the need to justify every single expense and you would be surprised

170at how many thousands and thousands of expenses we have within our budget um and i'm just i'm focusing right now pretty much on the expense side of the budget i'm not even looking at the personnel side at this point um the consideration would have to be given for each budget item the good thing also is that this could be done with one department it could be done one individual school we could do this for special education costs only we don't have to do this in the entire district and honestly i don't i would never recommend doing the entire district all at once if it's something we would want to do i would break it down into a cyclical process where we would focus on different areas every three to four years um are this is

171extremely time consuming i mean i can't stress how time-consuming this process would be because everyone would be starting from zero um part of the issue is most people in the educational background do not have the financial expertise um so they're they struggle as it is with a lot of their finance if i am stand by the documents um and there's only one of me i have a great staff but there is only one of me so i can't do every single department's budget um the timeline even cutting it short for a couple of departments or schools would be starting literally right now and running straight through non-stop through november um if we were to do that because it's extremely time so are you saying non-stop full-time like someone just do this full-time not full-time but

172pretty close okay pretty close but one person or whoever is responsible for that budget i would say whoever is responsible for that so like literally all of our principals all of everybody in our administration would do no other administration period they would every like every principal like hr man john paula everyone would just be budgeting right so i i think is this realistic no it's not realistic i'm not trying to like cut this conversation short okay why are we talking if it's not going to be possible it's not even possible i think what we do because we're hearing from people they want i have recommendations because they want a zero-based budget and then it's used in conversation so i think we can't i think we needed to have this conversation you know by we were

173ten minutes so to be able to say we've looked into what is we heard what you want we've looked into what would be needed to be to make that happen we do not have the ability to do this so now the recommendation will be of what we can do doing our due diligence okay i'm saying yeah yeah no but i do also just want to mention that you know i've been focusing like i mentioned on the expense side of the budget um our salary budget represents right now 86 of our budget we are a service industry we are not we don't sell goods you know we we are completely service related um our expense budget is only 14 and of that 14 it includes our out-of-district tuitions and it includes our utilities it includes other

174various fixed costs that we really do not have any control over we can make sure we're getting the best cost for our utilities if there's agreements but there are certain situations we can't so um my recommendations where we go from here for the fiscal year 2024 budget process i recommend that we start our process by early october um we have two new principals we have a new food service director um it's gonna be every year our process has been a little bit better than the year before um and i think you know we should continue that process but we think we should start early in october aim to have it done by early december um i don't know what tom's guidelines will be again but i also think we should take an intensive overview of

175our staffing levels um that's where most of our budget funding goes is to our staff and we shouldn't necessarily roll forward the budgets like okay you have 10 teachers at this grade level let's really look do we need the 10 teachers do we need these interventionists i mean i'm seeing less of a need i mean obviously we have a need for classroom teachers but less of a need in the classroom and more interventionists more coaching positions more things that will make a difference with our staffing and how we meet our educational demands um so i think that's something we should do we should probably take that on early on before we even roll out the budget packets okay let's start looking at the staffing levels i thought i was on the impression we did that

176this year i mean we had those sheets in our budget book that said here's what we've got and based on our goals here's what we need both addition and subtraction so i guess i'm my impression my understanding was that we had done this we did we do but we're not thinking outside of the box that's fair enough i think we really should take a deep dive you know like oh yeah that's been working let's just keep it i think we should really take a good look at a broad look and um you know and i think john and nan should be well involved in those conversations and those those are abuse and those reviews you want to do full scale across the district or you suggested that you chuck those up too no i would

177i would recommend it across the process okay but i wanted to i want to make sure that as we go through this process we're very open with the public about what's happening and if one of the decisions is that we are changing ratios from what has been traditional in marblehead now i understand the way it's been traditional here may not be the state norm or norm in other environments but if we are diverting from what we have had traditionally as particularly i think the hot button issue will be ratios then that needs to be very well articulated and discussed with the public agreement in advance yes because also we have a policy around class size yes yes so that might be something that you want to include the policy committee with you know that discussion

178too because maybe you want to and again the conversation that yeah that conversation happened in a few of our like you know started in a few of our late meetings last year that you know we are all obviously we're all very aware of a declining enrollment and so how that's impacting and i think you know that historical piece to it and what that's looking like and i think you know we i i also think we do have a policy on class size i don't think we're following it very but it's also greatly dictated by the unit in contract and so we if this is something we're going to be shifting i i want to make sure that you know the public is aware of it the union is aware of it that there's no surprises

179the last thing we need is someone jumping out the last minute saying well i didn't know this was happening yeah and i think all right so two things one is that's in my mind that comes down to a policy conversation too which automatically puts it out in the public forum but i think this whole process goes back and again enough to be like a pain in the butt every year um proactive communication and having that communication process laid out so that we're every time we're going through this will be a change like kind of change management we have a communication process around them because to your point sarah like if we don't get out in front of it and say this is this is what we're doing this is why we're doing it this is

180where we're going to come back to you with some more information that you know it's not the public doesn't like that understandably and they shouldn't so we should have kind of that process kind of laid out upright so john is this something you would want to let the union know a process we're going to be start looking at well i mean i would just say though we're not doing zero-based budgeting michelle's not recommending it i'm not recommending it yeah but we couldn't even begin to without the work that michelle has done yeah she came into empty file folders empty no historical data a system that was like an abacus and a stone tablet and she's got spreadsheets and information that enable us to consider being able to do that oh no i don't want anybody

181to think like no we're the goal dealers that's like going to be mining we're not too much we're not you know we we're looking for the middle ground not completely relevant here but just speaking of michelle and all the work she's done she does a lot of work that is not necessarily that she has to do because of the systems we have in place so i would like whoever ends up being on the budget committee and john to please push that forward that we need to really have a hard look at that because michelle spends way too much time redoing and doing spreadsheets because the systems don't support what we need them to support the infrastructure yeah and i think unfortunately the requirement is you have to be in the same system as your town

182correct we can't go on our own can we we could go on our own but it makes it that much more difficult yeah okay so we need to get that might be where an mou comes under you know when we have that yeah we already have that one in place yeah that discussion should be you know brought forth so with our three town managers what have i said to all three yes exactly that we absolutely need and none of them have disagreed with you i i think um thatcher is in a complete agreement that we need to make this priority for your financial assistant so because that then that makes our planning and tracking yes easier yes and this year um one thing i do want to do is make a more public document for

183our budget book i mean we heard that loud and clear last year i mean we have this lovely book that i put together we spent so many hours putting it together and literally it's outdated by the time it's in your hands so what we want to try to do is i want to work with stephen make a more interactive book um it may not give every single document that we review but a great summary of every departments in every school's budget um all the time i use mine a lot out constantly i keep it under my desk but i thought i was the only one that did that no i know that's probably the only reference thing in my house that i know where it is and go too often including like my personal one

184but um we're going to work on making a an interactive pdf document searchable um that we have test maps and whatnot yeah which will be great because we're all using our laptops every day and it's a lot easier to pull up a document and it's a lot easier for me to change a document than to change 20 different binders so yes that's the piece for the binder with me is that we continue to get these documents and then inevitably i don't put them into that binder and then i'm working on those those recent documents and the binder is just kind of you know collecting dust um so let me just make sure i'm understanding this conversation this was a presentation on zero facebook but this is actually what we're doing this works is what you're

185recommending to the school community i am recommending that we do not zero case budget and we continue with a modified version um of what we've been doing tweak it to make it a little more you know useful for all of us um and to take on a a significant staffing review because things change mm-hmm i think that's what people even know they were saying zero based i think what they were really looking at was to see more justifications around staffing levels and requests for staffing exactly and i think again you know again we all know we heard it from the public the declining enrollment piece i think drilling into this really deeply this year sets us up for success as we move forward with continued declining enrollment absolutely and something i've learned along the way

186it necessarily wasn't wasn't here in the past three years in this district um but i've done comparisons looking at staffing levels in other districts from you know 10 15 20 years ago and they're consistent with the levels today even though the enrollment is very different but the needs have shifted right they're not the same among the classroom teachers they are the interventionists they're the the student supports so while the makeup has shifted the overall number hasn't and that's why people are complaining they're like oh well you've lost you know 500 costs more to educate a student now than it did to educate a student 10 years ago i mean even if you look beyond some of the increased special needs we're seeing of some students which were identifying students more more clearly that need needs

187in earlier which is good for outcomes there's an associated cost but even from a technological piece it's it's a much it costs more to educate a student now than to raise a kid now than it did previously so you know as long as we can articulate that and absolutely even even operationally i mean you look at it like for example technology is a perfect thing you know years ago you had one tech person in anything you didn't have technology to support i mean i remember in my fifth grade class we saw our first computer you know it was like wow we all had five minutes on this one computer that was in the main office i mean i am dating myself [Laughter] but but i mean now we have a tech staff and we're always

188needing more because we have so many devices to support so many programs that we need not just for our operations but in order to educate our students and at the end of the day from a student services point of view we need possibly more or we have if you look at the trajectory through the last several years because we've realized that into like being children being included in the least restrictive setting is what is best for children and we've in marblehead decided we're going to do everything we can to keep students in house and produce these programs and those have lower ratios too so these are all just pieces that fit into the puzzle absolutely can i just i also just want to add with the declining enrollment conversation that and the expense of educating

189students there's also a deficit in terms of materials and instructional pieces that we have here that we're going to have to look at at some point we have got to look at our litter our early literacy programming we have to look at our social studies programming we have to look at some of the texts and resources that we're using at the high school some of our science materials that matt is looking for at the middle school so there there are a lot of things out there that we're going to have to figure out where they fit and how we get those even though declining enrollment it's still what we have in front of the kids who are here um that really needs to be purposely planned for through the budget night there's only so much

190you can defer not just me exactly yeah everything absolutely all resources yes that brings us to the schedule of build everyone should have received um schedules in their packet if there's do you have anything to present on this no okay if there's no questions i'll ask for a motion to approve the identified schedule bills totaling and 873 three and seventy five cents second i'm all in favor [Laughter] um and then we have user and lunch fees um michelle noted that john constantino our new food service director was going to come and speak to us on that i can i can i can come out there and think i think i can come up here okay so but actually i did want to mention that this is just on um lunch views or school school meal

191prices um we're not proposing we change the user fees because i believe greg has actually even started the enrollment or the registration for the fall for the fall season already uh and honestly we really need a deep dive into our fee structure for athletics versus user fees we need to be able to capture how we're accounting for students who are using the user fees for not in the athletic program and it's a tricky task because some of these little programs will run here and there obviously the school knows about um we in the business office do not know about them it's not necessarily a registration process it's kind of like a drop-in process we assume they paid their user fee for the year um so we need to get a better tracking of how to

192do that and actually when bill mcauliffe was here he had trouble wrapping his head around he's like well how do you not know what percentages athletic fees and which percentages use a fees well we don't because it's a one user fee entire district yeah and it's kind of complicated too i think they've been yeah looking for a while to kind of so i think this is the year to really come out with thank you a new proposal okay and go forward for the next not not for this coming school year um for the one after that so so the only thing i'd recommend though is that we get that done sooner like not like yes in october but like in enough time that we can okay i think we need to start sooner than later

193so we can actually discuss it during the budget season yeah because much like the kindergarten the all-day kindergarten piece you know we know that there are some communities who cover the use of these and so you know what would that look like is that something that we want to pursue i was just going to say the best way around this user feed conversation is don't charge exactly i don't have user facebook right no and people participate in fine arts and athletics and don't charge them right and that will be a budget discussion as well so certainly can do that so this this pertains only to the um school lunch fees um richard did provide some information um and then i volleyed it to john last week and made it like okay john this is what

194i recommend and this is what richard recommended what are you doing and then he had some thoughts and 700 brown and glover seventeen percent increase yes you know what we originally said set this up was that we're gonna do increments yeah 17 is a lot in one year especially when we're in a reception i mean i know we're you know it's 50 cents in the long run but but we haven't raised them in two years because lunch has been free for the past two years and no i understand that but we had said we were gonna raise about two between two to three like we're three percent which would give us six percent not 17 there's also the thought that you only and you you increase in in quarter increments only you do not increase

195but that's 50 i know well we're also trying to get brown glover and village on the same pricing tier we don't know why those three are different do you have more options at village very well i can tell you very well made me that prior to being a brown a village you got a fresh cooked hot meal and here you got one that was cooked earlier in the day and then shipped here that i mean it is scary too right yes that may sound crazy but i think it took you know that was a concern that they were getting a fresh hot meal right so i also happened to speak with richard because this having this on an agenda what we talked about at the end of the year before um so i know one

196of the pieces that richard talked with me about was the idea that you know food costs are so much more expensive right now and this line as you know most of us have witnessed it previously it is a really volatile line for our budget and so i think richard was really concerned michelle correct me if i'm wrong um but that he's really concerned about covering [Music] covering this program in quality food yes um one thing that when we interviewed um john that he talked a lot about which i really liked was um he does a lot of grant he's done i mean granted he came from boston where there's a lot more grants available but there are a lot of brands out there for healthy eating for kids or is there a way for us

197to be looking at those possible in your freezer yeah um where he has those connections he knows which ones he's utilized before i mean i mean some of them might only be specific for larger districts such as boston or boston only um he would be able to you know shed some more light on okay as well and i think the other question people can talk to him about that is this shows what they cost it you know like what the meal price is but like we're missing the piece that says like here's what what his line item like his expenses are right right so how do we know what their profit if we say it's five dollars like what does that actually mean are we covering are we not covering like i don't it's hard

198to kind of make a decision right i think that's what he really wants to use this year to be able to determine what his true meal cost is there is also down the bottom here there is an item called price equity so we need to make sure as the federal government reimburses us at a higher rate for free meals for those students who are determined to qualify for free meals they can't be supplemented or supplanting our program we need to make sure that we are charging the same or higher to cover what are the meal costs what do they they haven't said that yet for this year that's that's my next question is going to be have they have to have the feds they have said that they are increasing it by 40 cents at

199least but they have not said it so yeah and do we know do we know for sure that they are only covering that they're going back to only covering free and reduced or now they want being reduced into free and there was the last article i read which was probably at least a month ago it was it was difficult to understand it's very difficult to understand yeah the recommendation is to plan that the government is going back to a three-tier pricing situation with the free the reduced and the paid it's not known i'm literally hearing it should be coming out any day now but i've been hearing that for about a month today um yeah i know because that was sort of what while we hunted at the right time absolutely yeah in july we

200still don't um i talked to another director who i'm very close with and and she said second i hear i'll let you know and she'll go out here before anyone else yes i'm like okay and i still haven't heard from her you know what's this new division premium or just john so i guess prior to covid there was a premium lunch of fresh made deli sandwiches at the high school offered it has not been offered in over two years um and so that is typically higher cost of 1.25 for the students and then adult meals should always be at least a dollar more than that so that was the pricing structure we kept with for now john food service director really wants to dive into you know what his meals costs he doesn't even know

201what his food costs are going to be for this coming year um he's just putting items out to bid but we even found when we put them up for bid for the year we're not finding a lot of vendors want to commit to a price for the entire year because their prices are fluctuating so what richard recommended before he left is actually putting out a bid for one or two months at a time um so i mean we will see some fluctuation but we might actually get people bidding on our needs and does does um we've got way too many jobs now um does the food service director john does he have a in does he have the intention to look into sort of the usage per school too because it seems to me in

202my very limited perspective that the school lunch program gets a lot more use at say brown and glover and village a little less and then what's its use of the high school and so are we sort of what's our food waste i guess at the end of it it's sort of what i'm wondering because obviously that is a cost impact as well and so do you know is there any have we ever looked at that is there any intention to look at that so that we're so that our costs are staying as low as possible and we're wasting as less as little as possible oh absolutely um that's something we should be looking at continually anyways um this the past year or past two years our participation rates have almost been higher than 50 which

203is almost unheard of um which is great but you're also getting the kids who their parents packed on the lunch and they're like oh i can also get a free lunch so they're eating their lunch for snack and or a second lunch and they're going to be you know what matthew does every day it's more common than you think um so we are seeing that participation which is great and it's it's wonderful for our reimbursement rates right now because we're getting paid for every single meal that every single kid is taking right and then the tricky part is once you have to start paying for it again how does that change right right because typically our participation rate is um it's below i want to say it runs normally 25 so it will probably cut

204in half if we go back to paid meals immediately the price increase may discourage a little more participation usually when you see that price increase it also goes down so it's a correlation between the prices and the participation um however it's just it it's it's a crapshoot right now trying to figure out what our lunch costs are going to be for this year i mean most likely we will probably end up losing money if the government does not continue the universal free meals that does make a difference like for experiments i'm not the average family but right now it's free but if it went to a hundred dollars a week which is what my my lunch school lunch cost would be it would be a hundred dollars a week for them not getting food that

205is as nutritionally dense and fresh as what i would send them right or that they may even eat anyway regardless yeah right i know free pandemonium sort of say okay pick one or two right right during the pandemic it was like what do you what do you want from this this week yes absolutely it's also frustrating like just listening to this conversation because we have to make decisions but then we don't have the information that we need to make the decision right and every district is in this situation they are yeah so you need a vote for us so vote and then if they pass it our votes no absolutely then because whenever they give us the universal free meals absolutely and if we find at some point during the year that it would make

206sense to come back to us and lower the cost like can we just say that that like absolutely that theory that could happen absolutely okay and i think you know john john's only been here not not this john john john has only been here for um he started july 1. so he hasn't even been here a full month yet he's really trying to dive into the historical documents um he really wants to increase participation by offering fresh healthy food but things that kids are interested in you know he is key yeah absolutely and that the parents are are willing to spend their money on you know and the free and reduced lunch counts counter intuitive to what a lot of people believe any family that really is going to qualify whether they're actually going to

207buy lunch or not those counts help our district it truly does it is a benchmark that the state or government uses to fund the district so the more free and reduced participation even or not even participation but qualification our district has is the more funding to marblehead so um assuming we're not going to have the universal free meals anyone who might qualify for free reduced lunch i would urge them to fill it up for us and we probably have an increase in signups for that absolutely it's just given right right and typically what you have is the previous year qualification carries through to the end of october we don't have that because if universal free meals go off we're not going to have those kids being able to carry forward in september or october so

208we're going to need to get those applications out to his family soon i was gonna say well that's another piece that we'll want to communicate far and wide repeatedly to ensure that we get as many people to sign up make sure that's clear to them exactly and do we utilize like i know as a school counselor i'll take this on the chin right here do we utilize our school counseling and guidance and the the people who probably have a better grasp on where families are at in need we have um a lot of them will actually reach out to myself or the food service director and be like how do we get these kids into the program and we'll work with them to do that even if the parent is not willing to fill out

209the applications um this could be a conversation for since the beginning of the year and am i wrong in my thought that if you apply for and receive mass health you're automatically enrolled in this um usually yes okay yeah because we pull a listing from the states um of all families that automatically qualify are all students that automatically qualify we pull that quite a few times a year but more often at the beginning of the year are you ready for motion or is there any different questions yeah no i think so just help me why is um breakfast 25 and one just 50 increase most lunch is 25 except for the brown glover yeah why is that more expensive because shoes i don't know why brown glover and village had different prices i think you're

210probably accurate or whoever said it that there was no hot lunch available at brown glover pretty much so it's a 25 increase yeah because no one wants to be paying two dollars and four cents because everybody um the idea was without the historical knowledge of why brown bluffer was so much less than village because it is the same launch they get if you look at the if you look at the lunch menu it's differentiated between brown blubber village is one lunch you get and then the others is another lunch menu so since it's the same food you're getting why was it two different costs and the assumption was because one was like prepared off-site and shipped here not warm it's the same serving size but now you know now it's the same food so price

211yes i'm going to ask for a motion to approve student paid meal prices for the 2022-2023 school year as 225 for breakfast for all schools 350 for lunch at brown glover village 375 for lunch at veterans four dollars for lunch at all high school are at the high school and 5 25 for premium lunch at the high school do you need the adult uh the adult lunches in there okay [Laughter] um so we will break for lunch if if no one is opposed while we're eating can we talk about do a working lunch and talk about the masc conference um attend these so we can move through that we'll just get as much done as we can yeah all right [Music] okay so i think they set up cafeteria okay so we'll take a recess

212um um okay so we are proceeding along um finalize massachusetts association okay sarah okay so we're going to finalize the masc conference attendees um originally sarah gold myself and emily had expressed an interest in going um john and nan will be going i believe the five of us have been booked um we're set with that was there any other interests maybe i thought i said in the last meeting too but okay i i think and i think there's probably something on that so if you want to go and study like that's perfectly fine because we can switch names yeah yes can't they're just not refundable but they're transferrable okay all right so we have three um three spots i'm going i'm planning to go on thursday and friday and emily is prepping for me planning

213both friday and saturday okay and then i said friday yeah and it's on the tentative schedule i believe uh joint conferences move to wednesday night uh the second to allow members on that um so exactly work for everybody so i've said that again we have a meeting scheduled for the airlines um well we have a tentative schedule that was in the dropbox i believe um [Music] and if we need to move that one meeting to tuesday instead um we can do that as well i want to say last year yeah yeah so i think you know once we get to the beginning of september we have a tighter idea exactly we'll look at that and change where we need to um yeah there may have been three or five thursdays in october last year or

214something like that yeah something that was relatively easy to remember so we'll just see um all right are we gonna finalize this meeting scheduled today no it's just it was just a draft schedule i think in their um outline in the first and thirds the date so everyone had them for their books um and the only conflict we have right now is parent conferences in december i see um as well as the conference in the first meeting in september we it used to be very hard to switch to the when when we get to the second and fourth because so many of us were on building committee and that was always customarily excited and fourth where the building committee may need one or once or twice more to finalize his ills we certainly are not

215meeting every second and fourth so unless there's opposition um in september could we switch to the um the second and fourth which would be the 8th and the 22nd and if people need to check family calendars and things and get back then you can i can't do that standing meeting on that other person okay and it's not building it's not what it's not building committee because it used to be oh no do you want to get back to me on that and then i will for scheduling purposes reach out to everyone yeah because then it would make it the 22nd and then it would be another two weeks for the sixth year because that's a long like the way the days all that money thursdays okay yeah um yeah i may just leave okay all

216right so get back to me on that and then emily you may have to miss the eighth you said yeah so i can't do the second thursday okay okay and is that for the whole portion of the meeting or could you hop in at some point do you think um those meetings are probably at least two hours they're probably not okay all right i think for september just because the schools it's the last week before school is back in session if you don't mind that we do that on the yeah i just want to be able to okay okay okay um and megan you have actually on that okay perfect sorry sorry no one's actually brings us to sub committee and lee is on assignments um i had one member reach out with some requests

217um emily had touched space briefly you said you really didn't have any specific requests i know i didn't email you but i spoke to see pep um so i would like to meet you okay okay are there any other um i'm happy to stay on policy actually bizarrely kind of like it um it's just very interesting okay um so but i'm really happy to do whatever um that teaching and learning on the curriculum one i don't have all of the information to prevent so i apologize for that but um basically what i'm hoping to talk to the woman over at beverly um after i return from vacation but it's basic it would be led by man um and has committee members and i think some parents and staff that are part of it and they

218sort of pick a curriculum directive overview or um you know um that they are going to focus on for the year but then there's also some kind of little celebr little i think that but like a district celebration at the end of the year that um kind of rolled or presented some of the things that they had worked on and obviously if there's somebody if there's any decisions to be made um but that's sort of the overview that i have on it at this point okay i'd be happy to be on that one um but again like i'm yeah i'm happy to do whatever okay um and then as far as liaison for the sacs um are there any is anybody looking for a change or no if not um allison i'm gonna make my

219annual appeal but the principals do not want the school committee rep on sacs i didn't say it quite unfortunately my first year i knew once a little bit last year but this year and i think man would support the feedback from principals is that it's it's so varied that some committee members may be super involved in blurring the line of what is the school committee member what is the parent others are completely passive and principal wonders well why are they there so i i told them that i would bring it back and i think what we were hearing from colby saying you know you always have the hat on right and that was resonating with me in the conversations we've had the principles that they just feel like that hat is always on and it

220just inhibits sometimes transparent well it's supposed to be on in those meetings we're there as a representative of but a lot of times we're also parents yeah right right and it's hard to get away from that in all you know in some schools because we do have kids in the schools you know like all four of us have someone at village school so yes we're a school committee but it's really hard to not think about also as a parent in that role i'm playing devil's advocate for both things yeah i get very torn on this because i do like being on them and at the same time i totally understand where the principles are coming from and certainly have had that experience particularly this past year and have the experience where i feel i felt

221as though in one instance in particular maybe a couple more it's a little bit less so being there at school committee actually caused the situation like the discussion to turn sideways it may have turned sideways anyways particularly one larger thing that i'm thinking about but it i think it made it worse that i was there i i think the conversation is very different when i'm in the room than a phone on the room 100 so yes you know i love my village as they say i love it because i find out things that go on in that school that i might not know otherwise but am i being productive in my role as school community member in the sac conversation and i don't know that in that instance it is the most productive thing for

222the group that said if we aren't to do it i really we really have to figure out how we stay involved in those schools so we do know what's going on because it's really useful did the principals have any idea how we could do that so i think it's important that we hear the principles the principles felt heard and you coming back you know third time and i didn't mean to leave michelle after that she's part of these conversations um is there was there any feedback on other options on how we could still get that in the first year that i brought this up we're talking about maybe having school committee visits or a school committee member to walk through a school with me and or with nan or with michelle um actually there's a

223policy that provides for that bhc where school committee members can schedule visits and do walkthroughs so i feel like that is very intimidating to staff i think that the walkthroughs at times make them uncomfortable and i i just worry that it's i worry that if we add the school committee to that he said it's going to then make them feel watched versus those sacs are very much so like a round table collaborative discussion i would think they would feel even more intimidated and having someone via every single discussion versus just walking through one day that would be my take if i were well i think because it's not the norm initially it will be uncomfortable sure which is what man and i have ran into with walkthroughs this year with principals by the end of

224the year we're getting emails from staff saying come to my class yeah and i think that's the piece that i want like not to lose sight on like what is our goal of this and our goal generally is how can we be more present in the schools and more active participants i don't know that's the best choice of works but just so that we know what's going on and that and and you know i would love to see us just like kind of be more ingrained in it and not be so intimidating yeah i think also the students really i happen to be there we were i was doing something because i was roommates when dr bucky came one day here at brown and it's a the students i understand it being intimidating to a

225teacher but for the students it's like um oh this is oh my gosh somebody's here and so i feel like yes i think it's important to note that because we don't want to lose sight of that okay and making it exciting i also my thing with them is that i was on the vex so i know what's happening with x but i have no idea what's happening anywhere i mean that's true but like i don't have that same information about the other schools and that's what i feel like we're missing out on each of us and we have two new principals so if we all went and we're able to talk because the time we can go and have them tell us what's going on and what they're doing and um and i guess what's

226helpful too is because they are publicly posted meetings and anybody can still go with the member public to any of them that they want to yeah and i think you know all of this is up for discussion every year you know if we try something new out this year and feel like it was not what we wanted um you know then we can you know the next committee can figure out what worked what didn't work um i think the it was actually um principal bauer who gave me the heads up on beverly's curriculum subcommittee and it was sort of as an additional piece of like how can the school committee understand things more deeply and sort of be be out of that you know in the district in a different at a different level and

227and um and so that you know that was one of the pieces that i was like i thought it was really an interesting idea from him but i think also the high school ssc is a little bit different because there's students on that one and that piece i do want to find a way for us to hear students on a more regular basis and um and that was like that's the one good thing not the one good but that's like something i think that it adds a lot of value to the school communities having that student voice yeah sac so my question really would be john back to you and dan is to maybe come to us with some recommendations or some ideas on how we can be engaged with families and students especially at

228the high school right you know in terms of getting feedback in a way that is also effective for them right correctly for mom but there was like like some pizza lunches on that list yeah we shelved all of that because of covid and then you know i don't think any of us really thought this is gonna impact us this long i think that's a great idea that's a great idea um so you know i wonder if that might be and they'll be presenting in here okay so they're just asking about where they set up so just okay just hang in there yes okay though i don't think i know okay no worries can you clarify because it sounds like i'm not remembering all the details on the possible lunches with students yeah um leadership lunches

229so the superintendent and a member of the school committee go to the middle school kids sign up the students sign up for pizza lunch and get sick and ask them what's on your hearts and minds they will readily tell you but maybe maybe cut them a little bit maybe there's something they want to talk about and kind of like structure it yeah so there's like a discussion topic they come up with yeah curiosity did the new principles echo kind of the same thought or they didn't they haven't mentioned the how that dynamic changes i mean maybe you know it's something that they think they want but then at the end of this year maybe that's a little bit of a change let's see if we are not having sacs continue just as a look ahead

230to give them i would like to see a more robust presentation on school improvement plans because we are not embedded in seeing the development process behind those i'm going i would personally expect that that is going to be a more robust yep that's great yeah and i think that's been nan in my experience in the past is that school committees really went through school improvement plans and leaders of building presented them and then fielded questions about them so maybe then we do that over a course of a few meetings because we don't want to get them about five minutes um yeah so that just takes some like scheduling um so that puts that in the hole for a little bit um so as far as the subcommittees go do we feel we need a little

231bit more do people feel they need a little bit more information on teaching and learning in what direction that what that really is going to flush out to be before um they set up for that or it's going to be fascinating it's going to be amazing and we should all be clamoring to be at that one i wonder on that one do we need do we need two school committee numbers on that i feel like that's overcome first line otherwise it's not a separate name right i can't be posted so beverly has a bigger committee than we do and so they it has it sounds like they have their regular she said we basically have our school committee members on this committee meets monthly for one hour and we cover topics of interest and have

232action items to vote on sometimes prior to bringing them to the larger group our assistant superintendent learns the whole thing she's pretty amazing at it this past year they discussed the ela literacy program changes that the school committee had approved earlier in the year leadership instruction and accelerated learning culturally responsive teaching time on learning after school clubs and activities summer reading nesca findings college and career readiness mental health support el program textbook approval handbook changes and the student improvement plan so typically my understanding of the subcommittees is that it covers things that are within our curriculum right so policy budget and then by default facilities because we own them and that's why we have a subcommittee right because they're our purview so i think a curriculum group or whatever we want to call it is

233really important and it'd be good to have a school committee member on there but i don't think it's our purview to have it as our subcommittee i think it's something that the administration owns and we are a member of so maybe do you want me to talk uh because that we're emailing and we're trying to find a date when i return and so in early august hopefully to talk do you want me to kind of ask like what's the value out of here why did they set it up the way they did as a subcommittee if you can do that that'd be great and then we can we can table that one for right now yeah and man i wonder if you you know i haven't had any contact obviously with the assistant superintendent but

234i know her very well okay if you want to maybe take her brain from the administrative side of it that would probably be really helpful one one thing i'll put out there is after seeing what we went through with the schedule um in launching the new schedule last year if it's a subcommittee and it's posted then when the decisions are made and we get any possible pushback from the community we can we very clearly can say these have all been posted these this has all happened in the public view at any time the public could have attended um and we've offered that and i think that although it doesn't have to happen that way we have heard loud and clear the more we do in the public view the more public support we have and

235we need buy-in we need more buy-in than we've been getting in the last couple years and i think it's a little bit of a hurdle that we haven't totally figured out how to clear because our we've increased email communication you know we've increased the robo calls and stuff and yet we still sort of are like ugh what can you have some meetings yeah how can we keep moving that forward and so yeah and i can't remember the exact context in which dan and i were talking about this but i think it was around his schedule changes and everything and and you know just again being able to improve these pieces and give another outlet for the community because involved that was another big pushback we had where the community felt they didn't know and again

236if these if this committee happens and there's minutes and it's in the public purview that that takes that off the table so i'm gonna push back a little bit on that because i think like let's take the budget for example we had three forms over the course of three weeks and we had the same time people pretty much show up so i think even if you have these open meetings it's going to be a very small subset of people that can actually attend because let's be honest they're going to be when teachers can attend also so they're going to be four o'clock on a school day and secondly i think if we have a community a communication process in place that we follow with consistency especially when there's changes then we we address the getting

237the information to the public piece because if we follow that process that says okay here's something we're going to solve this is why it's an issue this is what we're going to do about it this is when we're going to come back to you this is when we're going to you know present to the school committee and offer a public comment then you get the best of both worlds you get the ability to work in a very um workshoppy way i don't know i don't know and also and also follow that through so that it comes up to the school committee because we want to make sure in my mind we want to make sure we're solving the problem we need to solve and this isn't necessarily our purview so i think we should have

238a member part of the conversation and that should be a regular communication back through the school committee with other communication mechanisms in place as well to make sure you know that the community is aware that we're looking at the schedule for example my concern there is i i i would err on the side of having it be having it be a committee having to be someone assigned having it be public having 30 minutes and everything that the public can see i think showing that consistency and transparency throughout the year i think from the budget perspective i understand what you're saying i i understand the people that the same same people and i get that and i understand the frustration with that too on both sides because more people want to come but when it's you

239know depending on the time people work activities etc they can't but i think people on that particular topic have probably already made up their mind one way or the other and so they weren't going to go necessarily but i think it's something like this especially around a discussion topic like teaching and learning and it being new i think that the public will have a lot of questions about we'll have more questions as a result of that not necessarily bad questions i i just i think that they will have far more and the more we can allow them to see into that i think the better i don't i think i think you're going to have teachers and students who are not going to be as open in those meetings then because because of that and

240you won't get the work done you need to get done and again it's about what is the purpose of this committee so i'm not against like i think that we should be presenting out to the community we should all be offering the opportunity for review and conversation and question 100 but i don't know if it belongs in that kind of working group so i think my mindset where i am is especially if you're listening to goldman this morning is if there is a meeting where there is a representative of the school committee that meeting will happen in the public purview with the exception of safety is clearly um that those meetings cannot have i haven't been the liaison that cannot happen for obvious reasons in the public purview but otherwise if it's not our then

241we don't necessarily need to be at that meeting we do not need to have a representative either we the school committee should be a representative at that meeting in which case it will be a subcommittee or we should not have a rep and either way there's there's been arguments to both ways but i don't know that we should i think it's one of the others then i would say we shouldn't have a school can do work on that because i don't think that the level detail of the work is necessarily school committee level and i think in that case man should have whatever committee she needs to do her work and then present up to the school team which is what she does which you do it's the function of your entire scope so you

242don't need a so nothing would necessarily plan for success i think we were looking to change it because the dan's suggestion was the backlash that was received at the high school and and what we're saying is that we should have this in the public as a public meeting i think that was the just an feedback i think if there's something that they do in that district that is above and beyond what we're already doing and they see value in it and then that feedback is worth absolutely yeah so i think all right but i think the way historically that we've gone about changes we haven't necessarily been as proactive with the community as we should right so that's why i'm gonna keep harping on having like a change process that involves community discussion so i'll

243continue to talk to this chair okay and you'll reach out to the assistant superintendent and we'll report back and see what you know what questions it answers and if if it becomes appropriate that to loot me in and that's discussion then you can do that sounds good um okay so megan is going to stay with cpac um emily did you want to stay with matco at one point you had mentioned because as you're here i know you've done that a host family and okay you still have a sticker on my mom's stuff but if you're comfortable i mean i don't i don't want to jump in and like to take things from people that are really passionate either so tell me no too um i think they need a little consistency okay okay so that

244is right they've handled it okay so emily is on the macro lease megan is the cpac liaison um policy is gonna be sarah gold and emily um that leaves us two which is the facilities and budget um so i put those in mine you put them on yours and you're not on anything yet um so i i would like to i'm going to remain on facilities and um move to budget and emily you've been you're both doing budget and facilities because those are like our two biggest ones no we haven't made that decision yet i just said i'm remaining on facilities and going out to budget um emily for one one of those um most definitely alison will go on because she's not on another one and we no longer have sacs so um she

245will go do you have a preference between those two which which committee you would go on probably budget budget okay um i would put teaching and learning on you know my oh so um and then emily you're on two already megan you're on one allison's on one and sarah's on one um i'm one of the reasons i was only on one last year was because of the duties of the chair so oh and do you want to continue in health and wellness that's kind of yeah okay unless somebody else has a desire to do that okay all right yeah i'm happy to help out i don't have any okay um and then facilities um i think it is helpful to have a facility's background on that facilities just for the the you know discussion points

246of it um emily would you want me to swap out policy and i can do facilities again um megan would you want to or do you want to do this i can't really take on anything else sorry i'm gonna get okay um i'm not gonna allow it okay and so if someone has a it's betw it um okay and then safety advisory i had done if someone would like to do that i'm i'm happy to it's very anxiety yeah i'm happy i mean i can do it if if you're if you're scheduled it's during the day mm-hmm um so i don't know what your schedule is i can be relatively flexible okay kind of thing okay so sarah gold if you um so you're still in policy correct what you see in the presidency right

247yes okay um so if you want to if several if you want to do safety there yeah um we didn't have anything like we were paused with at the end of the year um all right so as it is right now on budget it's myself and allison taylor facilities is myself and allison taylor policy is sarah gold and emily um safety is sarah gold health and wellness sarah gold and then matco is emily and cpac is not getting up the chair without using free time and then you just took 87. i know sir that's a lot of work are you sure like share is a huge time commitment budget and facilities are the two biggest and most time consuming especially this year with budget knowing that we're going to start in october and we're going

248to be going with the town current override it's so not good just know that if there's something that comes up and you are if we can get that like just come to us and we'll figure it out no absolutely absolutely i i feel good about that um and then sarah you'll get more information on that teaching and learning yes i will definitely do that okay all right so um do you need anything else no would you this is great okay um yeah and then we're ready for m a s let's see not a lot actually much more like focus of a lunch program oh oh oh can i switch to health and wellness too i'll take sarah she now she can have it okay sold all right which we do need to you just went

249[Laughter] when the districts have like implemented alice i know it's bigger than just alex but that the the town is working this tower a little bit and sometimes i go in on that discussion at tower too so i feel like it might be a nice sort of community um role for me to have okay yeah all right so that is set and then we just have to find um dorothy so i know i know myself going somewhere are we are we going a little bit out of word i just need to make a note if we're gonna i think we're missing the oh yeah the um segment positions and earlier um in the year about if if there was going to be a continuation of the live streaming as well as zooming um which i

250think we definitely will continue to do that he felt it needed to be a stipend position so i asked him what he felt that proper amount for that was and he boarded a quote to me um regarding he wanted to create a cart that um would have everything they need for these meetings on it dedicated so he's not kind of borrowing it from school resources and putting it together each time it would make it more effective and efficient to have the cart needed for these meetings so he he sent us and that's was put in your dropbox he sent us what he felt was needed on that in full disclosure i do not understand um the items needed but i trust even implicitly for that we need that if he's saying this is what we

251need this is what we need so um i believe in my conversations with him um it's it's this it's the same brand as what he was yeah yeah i believe it might be a little bit more high powered than what we were using to give a little bit better zoom in and and and pictures capabilities and it would also inform me it would give um you'd be able to see the committee as well as the the set up whatever is needed for the person doing public comments whereas we've set up an additional laptop for that and that may be what he needs to put on the cart yes but that's why he wants a cart for for our meetings so what are we doing with this for all the other days and times when don't

252school this could be useful i believe this would be mainly a school committee this would be a meeting yeah that doesn't make sense yeah i was the that's that sticker a little so we can choose to not do the cart and just tell steven to to move those items around as he needs to but the stipend to have someone set up the tech um he felt really was yes and run the test where's the second items he's using though are actually earmarked for the brown and were paid for with a building project he was just moving around so they have to be actually installed in the ground that is right they were going to be installed in another conference room first and we have not done that sounds like um he said it depends it's

253meeting dependent but he felt with the number of meetings we have roughly that between 2500 around that mark would be a stipend for that and then the individual would be at the meetings similar to what lisa currently does they would set up prior to the meeting and it'd be at the meetings like the zoo part yes plus like a budget hearing and things like that i do understand the price of this like it's hard i think we should find out if it is just transferring from brown but i will tell you another nerd alert my job my work study job was in college was like setting up the av stuff we had carts like this and it is unbelievably more effective and efficient to just have it all in one spot ready to go that

254you know i can come in and do it or i move to fiji because i win the lottery at least can come in and do it it's it there is that element to it which you can't necessarily quantify in dollars and i think it's not just i think it's you know that you've pointed that out that equipment which we were in the short term was purchased with msba money as well for the purpose of this building in students so we cannot continue to do that um now that being said the town has the same equipment and they purchased that with um our funding money to make their meetings hybrid and now if they could do it for all of their readings i'm not sure why that would not work the same argument for us i

255think it will absolutely get more effective and easier for stephen 100 but that price tag i don't know how we justify it for just our school community meetings so there's another way to fund it sure but not from our own project well i think that we have to ask you know the town uses the town bought it for their meetings for the arka funds um and i believe stephen helped them set it up so that was very collaborative um would would thatcher make or would thatcher make the recommendation that the school committee would also need because they bought multiple food for the yeah also knowing in that line i wonder if you know there are more meetings no more public meetings than just hours that occur in the high school library um so that equipment

256was to live at the high school library would it be effective in other you know could could have used in other meetings too yeah not just to your point not just for the school committee and i i do agree that actually up in the middle of the night thinking about that number um because it was just really steep uh you know kind of just wondering where is that coming from yeah well i think that i think the answer we we need is if the town could utilize argo funds for the very same thing for multiple units these aren't these are town meetings soccer meetings i'm meeting with them at 3 30 today yeah um very quiet yeah um and if they can't then can we use one of the ones that they have because they

257had one for mary ali and i believe they had one for abbott hall it is in the conference room but very out yeah and so meaning would we then switch our meetings to offensive marielli or is that kind of mobile like you know what i mean like does that mobile cart live at muriel or and then if the answer is no then i can ask you when is there some grant money out there i think i think this this is a it's i it's like sticky in my opinion because the order was you know the the the state order was pushed for significantly i think until like 2023 yeah and i think that there was talk of december like one house passed it in for december of 23. so you know we could we could

258really see this continuing forward for a long time um and so there there's there again like it's unfunded mandate piece to this of like we have to figure something out and how do we do that in a fiscally responsive responsible way and and and the responsible way to our staff and whoever recycling and you know that just a whole package there so yeah i have no reservations about the stipend right no that means yeah they're working they deserve to repeat their time um it's just whether or not they're setting up you know off a cart or if we're setting up a laptop you know we will continue to um run meetings that people can join in hybrid nightlife and bottom wants that and they want that we will continue to do that so it's how

259um laborious is it nonsense um but we'll get the information from doctor and then we'll we'll move them to there all right um and then [Music] one thanks right um looking for wallpaper at her house someday i will give her his crayon i got more people oh my god i'm going to be wallpapering here's my purpose i mean it's going to make you want to vote and emily i don't have to give you any other plan that you ever changed i told you was at the signing of these is oh we're going to build a lot of school buildings or if you join the zoom meeting i can give you co-hosts oh yeah i can make you a co-host and you can just do it from your computer i believe yeah so and it will

260that will go on the screen she is [Music] hmm what i met mary oh good yeah um it's my fourth year in the school community i am michelle cresta assistant superintendent for finance and operations john buckey superintendent schools sarah from masc martin professor namiasi tom scott nass chris mcgrath mass health is my first retreat it's just elected happy new year nan murphy assistant superintendent teaching and learning megan taylor school committee finally there is cool committee sorry and our technical consultant and i am dr bucky's assistant you ready to roll yeah okay well thanks for having us here today spoken a little bit with uh sarah and john about what we want to accomplish today um whenever i do a workshop i want it to be more of a discussion than a lecturer so please feel

261free to jump in with questions with comments but what i want to talk a little bit about today in a very broad sense is goal setting um from uh from like sort of the big picture perspective and then and then sort of segue into the goal-setting process in the superintendent evaluation process so i'm not going to talk about the entire superintendent evaluation process but just the initial part of it the goal-setting process um emily i think that means [Music] is that right yes um so first of all let's talk a little bit about why we're setting goals if we go back to the big big picture we want to remember that we're all here right on a school committee to work together as a committee in that continuous improvement in student achievement and when we're

262talking about student achievement we need more than just those academic achievement more than just mcas scores we're talking about what do you want marblehead students to achieve by the time they cross the stage at graduation in terms of skills and competencies and academic success so goal setting is one of the ways that school committees exercise your leadership if you are not setting goals special interest groups are going to be happy to come in and fill that void for you and then you will be following rather than leading and you'll be reactive rather than proactive um it enables you to keep the committee and the superintendent and the district on that continuous improvement track um and if you think about the having those goals in place monitoring those goals and making sure they get implemented it

263gives you a good story to tell in a couple ways when you're going to the community looking for resources you can talk about we have these goals we did the work we monitored here's the success we had on the goals so we took the resources that you gave us and we used it to further student achievement and now we're asking for a new set of resources to continue that track of student achievement so you you have that story to tell your community about why you need the resources and it also tells the staff why they're doing the things they're doing right you have that big picture um view of where you want the district to go and everyone in the district all the staff has a role in making sure that happens so not only

264what are you doing at the school committee table um to make sure those goals are further but what am i as a teacher doing in my classroom that helps contribute to those goals so um it and it helps the staff understand why is this the professional development initiative that we're having this year why aren't we working on this curriculum why are we making these changes because it furthers our goals any questions so we always talk about wanting that alignment of the goals this is going to be a bunch of clicks i'm really sorry um so we're starting with the picture district goals right what is that overarching goals of where we want the district to go then when you're looking at school improvement plans when you're looking at the superintendent goals when you're looking at

265the goals that you may have for yourselves as a committee you want that to align back to the district goals how is the work of those groups aligning back and helping further those district goals that we have the superintendent in working with the administrators is think you know working with what is the administrator's role in making sure those district rules get accomplished and implemented these principals are going to be looking at that with their teachers she's gone thank you you know what what what how do the teachers goals align back like to the school improvement plan how are we working to imp in my classroom to implement those school improvement plan goals and all that is in that pursuit of that continuous improvement in student achievement which is at the top of the pyramid so

266you want to make sure as you're looking at all those goals that they're aligned so goals put a frame and a structure around the work that the school committee does in my mind i like to be super organized and to me if you're thinking about why we're here and what is the work we do and how do we structure that work the goals can get put a frame and a structure around that work so part of what you're doing is making sure that there is that alignment when you're working with the superintendent to establish the goals when you're looking at your own goals when you're looking at those reviewing those school improvement plans is there that alignment or is something going off in a different direction that we want to pull back in part of

267the reason that you have the school committee meetings is to monitor the progress when i was doing a work a while ago on strategic planning or whatever we now call strategic planning right um one of the things that i learned was most plans fail because of the fail to monitor the plan right you you do all the work you put the plan in place it goes up on the shelf and you go anyway right so unless you're monitoring the plan making sure that the goals that you have get implemented or maybe the plan that you have isn't working the way you think it was going to work to implement the plan so then how do you re realign your work to still continue to with that goal the budget is the biggest resource that you

268have to make sure that those goals get implemented so as you're making your budget decisions you're looking at how are we using our resources to make sure that those goals get implemented sometimes when you're having a tough budget year which is every year um that can make some decisions easier right because you're you're needing to make those decisions to implement your goals and you're all if you're always thinking about how how is using that resources helping us implement the goals then maybe some of those decisions about well you know we we've done it this way for 30 years maybe we need to revamp and do it a little bit different way because that's going to get us towards our goal it makes some of those decisions easier and then i believe you guys have school

269committee goals right that you loosely yeah yeah so so so thinking about what is what is the work that we're doing together as a committee to help further those goals um not all school committees have them but many do um very you know if we're thinking about what are our buckets of you know budget policies so forth what are we looking at this year for instance i know you're doing work on diversity equity inclusion so you might be wanting to look at are we looking at our policies right are we looking at our policies to make sure that they reflect the equity in the inclusionary diversity that we want reflected in the way our district runs so looking thinking about your work in any given year and how does that help further support the goals

270make sense questions sorry um so when we think about goal setting um we we think about it sort of from the very top the overarching goal what is the vision that we have for the district and students you did that work you've done that work with your planning for success right you've taken that overall vision usually looks out three to five years um taking a step back what are our strengths where are our challenges so how do we how do we what's the word i want how do we further our strengths how do we address our challenges um and in that work the superintendent is doing a lot of work to find out what are the strengths what are the challenges let's get down to the root cause and then the school committee is representing

271the vision and the values of the community at that point coming together overarching goals can be called a strategic plan planning for success is would be another example of overarching goals um with the district improvement plan it's got a lot of different names but it's basically one of those big picture buckets that look out three to five years um that will help us be on that path of continuous improvement um one of the one and also the work i was doing and looking at planning there one guy had a line which i thought was great it was done doug evans who's done a lot of work on school committee work um he was at a workshop that he did and he said the strategic plan has died a well-deserved and overdue death right um that

272thinking about that that idea that you you lay it out very specifically for a number of years um and it's static right because the idea is things change like if you had done a strategic plan in 2018 into thought i have to stick to this plan and then a pandemic happened you would have been what would have happened right you would have put the plan on the shelter on your way without thinking trying to keep those goals in mind and work around work with them as best you could in current circumstances um i worked with a committee once in another state so we don't ask the ones um they had a street they did a strategic plan they had 35 initiatives in year one they had 17 initiatives in year two i was talking to

273them at the end of year two the school committee was saying to the administration there's problems in high school guidance that need to be addressed the administration's answer was that's in year four we can't look at it and part of the reason was they had way too many initiatives and the staff was just like in vulnerable right they were trying to you know take care of 35 plus 17 initiatives with more added in year three and it wasn't going to happen right um so that i so that idea of you have those overarching goals that you want to keep a picture of um but you need to be able to be a little bit flexible in keeping those in mind but how do you get to them by looking every year at the middle line

274there of how do we get closer to that vision every year it's having an annual plan with more specific goals in us you know smart i think you're all familiar with smart um um that the school and the school committee and superintendent work on together um and looking at what's the work of the superintendent what's the work of the school committee what's the work of everyone in the district to get for closer and closer to those overarching goals um and then part of the work of the school committee and the superintendent together becomes monitoring that right we're getting regular reports we're understanding what's happening um we know we're on track or we're getting off track how do we get ourselves back on track to be able to realize the goals um and um that's the

275school committee and the superintendent together working to do that monitoring and that correction as necessary questions so overarching goals if you think about i've sort of described them already there's those big buckets those very carefully chosen initiatives they're usually integrated right you can see an interrelationship um very typical ones might be something might be involving facilities might be involved in curriculum instruction um diversity equity and inclusion you can see that there has to be a tie together on that they have to be integrated and support each other in a way to get to where you want to go i tend to think of them as targeted vision statements so vision for curriculum instruction vision for facilities vision for whatever the other buckets are but there's a limited number right of those buckets um and it's

276where the vision and the values of the community and the need of the staff to get the job done come together so a lot of time at goal-setting time we talk about the superintendent is bringing the needs of the staff to get the job done to the table school committee is bringing the vision and values of the community to the table and as you're having those discussions and coming to a consensus on what those goals are that's where those two things come together any questions okay so and then you as i said you're probably pretty familiar with the acronym smart so you have those big overarching goals they're more visionary um smart goals are going to be more specific what's going to happen when is it going to happen how are you going to measure

277that it's going to happen right so a lot of times when i talk about smart goals i pick out that m as measurable because that's what can trip you up right you want to know exactly how you're going to measure what's going to happen um so when you're thinking about having those smart goals sometimes they will have in the statement as measured by um so that you know what is going to change a lot of times i think a good way to think about it is how will things look different a year from now or at the end of this whole cycle if the goal has been implemented so how so how do we look at and measure that that's going to happen it's not always data it's not always numbers but it can give

278you some indication of this is how things improve right um and when we're talking about developing all those goals we're talking about this this group doing it together right reaching a consensus or ultimately school can be voting and saying these are what the goals are um you know we're we often talk about probably say it again when you talk about the superintendent evaluation um superintendent has one boss right then it's that one boss that needs to determine or that one this one body together that needs to tell the community these are the goals that we're working on so we're always looking for that continuous improvement how do we keep doing a better and better job of serving our students how do we do a better better job as a district how do we segue to

279changing needs of our students and making sure that we're addressing changing needs so you start with that district strategy those overarching goals whatever you call that document it close by the eleven years um and then you have that every year or every goal-setting cycle you're thinking about what are the specific actions we're taking this year that will help us fulfill the goals those overarching goals in the district strategy you're linking that work to budget and policy the superintendent and his team more specifically are working on implementing those goals together you're monitoring are they in place then you get back to the end of that goal-setting cycle and say oh now we're going to pull that district strategy down again and see what is the next set of steps we need to happen so a lot

280of times as you go from year to year those smart goals are iterations right they're not you don't throw them all out and start all over again it's what's the next step what's the next step so you'll see in superintendent evaluation and in the smart goals for the disc in the district plan um that it'll be what's the next step what's the next iteration of making sure that things go forward you know i don't know if it's here presentation or not but this is where we got a lot of feedback from the community right because that's exactly what we did right we did the planning for success we came up with the in our case five buckets using that very kind of comprehensive process from desi and then we developed the initiatives you know the

281list of initiatives that we were going to need to do to meet those overarching goals but we didn't say okay we're gonna in year one we're gonna do these five and year two we're gonna do these five you know we kind of picked for this year which ones we were gonna focus on but we hadn't picked you know year two exactly what that was gonna look at three four and five and that's where we got a lot of pushback from the community because they're like well you don't have a plan like that's the feedback we got even though we had the planning for success with all the initiatives laid out and those you know that rolled up into each one of those buckets well and that's where the the strategic line has died that well

282deserved and yeah you know for deep death right that's the piece of having a hard time communicating out to the larger community yeah i i think we have the overarching top level i and i know that you've noted that there's a lot more work that's been done than i've seen because i'm just new here so and i look forward to seeing that to get us to the next level which gives us what the actions are you know what specific items even if we don't have it mapped out every single thing that we're going to do this year next year i don't think that's it i think it's what are you going to do this year and how are you going to do it what are the actions that you noted and how are you going

283to be successful with those initiatives from the superintendent's perspective with the schools from us communicating to the community making sure everybody feels involved and that they i just feel like they felt having been a member of the community um wanting to know that next level of detail um in whatever form that might take you know not not giving them too much and i guess i would look to you to answer that question from a guidance perspective on is it okay to give them that next level of detail i think they would feel more comfortable with that next level um marblehead is very much so we they have a specific way that they're willing to fund things in a specific way that they're willing to look at things and it's while planning for success works in

284many communities um because it's much more of a living document i think what we're hearing and what we've heard very clearly is in the eyes of the marvel head voters as much as the strategic plan of days past you know you're saying there has has died that is is not what we're hearing the people here will accept if we want money if we want funding and override so what they're saying is they want to know what is happening with more detail years two three four and five and i think what we need to do is find the middle ground where they understand this is a living document and this is what is happening years two three four and five however as circumstances arise and new initiatives come out in education and this needs to be

285a living document and there will be changes as we move along as as you give the example of if anybody who had a strategic plan in 2018 knows things have changed so i think again we need that middle ground of there needs to be more of a layer of layers of detail of what are the larger initiatives you're looking at for year two three and four not necessarily the minutia of them but the the you know will is it and i keep using some of the same examples so i apologize to people who've heard the same ones is it that in year two you'll be looking at buying in a social studies you know these larger scope things so then they see okay i can see that this these fun there is a need for

286a proposition to have the argument we were hearing us i was i see clear plan for one year but you're looking for a prop two and a half which is perpetual funding and the hard part and marblehead has been to say we will we will i just want to make sure everyone's you muted um they want to know the larger specific or semi-specific bug buckets that will be used year two three four and five i just go ahead i would give them a little bit more credit and say that i think that they would be okay with shifting well yeah that's a living jacket right yes being more clear about i know we were probably clear but being even more exhaustively clear let me put it that way because i think that was an overarching

287thing that we heard from the community right um that the this is our plan would like to get all these done by 2026 but what the only date on here is 2026. what what do we have to show and i know that there are things that we can show the community that we have done in the year 2022 in year 2023 and yes they may change because who knows what might come down the road like you said um and it needs to be dynamic but i think so a lot of times what i'll see and chris you've done a lot of work with um new superintendents and creating those district plans is you want to be really specific your two might have some basic things like we're piloting three social studies um curricula year two

288is gonna be we're gonna pick one and buy it right right so but you're not saying we're gonna buy this one and buy it i think you just wanna hear we're going to buy a social studies curriculum and in that we know that they range in this price they just i think that that level of detail is what the public has been saying they want well and when do when did you work on planning for success i mean that yeah that's not a document that gets thrown together without a lot of work behind it so if you're still planning on filling in some of those year to year three um and i understand ruth i always want to say [Laughter] i wish it would be gilbert is coming to um to help you fill in

289some of those more of those action plans and then it's i mean if if you're gonna do that planning with integrity it's not all gonna be thrown together really quickly either right so yeah i don't think anyone would expect i don't think they're expecting that i think the kind of public knows how how they know how long things take to do it properly to make it so that you're setting yourself up for success also you want to put a plan together that you can't work towards i think we just need that second layer of action plan to be like you said you know the first year is this detail the second year is that almost like another pyramid that could be kind of teased out a little more the action plan i think means you

290tease out more than a year in advance so i guess where i get lost um is that you know we have our buckets we have strategic um objectives um and so i guess you know how do we pair how do we drill in without pigeonholing ourselves and then being told you know well you said you were going to do this and you didn't do this and you know you did this other thing and so we can't trust you anyways that was right good question yeah we say i'm going to do something in here too but like you said things happen we need to be flexible and we don't we're going to get criticized for not using the money correctly and then we'll never get money again right like that's the narrative that i mean because

291the whole narrative is that we didn't part of a large piece of the narrative with that we don't have a strategic plan and we do and no matter how many times it was stated it continued to be that we didn't have a strategic plan um so i guess i just there's like disconnects for me and i'm trying to figure out how to get over them so that we can be successful um because you know i don't particularly care how we get there i want us to get there want us to be successful i think we need to anticipated next steps we need that middle like you look at milton and it's like 58 pages of what you the old strategic plan and it's like re it's it's the old strategic plan and then we have

292three pages i think what there needs to be is a middle ground where you had yeah listed there on the the goal settings with more about the measurability i think it's what it would be like i know you're getting somewhere i i think if we had more i definitely hear what you're saying but i feel like if we had more of those details on a yearly basis for each of these goals what are we doing or what is our goal what are we hoping to accomplish to get us closer to this by june of 2026. what are we hoping to do this year then that's fantastic yes so glass half full superintendent we've not come to the end of year one yet so nan and i will be reporting out on the strategic initiatives that

293we had this year the achievement of those and then foreshadowing in year two these are those strategic initiatives with added detail because i'm hearing that peace that they want those action steps and so that's what ruth is coming to do for year two we just we haven't been through a full cycle yet and so i think we were asking for the override and people were asking for this information understandable i get the public's interest in having that we just weren't there yet do you think looking ahead that that it's as we worked that as you work with the leadership team to develop the second step of this and as at the same time we work through the budget process this year that that the timelines might line up that while we're presenting the next round

294of the budget that we'll have that next layer not just for year two but where we heard in year one that people really wanted to know what year to look like do you think we'll have a further look ahead i keep using a pose word of what they have used to say that all the time do you have a do you think we'll have a longer range look ahead with the further you get out of being slightly less detailed but do you think we'll have that to present or or is the leadership team working on mainly year two i want to balance the two because i'm hearing what emily and megan are saying about committing ourselves to stuff and then hearing what we promised the community and that not but i want to balance the

295two okay i if i can also add i think we always are trying to balance the needs of our teachers so there may be curricular needs and program needs but to buy them all at once and to be able to put them into a budget or plan for them when you know you have limited bandwidth with your staff that that's part of the puzzle as well yeah so it's not just about the budget it's about the capacity of this needs and that's kind of the dynamic nature of the document right and things could change as well and i i i understand the concern but i do think that if we had if we came out of the gate with more of that detail that the community would be more amenable to listening to hearing to

296trusting hesitantly maybe even but that's okay because that's a step in the direction we all want to get to with the community and and then if something does happen another pandemic god forbid or what have you they're aware that these are dynamic items and that they could change for a myriad of different reasons and that we need to all be aware of that but here's the detail that we have for right now in this minute today with everything as it is today tomorrow could be different and so lesser how would you how do you guys because both of your faces lit up when you said the strategic plan for the guided staff yeah how do we balance this how do we balance um sort of this desire that we've heard loud and clear for this

297i don't want to be insulting at all so i'm just going to say it and just practice it by saying i'm not being in something but the desire to sort of have this old school document that that is very definitive with sort of this new way that things are being done how do we balance that i just want to get some clarity about something you looked for an override and you didn't get it and there's a sense that the community didn't have the specificity it wanted with regard to its goals at the time the override took place and one of the problems was that you hadn't been through a whole year of implementation of the goals in order to have the information would it not have been possible to have provided or to provide at

298any given moment sort of an up-to-date summary that could be understood by the average community member doesn't necessarily speak the same language that everybody in the educational world speaks uh to to have something like that available when it comes time to go to the thing calm okay i think that would be great can you go back to the goal setting can you explain what you mean there well let me let's let's an overarching goal i'm making i'm totally making this up an overarching goal would be to improve the performance of students in marblehead in mathematics in grades 4 to 12. call that more specifically okay improve the performance of students in math and to have a measurable achievement in that because middle school is the problem of the age you're looking for a year later

299to be able to say here's the progress we made here's why we made it here's one we didn't uh here are the further complications what do you do mid-year when you don't have enough data left to do this and i guess is there any reason why that problem in the future cannot be ameliorated by coming up with a mid-year summary to keep the finn come happy yeah so i wouldn't even say it was being calm because they passed our i'm sorry what are you calling us pass us unanimously oh okay but i think that's a very valid point i was thinking it when dorothy had just slapped him the monitoring piece is one that i don't think we do well there's definitely room for improvement right and so and yeah it would have been hard

300you know kind of six months in at this point but now that we're kind of a year and a half and when we get to january i think our monitoring process is one where we absolutely need to see how we can um see how we can improve there and communicate right so like how do we put that in digestible nuggets of information out to out to the community so can you say the strategic plan had died and i noticed it too that they were both like the few thank goodness i took that to mean strategic plans of your with like 4 000 pages and every left and right hand turn you're going to take yeah you don't mean this no right like this is still a little oh i know exactly what you just said

301okay exactly okay and that's what i thought but i wanted to clarify that and i want the community that might be listening to this i think there's a lot of interest in this they may fast forward in this section let's hear it too um so for this particular slide here i think for the second line to have because we have really great objectives and overarching goals having specific steps that help get us closer to that vision every year and maybe we have them and they're not in this document or maybe this document just needs to be blown out a little bit more to have some more detail and have dates attached i think that's really what people want to see as well and then from that we will have something to monitor because if you

302don't have a step you don't know what the specific step that you're going to take in year one or year two is how can you monitor it okay so when i say every year i don't mean at the beginning that you have your one two three four five laid out right right i mean that so now we're in year one and we're gonna have real good detailed plans for the work to do in year one and some idea of if we accomplish everything we know what needs to happen in year two right but i don't mean to say absolutely and you one through five is all going to be laid out right i think you can and i think the emphasis for that is that it has to be dynamic and since it's dynamic you

303can't possibly have it all done but i think even having that for that first year um for what what you've already done and then what we're going to do for the fall for now the second year i think would be really clutch for people to feel heard to feel like okay we're getting the detail look at all of this stuff that they've done that we didn't people don't even know about that has been done so i think allison maybe just i guess where i'm trying to get to is so like and i think in my mind kind of what i'm hearing is the information is probably all out there but how do we put it in a way that is easily understood and that we can push up to the community and admittedly it probably

304isn't as straightforward as it could be so for example like we've got what you're looking at there yep yes they're playing for success right and we've got the kind of finish i don't know what we want to call them and it's just for lack of a better word that kind of we probably get like seven or eight for each one of those buckets and then each year this time of year we put together those smart goals for the coming year so last summer we did the smart goals for this past school year and then and that's basically what makes up the superintendent's evaluation so we put together our school committee goals we put together the superintendent smart goals and then we theoretically should monitor those throughout the year and then the superintendent's evaluation is basically

305saying how did we do in achieving those smart goals so and you can look at that in sort of two different ways right you have the superintendent smart goals which is what is the work the superintendent is going to be doing this year to implement the goals we still have those district goals and a lot of other work is going on right but you can also be monitoring those district goals right and one of the things that we'll talk about sort of in the superintendent evaluation portion um and you can do it for the district goals too is a year-long agenda of when are we going to report out the progress right and you can put right on your agenda um uh uh report on professional culture and you know and so everybody knows this

306is a report out this is how we're monitoring our um strategic objective on buildings uh strengthening and supporting educator capacity yeah right and that's where i think we don't where there's opportunities for improvement and probably haven't had that kind of schedule laid out on how we were going to monitor each one of those goals and i think the separation of the two goals like john's goal is very different than these district goals and that's what we're missing is those where are you this is perfect this old like boys um like the driver is articulating the districts or whatever the next one now district goals and that's what people want to see and what we're going to do specifically and then what's going to happen this year and then monitoring i think right am i yes

307i mean i know you can try to go and there might be a lot of that already done so that and i think that's what you're saying in our meeting in june that there may be a lot of that discussion that documentation already done but we need to get it we need to kind of expand on this add some columns or what have you so how do we just get it all into basically one little thing yeah yeah but that gets pushed out yeah no i think you're right on that for sure i think communication 100 in some of those larger pieces earlier in the day miami talked about when we talked about how for the budget we really need to dig into looking at our staffing and what is appropriate staffing but you talked

308about how some of our curriculum materials have just been had for budget reasons had to be put off year after year and that we have some holes we need to fix i think it's almost that we need that that list too and and to say we don't we have not been filling these holes so when we hear push back from the community well what are you doing in year two or three and perpetual of this this money because it's approximately half and it will stay forever more in our taxes you can say well here are some of the things we know in the next you know three to five years we have to have and we don't have to say and we're gonna do this curriculum on year two but to have all of that

309information this is what we have done without and this is what we can no longer do without and need to implement in the next three to five years i think those specifics are really is really good information to have okay does we deal with a lot of different communities most of our communities that we deal with has at least eight constituency of the perpetually disgruntled um other people when you speak of the community who monitor your goals that closely and does the community at large truly monitor your goals that closely or in light of a very highly charged override vote which they all are there are those who would seek to defeat the override or support the override by spinning where they think you aren't a very large number i think disproportionately large when you

310look at other towns our size of people in our town who are very involved and follow closely and that serves to great benefit in many areas of our town but sometimes it also um can mean that that there's more information wanted more readily than maybe another account but we have a very i mean i would say we've been very involved i think so too i think there's always going to be people that are disgruntled in every single town that's not new or specific here i think in this there's were a lot of people paying attention this year because it was a forever thing and right and having it people are always going to spin things to fit their their narrative that's just part of life too but i think if again just kind of focusing

311back on on this and what we can do i think very successfully to have a better outcome next time next year i you know so does someone need to think about strategic communications to explain this to the community yes huge improvements in the last you know four years or so and yeah to me sitting in my seat i still feel though it's a failure particularly given the failure of the overriding and the end this conversation it's very frustrating well you have a school committee and an administrative team that does not suffer a short supply of communication skills maybe the community might not feel that way but people are they're teachers naturally they explain things to people they explain things to parents it's not like this was a different kind of business where people don't know

312how to talk to the community it seems to me you ought to be able to figure out some type of master communication strategy going forward targeting the fact that the community wants more right more data and micro data i will tell you though um god bless them if they're that interested in you welcome to it um most of the communities that i deal with don't get into it to that degree of detail they know how they know what they think is coming for their own kids but maybe when it's an override in play that level of concern gets drawn out and i wonder if if as much as you go on offense to do everything you can if there's not an element of defense that you need to put up with from uh from people

313who will demand more information i think even starting i'm i'm the new person so i but i i definitely feel that there is a path to get there um i think that it starts much sooner rather than later even if it's just telling people hey guess what we're going to do you you spoke and we listened you spoke very loudly and very clearly and we heard you and we want to do this for you because together we want it to be a success we don't want it to be the it's for the children we don't want to spend the money back and forth argument again and starting that before anything's even done and just letting them know hey we've come to an agreement you know we met with the team again and they advised us

314very wisely on what we can do you know isn't this you know having a forum about that and saying is this something that isn't this going to be great work look at the progress that we're trying to make already because i just know it is giant will there be another effort next year yeah the town is already the town has already stated that they um need a top two and a half to move like well we have such a a deficit i think we were left with 800 thousand dollars in free cash at the end of this year yes or 400 was it 400 000 so when will the next override election taken june next year next year okay so yeah so starting that time right so starting that strategic communication making sure that it

315is it's just started early and we let people know that they're being heard we let people see our progress see the progress that we're making as a team together working together but also listening to them these this community is very very small and it really wants to be heard and i understand that um and and i think it's a wonderful thing and i hope anybody watching is seeing that we're doing all this that it's very frustrating for people who put in so much time and effort undoubtedly on this and there's much more beyond these three pages that they've seen but we just need to put that in here and i just think that that's great one with the curriculum piece will be really really helpful in in articulating these needs out into the community that

316we have many areas of deferred needs in our town so some of this is going to be using your meetings very strategically to be able to get that information out and you can to make sure that your meetings are efficient and effective in delivering that message with through the presentations that you have um and and trying not to get sidetracked on other things um but making sure that you're very focused in your meetings on delivering use like um we just over the weekend we had our summer institute and part of what we did was meeting management and thinking about um thinking about your meetings in a year-long thing like if every meeting is a chapter in your story what's your story about so you now have a year just like short of a year right

317to tell the story right um and use your meeting strategically to build that story in those communications i would just add i'm reflecting back when we started our work together in july of 2020 where we were at with respect to technology and i think about where you are at today skillful benchmarking shell watching the numbers i mean certainly colbit was an accelerant we have put technology in the hands of our children but i just think the progress you have made across a 24-month period in technology that might be an interesting prototype and as a community member we all understand technology we become technologically dependent right thank you colby so i i just you know you know me i'm a kindergarten teacher i have to give the praise but i'll just say to you just a

318boatload of progress in technology with some specific benchmarks and persistent discussion with the members of your leadership team and every leadership team meeting uh thank you stephen about where we're at where we need to go are we going to lease are we going to buy and everybody said onboard that's like the technology piece it's such a great example because it was never that we didn't know we needed technology or that we didn't have the capability it was always that we didn't have the money for the fine for the technology and because of all the cares money that flew in absolutely but um we were able to then you utilize the funds to do what we need and that's a prime example of when properly funded we can get ourselves up to where we need to

319be and that's a really great like example of how we've done that but that's another great example the community when we first got here they wanted live streaming and we could have used cares money to go out and buy our cameras but the back of the house was broken we didn't have routers and switches and broadbands and servers and you couldn't use a cell phone and a laptop in the same room without the wi-fi network crashing but people were starting petitions and saying but it was because it hadn't been funded over the years there's such a in many districts in fairness we're able to use that money to do alabama's livestream but be and this is a good learning piece like because we deferred for so long we had to play catch up instead of

320getting started yeah yeah so you know this is this is our takeaway as a community it's let's use this proper planning um fiscally to not never put ourselves hopefully in a position where we have to use emergency funds to play catch-up rather than to get us where we need to be so emily do you want to go forward a few slides so evaluating the superintendent next slide so why do we do this right why do we evaluate the superintendent this is again sorry first of all it's one of the ways you monitor progress right it's one of the ways you're making sure you're on that path of continuous improvement the next a word is accountability so you know you we as school of committee have to hold ourselves accountable for the work that needs to

321get done we also need to hold others in the schools accountable for the work so it's part of making sure that you're taking care of that accountability it's helping you stay on the track of continuous improvement um you know that again the same thing we talked about in goal setting for the district um and then last it's required [Laughter] [Music] i've tried to make them go away trust me that's right so um so i'm going to talk so there's a five step cycle allison when you do charting the course we'll hear all about this and we can do we have learning challenges and all um all about this um but i'm gonna concentrate today only on the beginning of the cycle but i'll just go through it really quickly so you you're at the end

322of a cycle now so the cycle starts and ends with essentially a self-assessment whatever you call it where are we right where are we now um where is the superintendent now out of that you're thinking about again that continuous improvement that sort of iterations of goals so because of where we are now what are the next goals that we're going to set to move us forward um super again this that when you're thinking about superintendent evaluation what is the work that the superintendent is going to do or receive so forth this year that will help that path of continuous improvement help you implement your district strategy so um you're that you're setting a goal and developing a plan where you're the superintendent is setting up working with you to set goals and develop a plan

323plan gets implemented part way through there's that mid-cycle review hopefully it's not the only time you're talking about those goals hopefully that's embedded in your meetings so you're following that progress throughout the year and then at the end of the final evaluation but as i said we're going to focus on the beginning part of that today so there's two parts to the evaluation tool the first part is smart goals i'm not sure what happened to the is that gonna come oh um just go through the whole thing you guys know what smartphones are right yes um and then there's one more click i think um smartphones have key actions and benchmarks so you know approximately what's going to happen and or you know what's going to happen and approximately when so you can do that

324sort of constant monitoring throughout the year their goal their three goal areas professional practice goals student learning goals and district improvement goals sometimes student learning and district improvement you can't tell the difference that's fine um and sometimes district improvement goals may be more geared towards communication or fiscal management or building projects or things like that go ahead um so again this is the same side you can went through this really fast it's that same slide about wanting that whole alignment so as you're working with the superintendent to establish those goals you're going back to those district goals and determining you know what is the work of the superintendent this year how does it align back to the district goals just keep going on through that so the second part of the tool is the standards

325so the goals think of the superintendent evaluation as being a goal-oriented tool right the goals of the superintendent are what move marblehead forward so you want to be concentrating on what are the goals the standards are the same for all superintendents throughout the state in those four areas um instructional leadership management and operations family and community engagement and professional culture um so but when you're talking about that whole setting that first part of the plan concentrate on the goals um usually what happens you want to just go to the next slide um so usually what happens is you're this is sorry um first of all you're going to agree on the goals typically the superintendent comes to the school committee and says here's the goals i recommend for the year um school committee again one

326boss multiple brains needs to come together um and agree on what the goals are but ultimately it's the school committee that's going to vote and say yes these are the goals um and it's the committee together that is accomplishing that you want to think again about what are the outcomes right not just what are the outputs but what are the outcomes i noticed in last year's goals that that that sarah sent that you had outcomes and you had what i always think should be there and i don't often see is anticipated evidence so how are we going to measure this right so that comes into outcomes it's not just the goal should the goal should be specific enough that to the extent that six heads can all understand what's gonna happen um have the same

327understanding of what's gonna happen you've got that articulated and it's not just did the superintendent walk through the buildings 12 times this year it's as the superintendent walked through the buildings what was the superintendent working on which you had articulated in your goals about you know observing about whether different pd initiatives were being initiated in the classroom um so one again one of the ways to think about outcomes is how will things look different a year from now if this goal has been able to be accomplished um and then the superintendent can then think about since you're not flies on the wall all day watching you know following what can i show what can i show the committee that will help them understand that this work is being accomplished and if you have that conversation

328at the beginning it helps focus everyone on what the goals are and intended to accomplish and helps the superintendent think about how he can show that that will happen so then once you've set the goals then go into the rubric and and determine what the indicators are you want to use the indicator level not the element level of work this time around makes it easier for everybody i think we talked about that before when i talked about evaluation um so uh and we say applicable indicators but there's about um 20 plus indicators you don't use them all you're going to pick the indicators that most closely align to the work that's in the goals um again not too many so you can weight the standards differently i say this with trepidation i in the how

329many years almost 10 years that this has been an effect i've only ever shot one committee that weighted standards but jesse said you can so there's a history behind that if you indulge me for 60 seconds you're trying to get this work done there were 40 people around the table and it was stalemated because of who was running the department of education and who was in the room the department wanted using achievement data to evaluate superintendents and the department wanted pay for performance so everyone decided that okay we will allow the use of achievement data to evaluate educators and we will permit paper performance subject to negotiations at the collective bargaining table and that sort of broke the stalemate subject to negotiations so we didn't want to negotiate the school committees and the teachers didn't

330want to negotiate it so the commissioner declared victory the secretary of education declared victory and we moved on with this system that's how the the option to determine waiting if you think community engagement is very very important you give it more weighting if you think curriculum instruction is more important and you know give it 40 or 50 whatever it is you can do that if you like so far no one has elected to do it but you have professional judgment in your hands which you can use that's the story behind that confusion yes short question when you're saying agree on applicable applicable indicators do you mean to this level yes you do okay so you have like just one a right like not one a one right yeah this is like one a1c yeah okay

331perfect and then whatever ones you pick i mean that's a word document actually so so you can actually whatever ones you don't pick you can blank out you can remove so that when you do that evaluation you're only looking at the ones yeah this year yeah okay and you have some flexibility if you need to redefine success if you wanted to the states come up with the language i don't believe they have the authority to enforce it literally and i guarantee you the commissioner is not sitting in his office today worrying whether or not the marblehead is following the specific letter of my 800 pages of instructions i will also know with that i mean first of all when this first came out everybody was like oh my god it's so complicated and as people

332have used it they've figured out ways to um make it less cumbersome less complicated and when it is done well it it becomes a tool that actually results in a more objective and less subjective evaluation than than models that were used in the past so um some of the words are in regulation but i mean i can totally see that and having kind of like the the different kind of criteria for each rating is really helpful yeah right and then always going back to the goal that we set like that's what we're looking at did he meet this goal and did he kind of follow these criteria yeah so i think that's really helpful now that we know we can kind of delete the rest that we'll make it yeah yes it makes a whole

333lot easier to just focus on the ones that you picked and just ignore the rest okay yep yep um so then again um it's always helpful to have that discussion of the evidence that will be shown at the beginning right so it gets the superintendent thinking about how do i show it and it gets it helps get everyone's mind around what exactly are we trying to accomplish here so that when you get to the end you'll find that those ratings are much more closely aligned because you all have more of the same expectations of what's going to happen so question on that too in terms of so we identified the evidence that we want to use for that but in terms of compiling that throughout the year and john maybe you already know the answer

334to this i just don't but like how do you go about that so that we all have the relevant pieces of data you know it's not john at the end of the year being like oh yeah i did this report and i did this well so so sometimes um superintendents will create sort of i'm not a google doc user but they would create a google doc but they'll have a folder right and they'll have a presentation and they'll drop that presentation into the form of that goal okay so the idea is you know you have the mid-cycle evaluation or the mid-cycle it's not an evaluation it's um just a check-in right um but ideally you're talking about the progress throughout the year so ideally you're getting those um those in fact it's the next bullets

335um so ideally but it's the next exploit sorry so ideally you're getting those updates throughout the year and when you get to the end to do the composite you're really just reviewing information that you've learned all throughout the year not getting like this is the first data dump i've seen of all this documentation right so or you can take individually you could take um your your like meeting packet from every meeting and keep your own folders of yeah but when you reference the presentation like is he creating that presentation or is that a presentation that has been created and given at the school committee meeting and then it's generally or i mean it might be a it might be a document that's different than a presentation but generally the updates are coming because you're updating

336not only the committee you're updating the community right um so last year we tried to put a gen different agenda items and link them you know like 3a or kind of right next to it so that and then we were going to put things together we dumped those agenda items or those um agendas into a folder yep so that people could go back and see that as well and reference documents yeah so those types of things yeah okay so sort of keeping of so sort or a file throughout the year where you're you're dropping the information in as it builds up so that you're again and a lot of some of what happens then too is you're not only and this is goes along with getting the updates on the district goals too is you're

337not only learning monitoring the progress you're getting some expectation of what's going to come next to it right so that when a new goal comes you know yeah of course that's the next set of work because we've been talking about this all along we understand that's the next set of work or we understand that's why this is going to be requested in the budget because we know that you know this is what is being worked towards as we're working towards that yeah so that is one thing that we had remember right the first year we started that was in place kind of having that year-long calendar and yeah other things kind of fell on the agenda but there was a set thing you know a set list of reports that we were going to do

338the topics we were going to cover um for the entire you know for every school committee meeting i think you know this happened and everything around the world but i think last week i reached out to dorothy and i made my timings a little lost but i reached out to dorothy and she shared two um suggested models uh exactly two examples two examples and i'm gonna compare that to what what you know we've kind of done in the past some things for instance in january we always do is at the first or second meeting we do the count so i'm just going to review those and kind of look at it and then also line that up with the goals and how how john's goals in any particular presentations would would lay out as well

339so just to piggyback on that's for your doesn't fyi there's a document an excel file or sheets doc um that is in there that lisa and i have worked off of yeah i think they're on it at this point um and you know this past year we used the year before to look back and say okay what did we do and then we would reference back to the previous years too yeah and i would not do that sarah i would not do that in isolation i would do that with john oh definitely so because you know there's some of those presentations maybe staff presentations right part of the the um benefit of a year-long agenda is that you're giving staff ample time to premiere right and not you know there was a school committee meeting

340last night in a week can you have a presentation put together on this huge thing and so also that will give john a chance for himself and for any of his staff that he's having present to us to kind of balance out who's presenting when in in in nowhere but yeah so everyone i just think the look ahead is very important for everybody and and it helps when when different issues or topics of interest come up among the members for that for the i mean it's it's a document that i wouldn't i would share amongst the committee with the big caveat this is not a carved in stone this is not hardening stone this is a plan subject to change um but that um if if if something comes up that a member has a

341concern about or questions about or an interest in then it you could say well in three meetings you know that fits right in we don't have to put it on the next agenda because in three meetings we're going to discuss it and we can fold your questions into that presentation or that yeah i think it's really helpful for the public too for instance there are a few hot button items this year that public came out very strong on as we were about to present them and then we had a maybe table and items the next one if they know this is coming up in two months they can reach out to john's office or wherever it's appropriate to say i i want to have a discussion or questions and concerns so that it's not that

342you know john the other administrators are ready to present something and then all of a sudden people are aware it's on our agenda so everybody i think the more we have a look ahead i just think it's going to to make things a little bit easier the facilities for all interested parties but i can't just say the other thing that this needs to be organic is in the sense that the last thing you want to have is surprises so the superintendent doesn't want to have a surprise that isn't a festering concern of an issue and you don't want to have that happen in terms of the superintendent not only be informed so that to me is sort of a cardinal rule that you really work towards that no surprise concept and that why that's why

343i mean by organic in the sense that things will come up there will be individual members who have a need for information on something and they deserve to get that information and the timing of that information is important so that the superintendent knows how to deal with it and it doesn't become something that's a bigger issue than it needs to be yeah yeah it's an important point just sitting in my seat when i post agendas i think it changes a lot like there's a lot of things that we're adding last minute or adjusting to fit what might be requested or changed you know i would think right sort of we do every other you know like between the two weeks yeah i just think like some things come up right and we have sometimes to

344go back and say oh do you remember amendments do you want to post now so if there is things that shift and change that's just an important point yeah yeah i i always think of that year-long agenda as being the most flexible document that you are dealing with throughout the course of the year i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily i would keep it as a planning document i'm not sure how much i would put it out in the public and say here's our plan um but i would keep it right because we share a couple of meetings well i mean the big broader ones i always think of um calendar because it's it's something that people feel weakly in our community um so so i want people to know we vote because i think it's contractual

345we vote the calendar in january so if people have a very specific concern about that they should be reaching out to someone not the first week of january because a lot of work john puts a lot of work into that calendar prior to that so i first did yeah so um those are the items that i think if people have very strong feelings you know it's it's not it's better for them to come forth earlier if they know this is this is something i know i have a strong feeling on and i know it's on a future agenda i think that it's better to share those strong notes i think we can expect some of that to hopefully settle out as well i mean the last few years have been so chaotic um and you

346know you kind of never know what's around the next bend so i think you know there's we now have a little bit of institutional knowledge going on too and and sort of some patterns that are starting to fall into place and hopefully this coming school year is that much more calm and and normal um so i think you know some of that will start to just settle out as as things settle out just going back to um the evaluation can we get that google folders structure set up for the evaluation so it's like you know here go on go to and just start dropping as soon as we set the goals then i like the chair and lisa of trying to kind of go you know we spent time going back at agendas and pulling

347things this year so if it's being dropped sort of in the aftermath of meetings that'd be so much better yeah because i know historically like even prior to us they didn't list it on the agenda but that's really hard right because then we've got to go back through every single fold every single meeting so if you're just dropping it out there after each meeting that would be great you still i mean there still may be a value in listing oh yeah i think we should still have on the agenda because it gets your head around yeah this is why we're having this presentation yeah i think it should definitely be on the agenda but then like we'd have to go back and look at the agenda then find it having those media materials but if

348we just kind of have it drop it afterwards i'm sorry just to just so i understand and i think hopefully we're on the same page but um you would make it like part of pocket like as if it was like a memo or something john would be kidding no that there's a separate you know there's a file for each meeting that there will be a file that says superintendent goals yeah and in that folder there will be goal one goal two goal three whatever yeah whatever you know whatever they are and then when john presents on xyz we understand the reason we're getting that presentation is it's moving towards a goal yeah when he's presenting that night but then that goes in that folder so then when we're evaluating goal one all his presentations and

349his due diligence on goal one goal one are interval thank you and then also i would think i would think john would make it easier at the end of the year because you are like it's done yeah okay okay so just one last slide so there are some resources um on our website um superintendent evaluation and on the jessie website um there are some um videos that were done um with different school committee chairs and superintendents of different types of committees around the world they haven't changed since last year yeah those are when we get to them they're very helpful the ones from dusty and dorothy i think you're the moderator on all of those um and they are very helpful because it is an odd document to kind of wrap your head around and

350i think you know that so that i mean one of the valley of again superintendent evaluation more objective less subjective than in the past but it can be a tool that really is facilitating that good working together relationship when you're all pulling together on making sure those goals get accomplished and supporting each other on making sure that your district goals and the superintendent goals get accomplished it can really be a way that helps like facilitate that good communication when are you going to present your goals to us german first meeting in september and then do we need do we pick the indicators or do we see that together they're generally aligned so if i have any budget goals necessarily standard two operations or budgets where some confusion happens this year so we should just think

351about that later yeah and if there's if if as we look ahead you know and align it with our our plan for success um if if we have specific goals we would like there to be a focus on that that that aligns their um plan for success would that be appropriate for us to reach out and say would you consider me you know making this one of your goals prior to you presenting to us and then obviously when you present to us we have the deliberation on how where everyone stands just in the spirit there being no surprise it's like i would hate for us to know that ahead of time and not share it and then you present and then have to go back to the drawing board potentially i think that that's the

352perfect entire evaluation process is that the summative evaluation isn't the first time i'm hearing about something yeah that if there's a concern or there's a direction that you want or budget or goal and alignment piece that we're having that conversation throughout the course of the year you're asking for presentations can you let us know but not waiting until the summative to say these were the concerns that came up over the course of the year and it is really an iterative process i mean i think through our protocols that's what's laid out anyway like if you have something to say the superintendent call them and say it don't wait for school i think part of it where it was harder this year or in the list first of all for instance and purposes we're all somewhat

353none of us and this was the second year that we had done this yeah this process um but also i think if we put a little more discussion into the goal setting and so that we know the goals are the ones we want that we want them to be for the district and for john then we're evaluating effectively because i think when we set goals this year i don't know how much discussion we had as a committee i think john did a very good presentation on what his goals were but i don't know that we discussed it beyond just approving them so part of one of the things that i felt i should have said was the more work that you put in at the beginning of the process the easier it's going to be

354the entire research and i think we've learned that i think that that first step that was harder for us it was to understand that we should be playing a larger role in that first step yeah so if you're presenting your goals at our first school committee meeting then as a committee we need to set scope you know like our goals before that right like if you go back to your slide i don't think the order matters it's what works for you there's no magic to the order okay because they both and his goals to be alive in alignment because they are both in alignment with the district with the planning for success right right okay all right and then and on both sides right there's probably going to be some support you need from the

355administration to accomplish your goals and there's going to be support that john needs from you to accomplish his goals if you set a goal for him and then don't give him the budget to do it you know as a blatant example um of um i mean there's got to be there's got to be that element of we're all working together while supporting each other in accomplishment of these goals and keep in mind that that's what everyone else is watching your community's watching that your leadership team is watching that your teachers are watching that so the way that you work together makes i think a big difference in terms of how you create the culture that everyone else is following because if they see you divided then they know that they can beat the system and

356they're going to be less less likely to uh support an override yeah one of the one of the goals and again i don't have the jesse rubric in front of me you know the 1a or whatever the verbiage is but one of the things i think we heard here was that whatever form that next step of um planning for success success seeks that one of the goals i would think should surround giving a a more simple detail in that look ahead um so that we can at the end of the year have that information to present to the community that it's not the strategic plan that has died but it's more than than this it just yeah so that means and i don't know how that specifically works into a specific goal but i i

357i think that we all were saying that what we're saying here is in some form we need a little bit more than what we have right yeah i think the way i think our communication out is something that we have struggled with historically like every year and every year we do a little bit more but every year it's not enough so we've recommended a communications person we're not going to get that i'm not a communications expert or pr that's not my expertise i can offer suggestions that as a community member i think would be helpful but like that is where we fall down we do not communicate out to the community in a way that is easily digestible and understood we just don't so that for me is like what we have to fix because

358all the information is there but we're not doing a good job of consolidating and pushing it out in my opinion like that yeah six years that's my that's kind of where my head is at right now like after everything today as well so how do we do better and i will say some of the things that i from from the last couple of years some of the things that you get communicated clearly it the narrative gets changed in the community and that's not always fair to the people in the work because then i'm out there and teachers are questioning things and i'm trying to restate what was said at a school committee meeting or and it just i i feel like at some point we have to have some non-negotiables around how the work gets

359communicated out and i think some of that is gaining back to trust also i i think you need to be honest about that we need to gain that back but i think we can i don't think it's you know turtle gonna be easy but i think that we can't part of my daytime job um is i have i build customer success models for startups so i'm happy to help with that communication and making sure that it is crafted properly depending on where it's going the group or the audience that it's going to be heard from whether it's powerpoint presentation or an email or what have you because that will be really key in gaining back that trust and getting people understand stopping the twisting of the narratives good better and different um in every which

360way and will get us to a place where you know come next june those three meetings will either have nobody at them because everybody's like yep we got we need or there'll be maybe a lot more people at it because they're excited about it you know i that would be the goal the big goal right yeah i know dynamic presentation so does that cover the strategic communication too we like covered both things okay was there any other part of having masc and mass hear about the process i mean we've covered the desi process but internally marblehead what we do what we don't do because having the experts here or ideas about the process i think what i talked about with dorothy unless i misunderstood was that it's better it was it was better to kind

361of talk about this the importance of the goal in the path of the goal setting now because that's what we're doing now and then once we get closer obviously prior to the evaluation but as we get closer to that we have and now we have to go back to talk about the end of the process the one thing i'm gonna not perfect that's the wrong word but i guess my question is we had talked about process changes when this evaluation cycle went through so if there's any process change we want to make to the way we do evaluations i do think we should talk about it now we should get out on the table we should get advice from you know our experts here because i don't you know i don't we don't want to

362be getting to april may and saying oh well now we want to change how we're going to evaluate john well we've changed it a little and that we've talked about the biggest first step is that we've now i think identified that in the process the one of the meatiest portions of the process is the goal setting and i i don't know that we had handled that in that way prior as far as really digging into that it was more of a presentation and then we approved it but if we are really correct if i'm wrong now that we've clarified that we really everybody needs to [Music] have more of a robust conversation and involvement in that goal setting that we have in fact changed that process and that we know and and the fact that

363we're going to use the folders and so we have we're collecting the evidence as we go along it's it's um a very you know iterative process and then not a nerve process but you know we're doing it step by step and then and then really at the end it should make the end work very easy i'm thinking because we've done we front loaded work if you're talking about the end of the process the summative part and the protocols you do want to make sure that you agree on the ground rules who gets to contribute does somebody who's just stepped off the committee get to provide input does someone who just stepped on get to provide input um our elections are at the end of june is when the aggregation takes place and the aggregator whoever

364the aggregator is uh develops a draft of rankings and summaries and that gets presented to the school committee now that's done varies from district to district sometimes it's done by a well and that's what i was going to say that that is the discussion that they should probably have like sort of in march before you ever start doing any of them but you okay you do want to recognize that the evaluation is a process of the majority of the school committee that whoever is the aggregator is sort of the chair of the process and the chair is the servant of the school committee not the master so whoever's and the aggregator is the servant of the school committee the aggregator is doing you all a big favor by engaging in the first round of group

365editing which is my staff knows i believe is a crime against humanity but and then everybody gets an opportunity to say um i agree with these rankings i disagree with these rankings and the majority gets to decide and the majority of the school committee gets to say i think these favorable comments are overstated or i think these critical comments are overstated i have a proposal to change the aggregation and the aggregation is the product of the majority of the board that's when we run into trouble that's where we run into trouble particularly if the aggregator says i did all this work and now you're not going to change it and no and now you want to change it or i added up the numbers and created a matrix and here's where the math tells me

366the rankings are it doesn't work that way it's whatever the board decides as its protocols and i'm just saying this because it's an issue everywhere oh sorry so that's what happened this year we didn't send our protocols before we evaluated as the person who compiled them it's a special corner of heaven for you [Laughter] so we definitely need to do that because that because it's laid out but we just need to talk about it like it's important that's what that's what you know one of the things when i do like the full presentation of the whole thing say before you get any paperwork to do that your individual evaluations that you have a discussion and it's very clear to everybody how the compiler is going to do the compilation but that to me that was

367i mean given all that you're talking about today the reason that i talk with sarah about doing that closer to when you're actually going to do it is so that you didn't it's fresh so it's fresh one question one one question two that came up and this is my question is when you vote to approve the summative now i have a very analytical mind that you can't say that something is or is not a summative if you do if you do not know the part what the parts are so that's what's hard for me is voting on a summative when i've never seen the individual evaluation well the individual evaluations of each school committee member are public documents so we could have seen so if my sister shirley from new jersey wants to see them

368she gets this okay so i think there was just misunderstanding on that because i had asked to see them and was told i couldn't and i think that that was just pure misunderstanding i really do getting into that you know i know that but so we're clear that your individuals can be can be viewed they can be viewed by the school committee before you finalize the process because you may be informed by everybody's opinions okay all right okay and remember when it's when it's over all the documents are public so when it's open but not while we're doing it well the school committee can see everybody else's oh see there's a conflicting case law on that at this yes with regard to um the school committee being able to see other individual evaluations before the

369public gets to see them because then it can be taken as deliberation well it was conflicting only in the sense that i mean we had the whalen decision which was no no decision was yes and that was the most recent decision that they had given them to the school which time it was so after hearing this point my takeaway is if if i've done my evaluation and i've emailed it on to lisa it is a public document period ah that would not be our owners no okay i don't think it's until it gets before the school committee yeah okay so all right so is it different different it is a public document because it's in our school committee email it's a public so you're saying the school committee members can see the individuals prior to

370voting the summative there i mean there are school committees that provide the individual ones to all school members and their ones there are school committees that just do just present the composite okay and that's what was hard for me because it's hard to say something is a sum of the parts if i don't know what the parts are but it's not necessary i mean it's called the summative evaluation because it's at the end of the process yeah it's not the summation of everybody's it's a composite evaluation which reflecting the majority more of a medium median than that i'm not necessarily reading in a majority yeah of the majority view of the committee okay so summative is because it's the how do you know that how do you know that if it's the majority of you

371don't see the four parts of the language yeah but that was my again it was a very analytical mindset how do i know some in an opinion is the majority opinion if i didn't read the other opinions interesting rebuilding yeah that you do have meetings with the school committee at which you'll be talking about the summative evaluation and at that time um you can ask to see the other evaluations because you're with the public process and you're deliberating i do know there was an sjc decision about this where they specified how you could do this as a way of doing it which i thought was when i read the decision i thought it was very interesting because i didn't think the judges had read the open meeting law and they were combining and this is

372me whose legal education is from watching television so um but i think you're all likely to be well informed by the input from others or you may find you may find your views more validated and feel better about arguing for them but before you promulgate a final evaluation everybody gets to weigh in and and uh you know i'm thinking of the example that we had in stoughton where there was a particular member who remember heard him from stoughton who believed that satan brought the superintendent and they were evaluating the superintendent the superintendent got six exemplaries and one uh unsatisfactory and comments made individually that the superintendent lacks the intelligence to add a column of sons i mean it couldn't get any lower than this stuff and this was all brought out in public and the

373school committee voted six to one rejected every proposed edit and recommendation the media reported responsibly and uh that's an extreme example but i've seen other instances where uh there's an argument about oh you know an argument about ranking because somebody created a matrix and said the rankings will the matrix will decide mathematically where we rate the superintendent and the system gives you the discretion to use your personal and professional judgment rather than a mathematical matrix so remember that you you were allowed to use the heart as well as the head in coming up with your evaluations we've had superintendents who get who get uh you know four uh or or five uh exemplaries don't get their contracts renewed and some who get four and five um proficients and get a lengthy extension because people use

374their professional judgment and try to make sense of it i would just i would caution against using taking the four rankings and calling them one two three four and looking for an average i've seen people try to gain the system i want to bring the average down or i want to bring the other job so i'm willing to so but but you know the thing that's really important here is that unfortunately and snowden is is an interesting example but some places it's a gotcha game and i think the conversation earlier today was how do you create goals that mutually agreed upon how do you communicate during the course of the year so they're not surprises so in effect when you get to the evaluation superintendent shouldn't be surprised if the superintendent's surprise that's not good

375that's where trust breaks down so i just i think it's really important the spirit of when this evaluation process put together and directly you were a big part of that was this is an ongoing process and so it's not you know we've got goals at the beginning of the year and doing an evaluation at the end of the year and and no one really knows what what the outcome is going to be you shouldn't have that you should have something where during the process of the year the superintendent knows and you all collectively know um you know where the where what's going well what's not going well which we should improve um so i just think that that in the spirit of the previous conversation about goals that's i think you've got to be thinking

376about keeping keeping that in mind well and i and i think that's exactly where the concentrate on the beginning of the process comes in um so that you're thinking it can start the line as the line does again six different brains can make it right and stays as aligned as it can throughout the year you'll find that that that that final composite evaluation falls together you have two amazing assets asset number one is you're deeply committed to getting it right i'm starting my 13th year as a coach in the new superintendent's induction program it is rare that school committees have taken up the evaluation process with the seriousness the purpose that that i've witnessed over the last two hours and second asset that you have is you have an incredibly strong team so that whatever

377goals you and john agreed to you have the person power to achieve these goals it's it's i'm going to miss this team you're here for a full year drastically reduced hours oh really yeah we'll have the year three is what we call a consultancy model oh so we will meet about once a month with about six colleagues from this area problems of practice and the goal is that the coach fades out of sight at the end of year three but that personal relationship among those six people endure you know well and i'll see john at the north shore superintendent roundtable you're looking at the new president i'm glad that you brought that up congratulations john it's a quite achievement yeah it's a great group yeah that's awesome and good food all these important two different

378pictures no no just some one thing you always had everyone here i didn't see the protocols on the agenda um we talked about that we're going to be meeting in august um at some point the school committee um john had said that the the we haven't worked up to john's working with the principals the principals want a little bit more of an overhaul of the the student handbooks than they have in the past so we're going to do a workshop together with that and that would be after allison's had a chance to do her chart in the course so i thought it would be good if she got to do her charting the course and hear about you know more of the global what a massachusetts school committee member does before we ask her to

379look at and vote on the protocols and norms so um i'm going to put that at the end of the day when we're doing the workshop and it will not be another full day it will be a couple hours with the principal's do a workshop and then we'll talk about the protocols um so right now we don't have any protocols in place right we didn't stop being our protocols in norms we only vote them at the retreat every year right because we have a new committee we they didn't cease to exist though and they're still they're still there yeah um but then i just thought we could have more of a thoughtful conversation about it because everyone would um have been a level playing field as far as what is um what is jesus um

380[Music] oh but i'll be in touch when i know my mind yeah is