001hello were you able to get some dinner oh me anybody i got a bowl of goldfish for dinner here it's my uh yup there you go very excited about it joe you're a little behind hello everyone hi gary long time no see i know i know finance committee never rests how are we doing on members present i'll do a roll call at some point but i just want to see if everybody's here i'm occasionally getting some issues with the audio so i'm also going to call in on my phone so i may be speaking from the phone rather than from the video at times all right thanks steve all right i see ursula steve julia curtis carrie jose is on looks okay unless i'm miss counting i think i see um six okay so what's
002for tonight is is that okay great um [Music] i'd like to call to order the mount railac regional school district school committee public budget hearing and school committee meeting the time is 601 pm the date is march 10th 2022. i'd like to ask someone to read the covid um [Music] paragraph at the top of our agenda do i have a volunteer from the committee thank you jose no problem at all carrie um this meeting will take place virtually pursuant to the law signed by governor baker on february 15 2022 which extends certain covid19 related measures the new law chapter 22 of the acts of 2022 includes an extension until july 15 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of the governor's march 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law terrific thank
003you so much um would someone on the committee like to read our mission statement julia thank you sure at mount greylock regional school district our mission is to create a community of learners working together in a safe and challenging learning environment that encourages restorative based processes respect inclusive diversity courtesy integrity and responsibility through high expectations and cooperation resulting in lifelong learning and personal growth thank you julia uh welcome everyone uh christina conrie our school committee chair is unable to make the meeting tonight she has asked that i facilitate the public budget hearing and the school committee meeting following in my capacity as vice chair of the school committee um i'd like to just preface the budget hearing with some guidelines for the public comment which will follow directly from the public budget hearing as you
004know we allot uh three minutes per person for our public comment virtual public comment that's according to our policy b-e-d-h-r guidelines for public comment at a remote meeting i do want to let you know that we have 15 people signed up for public comment following the budget hearing so if possible for those who are following lengthy comments by others and by lengthy i just mean up to three minutes if it's possible for you to shorten your comments and try not to repeat remarks that have already been said but simply to express your support or opposition to or whatever it is you're commenting on that will help us move through our agenda in a more concise way we do also have two comments that people have asked that we read after the people who signed up
005in advance and the two that the committee will read we will take public comment from those who are present as well um we'll give a 30 second warning um so at the two and a half minute mark we'll give a 30 second warning and then if someone starts to go over certainly we'll allow an extra few seconds but after that time we will need to mute comments that go beyond a few seconds over the three minutes and this is really not intending at all to be rude i know it may come across as rude but i'll apologize in advance again just trying to keep the meeting moving um all right after the public hearing the school committee will have an opportunity to discuss the fy 23 budget as presented we will also have an opportunity
006to comment on public comments so the school committee will hold its commentary until that time all right um i think that is all my remarks in advance at this time i would like to introduce our superintendent dr jason mcanlis he's the superintendent of the mount greylock regional school district he will be followed by joe bergeron who is the business administrator for our regional school district um and they will take public hearing thank you so much thank you carrie and thank you to everybody who is uh who's here tonight we really appreciate your participation in this process and um you know speaking of the three minute rule carrie if you want to shut me down after three minutes and put everybody on the zoom out of their misery absolutely feel free but but seriously we are
007very grateful to have this many folks here tonight weighing in on on really one of the most sacred things that that a community does every year which is to pass a budget whose intention is to educate the community's children um we all know that annually we are obligated to adopt the school budget i have this is my my i think 17th or 18th school budget that i've presented as a superintendent in berkshire county and um i i've always tried to work through kind of these three bullet points about what what and how we prioritize what we do uh in terms of putting a budget together there are some things that a public school system in the commonwealth of massachusetts is absolutely obligated to do um a community is obligated to to take care of the
008education of its children and within that obligation there's lots and lots of obligations that were mandated to do from regular education to special education to transportation and a hundred other things just as important as the things that we're legally obligated to do are the things that we're obligated to do because they are the right thing to do as human beings that care about the other human beings that we share our community with so this this first layer of the filter is what we have to do to stay legal very close behind that is is what do we do as moral and as ethical human beings and then really uh close below that is what do our staff students families and communities need and then what do they want finally and that's that's the the lenses
009that we look at our budgeting process through a school budget always has to reflect stewardship those of us that work for the school department we don't own anything relative to this school we are merely honored to be stewards and caretakers and shepherds um and and and communities deserve very respectful leadership and stewardship in that area and uh and and humble and thoughtful uh stewardship in that area we are always mindful as we're preparing a budget that uh the the towns of williamstown and lanesboro um care deeply about their school-aged children we know that many people that we serve are parents many are grandparents some are uh aunts and uncles and just simply people that care because they care but we also know there's lots of other things within the work that a town does that
010we also care deeply about all of us and so we know that that we're sort of part of a bigger budget team that has to make things work so that all the work that has to get done for the good of a community's residents can get done and we know that it's important that we listen to the people that we're serving it's important that we listen to the people who actually walk into a school building every day and do the work of making education happen and so these are these are sort of collectively the spirit in which we approach building a budget what are we working to do with this particular budget um those of you who have followed the mount greylock regional school district in previous emanations before you may see some differences in
011the way things are presented tonight mr bergeron our district school business official and his team in the finance portion of our center office have worked very very hard to build consistency in the naming functions and the numerical functions of the way our budget works and the way that our expenditures are reported back to the state you'll also notice that we go to great pains this year to separate employee costs and where we are with the people that do go into buildings every day and do the work from the stuff the equipment the materials the subscriptions the uh the energy that we use as we as we operate our three or three campus uh school district we always are working to bring more clarity so people aren't leaving mystified about what we're doing we're always working
012to bring more transparency and understand of understandability to the written budget itself so a person can pick up the budget documents and actually understand what's happening as i mentioned earlier we have renamed some of our lines and we've gotten better in line with the way that jesse and the department of revenue expect expect us to report out on what we're doing for money every year and we're rethinking our budget processes to be more focused on the things that we're actually here to do we're here to educate kids academically socially emotionally and i think we're here to to help fulfill the the mandate of being a more empathetic person who can live with with everybody else in harmony in a community no matter who that person is where that person is from or what that person
013represents cultural competency goals and then as always we work annually and really year round to just generally increase how correct and how true our budget is this is important as we move from year to year as bureaucrats and it's important as folks out in the community who actually pay the bills can can see that what they are seeing is actually what we're intending to have happen so this particular school budget says uh many things you know it's it's if you think about your own home the way that you spend money within your own home where you invest your money where you give to charities where where you put your support it says a lot about the things that are important to you in your life it says a lot about the things that you emphasize
014and that you care about in your life and our school budget says the same thing this school budget says that we value the people who work directly with our students we value our staff no matter what their title is what their role is we we know that it's those folks who make school happen every day we understand that we serve our students best when we infuse the budget and infuse our programming with opportunities to become more culturally competent to build a better sense of belonging for all of our students and to make sure that all students are represented in our curriculum our materials and our approach to teaching and learning we hope that our budget says that we value um classrooms themselves the people that occupy classrooms and the work that happens in the classrooms
015in each of our three schools classrooms are the center center piece of everything that we do here and we think this budget shows that we do believe that education is more than just about academics and about the things that we discussed or i said a couple of bullets earlier we know that school and a school experience for our young people and this was part of the heartbreak of of the last year and a half or two years we know that school is more than just coming into a building learning for six or seven hours and then going home it's about the social and emotional well-being of our students it's about offering them opportunities to be social to be together to be reflective as individuals to be reflective as a group or a team um and
016to um just engage in things that help them to be more thoughtful more global more more more team oriented global citizens and then we we hope that this budget shows that we value clarity so that you folks watching this who pay the bills buy your property taxes every year know where the town's money actually goes and where the school district's money actually goes so we have um new investments that we're making once again this year we are continuing to focus on recovering from from what the last two years has dealt us it feels like we're on the verge of a return to normalcy for the most part but we're also focusing on growth um this year we desire to honor school council requests for those of you that aren't familiar with with the way school
017councils operate in the commonwealth each school by law is mandated in the commonwealth of massachusetts to have a school council it has several functions the two primary functions are to help create the school improvement plan annually and to help inform and weigh in on the school's budget requests annually and we're very grateful to those folks that that sit on and make up and think and give their energy and their experience to our school councils so thank you to our school council we have some short-term needs that we need to address to some degree still under recovery helping students academically and emotionally get back on track after a very disjointed year last year but a little bit more of a more normal year this year and more normal still moving forward we also always have to
018have our eyes just as we have our eyes on what's going on now we have to have our eyes on what we think we're going to need three years from now five years from now 10 years and so we have to plan for wise long-term investing we have to plan for changes including demographic changes that we know are coming upon us from our future and then we have to respond one of our focuses is to respond to our school community needs and then our larger community needs two towns that occupy our our northwestern corner of the berkshires here in lanesboro and in williamstown so just want to say a couple of words about school enrollments um you can see this chart it reads from the current year that we're in 2021 going down uh to
0192016 2017 which i think is a year or two before the district was actually a district so this is data that's pulled together by looking at three separate districts in essence lanesboro elementary williamstown elementary and then the mount greylock regional school you can see that our district enrollment has a nice rebound from last year you all will be aware that last year was was such a disjointed year that many families chose to educate their children in alternative ways be those alternative ways independent schools we had a lot more homeschool plans than we've had in the past sorry if you see me moving around i'm just trying to get my lights to come back on we had more homeschool plans than we've had in the past we had students doing things like the greenfield virtual academy
020which is a commonwealth school but you can see that that we are actually back to 1920 levels plus some we're certainly you know experiencing what most other communities in the berkshires are experiencing which is a slow decline of student population but we're really heartened by this bounce back to 1166 students and that's of the very beginning of march lanesboro elementary you can see is really tied for a six-year high in terms of the students that it's serving 210 williamstown elementary is is rebounding up from 376 students last year to 429 students this year and we expect that number to again increase as we look ahead to fiscal year 23. and then mount greylock regional um remains right about where it was last year we did have fewer homeschool plans last year coming out of secondary
021world and you know when you think about that that's quite understandable and some of that is also about just just trying to control in a new building in a new environment we we have not opened the floodgates on school choice because it's very important to us to to make sure that we're operating school in a way that protects the investment that each of you who chose to purchase a home or to live in lanesboro or chose to purchase a home or to live in williamstown it's vital that you are getting your money's worth before slots go to other communities at a highly highly discounted rate compared to what what our two communities pay on a per student basis and so our enrollments are up uh they're not up to historical highs but i would suggest
022that when we look at some of our demographics we we may indeed be approaching if not eclipsing some historical highs when we consider students needs so now draw your attention to where i'm i'm wiggling the cursor around right now our percentage of high needs students high needs students per the commonwealth are students who are um who are living in circumstances where they're considered low income where they are on ieps or where their first language is not english or any combination of those so you can see that over a third of our students in this current school year are considered high need students you can see going over here to this portion of the screen that that over a quarter of our students are now considered and i'm using the language that desi uses a couple
023of years ago they made the switch back from economically disadvantaged to low income you can see that i would suspect going into fiscal 23 when we do our october 1 reports we will likely be closer to 30 percent low-income students than we are to 25 and as we sit here uh in the middle of the year of this school year we're at 26.3 we would anticipate that when we come back to you with a budget uh for fiscal 24 that we will likely see an increase in staff that are specifically trained and licensed to work with ell students students who are coming to us where where english is not their first language at home and that we must make accommodations for you can see that that percentage is uh is is on the increase too
024so our enrollments are are growing compared to last year maybe even the year before slightly but our level of need is actually increasing and we're certainly not alone in the berkshires in the commonwealth in new england or in the country in uh in in these facts but these facts do have an impact on what we need and how we operate to make sure we're providing all of our students with the opportunities and the uh with the opportunities to pursue learning that that they are deserving of so now we really get into the heart of this presentation which is um here's here's the new people that show up in the budget joe will discuss later um where we are with everything else um i am going to discuss right now in these next few slides where
025we are with the personnel that uh that do the work to keep kids safe keep kids to keep kids learning to keep kids um happy and to keep kids fed and to keep kids uh transported to school and everything else uh although that's a contractual service so um we're starting off with this first set of bullets these are adjustments that we made to staffing over the course of this year that were not reflected in our fiscal 22 budget prep but that are showing up in our fiscal 23 request we we found ways to fund these because we needed to in order to serve our students as we were proceeding through the school year so over the course of the current school year but not reflected in budget prep from one year ago was one classroom
026teacher at lanesboro elementary school that teacher was added in the first quarter of the school year two paraprofessionals at lanesboro elementary school they they too started in the first quarter of the school year we added an additional classroom teacher at williamstown elementary school in the second quarter of the school year we added a position known as a board certified behavioral analysis an analyst at williamstown elementary school in the second quarter that position ultimately will see a decrease in a hefty contracted services uh uh contract that that we have now to get those services we think ultimately and you may see this show up again tonight or you will see this show up again in the in in joe's portion of the budget presentation we think in some ways um utilizing our own staff and having
027them here with us all the time is not only in the at the end of the day and over time a less expensive option but it but a far superior option than than extending um that very important work to folks that that come in and join us occasionally and then we did add an additional staff member to the front office at williamstown elementary school to assist the the front off the front office clerk just really because of the the incredible busyness of that front office as it as it serves over 400 students and that position was also added in the second quarter now moving to the second set of bullets these are the positions that we are asking for uh anew either asking for a new or or adding a piece of a position that
028is pre-existing um in the in this fy 23 budget request so the first two bullets are both the same person it's a person that currently works in the district as a .6 full-time equivalent so you know you can think of that as somebody that works three days a week out of the five this we have need because of student need to add um you know a a 0.2 piece to to uh this in one place and another point to in another place bringing this individual up to a 1.0 full-time equivalency in the district what we like about a model like this is taking somebody that's part-time and making them full-time is this does not come with additional employee benefits cost because the person is already a a benefits eligible person we're not adding another whole
029person to the payroll we're taking somebody that's already on the payroll already eligible for benefits and merely adding time to their work week as they serve our students we are looking for a 0.5 special education teacher at williamstown elementary school that is to serve student needs now and it's and it's ultimately looking at a two or three year approach to expanding into a fully supported and staffed student resource center at williamstown elementary school that too might cost a little bit now and it will cost a little bit in the future but it's a but it's a much better option in a couple of ways uh for for students and for the families that that live in williamstown the first way is that these are students this is to support students who who could potentially be
030looking at an out of district placement either through a a residential school in the most in the most serious of cases or a supported day program or a therapeutic day program elsewhere hopefully in berkshire county for some of these other students those programs are very expensive and and there's transportation included so the financial impact of those programs is great but as important as the financial impact is people people chose to live in a community you want your child to go to the schools in that community and be with other children in the community and so ultimately this position is sort of the the the first section of the runway that will lead us up to being able to serve more kids better and ultimately over time in the upper elementary and middle and high school
031keep them closer to home learning with their peers rather than being in an alternative setting we are looking at a 1.0 full-time math interventionalist at mount greylock school again some of this is around you know there's no question that some students struggled much more than others with with the year of a little bit of in person a lot of zoom and then more in person a little bit of zoom even at the middle and high school level we're still trying to make up for some of the learning that was that was sacrificed in order to keep people healthy um during during the pandemic so we are looking at a 1.0 math interventionist position there to help particularly some younger students in that school seventh and eighth graders and ninth graders just just accelerate a little
032bit in math so that they can join their peers and later grades we are looking at at taking a person who is working in a 0.6 position a part-time person and adding a 0.4 to that position so that that person again already on the payroll already eligible for benefits um this just will expand that department a little bit which actually and a lot will allow the uh the high school without hiring a new person to have a couple of the middle and high school to have a couple of periods of reading intervention work and um to do some work on on reading skills to to help students be better positioned to pass their high school english classes uh and then finally the the position that i suspect has brought you know most folks um to
033this meeting tonight and grateful for everybody for whom that's the case one director of diversity equity inclusion and belonging here in the district and uh and so this is you know really up here the positions that we added over the course of the year this lower set of bullets one two three four five six bullets the the what we're looking at adding in terms of personnel which accounts for the the great majority of our budget um to the mount greylock uh regional school district set of colleagues moving forward into 2023. um better investments in regular education when you when you see if we went back a slide when you see this word um interventionist uh on a couple of these an inter an interventionist is primarily a regular ed uh teacher it's not necessarily a
034special educator it's not necessarily someone that holds a special education license one of the ways that that that this school district is able to maintain on average fewer students on individualized education plans fewer students who require specialized special ed services is is by investing in regular education many times as you look at school budgets you might say hey we've got a we've got a challenge with special education and what what one might be saying with that is we have why do we have so many students in special education why aren't some students going in and coming out what you probably have if you're really having that issue is not a special education issue at all but a regular education issue um and so as we as we put in positions like interventionists we are hopefully
035addressing needs where they are when they are in in sometimes a pull-out setting sometimes a teacher pushing in setting but but we're keeping families from having to go into the process of having a student be specifically identified because we're addressing an issue when it's when it's a workable issue rather than allowing it to go on year after year and then having to play a bunch of catch up through an iep that may or may not really be necessary this allows us to to really have a more focused and better investment in the services that do actually go directly to students with very specific special needs services like the support centers that we're working to build at williamstown elementary school services like the occupational therapists that wear pieces of a of an ot that we're adding
036into the budget it allows us to invest more money in special education teachers and other very very specialized therapeutic providers and services so sometimes a good investment in regular ed actually frees up more money to put into students that really really need very very specialized training and that's what positions like interventionists are about you know the director of d-e-i-n-b uh i i have been here since november of 2020 um about a year and a half now and um you know we we we did uh really like a six-month project the the greylock listening and learning project to try to wrap our heads around where bias happens to show up uh in this school district and those of you that have been here for much much longer than i have been here probably were not surprised
037really by any of it and although i recognize that we certainly disagree on what we should be doing to address bias in our school district in our schools in our classrooms in our communities um i know that we all agree that um that we that we must be doing something and and i appreciate having the opportunity to to talk about creating a position of a dei and b director as one way to address that um each word in that phrase diversity equity inclusion belonging those are big big words packed with a lot of meaning and a lot of history it's really tough to wrap one's head around all of those words it's even multiples tougher to actually live the spirit of those words and what they mean and and what the needs are we know
038that we have students who carry a multitude of identities uh i put this chart up simply to say that you know if you go back to 2018 90 almost of our student body would identify as white as we stand here today it's about 80 percent i suspect that's actually a little bit high because that's data from october and we are now in march so this is looking at just one um one slice of of our diversity needs all of you watching this or engaged enough and and knowledgeable enough and well-read enough to understand that diversity means a lot of different things we have students coming to us from really all parts of the globe all walks of life all economic levels all different world views at home and and we know the challenges that this
039creates in the wider world we know the challenges it creates here in the berkshires we know the challenges that that can create in our own communities and i think we simply must find ways to acknowledge these differences uh to respect these differences and the way that students and families come to us to learn from these differences to celebrate these differences and to encourage our students to be really who they are meant to be um and uh and and because we owe to every child the opportunity to grow into to who they desire to be and what they desire to be and it's these 13 or 14 years that we spend with students starting in pre-k until grade 12 it builds the foundation upon upon which the rest of their lives is built um this new
040budget does have this position in here it's a high dollar uh position it's we anticipate 80 to 100 uh in salary for this position this position is clearly a human issue i think the time for this position is now i'm not coming in here you know pulling this notion out of out of my backpack of of stuff from from days gone by i am coming to this uh fresh we we have but with eyes wide open having spent almost 18 months here we have to address national statewide and very localized challenges that are related to bias we have to address developing better empathy and understanding among all of us we need to increase the sense of safety and belonging for our students and their families in our schools and in our communities our leadership team
041needs to do this work your superintendent needs to do this work and continue doing this work our staff needs to do this work our students also need to do this work and our students not only do they have to do this work themselves facilitated hopefully at home and by us but they also deserve to have the rest of us working you know at least twice as hard as they are because they're the people that we're here to serve um i think it's really important you know i i see this as a very human issue i see this as an issue about being a leader who is first and foremost about the people that that i have the privilege to serve but i also see this uh as as to some degree being really an economic
042development issue um and and i know that that that that may sound really in incongruous but i don't think it is working to be more culturally competent working to be more aware of our own implicit biases working to be better prepared to um to serve to live in to function as a cohesive yet diverse community is is vital in many ways including economic development in the sustainability of the towns of williamstown and lanesboro when you look at a map of berkshire county and you think about who the largest employers are in the berkshires and a couple of these employers are actually among the the top 20 or 30 employers in terms of number of employees in all of western mass may think about the number of families that we serve who have a parent a
043guardian or a caretaker that work at general dynamics when you think about the number of people that we serve who live in lanesboro and live in williamstown who work somewhere in the in the vast network of berkshire health systems i know the people that we're serving who i was colleagues with when i was superintendent in pittsfield pittsfield employs 1200 people the pittsfield public schools mass college of liberal arts 10 minutes across route 2 williams college and this isn't even talking about the the other industries that really drive the northern berkshires finance and insurance hospitality and tourism and then you have our museums our fine arts our performing arts and our other cultural and recreational and outdoor attractions and um i think presenting the mount greylock regional school district as a school district that is ahead
044of the curve rather than behind the curve and that cares about working very consciously to create cohesive sustainable community for everybody for these employers who recruit increasingly from not only around the country but around the globe i think this is a really important message to send about who we are what we do and how we operate and how we're going to take care of your child should you honor us with living in one of our two communities and sending your child to school with us just as i'm getting ready to close and to hand over to mr bergeron this school budget is centered on serving young people that's the only reason why we're here this school budget is centered on people and it's serving the people who serve those young people our students our budget
045as it's presented comprises about 76 our budget is presented on the personnel side comprises about 76 percent of our entire budget so 76 of our budget in the mount greylock regional school district goes to the people that that see and serve our children every day i know doing some work with some with some statewide and and national school budgeting uh foundations you know a lot of communities are trying to reach 60 percent of their budget is relative to personnel and 40 only 40 is going to stuff in operations um we're we're sitting at now that has that has a cost to it for the people that pay the bills in the school district but you're going to pay for your schools no matter what and um i'm in my 29th year of being a public
046educator uh there if there's there's about a dozen things that i'm firmly convinced of um from starting a a teaching career in 1993 until sitting here before you tonight in march of 2022 and that's that there is nothing that matters as much in the education of a child as people our overall percentage increase from personnel to the entire budget is 6.13 joe a little bit later we'll talk about the increases relative to everything that's not personal just to break that down for you lanesboro elementary school's personnel increase from fiscal 22-23 is over nine percent williams towns is over five percent mount greylock regional school or seven through 12 school is four and a half percent the district office because of this deimb uh director position is is over 10 almost 10 and a half percent
047um those are those are some big numbers those are some hefty increases they will be offset by much smaller increases in the um in the the the 24 of our budget that is not relative to personnel um but we understand these are big increases but we understand we have a big responsibility uh to our children to our communities and we know for sure that we have a big job to do in terms of educating this community's children and i would just as i'm getting ready to sign off uh or at least for now i i really do want to thank everybody who's watching this at home want to thank everybody that took the time out of out of their evening to actually be here and to speak later on i want to thank each of
048our schools their staffs our administration and really want to thank the school councils for for helping develop budgets that work for our schools and our children thank you to the mount greylock regional school district finance subcommittee they meet regularly every two weeks and and it's it's serious work just like our town's finance committees this finance subcommittee in the district is a real gift to the communities i'd like to thank the three of you uh ursula steve and mary for for your work on this budget as well and then as always i would like to thank joe bergeron our district business administrator for for so carefully so thoughtfully so ethically approaching this budget work and i'd really like to thank him for walking us through this next phase of the budget presentation tonight so thank you
049joe thank you jake and as always you're an impossible act to follow so i i appreciate the challenge ahead of me um what i'm going to be giving a tour of are the considerations for costs within our budget that are outside of the salaries and stipends that are paid to members of our communities those are planned payments for services goods and benefits costs primarily so outside of our people we are seeing expected increases in the cost associated with level use of transportation heating some of our leases and materials costs associated with operating the district in addition to that our two elementary schools are at the 20-year mark their fire and safety systems need improvements the hvac system at lanesboro elementary school requires some incremental investment later on in this fiscal year the school committee will
050be seeing proposals for ways to upgrade the hvac system at wes via capital gift proposal and overall we're budgeting for higher maintenance costs across both elementary schools as we and i think that will be a consistent theme as we look through the next five to ten years in comparison to what we've seen in the past and then in addition to that we have some changes in expected special education services costs related to tuition out of district as well as transportation so that's part one of expenditure changes outside of our people part two is shifts that we've been able to make in textbook and technology investment during this fiscal year fy22 we we put a big investment into a new ela curriculum across both of our elementary schools the bulk of that investment was made this
051year and so we're able to pull back that line or those lines across the two schools and those now really just represent the consumables costs and we've made them as minimal as we can as we look towards fy23 again this is with the theme of trying to place emphasis on people and pulling back everywhere else that we can make sense while keeping our foundation improving our buildings and being able to keep forging ahead within technology we're currently at least temporarily placing investment in student and staff computer devices on hold we're hoping that with additional clarity from grant opportunities as we look towards fy23 that we'll be able to bring some of those investments back into fy 23 but in an effort to pare down the budget that we're presenting to you tonight we have removed
052that from the picture for right now um within the world of projectors and screens some of the things that our school councils were interested in um we have some funding for both elementary schools but we're going to wait and see for grant clarity here too before making significant investments in fy23 on the flip side we have some retirement and benefits costs that are dictated to us that we really do not have the option to pick and choose or or pare down um berkshire county retirement system our contribution to it for fiscal 23 is up by 14 within that non-staff set of budget sheets that you've received and reviewed that is the single biggest tail wagging the dog here within this set or within this subset of the budget with berkshire health group which provides our
053health insurance we do have an eight percent increase however embedded within that proposal for next year by berkshire health group we are seeing a planned month premium holiday the net impact of 11 12 cost for us along with an 8 increase in the monthly premiums is a flat expectation for this coming year now the warning shot though is that we should expect in fiscal 24 to need to realize that 8 increase perhaps more um so that is definitely something that we are eyeing as we as we look out farther into coming fiscal years and then in a second i'll touch on how the mount greylock regional school construction costs the the costs related to the long-term debt schedule that we entered into in 2016 as well as the short-term borrowing that we're doing right now
054how those have changed between this year and this coming year the good news is within those uh capital costs that we are um that we're not seeing dramatic impacts from them right now so uh in 2016 mount greylock regional school district in cooperation with the towns of lanesboro and williamstown took out 28 million 980 000 in school bonds to pay for a sizable portion of the construction project at mount greylock within the debt service schedule we are looking ahead towards the the june 30th 2022 and june 30th 2023 payment cycles those are what are dictating the cost that you see within long-term principal and interest costs short-term borrowing short-term borrowing is the the bridge between um where we stand right now with the msba which is we're in the closeout process where we've completed all
055construction we've made all payments the msba contributed 90 percent of its overall commitment alongside us once it hit the 95 point in the same way that it does for all projects in the state it then waits until the audit that close-up process is complete so that it can determine what its final payment will be and at the point of that final payment when that exact amount is known we are able to take the remainder that our towns and we owe and convert that into long-term borrowing so right now we're in a we're in a gap period where we need to do short-term borrowing in anticipation of being able to do the long-term borrowing once we know the exact amount the the amount that we need to borrow for this coming year is 3.99 million um
05690 000 will go towards interest there and 180 thousand dollars is required um as a principal payment so that's the 270 000 line that you see within the fiscal 23 proposed budget so the net impact across all of these non-staff costs that we've been looking at where we've cut costs wherever we possibly can and we've seen some required increases is a 0.89 increase in spending within that portion of our budget if you were to remove the sizable berkshire county retirement increase then we'd actually get a slight negative so all in all the the team internally that the staff across the district have done a really great job of bringing out everything they can to try to make room for these improvements that we know that we need to make for our students and for our
057communities so that's a look at the budget as as we look at expenditures now i'm going to switch gears a little bit to apportionment apportionment is the technical term used for once we know how much money we want to propose spending how do we apportion that cost between our two member towns that contribute in the form of operating in capital assessments the highlight here as we look towards fy23 is that there has been a significant increase in enrollment at williamstown elementary school and an increase in williamstown's portion of mount greylock regional school in terms of enrollment and that has led to if you were to keep all other things equal so if you kept the cost structure equal and if you just look at what the change in enrollment has done it's shifted about forty
058thousand dollars worth of the overall costs in the direction of williamstown so that's just share of costs as opposed to changing the cost themselves um if this trend holds or if it continues then the five year average that's used to apportion the the most meaty part of those costs would gradually shift additional uh share towards the town of williamstown versus the town of lansboro however last year the cost had swung towards the town of lanesboro as they saw an increase in enrollment relative to williamstown so this is something that is fluid and it's gradual by design so this forty thousand dollar shift relative to everything else that we're talking talking about within this budget um is is not a major factor this year um for people who are taking note of the of the details
059within the apportionment this is our second year of the eqv values the state puts out um for our capital apportionment and for a portion of our operating apportionment i keep on saying the word apportionment maybe i should come up with a different um dog and pony to roll out there but we do expect new values for fy24 within the eqv so these are two year sets that we receive from the state another topic that i know we have talked about at the school committee level and we wanted to make sure that we brought it forward is if we look out yet another year our fy 24 staff and cost projections are they will be dictated by the union negotiations that we'll enter into for fy24 during fy23 the adjustment to the grid the salary grids
060that are used with our staff they've typically been between one and a half and two and a half percent per year over the last five years step movement meaning seniority years of service is predictable call-in column movement meaning moving from having a bachelor's to having a master's that movement is a little bit less predictable you know we can certainly forecast in some ways but we're not going to be perfect the net impact of retirements that we might see as we move towards fiscal 24 we often say that there might be 20 to 30 000 in immediate financial savings associated with a very experienced member of our staff retiring and bringing in someone with a lot less experience but there are there are other ways that we end up incurring costs associated with those retirements so
061rapid column movement benefits benefits costs professional development those are all areas where the net impact is often negligible even though we we sometimes see people say well can you expect retirements and cost savings as a result taking all of that into account we did put forth projections uh internally this year that look at based on our teacher contract our esp contract which which are our paraprofessionals our and our custodians our cafeteria and all other non-union collective bargaining agreement staff if we look at a level staffing picture if we try to take into account column movement that we might see and certainly take into account step movement and where negotiations might go as we look towards fiscal 24 what we're looking at there is an fy 24 budget increase based on this proposed fy23 increase of
0622.84 so that's all other things steady not taking not taking anything else else into account there are certainly ways that that that is hopefully uh aggressive meaning projecting higher than where we'll actually come but since the school committee had requested it we want to try to make sure to put our our best foot forward here as far as giving you a little bit of an outlook towards fy 24 with staffing costs next up last step i think for me are revolving accounts the tuition school choice and our ability to carry excess and deficiency uh forward from one fiscal year to the next if we look at the start of fy22 we started this year with tuition and choice accounts that were about 1.3 and 1.2 million respectively and an excess and deficiency account that was
0631.2 million dollars the revenue that we're seeing this year 785 thousand and 355 000 respectively revenue to excess and deficiency is uh probably a mis misnomer but you add to your excess and deficiency if you don't need to spend all of the funds that you've received from your state and local governments so if you've saved your pennies appropriately you can tack those on to the excess and deficiency account that's that's the only mechanism for increasing the balance within that account um planned expenditures this year thus far within tuition school choice total million fifty eight thousand and five hundred and five thousand respectively um and within excess and deficiency we have 240 000 that was committed from that account as a part of the fiscal 23 budget leading to that account um all other things equal
064unless we're able to save and add to it as ending the year with the 960 000 balance so what you're seeing here is we are certainly spending more than we are bringing in in simple terms that is that is definitely going to be the case as we look at fiscal 23 the starting balances in those accounts projected again represent the ending balances for fiscal 23 or for fiscal 22 the revenue that we're projecting based on the changes in the tuition cost that we've put out to our tuition in towns as well as our best guesses at the way enrollment will will change as we have some students graduate out at the end of this year and we have others enter into our school district as well as the ways that our school choice program slots
065are evolving in that we are graduating more students this year most likely then our schools will open up as we look towards next year we're seeing revenue slightly increase on the tuition side relative to this year and school choice revenue slightly decrease from this year in terms of planned expenditures what you're seeing within our budget proposal that you're reviewing tonight you're seeing us say that we'd like to plan for the same type of expenditures from our tuition and choice accounts as we have going this year but we do not want to further spend down our access and deficiency account a portion of the plan there is that as we look towards long-term borrowing for that that remaining slice of the mount greylock regional school construction project it is important for rating and for our ability
066to borrow at the best interest rates possible for our access and deficiency account to remain strong and to not dip any lower than we need it to and so as we looked at what we can do to try to buffer some of these changes that we're trying to make the impact that they will have on our town's ability to to contribute we've made the made the proposal to continue decreasing our tuition choice balances which which really are still much higher than many school districts nearby us have been able to build but to not further tap into our access and deficiency account and so this is something that as we look towards fiscal we are very aware internally of the ways that we are going to need to make sure that as we're flying this plane
067while modifying it that we are bringing ourselves in not for a situation where those accounts are bottoming out and we aren't able to navigate but instead where we're gradually decreasing those balances to very reasonable but also very useful amounts in a way that will allow us to continue to expand and improve what we're doing for our students so what that takes us to is this very large chart that shows the top line if you look at my cursor the operating budgets that are embedded within the staff and non-staff spreadsheets that you have as well as the capital budget that you see associated with the long-term borrowing costs those operating costs transit down through the various ways that we can offset them prior to getting to the point where we assess our member towns those include
068our tuition account use our school choice account use gift from the williams college to mount greylock regional school grant use which has greatly benefited from relief funds provided by the federal and state governments over the last couple of years and this is another area where we're keeping an eye on where that funding goes as we as we look at fiscal 24 and fiscal 25 circuit breaker account other funds and regionalization aid so these are all ways to gradually decrease the impact that our operating budget has on our member towns chapter 78 this year is up substantially a lot of that is the leading edge of what you're seeing in terms of both our enrollment increase as well as needs increase that are documented within the state's database that determines how the state contributes its own
069funds to our local education spending our chapter 71 transportation aid is based on our transportation costs which are directly related to what we report as far as our costs our enrollment of eligible students for transportation charter tuition reimbursement that comes directly from the state medicaid reimbursement based on the billing that we're able to do and the funds that we receive and as i mentioned a few minutes ago we do not want to further tap into our access and deficiency account as we look at fiscal 24 largely for the purpose of being able to ensure both of our member towns have the best interest rates possible or that we carry the best interest rate possible for our member towns as we look at that final chunk of long-term borrowing so as you get down to this
070point within the budget you're looking at the total budgeted revenue that we're going to use to offset the total operating budgets at each of the three schools and then you get to the net subject to assessment and that net subject to assessment passes through the various ways to apportion those costs to our two member towns and then we get down to what everybody is really waiting for which is the bottom right hand corner over the last few weeks as we've really tried to take everything out of the out of the plan that that we don't need in order to fly it into fiscal 23 very successfully um these numbers have come down from from what was reported in the media over the last week to 4.29 as an increase for the town of lansboro and
0714.10 is an increase for the town of williamstown with the increases in dollar values here as the bottom right numbers the operating capital combined that would be assessed to the member towns if this budget was sent forward by the school committee here just in between the percentage and the increase so with all of that said which did feel like a long run-on sentence to me but with all of that said i will go on ahead and stop my screen sharing but we can we can bring certain things back up as we move towards comment and discussion terrific thank you so much joe and jake for your presentations uh we will now move on to public comment and we will start with the comments from those who signed up in advance this is public comment on
072both the public hearing which we're currently still in as well as the school committee meeting to follow that said the fy 23 budget is the subject of both a public hearing and does appear on the school committee agenda um so what i would ask is that when you come on for public comment that you state your name the town that you are from and the agenda item that you're speaking to you can say fy 23 budget if you're speaking to the public hearing however you would like to do it so first up is ralph hammond uh i've respectfully asked to follow luanna because my comments sort of build on hers could you do that please all right um luana okay can everyone hear me yes all right my name is luanna marouz i'm from williamstown
073and i am talking about the deib hire we have sent you a petition signed by 67 people plus 13 anonymous we expressed concerns about the di higher energy discussion about the need for such an expensive position even if systemic racism is prevalent at the school it does not follow that the dei hire is a solution we feel that the taxpayer money is best used to provide new learning experiences and to help struggling children thrive at mount greylock even the recent study by courtney tonis highlighted that the largest division at the high school is a social class slash town division mainly the division between williamstown and lanesboro children a dei hire would do little to mitigate this division and may indeed exacerbate the divide many fdi efforts around the country several resulting in recent lawsuits have
074focused on creating the illusion of comfort to the detriment of the very students they aim to protect discomfort is often implemented by lowering the bar for education removing math expectations allowing students to self-grade or making homework optional they create spaces to isolate groups of people from other groups something that often goes by the name safe spaces this only divides us we should focus on solution that heal feelings of unsafety and eliminate in-group out-group hostility dei initiatives have led to the overselling of implicit bias and microaggressions that contribute to the toxic environment in which speech is considered violence and in which if you say the wrong thing you can be denounced ostracized and even fired as a latina woman of mixed ancestry a dei trainer once told me one cannot have the same academic expectations for
075latino women because they have more obligations towards the family these lower expectations do not help me or others like me to succeed and they might indeed cause a lot of harm if absorbed this is not to deny that in-group out-group aggression in bios exist after all we are humans and we evolved from one of the most aggressive branches of the mammal tree the monkeys hostility has been with us from times immemorial but the solution is not a di hire every teacher should be responsible for creating a safe space and work to unite the children not to separate them by ethnic and racial groups please do not mischaracterize our efforts as against diversity for they are exactly the opposite that's it thanks lavonna um all right we'll move now to ralph and after ralph will be
076asked dinner thanks carrie ralph hammond 42 cold spring road williamstown speaking to the budget as one of the framers of the petition that uh luana referred to i'm glad of the many who signed but i'm very concerned with the great number who agreed with the petition but were afraid to sign here is a sampling of the least inflammatory comments that we received from confirmed town residents first i don't believe a deib person is the best use of resources in our school system to address racism classism and other inequities diversifying the curriculum would be a better start emphasizing our shared humanity and differences without setting up an environment of blame would be more productive the current climate of anti-racism which a diversity coordinator would bring is far too dogmatic simplistic and anti-free speech i'm a non-white
077person and i oppose this deib initiative next i am writing anonymously because i am afraid that my being in favor of the petition will be misunderstood and i will be ostracized i'm not opposed to diversity initiative or hires i'm in favor of such initiatives after serious public discussion about the costs and benefits next i'm afraid to sign my name in fear of harassment by townspeople and colleagues that is the reality of life in williamstown these days and it disgusts me if you disagree they call you a racist the biggest problem this district has is a lack of respect for diversity of thought next i am anonymous because i work at the college any issue dealing with diversity has the potential to be misunderstood and misrepresented the money is better used offering additional programs and help
078for the kids and finally i fully agree with the petition but i cannot sign because i have grandchildren in the schools now to me those last responses reveal a shameful and ironic truth in this town people are afraid to speak or even ask for further discussion for fear of reprisals for example consider the may 13th 2021 school committee meeting where in a letter from the deib school action group was read following a letter that questioned the proposal for a deib hire the second letter accused anyone who questioned this hire of being white supremacists and xenophobes and today a professor tweeted that such questioners are nazis so finally in response to my friend jake mccandless's comment in the eagle i believe that students should feel discomfort and horror in examining the egregious events of our society
079but we shouldn't manufacture discomfort amongst and between the students in the name of equity each teacher and administrator should be doing the work of creating a safe welcoming school it is their job to prevent to confront prejudice it doesn't require a special coordinator it requires empathy critical thinking and courage thank you ralph um you are on the mark exactly impressive um ann skinner is up next followed by donna weed uh thank you carrie and others as as carrie said my name is ann skinner i live in williamstown uh and i'm not here as part of a group i didn't actually sign that i didn't sign that petition for example i speak as an individual who's concerned with the school and with the budget and i'm requesting that you postpone the creation of a dei b
080director let me start by saying that i fully support the concept of belonging studies have shown that this is crucial to academic success and achieving this in an increasingly diverse world is not trivial i have seen this issue in my personal life i know directly what it is to be other in your environment for those who don't know me i have a phd in physical chemistry i was the only woman in my graduate school class and one of two or three in college throughout those uh years i received both implicit and express and explicit messages that i did not belong two things kept me going the support of my parents my mother never really knew what it was i did but she was sure that whatever it was it was the best thing since sliced
081bread um and the other was the mentoring that i received from my high school chemistry teacher his belief in me gave me the feeling of belonging that later discrimination could not erase from that i take two messages children in our schools need to graduate with a sense of belonging and that good teachers are what is potentially life life-changing given that i question whether the best way to achieve these goals is by increasing administrators rather than empowering teachers my question is exactly what is this proposed administrator supposed to do and how will their success be measured the eagle article gave some ideas but also noted that the job description is still being written is it perhaps premature to fund a position when you don't know what it entails and finally right now even with the reductions
082that we just saw the school is asking for an increase that may not be supportable for the member towns under the perhaps admittedly regrettable uh terms of proposition two and a half uh i would like to know if um you need to reduce the budget what would be your priorities thank you anne donna can you hear me yep and donna will be followed by janine laidlaw okay great thank you good evening and thank you for this opportunity to speak donna weed williamstown i'm a parent of two mount gray law graduates a grandmother of several young people currently enrolled in the district a former teacher at mount greylock a former member of the williamstown elementary school committee and a long time community member who cares deeply about combating prejudice in our schools and in our community
083regrettably at this point i am not ready to support the diversity equity inclusion and belonging work done in our local schools first we must remember that only williamstown is bound by articles 36 and 37 passed at williamstown 2020 town meeting the district serves other communities and wealth all the communities williamstown included need more information about the history of the initiative possible curriculum choices suggested teaching methods but perhaps most important of all we need to know what principles are the district's core deep principles some deep efforts elsewhere espouse values that many find unrealistic and downright prejudicial are these principles alive and well being taught to our young people most of us simply do not know we need ample opportunity to publicly question and comment on this important initiative before we ensure its future therefore i encourage
084you not to include the director of dei position in next year's budget the district spent more than two years discussing what kind of grass would be the best to cover athletic fields does construction of turf fields warrant more opportunity for public education and public comment into deep initiatives like the most effective way to combat intolerance and prejudice be to model the behavior we hope to instill can we show our young people that diverse points of view can be openly freely even passionately discussed but with both reason and respect let's not just hear each other but actually listen to each other it is time way overdue it is time that we all join together to get this right thank you donna janine layla and janine will be followed by kim nickel janine you need to unmute
085yourself can you hear me yes thank you janine laidlaw williamstown speaking on fiscal year 23 budget so 100 000 is a great deal of taxpayer money i checked my most recent property tax bill and i reckon that a hundred thousand dollars is almost exactly equal to the sum of taxes paid on 20 properties in williamstown that are valued the same as mine so well you know my property isn't particularly grand taxes on 20 modest williamstown properties will be needed to support this new deib position a position that according to a recent supportive position petitioned by the deib parent caregiver action network pecan is quote still evolving this deib parent group dismissed another group's questions and concerns about the district's deib initiatives by calling questioners quote questions unsubstantiated accusations and attacks and by using the go-to
086labels xenophobia and white supremacy very nice very inclusive 100 000 20 households now given the premise that there is an urgent need that there is ongoing destructive systemic racism in the schools i understand the desire to do something to do anything doing something however expensive is better than doing nothing as mr mccandles said earlier tonight we want to show that we care the patient is sick maybe terminally ill and there is a desperation to cure the disease so let's fix it it's a disease we'll buy some medicine disease medicine racism consultant but if you ask questions about the diagnosis or ask for a second opinion you're just denying the problem you are a troublemaker or in the words of that parent caregiver action network you are quote undermining the fundamental work of equity and civic
087engagement that is at the core of deib initiatives if you ask questions a school committee member may offer as one did in may of 2021 to make an official motion to i quote protect the time and energy that is of the school administration from needing to respond continually to criticism of what people think you might be doing if you ask questions about the diagnosis or about the cure-all that is chosen from among the fashionable offerings of the day even a medicine that is as has been noted still evolving you may be as the school administration has excuse me janine that's time could you wrap up thank you okay you may be told that you're uncomfortable i would suggest to you that calling peop telling people they are uncomfortable is to infantilize them and it's a
088type of ad hominem argument okay thank you um kim nicholl is next uh followed by molly regan hi can you hear me okay yes yes great thank you um my name is kim nichol and i'm here to comment on the fy 23 budget and i am a resident of williamstown um superintendent mccandless members of the school committee and members of the community thank you for allowing me to speak with you this evening my name is kim and i am the parent of two children in the mount greylock regional school district one at west and one at mount greylock i'm here this evening to ask you to vote to approve funding for the position of director of diversity equity inclusion and belonging for the district as i have tuned in to these meetings over the past
089several months i have heard jake joe and the principals present their budget proposals specifically proposals for the creation of new positions each of these have been thoughtful proposals based on multiple sources of data that our school and district leaders have analyzed to determine the needs of our schools and our students the deib director position like the interventionist occupational therapist additional special educator english teacher roles etc is one that is being proposed by our leaders and that includes school council principal superintendent business director based on thoughtful data analysis community focus groups teacher focus groups student focus groups and multiple surveys to determine the needs of our students this position will help ensure all of our children encounter a welcoming inclusive community that values them for who they are and in turn will allow them to access
090the high quality thoughtful public education that they deserve i urge you to vote in support of fully funding this well-researched much-needed position i thank you for your consideration and for your work on behalf of our communities thank you very much kim next up is molly regan and molly will be followed by anna moriarty live hi i'm molly regan i'm here to speak to the budget about the dei position i live in live in williamstown i have just thrown out everything i was going to say i will try to be brief because with the exception of uh kim who spoke before me i so passionately agree with everything everyone else has said and i could not possibly say it better and i just support that very deeply and i just want to make a couple quick
091points i think this position as a proposal is now is a pandora's box of unintended consequences that you are opening it has not been planned it has had not been thought through the devil is in the details and i hear no specifics um i hear throwing a hundred thousand dollars at this position and then you hire this person and then then what do you just say fix our problems how do they go about that what is the philosophy that this person has you haven't even written a a description of the job so how is anyone to know what kind of person will be hired and what will they believe on the one hand do they think in the terms of tanahisi coates and ibram kendi or john mccorder and thomas chatterton williams you don't have
092any specifics here so please reconsider this at least be specific in your proposal um and the major thing i want to say even more than this is the tone of the discourse of the in williamstown where people can't sign this petition for fear of being called racist by people who are intolerant and will not even listen to another point of view and they think if people disagree with their process not their goals but their process that they are then anti-diversity or racist and it is crushing that so many people are not willing to speak and are not willing to sign and just are intimidated by people who harass them with the impression that they have a monopoly on virtue and they don't so what we need i really think has been said before the first
093first place we need to start with diversity is a diversity of thought and a tolerance for that thank everyone for their opinions thank everyone who does all the hard work that you do to try to put this together but i think it's a grave mistake thank you thank you very much next we have anna moriarity lev and anna will be followed by nicole further hi my name is anna moriarty love i am a parent of a williamstown elementary student and a williamstown community preschool student who will soon go to the elementary school and i just want to say that i encourage you to fully fund this director of deib position in the next year's budget and i really agree with all the thoughtful points that kim nicol brought up and just want to add my
094support to that and my support to funding this position thank you very much thank you anna uh next up is nicole and then we actually have two comments that were asked uh that we read into public comments so those will be next thank you carrie so my name is nicole porter and i have three kids in the school system here and of course i'm referring to the i'll be speaking to the dib position and i'm going to be very brief and first i want to just thank jake for mentioning that word human being human that phrase that um resonated with me and like anna and like what kim said this position is very much needed and very much welcomed after all the incidents that my kids as well as other kids of color have experienced
095in the school district and i support it 100 thank you nicole um would someone from the committee like to read the two comments that are in our reading packet as having sent in for being read by the committee jose thank you sorry carrie i was just unmuting um i'll read the the first one uh who um is from williams w matheson uh from lanesboro and he's speaking to the the dib position uh william says uh that i'm a resident of lanesboro who supports diversity equity inclusion belonging in our school system this cost seems particularly important in our region i encourage you to fully fund the position for a director of dib in the budget for the coming year even though we have had no children in the schools we have benefited from our own public
096school education that's why we vote to support the school budget each year at our town meeting and have ha and also have supported lanesboro elementary and mount greylock school building projects what happens inside our schools is even more important than the buildings themselves thanks for your consideration william w mathison i can read the second one all right uh unless anyone else on the committee wants to read it curtis thank you [Music] sure thing uh an email from elena treister to be read into public comment uh my name is elena treister and i am a parent i hope i'm pronouncing that right and i am a parent of two children who attend williamstown elementary school i would like to express my strong support for fully funding the proposed position of director of deib for the mount
097greylock regional school district in next year's budget cultivating a sense of belonging among all students through dialogue faculty professional development and curriculum development is important for educating all of our kids within a supportive community thank you for your consideration all right thank you curtis um next up we have nick stroud and nick will be followed by courtney hatch blow out thank you carrie my name is nick stroud i'll be commenting on the fy 23 budget i'm a parent an educational professional from williamstown as a parent of two children in the district i want my kids and their peers in fact all the children in the district uh to learn in spaces in which they feel a sense of belonging i want them as some others have had said already tonight to be able to hear
098to listen deeply to perspectives beyond their own um and to make this vision a reality i believe additional work is required to help guide and support well-intentioned instructional and non-instructional staff and that a district-wide position could provide exactly that type of leadership as an education professor who has worked with local schools including all of the schools in this district for over a decade i know the importance of committing to long-term work in order to make changes especially around issues that have historically and systemically plagued schools locally regionally and nationally such long-term changes as suggested in the listening and learning project report require an ongoing investment such change is not just about professional development for teachers and would need to span all facets of the district's operations after all systemic challenges require systemic solutions as both
099a parent and a professional i encourage you to fully fund the director of deib position in next year's budget and i applaud the district for taking this first step thank you nick courtney is up next followed by conrad osborne hi my name is courtney hatchblavel i'm a parent from williamstown with a one child at west and i care about diversity equity inclusion and belonging work in our schools and i support all of the budget changes proposed especially the director of the eib i believe this person can help provide the support education and programming that it seems we all agree is necessary for our students educators and community i've heard a lot about empowering our educators to do this work instead of hiring someone else um and i'm seeing both in my own job at miss
100hall school and from observation in williamstown how hard it is right now for our educators who are already working so much on so many things and without this position i feel there wouldn't be enough guidance or support or direction for educators who do truly want to center diversity equity inclusion in their work to be able to integrate it into their other overwhelming responsibilities i've also also heard reference to courtney tunis's report which highlighted a lot of concerning issues some of which i'm already seeing affect my son it's my understanding that this position would be able to begin attempting to address all of these issues in a more holistic way than just hitting one population against another at miss halls we hired a very similar position three years ago and it has been flexible and evolving
101to address our ever-changing needs because nothing's gonna stay the same um and it's also evolved with consideration of that person's particular knowledge and strength and i envision it would be maybe similar to this the person has also been just an invaluable resource for community and no one is regretful of hiring them i'll also say if someone who grew up and attended public schools in south county of the berkshires i wish we had these conversations back then i wish this was a topic that was more fully addressed i wish i had been more prepared to critically consider these issues much earlier in my own life i truly hope my son can have a different education in this realm i truly hope our district can become a leader and role model in this work for other similar
102districts thank you thank you courtney um i see andrew has a hand up andrew we have uh two more comments from folks who signed up in advance and then we will get to hand so leave your hand up and if others want to raise their hands as well we will get to you in the order um that you raise your hands we hope all right conrad osborne is next followed by dr matt smith and that will be the end of uh pre-signed up public comment thank you thank you i'm conrad osborne i'm a resident of williamstown and as you can probably tell by looking at me my career as a parent uh has long passed the stage of the schools that we're talking about and i appreciate all these concerns but if i were to
103draw up compile a list of 20 things that i thought could be of real help to kids to teachers to administrators and the school to education this would come in i think somewhere around 21st on that list particularly in view of the ongoing expense slot that would have to be put in for it i think there's a great eagerness to jump on the diversity bandwagon and bandwagon is great it has momentum it has excitement and in this case it helps people feel good about themselves so i understand but once you establish a position like this you hire someone with a predisposition no one seeks this kind of job no one goes through the training to qualify for it without a proclivity for looking for discovering needs that that person as opposed to the teachers the
104staff the administration apparently cannot address their proclivity is there and i'm sure that in most cases and maybe in all cases they are trying very hard to be fair and objective but since the proclivity is still there there is a tendency that's what confirmation bias means and that's how this often operates when it gets set up once you have established this office it has the need to continue to justify itself that means to keep rediscovering these needs which this person alone can address and to perpetuate the expense involved so i guess i would have to say that i oppose i would have to oppose voting for this proposal as it presently stands it has not been fleshed out uh it will develop an inertia as it goes along that is very hard to arrest i
105think i would need to see first of all more direct real on the ground real life evidence that it truly is needed in this particular situation and that i would want to see a more complete filled out description of the protocols under which the office would operate so i would urge voting against it and if not at least postponing the vote on this until those conditions have been met thank you very much thank you um dr smith and then we'll move to uh raised hands thank you vice chair green can you hear me all right yes great thank you um good to be with you this evening my name is matt smith i am a parent of two children in the district and one at west one at mount greylock and i'm here to speak
106on the fy 23 budget members of the school committee at last month's meeting and i read you a letter and petition and i sent you an updated version of that earlier today that i'm going to read a portion of we have more than 200 signatures in support of the director of deibi position and i'll just note there's a wide variety of community members that have signed on both from williamstown and lanesboro including students alumni educators parents neighbors as well as school choice families in other towns so as you know dr mccandless has presented a request for full-time director of deib we're writing to express express our strong support for creating and permanently funding this position beginning in the fall of 2022 over the past year the school committee has repeatedly voiced support for deib initiatives
107and funded multiple projects including the listening and learning project led by courtney tunis and ongoing professional development for educators led by dr kiyati joshi we appreciate your investment so far and as the listening learning project report highlighted clearly there's still much to do creating a dedicated position to lead and sustain this work is the next critical step and while this position is still evolving we ask you to encourage district leaders to engage students in each of our school communities to thoughtfully craft a role that centers our most urgent student needs thank you for your time and attention thank you matt all right um moving to raised hands i'll just remind folks at this point that each speaker has a limit of three minutes and um i'm not doing the 30 second warning i'll just let
108you know when your three minutes is up andrew art uh andrew art williamstown um i'd like to draw back to what was said earlier i'm speaking on the budget um that there's a distinction between good teachers and this deib position and i think that's really a false distinction and we have excellent teachers on deib issues right now but they just happen to be the students of color in the school who are subjected to issues where they're the targets of racism and intolerance and they're the ones that are doing the great educating right now but it's unfortunate that they're the ones that are asked to bear that burden and when the multicultural student union came before the school committee their number one ask of the school committee was to increase the number of relatable persons of
109color on the faculty of mount greylock and that was their ask as students so i really appreciate matt's comment just a moment ago that we center students in the effort to design the types of programming that are important to them because they're the ones that are centered right now without that kind of programming and they're the ones that are taking the laboring or to be the deib educators at the school so it's not a question of whether the dei education will continue but whether who will do it and they need some professional support to help them and they will continue to be the primary educators and their parents who have to weigh in on these issues and incidents that continue to occur at the school so i hope that you passed this budget and that
110you presented to the towns and i hope that the students will get some support that they need thank you thank you andrew next up is arlene kirsch thank you very much appreciate the opportunity i'm arlene kirsch i live in williamstown and i don't have children in this district but i have raised children and we're and i have grandchildren in schools and everyone in the country is talking about uh some of these issues and so in order to prepare our children williamstown and lanesboro and neighboring community children for the world that they're graduating into they need to be very very well versed in these issues and it it's going to be a professionally trained deib uh individual who can help them graduate with the skills they need i'm talking about mostly the white kids who are
111here but the kids of color may um actually learn some facilitating and other skills as well um to navigate the world they're going to be into the world they are in right now but also um right now there are a lot of children children of color and also white children who are afraid afraid of uh the disruptions afraid of racist incidents and uh teachers who are worried about this and so without the support of a professional who is trained and well-versed in how to handle these things what you're doing without a person like that is interrupting the educational progress of everyone and making it a hostile work environment in some ways so you need a professional deib trained person to support the teachers to support the students to model conversations that are appropriate to uh
112help mediate situations and and and like shine a light on the path out of um difficult situations so i applaud uh superintendent mccandless i think that this school district is darn lucky to have him and i urge the school committee to fully support the budget that he has presented thank you for the time thank you arlene next up we have henry art can you hear me yes you're a little wobbly okay um my name is henry art uh i'm a student at my greylock i'm from williamstown and i'm here to comment on the budget um i had not initially planned to speak tonight but i felt it important to have my voice heard as a member of the school community and a a leader in the school community i've been the class of 2022 class
113president for three years and i'm also a member of the mount greylock cure team which is involved in currently facilitating some of the deib discussions in the school um and i can confidently say as a member of both of those uh a member of both of those um groups that uh sufficient uh support from from the uh from someone who would be in that position as a dab um director uh is not currently present and i feel like that sort of uh leadership is is paramount in in actively uh increasing the efficacy and and the impact of those of those discussions and currently uh in the future making making the school and the the school district a more inclusive place um dr mccandless said earlier that we're all here to serve kids first and foremost
114and and i think the deib position uh is at the forefront of what the school community uh at least from the student the student body's point of view i think that's among the uh highest areas of concern among student population and um i think it's a necessary uh position to be filled both um from the students and i would say from the teacher's viewpoint um and so i would strongly encourage you to support funding for a dip director position thank you henry and thank you for your service to the school um katie could you please state your full name where you're from yes thank you good evening um my name is katie madrigal i'm a resident of williamstown and a parent of two children at williamstown elementary school and mount greylock and i'm here to
115speak to the 2023 budget i'm going to be reading mostly because i'm a little bit nervous so please bear with me but i'd like to applaud superintendent mccandless and his team for thoughtfully including a full-time director of deib position in this year's budget i work for a very large network of early childhood education schools akin in many ways to a school district and our organization created a vice president of deib position about three years ago through this experience i've seen firsthand the tremendous impact this type of full-time leadership position can make in terms of building capacity to disrupt biases create inclusive learning environments and provide a more rich relevant curriculum that benefits all students i would like to express my support for the full funding of a director position in this year's budget thank you
116katie uh below ansari is next greetings everybody i am bilal ansari resident of williamstown um and um first of all i want to thank everybody who opposes this um i really do i i want to thank you so much because you give me the chance to uh you give me the chance to to follow my mother and father's like footsteps and to fight for like like civil civil rights i was always jealous of them that they had to endure bottles being tossed at them and you know negative words and they had to be they had to be um um they had to endure um curse words as they were trying to fight for uh their children and them uh themselves to just to be included in a white schools um and so i i always
117felt that i missed the missed the opportunity to fight for uh social justice but you give me an opportunity to do that so thank you um i want to talk about my proclivities because i have some proclivities i have to in full disclosure um i'm sorry i i don't have a couch to like to like lay down on but let me talk about my poke my like my my my proclivities so i grew up in my my mother and father won the right for me to be bus you know to all white school um and so here's where my popularities came from um in that white school um in kindergarten my mother goes to parent state and they're like oh your son kevin he's such an adorable young man your son kevin your son kevin
118and my mother goes who's kevin and this is kevin i had changed my name to kevin because my white friend whose name was kevin he had a house with with a backyard and and he can walk you know to school and i was bus you know from the projects um and um and but kevin did he had two parents that walked him to school and he can walk home and there was such a such a a longing to be white or to be accepted you know and and i didn't have anybody in my school to talk to um about that um struggle um in sixth grade i was invited to a skating party it was my boy's party i go over to the house we're in the basement sixth grade i bring him a present
119put my present down i sit on the couch and his six-year-old brother says what is this what is this doing on my couch everybody laughs in the room except myself for the first time i realized that i was really really perceived as something different and i had nobody to go to the school back to talk to so here's my proclivities really starting to grow i do admit they were growing and in seventh grade i go to eight seven to the great day i'm looking for help there's nobody black in the school except for a home eq teacher home economics i had to choose from gym or home economics guess what i chose i chose home economics so i can just be in a room with a black woman teaching that class but she was always
120sad and frustrated and angry because she was the only one carrying so much weight and in high school i was almost expelled from school because i had so much anger and rage and i was getting in so much trouble but there was a dei person working in my high schools who saved my life who fought for me to be there and so my proclivity has gone to me being the assistant vice president for diversity equity includes at williams college because of my proclivities i fight for the rights of black and brown students to have a belonging in williamstown and so i thank you all for opposing this you give me a right to follow my beautiful parents in fighting for civil rights and justice thank you below are there any other folks on the call
121who would like to make public comments if so please raise your hands otherwise we'll bring public comment to a close carry wara i am actually i'm going to hand this over to my husband hi i'm scott wong i had no intention of speaking tonight at all um for those of you who don't know me i teach at williams college for the past 31 years my specialty is immigration history to the united states is actually the study of race relations and my specialty within that is asian american history okay we had a daughter who went to mount greylock every december 7th she was harassed by white students because it was the anniversary of pearl harbor even though my daughter was adopted from china i will tell you now that in the courses i teach on race
122ethnicity immigration and so on many of my students come here to williams college not knowing very much about the history of the country that was outside of their environments that they grew up in and this being williams college many of them grew up in all white neighborhoods places in connecticut the gold coast of connecticut and so on they have very little exposure to the real world of race and ethnicity okay and if you do not fund this position to help students come to grips with their own proclivities both good and bad okay then they will enter college in places like students from florida and virginia that will enter colleges not having an understanding of the world beyond them because they're not even going to be allowed to hear these things you have got to do
123this and you cannot lay it on the teachers to take care of it because teachers have other responsibilities and they are teaching other subjects like math like sciences biology and so on and you cannot expect just the history people or those and whatever they call sociology or things like that in high school these days so this is an important thing because you need to prepare as other people have said your children to enter a broader world that is much different than the town of weepstown thank you thank you scott is there any other public comment jeff johnson and annie annie are you had your hand up previously have you taken it down intentionally okay uh jeff johnson go ahead jeff you're muted uh jeff johnson proud resident of 39 hall street williamstown williamstown select board
124williamstown dire committee member sat with curtis alphenbyne at the luau's in lanesboro fighting for tax money to get this school most importantly way above all that um a father of a current former and a product of the educators from your school district scott um what you just said was so valuable i really appreciate the community coming out here but i i tell you it's time to make a change jake joe thank you so much for putting this in the budget i'm 100 behind this i've walked the halls of the school i know what it's like to be different especially when there was less people of color at the school i was lucky i was big and strong and athletic and smart and i went to people to school with people like drew art andrew skinner
125curtis alphabet um we were very progressive the same things that were going on today were going on in that school back then and it's time to make a change and i just think it's so important for our youth and listening to you henry art being one of the first members of the original peer team at greylock i'm so proud of you you're keeping it alive and i'm listening to you my friends you're the future i was in a group with another uh committee today at mount greylock the same thing are we here for our kids or are we here for us and when i hear time to get on the bandwagon this bandwagon's been long gone this isn't about keeping up with the jones it's about making change it is time it is time so
126that's what i have to say thank you everyone for coming on tonight and most importantly thank you to all of our teachers and everybody that is working so hard for our students right now during one of the biggest crisis in mental health but thank you thank you jeff um looks like matt we have another guest uh yeah i'd like to follow carrie's lead and pass it off to my spouse dr jeanette smith uh good evening jeanette smith she her pronouns we live in williamstown as of last june hey neighbors nice to meet some of y'all i've gotten here listening to y'all while also having an ear on our two kids um and in the interest of adding something new to the conversation um diversity equity inclusion and belonging is not just about race i say
127that as a black woman who's had a lot of racist experiences and continues to in town in other places um i'm thinking about our children who identify as non-binary as trans as lgbtq i'm thinking about our kids who have varying levels of ability and disabilities i'm thinking about our kids who are not english language learners i'm thinking about our kids who have different types of homes those that are underserved those that are foster youth the the role and the goal for a person in this position is to really make sure that all children especially with all of these intercepting identities have a sense of belonging and can be set up for success so i would encourage you to to expand upon the definition and yes i hold race dear and important as well but it's
128so much more than just about race thank you so much is there any other public comment matt you still have your hand up i assume that's from jeanette speaking okay any other public comment i just feel like we should say we are the world we are the children all right on that note literally um i'm going to close out public comment and we will move into the school committee discussion of the fy 23 budget i do have in my possession a motion to approve the budget that we can make and then we can move to discussion or we can start discussion before making the motion what is the committee's preference on that i i think we're i i have a sense carrie that we're um ready to have a discussion following emotion being seconded so
129i'll i'll move to approve uh the budget as presented by uh jake and joe the scenery and i'll second let's see all right i'm i'm actually going to read jose the motion because it has the numbers in it um and then i'm going to ask you to go ahead and move that so i'll just read it and you can move it is that okay yes okay okay um so the motion is to accept the fy 23 mount greylock regional school district budget and associated assessments as presented for the period from july 1 2022 through june 30th 2023 in the amount of 25 million sorry ninety one hundred thousand six hundred and sixty two dollars for the fy twenty three operating budget and one million five hundred four hundred and twenty five for the fy 23
130capital budget the fy 23 operating and capital assessments to our member towns are as follows the town of lanesboro 492 dollars in capital 6 million operating the town of williamstown 1 million 35 933 dollars in capital and 12 million 853 dollars sorry 853 000 sorry 850 3555 in operating so that thank you jose who seconded it julia all right okay so that is the motion it's essentially the budget as presented specifying um the numbers that will go in the warren articles to each of the towns in the town budgets all right committee members jose thanks carrie um jake just i have four short questions that i think only um require a short which will be tough for you jake responses i think uh and i say that with nothing but love in my heart the
131first one i think i just i just wanted to um bear witness to some of the concerns that are we heard today uh from our community members the first was a phrase that is ends up repeating itself through a lot of the concerns that we heard and that and that is uh around the role that this position might help address uh issues related to systemic racism and if i just just nudged out to the side just for a second because i think it um masks some other issues that we we have witnessed in our school district this year and that is with regards to clear cases of overt racism racism that you don't need to search for that are and have caused tremendous harm to students of color this academic year last year and years
132before and and although it pained me to to imagine that i would suspect that it would would potentially see itself repeating it's you know this is something we'd expect to see in the future so is it is that something that you could could speak to is that from your perspective and from uh the the data and the accounts that you have at your disposal uh is our district one that um in which our students have experienced cases of overt racism and harm caused by it yes thank you jake that's a super short answer but the the answer is yes and thank you and those are the ones that come to the surface thank you so much jake so given that you know these are real issues that all of our students face but you know
133principally our students of color and as we heard just a few minutes ago many of our students from uh from varying identities have to face uh in our district [Music] one of the other issues uh that came up with that came up was the potential that this these efforts in this position might dilute our academic standards and academic expectations for the school district is that something that you would ever allow to happen and something that you see being a risk no no no on both of those thank you jake this is this is going superbly thank you for these pithy responses uh the third concern i think we we heard today um was around the potential for this role to perpetuate or increase division uh we heard from the report by courtney tunis the whole
134you know the about the real issues around identity the ranges of identities intersecting identities and experiences that our students have to cope with on a daily basis um do you see this position or would you ever accept except you know this position and whoever was filling fulfilling this position ever perpetuating or increasing experiences of division in our district i'm going to answer this one with with a little less pith than the last two one would have to really carefully define what it means to increase division there is not a human that i know or a person that i know that likes to hear things that they don't want to hear when i visit my doctor i hear things that i don't want to hear that temporarily make me have to step back and pause for
135thought and think about choices i've made and think about what my options are moving forward i don't like to hear them i think my life would be more fun without hearing them uh i would not be have to have to pause and be sober for for a time to consider do i want to be around to see my children as adults and and see my grandchildren that i do think that this position as any good teacher will any good educator any good mentor will occasionally have to facilitate folks hearing things that they don't want to hear will it be done in ways that bring shame now will it be done in ways that bring embarrassment no good teachers do not do that it but it but it is necessary to to sometimes have to um
136facilitate a conversation in which some accountability is is had um and and and i don't necessarily see that as divisive i see that as instructive let's help you think helpful thank you jake um the last question before i make a brief statement is uh i think there's a lot of concern around the lack of a job description for for this position um [Music] could you just very briefly you know share with us what you imagine this person to be doing on a on a day-to-day basis and then could you then follow that up with the process that you're envisioning um if this position were to be uh funded by our towns um what that process would look like to to craft that job description sure i i have what i consider to be a relatively
137well well-crafted uh and at least with lots of stuff job position that i have worked through with our administrative team and with dr yoshi you know we would we would see this person interacting on a daily basis weekly basis monthly basis as a part of the administrative team to help to help us as learners and to help guide our decisions we would see them working with staff not you know working with staff in real time around real issues one of the key items would be to to help us take advantage of teachable moments uh in in real time and as close to to the teachable moment occurring as is possible and to get our teachers many of whom are highly skilled at this almost all of whom are very willing about this work but almost
138all of whom superintendent included feel underskilled and feel nervous about wandering into um in into realms that we know can be very challenging and hard to discuss and that we might hurt somebody even if when we don't mean to we would see this person providing leadership and dis and expertise to the district leadership team we would see this person as being a resource for both the towns of lanesboro and the town of williamstown uh as as they work to do the same work and be members of teams that exist in both of those towns we would see this person working to develop educational programs and workshops for not only our staff not only our students not only our administration but for our parents and for our community uh you know when you when you consider
139when i consider my own comfort level as a parent having conversations with my own children about about topics that are difficult or challenging to explore i would have really appreciated some help and some guidance and some support and some resourcing from my child's from my children's school to be able to have some of these difficult conversations and we do that around a host of things but we don't necessarily do it around people who have very different religious beliefs than us or no religious beliefs we don't necessarily do it about our students classmates who are um struggling with with who they actually are uh in terms of of their gender identity um we we as as dr smith said it's it's um this is a diversity is big it's not it's not relegated to this or
140that it's all of the above we would see this person working with our curriculum director with the principals with our academic departments over at mount greylock and with our grade level teachers at our elementary schools on curricular on both curriculum development and extracurricular development we would really see this being as one of those positions that spans two towns and three schools and in reality spanning um new ashford and hancock as well because those students wind up uh being part of our educational communities we would see very much that this position has the opportunity to really start sewing communities together uh quite the opposite of tearing communities apart and bringing more divisiveness we would see a key function of be it during the day activities workshops programs and and after school or during the summer activities
141workshops programs for an opportunity for our elementary students to come together well well well in advance of the day when they start school together as seventh graders at mount greylock regional school we would see this individual working with groups like the mount greylock gay straight alliance who i will be meeting with to help flesh out what would what would our students like to see this person doing with the mount greylock multicultural student union with whom i am meeting on monday because you know our our students our students are the ones living this and and they are living it from a different perspective than i lived at when i was uh their age or when you lived it when you were their age we would see this person being a key figure in implementing a a
142really comprehensive three school district-wide anti-bullying anti-student intimidation and anti-bias plan we would see this person working with the school administration and each school's mental health professionals to make sure that our that our bullying and intimidation and harassment plans are are much more than just uh ideas that that sit in a binder and fulfill legal requirements we think we need the services of somebody who can regularly measure and analyze student data are students who who happen to belong to a group or a multitude of groups or identify with a multitude of groups are there courses that that they are not getting into are there courses that they are are faring worse or better than their their counterparts or their programs um or the different extracurricular clubs uh and activities we offer as welcoming as they should
143be we think that we need so i don't say i think we need help in developing supporting monitoring and evaluating appropriate responses to bias-based incidents whether it's student to student staff member to student student the staff member or in any way it might happen we need help with that and we need somebody who again can step in and um you know going back to the comments we heard from the president of the of the mount greylock multicultural student union last year that i think drew referred to earlier in the meeting we need somebody who can help us with a with a recruiting hiring and retention plan so that so that the mount greylock regional school district can actually be a leader not only in the berkshires but in the commonwealth uh in in recruiting a
144staff that from from my position on down uh in that that that reflects the increasing diversity in a multitude of ways of our student body and so you know with i i am recognizing that that we have not been talking about this specifically and directly for months and months and months although we have been been in some ways addressing this but this is this is much more fleshed out i'm very glad to have the opportunity to share that um my my concern my concern in working with the consultant that we've worked with my concern in discussing this with our with our administrative team and then looking to the folks in the community that are more expert at this certainly than anybody in our staff is is actually how do we construct a job description that
145is not so big that we're setting a wonderful person up not to be successful um and and so that's that's where we are in terms of developing this this work to uh to be done for the good of our kids and community jose yeah thank you jake and and thank you stephen and julia for your patience and i i i want to give you a chance to address a question that i don't think you um fully fleshed out for us yet but i'll preface it because that way i'll hand my hand the microphone over by um just saying that i think this is just a a wonderful opportunity for our communities and i would you know certainly see this as being an exciting time for the district and for our member towns to embrace all
146that we hope to be and all that we aspire to be as communities i appreciate that this position comes with a significant financial investment i appreciate that this is not the end of the journey and in many ways is the start of a journey of a process of being better and i would ask my colleagues on the school committee to consider this wonderful opportunity we have and to support this motion and i would ask our towns to engage in this process not just now as we're considering this director position but to engage in this process from here on out because it's going to take all of us to to make our communities to make to make us all you know as as as welcoming and as inclusive as we i think as we aspire to
147be so on that note jake just uh if you could briefly outline how you foresee uh the job description prescription process um playing out or are there stakeholders you might involve thank you we uh you know as i said we'll we're we're going out to to meet the students where they are um and we'll we'll be undertaking that work in in some form in all three schools um you know as i said i i have people as as a superintendent with a with a rolodex developed over 20 years of being a principal and superintendent in the berkshires and beyond who have been helping me to craft this uh and then you know the the the school committee has the the the outline of a job description now it will be growing it will be having
148things subtracted it will be changing and proved and refined and um and and yeah i have found no shortage of of uh folks willing to to throw their ideas into the mix whether it's via email or calling me or or or or any communication means um you know in in these two communities so you know it will be a work in progress once once the the process that will be uh you know with folks from the community weighing in as well as well as students even once we we if we have this funded once we have it hired it will continue to be a work in progress it's like all of our job descriptions are thanks joseph yeah thank you sir thank you jose thank you jake steve did we lose steve i know he's
149on a couple of devices um not sure if he dropped off you hear me can you hear me yes now i can hear you go ahead okay so i've got two sets of questions one on some stuff that came off at the finance subcommittee meeting today and then the other is on hopes and concerns on the div coordinator i'm happy to ask both sets or ask one set and then give someone else a chance whatever you prefer why don't you start with the first one and we'll see how that goes sure sounds good so these should hopefully you're following jose's expert start hopefully these should be fast ones jake can you tell us about you know what kind of budgets other towns in the area are considering putting in in terms of increases and how
150we compare to the rest of the county uh okay yeah um so you know we're we're thank you for that question steve we're we're coming in at about four percent increase you know a little bit over for each community um having said that we even once this budget is adopted and and the vision of the budget is adopted and and numbers are adopted we will continue to work to identify funds reductions that that don't impact people in in other areas that that we can hopefully bring in something that will feel a little more doable and a little more respectful uh to the to the folks in town that really um just very very rightfully feel that that that four percent is too much um i think looking at the districts that we tend to compare
151ourselves to here in the berkshires like a berkshire hills um a lenox i think i think berkshire hills is coming in at an average increase of 5 although one or two of their towns might be smaller than that and one of their towns is much much larger than that due to a uh a real shift in population but coming in on average at five percent uh i think lennox another district that we tend to compare ourselves uh with in in several ways here uh is is likewise coming in at at five or six percent and um you know i i don't know that that those towns that their town meetings that their their town finance committees will support those budgets but that is what they are coming in uh with we we are we are
152not alone in finding that our needs are shifting rapidly uh after after two years of pandemic and that uh our resources are not going as far as they used to in several ways i hope i answered that steve you did and that actually leads into the third question but i'll ask the second one first anyway uh could you put like a monetary amount as to how far are we away from a three percent joe i'm going to ask for your help uh we english majors run into trouble when we start talking too much about numbers but if you could weigh in on that steve just for clarity the question was here's where we are now what amount of money would we need to reduce to bring on average a three percent budget to to the
153towns that we serve so if i'm remembering if i'm remembering correctly from the finance subcommittee i think it was around 75 000 less from lanesboro and it was like 135 from williamstown yes that's correct like around like 211 ballpark you know total for the two towns just to give us a sense of putting these numbers in perspective so we get a sense of what is an additional one percent what does that cost the towns what are we getting from that okay thanks the last question i had along these lines was we have a position proposed for math interventionist but not for a reading interventionist and are these positions expected to be short-term to deal with consequences from the pandemic and the responses or are these now expected to be permanent positions that will be needed
154going forward in all budgets and we envision having a reading interventionist being needed in the near future as well yeah great question and in both of those positions that you're referring to steve math mathematics interventionist and a reading interventionist at uh both at mount greylock regional school or middle and high school the the english the the reading interventionist after much discussion among our our administrative team my experience as as both a a high school english teacher for a number of years but particularly as a principal and as a superintendent with secondary schools um a reading interventionist at a secondary level uh i will just say this it is a much much much better investment to put those positions in the elementary schools where where we have them it is it is tough to get the
155kind of movement that one needs to get when an intervention is starting at age 13 or 14 or 15 or 16. and and that's not to say it's not worth doing but it requires incredibly close monitoring to make sure that the gains being had for individual students are worth the the investment of of the teachers time the students time and the finances to make that work and whatever the student is missing to to get that intervention so to address reading at mount greylock we we are adding two periods in general to the english department and mr schutz will talk a little bit later tonight about about what those periods will be spent doing the mathematics interventionist is a new position it is full-time uh and i think in answer to your question it ideally if
156we're doing the right things at the elementary school it it is a it is a shortish term position to to help make get back some gains that were lost over the past couple of years of interrupted instruction um if we find that that position is a very successful in creating gains or helping helping students create gains for themselves uh and we see that the need is there based on students coming out of our elementaries and into our middle and high school it could easily turn into a longer term position but i think our vision of it right now is it is a short to medium term but but nobody is convinced that that it is a forever position thank you that does help and it matches a lot of my experience you involved in your
157tutoring and mentoring in terms of the value of early intervention yeah thank you so i'm happy to pass on to someone else so i'm happy to ask my questions concerning the coordinated position now yeah why don't we go to julia and then come back to you steve is that okay yep that's fine all right thanks so much so on to julia thank you um so i don't actually have any questions um because i think jose did a beautiful job of asking many of them i appreciate steve's questions as well um in the nitty-gritty and that presentation was incredibly thorough um what i wanted to say was i do recognize it's hard to think about increases in expenses right now and i know that our community members are many of our community members are struggling and
158that um it's it's a tough time for us to to make this ask but the flip side is is this is the exact time where we need to make this ask um given the ways in which so many of our community members have struggled um and so i i just want to i say that about the reading interventionists the the part-time reading interventionist the ot the math interventionist um all of all of the positions you outlined the bcba i guess that was this year all of those things i know um from hearing from you and hearing from schools across the commonwealth and across the country for what is happening in schools right now and how hard it is um and that's precisely why i also just want to state publicly and make sure people understand
159um you know my vote um on this budget and specifically on the deib director um that i hear those concerns i appreciate all of your responses um jake and i i am a hundred percent in support of it um and i don't think at knowing what teachers and the adults in our buildings have gone through trying to serve the students and what they have gone through um i i absolutely believe that we need additional support um in in um this particular area and not because everybody isn't incredibly well intentioned and incredibly caring wanting what's right for students but we all need to learn and um i see that i you know the other the other concern i'd heard outside in the community is that does this really have to be at the district level and
160um to that we didn't hear that tonight but to that i say a hundred percent because it has to be somebody who can align this work across the district um and somebody who has the leadership and authority to to really create those supportive mechanisms um so i um i just needed to make sure i said that because there's nothing um i feel more strongly about that we uh create this and without this honestly i don't think the reading interventionists and the math interventionists will be as successful if we don't have classrooms where students feel like they belong so thank you julia um back to steve and if other members would like to speak um why don't you go ahead and raise your hands this time okay so i will try to keep this as brief
161as possible and just talk a little bit about some of my hopes and concerns about this position you know i first want to thank everybody who has been advocating for this position as well as trying to help make sure as has been said by several people we don't burden the position with so many asks that it becomes unmanageable and not effective and so i just want to talk a little bit about what i would hope the position would do and why i'm not convinced right now that it's fleshed out enough to be ready to be added to the budget so i think the first thing i want to you know really think about is the unintended consequences which some people have brought up before and so we we've seen this before in our district i
162remember we had a vote to have a black lives matter sign on the school ground and i was concerned about this not because of the sentiment but because of what we're putting a sign like that expose the school district to and i had suggested that instead we have the students of the district draw up a statement that encapsulates our beliefs and we were then later told by district council that if we had put up such a sign this opens us up to other political groups coming forward and saying that they now have a right to have their stuff displayed as well and so it was remarked about how much time we spent talking about the fields really having meeting after meeting to make sure we got things right and that i want to make sure
163that if we have a position like this that we get it right and one of the things i've been quite concerned about in our district over the past few years is the fear of a lot of people to speak up on a variety of issues and this ranges from people afraid to support the artificial turf this goes to people making medical decisions related to the pandemic and now to people discussing precisely how something like this should be and to me if we are going to talk about having such a director to me it's absolutely essential that one of the tasks of such a director is to work to create an inclusive community where we can all discuss civilly with each other and recognize that disagreeing is part of the process and that this can be
164done in a constructive way to get to a better place related to this is some of the you know concerns about just what would be the metrics just what would be the details of what we're asking the position to do how would we be measuring the success what resources would we be providing and i would like to just see a little bit more detail on items like that the next one of course is related to the budget is i think unfortunately while it is understandable you know when we are in a pandemic as we have been for so long we don't always have the luxury of gathering all the data and making the best decisions we have to often act quickly without the benefit of you know long-term studies but we're now about to enter
165year three and i'm very concerned you know there's been a lot of articles nationally i would really like to see data as to just how are our students doing here where are they now relative to where they were before the pandemic began and just see what is the most effective use of the dollars right now in terms of providing support to the students that you know the choices we've made in terms of keeping the kids home and this goes back to the unintended consequences when we were trying to decide on policies for covid one of the things that we came up with was a set of metrics and if any of them failed we would go remote and i pointed out at the time that this was a recipe to send us to remote extremely
166quickly and that is precisely what happened with the color coding and my concern is without having everything you know truly fleshed out listening to all the different groups i am concerned about setting up a position that may not solve the problems as much as we want but may make us feel like we're solving the problems and we've had a history unfortunately of doing stuff like this a lot of our covert policies unfortunately i feel are more designed to make people feel comfortable and safe than to actually be effective in dealing with the problems and so i i appreciate everybody on both sides who is advocating you know these are as many people have said this should not be the task of just one person you know one person can be a facilitator this is something
167we must all be working towards you know students staff teachers administrators school committee members if we're going to do this i want to do this in the right way and so there's i think a lot more that i could say but i think this basically just you know sums up that at this time i'm just concerned about the impact i'm concerned about knowing precisely what's going to be done what the metrics are going to be and are we you know really choosing if not the best at least a pretty good path forward to deal with these issues or are we choosing something that's going to get us some of the way there but may not really be precisely what we want one of the things we had mentioned was just how long such a position
168would be if we go forward to doing this and i would definitely recommend that if we put in something like this that this be you know a position where we look at and then reassess so thank you thank you steve um curtis then ursula and then back to jose thank you carrie uh and thank you everyone who is contributing to this very valuable conversation um i will try to be as brief as i can uh i when i think about this position when i envision it uh when i think about the job description being crafted for it i think a lot about what uh courtney hatch i can't remember the rest of your last name i'm so sorry said about guidance direction and support and that that seems to be the umbrella of this position
169i i envision it as partially student-facing but also uh helping uh in crafting and finding resources to craft a fully diversified curriculum in terms of the nature of voices that are included in curriculum materials and perspectives to each person who brought up the point that is is each teacher's responsibility this position in no way alleviates teachers of that responsibility but in fact supports them in achieving uh excellence in that responsibility we have teachers who do an incredible job of creating and maintaining a safe and inclusive classroom for all voices and even they will clamor for more resources to maintain that effort as an educator of far too many years at this point i can tell you anecdotally in terms of specific incidents taking place in our district that i've taught at bart for 12 years
170their population is a quarter of that of our district and the number of overt incidents of intolerance uh and uh unspeakable behavior uh in the one and a half or less years that have been on this school committee dwarfs what i've seen in 12 years at bart and i don't think that accurately paints our communities or our school in any way as an intolerant and or racist community but it does point to the necessity of this position this is a position by the way that we've filled this year at bart miss halls has filled it many many districts uh throughout the state and country are feeling similar because there is a wide seen need for systemic change in the way we create craft and maintain inclusive safe environments in and around our learning centers in
171the early 1900s in the midst of a pandemic whatever that is uh we invented the guidance counselor like that wasn't a thing uh until the early 1900s and now i can't envision our school functioning without them or any school for that matter uh in the 1970s we invented special education because there was uh a widespread need that had gone unaddressed systemically throughout education in this country and what it looked like in 1971 in the midst of a country at war and in the midst of economic struggle uh looks vastly different from what it looked like in 1980 or 1990 or 2000 or today because it's an ever-evolving aspect of public education and i see that this position is likely going to be similar um dr martin luther king jr the late reverend once said you
172don't have to see the entire staircase to take the first step uh and i think this is exactly true of this situation we uh are making a change that is not only absolutely necessary necessary but incredibly long overdue just as the in the invention of special education and guidance counselors and the other ways that public education has evolved over the years in terms of the financial portion of this position which accounts for less than four-tenths of a percent of our overall budget uh which i don't say too lightly because that's still a sizable amount of money when i hear about the taxes of 20 households in williamstown being the equivalent i can understand wanting to have voice needing to have voice and where tax money goes but at the same time there's 5 610 households
173in williamstown and there's another 1255 in lanesboro and i pretty sure when i look at all of the information and all of the voices that i've heard 80 people signing saying that they want us to tread carefully and withhold from doing this uh either to wait or not do it at all or whatever and then seeing 200 signatures of people strongly encouraging that we do this and do this now uh it shows me that though there's a wide variety of voices and opinions on this subject just that majority right there uh lets me think that this is exactly what needs to happen and it needs to happen now uh in terms of crafting a finely tuned uh job description i think uh that in normal situations uh you have one of those really well fleshed
174out before it becomes a part of your budget but i would love to see what the job description special education director was in 1971 because i'm pretty sure half of that would be illegal now um so this is going to be a living document a living position it's going to change it's going to evolve just as public education has i i know this is not a time when we want to increase any expenses in any way especially amidst uncertainty economically in the midst of so many fronts but this need cannot go unaddressed any further and the thing that i want to end with is that when we talk about how we have discussions about this in our community and how it can become quite uncivil uh towards anyone with a differing viewpoint uh and putting
175the burden of fixing that on the person who holds this position is like asking the principal of the school to be the principal of the town uh that's not what this job is about this job is not maintaining it in the community it's creating it in the school first so that it can become the norm in the community and uh i strongly encourage uh moving forward with this role in this budget and moving very very quickly to craft a detailed and specific uh job description which is already well underway that will bring in the the right person or persons for this job uh and uh if the job changes and the person changes that is that is the nature of the game thank you curtis um ursula yes okay um i don't have nearly as
176much to say as as curtis nor will i be as eloquent but i did just want to voice my support for the position and i just wanted to know i know we've talked a lot about um race this evening and someone hit on it earlier i think what when i think about this position and why it's important it's not only race it's also all the different types of diversity like sexual orientation um household type different um division amongst towns there's so many different reasons that this is important and not just race while obviously that is very important as well um but i think about all those different things and all the ways that people need to feel included and and that's in my opinion makes it even more important so i just wanted to you
177know publicly say that i support this position and um i agree with everything julia and curtis have said um to that end thank you ursula um curtis is your hand still up from the previous time okay um jose back to you yeah thanks kerry and i i promise to be much much briefer than my first go around um what i wanted to to speak to was a point that stephen raised and a point that we heard from our community members earlier this evening and that is around um the pace uh in which we're we're potentially making this decision to approve and support this position there is some concern you know or folks have attempted to contrast this process with the process that our communities participated in regarding playing fields at the greylock campus um [Music]
178what i'd like to hear uh in those concerns is a concern to do this right which i i fully back but i'd like to to point out that none of this work is new and we're not breaking new ground here we aren't establishing a precedent the support for diversity equity and inclusion in educational settings has been going on successfully with great efficacy um across the country for decades you know in many respects we're behind the times and so i think for those who are concerned that we're going into this haphazardly i think can rest assured that we have excellent examples for how to do this well and we have a demonstrated need to do it right and to do it right now thanks thanks jose back to julia thank you this is just to put
179a point on jose's comment as well as and i meant to say this earlier the start of the meeting i read our mission statement and that mission statement was crafted with significant community input a number of years ago and that mission statement includes a learning environment that encourages restorative based processes respect inclusive diversity courtesy integrity and responsibility through high expectations and cooperation resulting in lifelong learning and personal growth and i think that answers the question this is this is something that our district has said we will be committed to a number of years ago and we see where we're falling short and this is a solution to try to help bridge that gap um i also want to say what i see in that is high expectations so to the question that you know was
180raised earlier and jose you you know asked of jake directly um i know this district is not going to lower expectations i know the teachers won't know how to lower expectations um i know this is uh that that will not happen um but i see us having a vision for where we can get to and working towards that vision so i just want to name this has been going on for a number of years um the work towards this end thank you julia i'd also like to take the opportunity before we close comment on this to thank jake and joe our principals curriculum director technology director all of our faculty staff and students for the work that they do every day and the work that they have done to support developing this budget because i
181know that um so many people have been involved in conversations um like to thank the finance committee as well ursula and steve for putting in so much time and i'd like to thank everyone who spoke tonight um this has been extremely informative it has been respectful um and it has been very helpful in thinking about all of the issues that come up in communities that work with each other to determine how to solve problems like this [Music] and so we as a committee are grateful for your voices and for your attendance at public comment tonight i'd like to move this to a vote if that's all right with everyone on the committee we will do roll call in alphabetical order o-n-i constantine eye elephant binay green eye malloy eye epstein all right so that vote
182passes unanimously uh with one abstention thank you um again for everyone for their input to everyone for their input um all right so we move on yes sorry carrie could i could i ask that we adjourn for five minutes to give uh folks a chance to stretch and just separate from the screen just for just for five minutes yeah is it a journey a recess i would say lisa thank you thank you thank you all for that all right i don't know do is that a formal request or is that something you can do as uh as our chair i think we can recess without a vote joe i'm gonna turn to you do you think that's correct can we recess without a vote yeah okay we'll take a five minute recess five minutes thanks
183everyone thank you hmm all right looks like we have julia jose curtis ursula all right great all right so before we move into the rest of the agenda let's actually call attendance by roll call go in here constantine is here [Music] oh looks like we don't have curtis yet okay we'll wait a minute for curtis you want to do the rest of us in the interest of time and then circle back no i want to wait for curtis to join us but thank you does anyone have curtis's cell by any chance let me check julia can you just text him and let him know we're waiting thanks oh curtis is back okay so curtis we're doing roll call can you just chime in yeah he is here hi sorry cat got out no worries green
184is here moloy here miller here thank you okay moving on to the approval of the february 10th 2022 minutes would someone like to move those minutes move something like the second second elephant line all right miller moves i'll combine seconds is there any discussion julia just i think a couple um small edits uh in section 13 i well first let me start by saying i so deeply appreciate that the zoom times are noted um and so i it is such a huge help so i just need to very clearly say that in section 13 i think the wrong zoom time is noted it says two at two hours 54 minutes it should be three hours 54 minutes um and i noted that because i think in section 15 on the last vote that steve voted
185no and it should have been 6-1 and he is noted as having voted yes and i went back to listen because the zoom times were there um so if that could be noted and then section 17 i think the notes that are listed in section 17 are actually for section 18. um and then one small hopefully small request i wonder if the zoom link could be connected in the minutes rather than i don't think i saw it there and i had to go to the website and follow the links to get to the you know so i think it would just be here if you just could click on the zoom um video from the minutes adding a link to the willingness cider to the mount graylock youtube to the macro like youtube site wherever
186the wherever the video is going to be yeah that's a good idea thank you are there any other comments all right so now we are moving as approved as amended as amended sorry it's a long night already uh bow and aye go ahead roll call vote bow and i constantine often by an eye green eye mole eye eye great thank you next item on the agenda is the principal update and i believe we are now welcoming principal jake schutz from mount greylock hi good evening everybody so if i could share my screen i'll pull up a little slideshow share screen yes and i do have permission so each year we update our program of study and this uh this year uh this is uh this i'm just hitting the wave taps and there there wasn't
187a um there's anyways just hitting the wave taps [Music] so this is the review process the departments go over their each of each part of their sections the curriculum leaders review it the faculty reviews it as a whole school council has discussions about it school council will continue to have discussions about it um school council will actually have some increased discussions about it um this this is even though the the courses and the course descriptions uh become set and then that really sets the stage for our students to select courses and for us to set our schedule and build our master schedule for next year this this document is can be a living document um not necessarily in in the course descriptions in the course itself but in in the other language and descriptions um
188as far as how we do business so if there's you know any errors or if we find ways that we can do things better and we agree um and we agree mid-year on that and find a way that we can improve and change things change things immediately that's something we can do right away it doesn't necessarily need to be something we we have to wait for but essentially right now um what is set in stone is typically the course descriptions and the courses and that's what goes forward those are those are the more concrete kind of things um and then also we meet with the school counselors and then as an administrative team and then it gets presented to the school committee so one of the focuses this year was on inclusivity and looking at
189it from a sort of a wide lens some of the things we did was make adjustments to course descriptions and i just pulled out a couple a couple examples and you can see the first one um an example was we were talking about voices and promoting student voice and seeking out and soliciting unique voices and calling attention to diverse voices also student perspective and making sure we are looking through the lenses of various perspectives especially in in our history in our social science classes then also in classes drawing links and building relationships between these perspectives and between these voices and then finally um developing skills and and empowering our students to be able to make a difference and be be empowered to act and be productive citizens with these tools and these skills that they
190have hopefully developed through all these courses they've they've uh they've taken here at graylak and so these are course descriptions from english history language and phys ed and again this is just a sampling for your for your review a couple adjustments to an impact impacts on the the program of studies we made a couple adjustments to our protocol for advancements so the first is our seventh grade math placements and i'm going to hit on that a little later on so our rising seventh graders for years have taken have taken a place placement exams in the in their sixth grade down at the elementary schools which have determined what math classes they have been at sixth grade and there's some pros and cons to that and i'll get into that a little in depth later on
191and we've tweaked that for the um to to bring it more in line and as far as how we do business in in high school and and to um also to make it more effective and to make and to re reduce the the anxiety that we think it often causes some of our rising seventh graders and we also made some administrative updates to our course advancement contracts course advancements we do allow some of our students if they choose to course advance over some classes so they can with the permission of their families their counselors and the curriculum leader and the principal they can self-study over the summer and take an exam in august and if they get an 88 or higher on the exam they can essentially um pass over one class um so instead
192of like having to take a prereq for something they can they can pass over it and then take another level that's in a nutshell what the course advancement is um we've also been able to increase the availability of classes and classes at multiple levels so specifically english and math so with the math interventionists we're going to be able to provide some new math classes specifically elements of math and as i have mentioned to you in in other meetings that's going on right now and we call it developmental math we decided to to call it elements of math to bring it more in line and as well as we change some of some of the courses of the names to make them as well as the descriptions to make them more indicative of their inclusive nature
193so as whereas we thought developmental just sounded um sort of less less inclusive and so we changed it to elements of math which really is is more a better description of what it is and um also with this math interventionist that'll take that'll free up some of our math teachers so math math classes will be smaller we'll be able to have math teachers teaching some direct math support classes we used to and we still have we used to run more often we have mcas prep classes and electives of that nature which we have in our our bank of elective classes that we haven't been able to run for a while because we just can't fit them in and so now we'll we'll have the availability to staff availability to more run more electives of that
194nature um another result of having the math interventionist will to free up some english english staff to um to provide some uh focus on literacy intervention and that has to do with how we run we run some homework support classes and skills classes and those classes are shared among all departments and so with the interventionists likely running one of those classes that'll free up our some of our english stuff right now we have two english staff members who are each running a support class so now instead of running a a support class they'll be able to run a more specific literacy intervention class and also jake mentioned uh the increase of that fte of the from the 0.6 to the the full fte well similar to the math interventions will decrease those class sizes and
195allow us to run an additional elements of english class currently we have an elements of english class for the 10th and 11th grade two sections two sections of of both um and we decided to add a 9th and 10th grade elements classes and much like um i don't know like seven hours ago you guys you all were having a conversation about um intervention early on and so there's similar thoughts here as far as we were offering this elements of english classes to the 11th and 12th graders but that was almost it's almost too too late at that stage of the game even though those students needed it at that level for for graduation to meet certain requirements but um we were we were almost missing the boat not offering it at the ninth and tenth
196grade level um to help them you know at the at the foundation at the beginning of their high school career so we'll be able to offer both now uh one other adjustment we we delved delved into looking into some of the the naming conventions of our department and one an odd one and i don't think we're set yet but our our arts and business departments are combined and it is a it's an odd pairing but we we re-titled it the visual performing digital and media media arts and business and science department um to put up an emphasis on the arts eventually the the idea is perhaps we can separate them right now they're all run and operated as one department there's one curriculum later um but we don't we want to give the arts the
197the same attention and um support that we give every other department so we're really in the middle of figuring out um how to do that so i just felt it important to put that up there and let you know that that's something important that we're talking about and that we're thinking about uh here are our new courses elements of mat math i've mentioned elements english 910 and again we have that as an 11th 12th but we're bringing it down adding another class to the lower levels robotics and engineering are not new classes they're relatively new but they are continuing and they're going strong cooperative art we we used to have a couple classes that we called adaptive we had adaptive our adaptive music adaptive pe and those were purely special ed classes with only students
198with ieps were in there and that's really not our cons you know we we want to include our students especially our students with ieps and integrate them into the classroom and integrate our students without ieps with those students and that's how they they learn best and so we decided to change the name to cooperative art and open it up to and not just have it not have it be a purely special ed class so now if you look at cooperative bar in the program of studies it's listed in the visual and performing arts department and it's listed in the special ed department so if you have an iep or if you're a student in the life skills program you that's you you you'll you know be able to recognize that that's a class that you
199might that you would be able to take if you are a student without an iep you'll be able to see that and recognize it and read the course description and then realize hey you could be in this class and almost and then be in a class and be a peer mentor and be as you know in a cooperative class with a student and other peers who are on ieps and get credit for it uh carrie thanks jake i sorry to interrupt i just had a question about moving um from all students with ieps to students but any any student being able to take the class um love that this is happening um wondering if the wondering why we had adaptive classes um specifically um were they grant funded through you know i mean so adaptive
200pe is a thing is if you have a certified adaptive educator and that is considered a service it's almost and you can have it in a grid in a student's iep we do not that is not the case to mount raylock um adaptive art is just a title of a course it is not a service it is not a special ed class even though that is how it was typically run so even though it was run like that and it was a course with just special ed students in it it was not a c grid sort of service delivery it was not taught by a special educator it was not taught by a service provider or or anything like that um so for these other classes we're actually um being more accurate and calling them
201and describing them what they are and and and soliciting and hoping that mo opening them up to other students um and i think i don't and i think um um yeah so just to carry on here thanks for the thumbs up there carrie we added um moving into the the performing arts we had an introduction to theater arts hey jake sorry for interrupting you i think uh ursula uh has her hand up i don't know if you can see it sorry about that i did not yes ma'am thank you i was just jotting it down to ass later um talking about the cooperative classes is that the same as unified physical education being used the same way or does that mean something different yes it it is the same thing the one reason why we
202kept that is because we want we're becoming a unified school with our unified sports um has a specific um has a specific uh sort of curriculum that we want to follow um so it's like the specific curriculum and a program that we're essentially going to buy into we're not buying it so i know you guys just passed the budget or approve that but we're essentially subscribing to that so i didn't want to call it cooperative where cooperative is just a general term we're using um because we we like the sound of it unified is is uh a specific term it's almost like a trademark term um and it's um and it it matches with how we're doing you know our unified sports okay thank you which unified track is uh you just yeah we just
203got unified track going um intro to theater arts music theory um theory cooperative music and digital r a and b so same thing both both intro classes graphic design also an intro class both open to students in ninth through twelfth grade um also we're going to have an elective or an enrichment class um which mrs stack ms stack will be teaching that will be sort of um a a digital digital digital uh computer science 101 it's gonna be you know how do i how do i type a week of typing a week of uh how do i save a file how do i um you know how do i set up an email some of the basic things that some of our students sort of we sort of miss you know we we go right
204into uh programming and uh advanced placement computer science um we don't we don't really have any um we kind of assume that the students know some of these basic basics so we're putting that into place in the middle school and the in the enrichment programs as well those you don't see here because that's in that's enrichment um so i just wanted to mention that we also added in addition to unified phys ed an advanced physic phys ed so this is a more strenuous phys ed that we're going to try to pair with the unified so with one place where we cut where we come into concerns here is we have so few faculty compared with how many courses we offer so a lot of these courses have had have been paired with something so like
205cooperative music we had an adaptive music so it's not it's a new course but it replaces something um we had an adaptive pe and so hopefully this advanced pe will fit in the schedule because it's going to back it's going to match the other the other half of the semester with the unified pe cooperative cooking is is not going to be offered this year um but the hope is it will be it will be next year and last year or this year that was a purely special ed program because the kitchen is in our one of our special ed suites but the idea is to to increase and get some uh non students without ieps in those classes all right so here's the seventh grade math placement typically that was um the feedback that we've
206we've gotten for the past couple years is that that sixth grade test was like a high stakes test and um it was it was really um anxiety provoking for students for families and for for even for the sixth grade teachers and so now we really brought in line the process of how we do do course selection in advancement in the high school which really seems to make sense and brought it down to the middle school so essentially sixth graders with the support of their recommendations from their parents from their counselors and from their teachers will be able to select whether they want to go into math 7 or accelerated math um and in the first first quarter they'll be able to switch um do it do a level change which we do in the high
207school all the time you can make a level change if you need to make a level change um the third option is to get it just to go to algebra seven so that's the in that case if you want to if if you think you would need to are able to advance to that you would have to fill out a course advancement contract which is in our handbook and do some sort of independent study over the summer which would need to be approved in august you come in and take the final and if you score an 88 or better you would be eligible to take that algebra 7 when when you come in and again you could move down if if you need to um once that comes up so essentially it's just taking that
208high sticks high stakes test testing out of the out of the um out of the the uh the scenario so other than that um there there really has been no changes in the in the rest of the basic courses the or the the the way we do business as far as the process of enrolling students course selections we started our junior groups yesterday and course selection starts in early april for our students so our counselors are going to be busy at work and we're sort of back on track for the regular swing of things as far as um you know enrolling students and getting them ready for next year so pending your questions everyone's tired does anyone else have questions thank you jake does anyone else have uh questions for jake i just wanted to
209thank jake for that very thoughtful presentation the array of courses that um are on offer are incredibly exciting and uh makes me feel a bit wistful wishing i could take some of those courses they sound great jay thanks thanks all right so we're moving on to accepting a gift from general dynamics which i think um the other jake is going to lead us off i think the elder the elder jake um yeah we we would like to thank uh general dynamics mission system who for years and years and years throughout berkshire county has been promoting stem education uh you know as a way for uh students to really get their imaginations ignited get their uh get their you know some vision for their own future in terms of what to study beyond high school uh
210and and then you know maybe even winding up back in berkshire county working in a stem field and so we're very grateful to general dynamics for once again extending a two thousand five hundred dollar grant uh to the mount greylock regional school and very specifically uh to the um the mount greylock robotics club which is a pretty powerful uh group of uh young folks and uh dan louis is our teacher you'll be having a field trip request from mr louie coming up here in just a couple of minutes but uh mr louis and uh ken mcinerney from general dynamics who is the mentor of the program um you know have taken this team uh to the great places over the past few years so grateful to dan uh grateful to ken and really grateful to
211general dynamics for continuing to support this uh this programming so uh we we put that uh as a gift before the school committee and and send our thanks to uh the general dynamics thanks jake is that is there a um document in the packet about this i joe is saying yes i am working from another document which we can certainly put into the packet tomorrow or share with you um it's really just general dynamics requires a very brief write-up of what you're going to be doing with this money and that's what i have in my hand okay typically we would have a gift acceptance document in the packet the school committee can vote to accept the gift and maybe um is it time sensitive it's funding the field trip i i think it would be
212good if we could vote to accept and then we can let the paperwork catch up and i apologize for that okay so what was the amount of the gift uh two thousand five hundred dollars all right would someone like to move the acceptance of the gift from general dynamics for two thousand five hundred dollars i'll move is this basically the same language as previous years it is steve right so in terms of accepting this i i feel comfortable since this is you know the same as in previous years right i think julia had her hand up to move but steve would you like a second i would be filled okay so julia did did you intend to move you had your hand up okay so bowen moves miller seconds is there any discussion yeah jose
213sorry just a a brief question uh jake and to um colleagues in the school committee have served longer than than i have at least uh what how do we express our gratitude is there is our what's what's the process i'm sure there's there's a it's a given but i'm just curious about how we're there's a letter that gets sent jose you know on behalf of the school committee and the administration the school that that goes back to thank folks who are who are generous to our students in this way thank you all right seeing no other discussion um let's take a roll call vote with gratitude well when i elephant eye green eye malloy eye miller eye great that moves that motion passes unanimously and we're going to move right on to field trip uh
214for the mount greylock regional school robotics folks sure so i'm i'm happy to talk speak briefly allowing to mr louis was was good enough to submit this uh really through through mr schutz we started the conversation in early february about um mr louise submitted plan a which was if covid uh measures were still in place in plan b if there was a relaxing of the coveted measures um when we when we got serious to talking about this around mid-february right before break um it seemed to me like this might be it's a very small group of students i think it's it's four who will be traveling to western new england college western new england university for the first robotics challenge competition and first it's not the first that's a acronym they will leave mount greylock
215after school on the 17th of march with their new robot and travel to springfield in a parent vehicle they will arrive at western new england university for the robot safety inspection they will stay overnight at a local hotel in the morning they'll have breakfast in the hotel before returning back to uh western new england u for the competition um and then another group of students will be traveling down on saturday and um and staying through until sunday and we were just as we were completely thrilled and excited to see the musical chitty chitty bang bang be sort of a reopening of of uh normalcy uh in the schools for for the students and with a larger crowd we're very excited that this is uh sort of the first field trip really that's that's outside of
216the immediate area that we're bringing before you for your consideration and i think you have the information about the field i'll make a motion to approve the overnight field trips right is there a second two minutes i will second uh sorry curtis beat you to it um we're going to make more work for you steve um so for i'm not going to see that because this is a regular meeting oh there you go you're right um so for members who are relatively new to the committee the committee does need to approve all field trips um that are overnight um so that's the difference between them all right is there any other discussion or is there any discussion all right let's move to a roll call vote all those in favor oh and i constantine eye
217elephant by an eye green eye molloy eye that motion passes unanimously um thanks to dan louis and to other folks supporting the robotics team um ken mcinerney and rebecca green is also on here um [Music] not sure if that's um so uh and also the robotic students who are participating congratulations good luck and we would love to see the robot so we have had a chance to see the robot in some years and if it survives the competition not sure how aggressive these competitions are um it'd be great if we could if we could see it in action or some video from the competition all right um [Music] so who's up next finance committee all right so finance committee met this afternoon and uh we have on the agenda a vote it's actually going to
218be two votes two separate votes um you i believe received an email from joe this afternoon with some language for the votes um let's have a motion on the first one and then we can have discussion and then we'll vote and then we'll go on to the second one um ursular steve would either of you like to move the first one um if you don't have the language in front of you i can read it sorry all right i'm happy to move if you could read you okay so ursula why don't you read it and steve will move it how's that yeah let's give it handy i don't because it wasn't all of them it wasn't okay so that's all right i'll read it so this is a motion to approve the expenditure of up
219to 165 thousand dollars from the williams college gift to mount greylock regional school over the next 12 to 24 months for the purpose of purchasing capital equipment for the care of the playing fields at mount greylock regional school so steve has moved would anyone like to second first level second and joe do you want to give us a bit of an explanation about this before we move into discussion uh sure the the team within within mount greylock has been working on this for for the last year or so and the finance committee has been reviewing for the last few meetings the the plan is to acquire the correct equipment to be able to bring all of our turf maintenance in-house which will have two benefits the first off is that given the scale of the
220of the campus needs and the very specific ways that we should be caring for these fields it's more cost effective for us to do it in-house the the second is that we're going to be able to do a job that we really just could not expect of a service provider that is mowing many properties commercial and otherwise for many customers this is all part of a plan that really respects the the trajectory that the the school committee and the communities around us have had over the last five to six years with respect to expectations for how playing fields are maintained and what that means for availability and durability and and just the general quality of the fields so this is one big step in that direction it is a significant investment however when you look
221at the five to ten year life span of equipment like this and the ways that it will overall save and contracted services costs that we will need to incur during those years um we'll be in much better shape both in quality and cost than we than we have been in the past thank you um one of the questions that i asked in the subcommittee is whether we would have a place to store the equipment once we purchase it and i believe the answer was that we would does that the answer is yes the um the contractor is initiating the process now of erecting that facility's building that should be on the edge of the campus if you're in the parking lot looking towards john t allen field and our softball and baseball fields it'll be
222tucked into the left left corner there per the plan other questions or comments i'll just comment carrie just to uh you know we discussed this at length at our finance committee meeting this afternoon and um just to kind of sum it all up it seems like save money better quality it just overall seems like a really good move so i definitely support it i just wanted to put that out there great all right um seeing no other discussion let's move to roll call vote motion uh has been made all those in favor o and i constantine elephant eye green eye malloy eye miller i great thank you so the next motion is to support an expenditure from the williams college gift to mount greylock regional school of 29 77 610.77 for the pair of nevco
223scoreboards as presented in the packet for john t allen field and the varsity baseball field i believe you all have these descriptions in your packet and one thing i didn't remember from the previous motion is that already been voted in the finance subcommittee so really only needed a second but no harm done so this motion is on the floor of the school committee would anyone like to second it i would second it all right thanks curtis um discussion joe would you like to say anything about this just these two scoreboards will replace the scoreboards that are that are currently serving those two fields um they will be the new scoreboards will be of the same era and quality and overall look and feel and operation as the brand new scoreboard for the varsity softball field
224that will be going up over the next couple of weeks so we'll we'll have a trio of scoreboards within this segment of the campus that will serve the current soccer and lacrosse teams any future football team or other teams that you utilize that rectangular playing field that is john t allen and the varsity baseball field for for the next couple decades hopefully jose thanks carrie thanks joe this uh just curious about how this could mesh with the you know with the potential for a new new field um would this be you know infrastructure that would be superfluous if a new field gets built or is it something that can be moved or what sorry you're shaking there's news to share it's it it's a good question certainly for the varsity baseball field i think that
225that's understood that that's that's not going anywhere i think every every expectation for john t allen field is that it will remain an important field on the campus it will host games regularly um whenever we have concurrent gains it would need to perform that function for for both both varsity teams jv teams that are playing and so investing in a new scoreboard for that field makes all the sense in the world hey um joe question i should have thought of this earlier but um that makes a lot of sense is the new scoreboard in will that be part of the new new field or will that be something that comes down the line later that we when a new field is built in the in the location for a new field that field will also
226require a scoreboard so at that point we would have the four scoreboards on campus yeah and so then we'll approve we'll have to look at another purchase it's not part of what we already talked about for the yes and the scoreboard for that field has been in every iteration of the plan for the field a scoreboard has um has been there on occasion due to cost concerns um the scoreboard has been thought of as something that might be donated through sponsorship and things like that but it's always been a part of the plan that needs to be there cool okay any other questions all right um so we have a motion and a second and we will take a roll call vote all those in favor oh and i constantine eye opened by an eye
227green eye malloy aye milla i [Music] thank you that motion passes unanimously all right um the finance committee really uh hasn't been working on the last couple of meetings much other than the budget and these other items that we've been voting on so i will yield the rest of the finance committee time to the superintendent unless there's anything i'm missing steve ursula we're good okay thanks gary yep all right so now we have the superintendent report thank you carrie and thank you everyone um i i will keep this brief tonight not kept anything else brief personally but i but i will keep this we we just wanted to do a brief uh covid 19 pandemic safety update uh great news tuesday's pool testing that we got back on wednesday came back with zero positive pools
228that was i i don't know the last time that that has happened if ever in our in our brief history of uh of running pool testing so it's very exciting to see that come back yesterday as we we reported cases to the department of elementary and secondary ed we reported only two cases to the decision zero cases from lanesboro one from williamstown elementary and one from mount greylock and again that's a much incredibly smaller number than we have seen in in the recent past or the distant past this friday tomorrow it's a half day for kids is the final day we will require masks we really appreciate the patients that give us this last week i think our data indicated that we probably could have made this move last monday uh the reality is we
229needed a week and almost a full week to catch up with the requests for for accommodations uh from from employees uh and also lots of conversations with families about what this was going to mean and what it was going to look like so we appreciate the patience we did need that lead time of one week as we knew we would we will want to be very clear we will be continuing our testing programs both our pool testing program and our at-home testing program i'm really grateful to uh to to the folks that have been participating in pull testing week after week after week after week we're almost on a first name basis with the with the students that come to tend to come to our tables uh to do this i'm just really grateful to
230those students for for for just making a little bit of time to do this so we will be continuing the pull testing program and the at-home testing program as long as the state continues to support those programs so if you're in those programs please continue if you're not in and you would feel better if you were um please do so and uh of course i'm very grateful to the folks the the the the group of staff members who were meeting to discuss this the physicians that that helped us out uh and and to all of you and everybody in the community for their input and of course we will continue to watch our school data our regional data town data and um and to make sure that our numbers are staying where where we're doing
231the safe and appropriate things and i think really the next order of business is is with within uh a week or two i would anticipate that we'll be returning to normal school lunches in uh in the cafeteria um so you know that that we're just going to keep another eye on because it's another level of contact but we're uh very grateful for for the support in the patients to get to the day that we're going to experience on monday so thank you great hey jake any questions for for jake yeah jose all right jose and then steve okay i'll be brief steven sorry the uh jake and apologies there was uh there's a little bit of chaos happening in my house with little people so i might have missed if you if you shared this
232news but um could you provide us out with an update if you could um with regards to uh negotiations with majia um with respect to the the potential for a vaccine mandate uh yeah so so you know we we had we had negotiated a a vaccine mandate uh in advance of bringing it to you last month and um you all you know we had an executive uh an executive session conversation if you will remember that that vaccine mandate did include uh out of respect for our individual employees um with majia it did include folks could opt out based on religious belief uh or conviction uh or or with um information from or with an excuse from a doctor and i do not have the at last count and this is going back to to last
233friday i believe we had 25 individual employees who had filed um paperwork with us to be relieved of that mandate and and we had several folks who opted to go ahead and get vaccinated as a result of that mandate thank you jake and then these are numbers that joe i think typically shows us just just the um you know the recent percentages of our staff that have uh provided evidence that they have been fully fully vaccinated have we maybe it's too soon to see an impact of of this mandate but but have those numbers shifted at all in response to these latest developments they have shifted a bit i do not have updated figures for you tonight sorry i didn't that was not on my list coming into this meeting unfortunately it's a shame joe
234you seem like you have so much time in your hands but we'll we'll sort it out next time no thank you thank you both joe's slacking a little bit here jose is having too much fun all right uh did steve have a yes steve has a had a question as well thank you yes so um i'll try to make this briefly as we always seem to say before we launch into long conversations so you know first of all you know these numbers are absolutely terrific and i think it's an indication of the great work that everyone has been doing but i would like to use this as an opportunity to reiterate my concern with how we are making decisions as a district that i do not believe we are making decisions based on sound science
235at numis junctions and i think a lot of our policies in the past have been designed more to make us feel like things are being done than to actually be effective in doing things and just as some quick examples just to remember how long we had kids masked outdoors to remember the changes in policy we had before spring break last year and now the fact that we knew massachusetts was going to remove the mass community by february 15th we had prepared policies from the masc and yet new york city still beat us by i think a week in removing the mass mandates and again you know in the greater scheme of things you know one more week two more weeks is not huge but to me it's a larger point of really thinking what are
236we doing for our policies and really looking to see are they effective are they really solving the problems that we want them to do or are they just making us feel more comfortable and so just going forward i've i've said this numerous times but i really wish we would point to scientific studies or say that there are none or when you talk to the state when they send us mandates or recommendations that they provide justifications for these policies so that we can better understand as a committee when we have to make these decisions when we talk to our constituents when we talk to our children why are we doing what we're doing and so you know in terms of the masks you know are the masks that we have your kids wearing are they really
237that effective in the classrooms in terms of doing what they're doing and so it would be really helpful as a committee member to have information like that as we're making our decisions so thank you thanks steve curtis and then jose uh just to speak to a couple points that steve brought up he and i both teach uh variations of mathematics i teach to sixth graders and he he teaches to uh any and everybody which is way beyond my skill level but uh i have been pretty immersed in data surrounding this pandemic there's a new study that just came out from the american association of pediatricians uh covering 61 school districts with 1.1 million students and over 150 000 staff and they tracked through contact tracing schools that had optional mass policies versus schools that had
238mass mandates and schools with mass mandates had an 86 reduction in secondary infections as track through contact tracing uh compared to schools with the optional masking and in terms of us being a week behind manhattan i'm well new york in general but manhattan being the major population of it uh they're so much more vaccinated than we are i'm totally fine with them being a week ahead of us uh there's a lot of data readily available on all of this and i think we looked at it and made some really good decisions and of course i would like to err on the side of caution during a pandemic especially closing in on a million american lives lost to it and i think moving forward we'll continue to look at the data that's more and more available
239uh showing the efficacy of masking and the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in terms of reducing and preventing hospitalization and death by a huge margin and i'm really proud of the work that we've done and looking forward to the work we continue to do to keep our kids in the schools and keep covid out of our schools thanks curtis oh jose i am going to do nothing but second uh kurdish uh just shared with us you know i wanted to you know just to acknowledge um steve's um i think concerns and perhaps even frustrations with regards to how our district has made decisions with regards to covet i suspect that in the years to come there will be dissertations upon dissertations written about the various uh you know an efficacy of the various mechanisms
240we employ to keep ourselves safe i think in real time when we are dealing with so much uncertainty with regards to this pandemic and our you know our main aim is to keep as many of us as well as we can possibly be and to stay alive and there are um you know kids in our school district in our preschool age that now you know for whom a vaccine is not available to them there are a number of different living situations in our communities you know from whom uh exposure to this uh virus could be incredibly life-threatening so i just went to second curtis and applaud um the incredible efforts by our administration to both attempt to balance the safety and well-being of everyone in our district while at the same time trying to make
241living learning i should say as comfortable and as enjoyable as possible uh while being while being together in person so thank you thank you jake thanks to your team thanks jose steve i see your hand but ursula you had your hand up as well did you want to say something before no i had the i had the thumbs up symbol oh thumbs up sorry okay no worries um steve one more comment and then we'll show on let me just look at him first so you know again i agree with a lot of what's being said i understand wanting to err on the side of caution and you're criticize i would love for you to submit the study you mentioned to uh packet or you know to something like that so that can be discussed i
242have other ones that i would you know love to put in as well i would love to have some of the conversations related to these scientific issues to try to help us make the right decisions when we have choices and i just want to push back a little bit that this goes back to the unintended consequences when we changed our policies last year you know against our procedure of having a first and second read right before spring break we created a situation where rather than having college i'm sorry rather than having people looking at colleges by driving from one school to another if they wanted to come back and play they ended up having to fly from boston to school one fly back to boston fly to school too so we actually created a situation
243where we had people incentivized to some extent to do riskier behavior in order to get data points on how they wanted to spend the next four years of their lives so what the point i'm trying to make is i understand that these are very complicated these are high-risk situations but we need to have an honest assessment of what are the risks for the various options that we are choosing what are the consequences what are the trade-offs and i am not always convinced that the decisions we're making are always in response to the best science but often in terms of things that often look good but are not as effective as we would like them to be and just going forward i really want us to be able to point to this is why we believe
244this is effective as a great example i thought it was wonderful that we were doing contact tracing and i thought it was even better when we realized that this was not providing valuable data for the amount of you know time effort and cost that it was that there are better things we can do i'll i'll just leave it at that thank you steve um all right let's move on to the next item jake were you all set with your report okay so the next item is the mount greylock regional school district calendar for the year 20 oh goodness 22 23. um and this is yours as well jake yeah thank you carrie um so you you all have had this calendar for a month now um and uh at least in draft form and i
245just wanted to to point out for those of you who whose eyes are getting tired like mine alright and large just a little bit because we want to focus in on really the first four months of the school year the 29th and 30th of august this is not a change from the last time you saw this are professional development days the 31st which is a wednesday is our first day of school for students in grades 1 through 12. this is a change actually if you if you'll move ahead into september and look at friday the first day for our pre-k students side-by-side students and our kindergarten students is going to be friday september 2nd and that is that has moved up several days from where we had it in the first draft of the calendar
246um we just um just just really not um those are half days for for our youngest students but we just really could not justify starting those students uh as much later after their their older uh peers as as they were so that's one change from the last time you saw this to now a second pretty substantive change is if you'll notice on monday september 5th and tuesday september 6th uh monday the 5th is obviously labor day which is of course a holiday the sixth is not traditionally a holiday but the sixth is primary election day and when we look at the paperwork that the town submits to williamstown elementary school for four-town voting to occur in the gymnasium of williamstown elementary school when we look at the numbers of adults who could be in our
247school building that day i become very very concerned the principal becomes very very concerned the staff and i think parents and guardians and caretakers many of them become very very concerned about is is this really as safe as it can be and so you will notice that on tuesday the sixth which is primary election day and then monday uh are i'm going to go down to november november 8th which is tuesday which is general election day and we do have some big elections coming up we have uh um governor and lieutenant governor locally um or probably or here massachusetts or the biggies those are two days that we are on on on september 6th we are going to be closed that's a day where school staff will not report um on on tuesday november 8th
248that will be a day that students do not report it's a day off for our for our students and it will be a professional development day for our staff um and and i apologize to to mount greylock and to lanesboro elementary school that that they're getting these days um but but really we're a district now what we do in one building we do in all of our buildings in terms of inclement weather in terms of things that impact safety and so that's that's a pretty substantive change and we wanted you to be aware of that before you look at this um everything else is pretty standard everything else sits where uh where it it tends to traditionally sit until we get to june 10th on saturday which is graduation day for the class of and
249then uh if we have an extraordinarily nice winter wednesday june 14th is our is our last day of school next year so share that happy to have questions happy to hear concerns but we wanted to get this moving forward so families could begin to plan their summers carrie i see your hand up uh yeah thanks jake so i guess my concern would be having the pre-k in kindergarten in for just one day prior to a four-day weekend yes we we the the the two elementary principals and i have have talked about this they have talked about it with their early childhood staff we really we we understand i understand what i think your concern is which is that seems like a very choppy start um the other alternative was that you know they were they
250would be starting on the seventh and we just we we felt like that was too late we felt like this was a day that those kids could get school they're starting the same week those who have older siblings they're starting the same week as their older siblings and at the end of the day the principals felt very strongly that that that was a preferable day to the seventh and what is the reason they can't start on the same day as the rest of the school uh there there are some preliminary things that need to happen and some meetings that need to take place with with the younger students and their families that i think many many districts by tradition do start the youngest students a little bit later than uh than older students in the
251building so if cindy and nolan were still on i would ask them to jump in because they could speak about it with much more expertise than i could gary okay uh jose i have uh what will certainly be the most trivial sounding question to be asked in our time together this evening but i'm gonna ask jake uh because uh this is not me you have to trust me this is not me that's asking this question but i've had some constituents um [Music] ask me about uh about opportunities to align school breaks in uh february and april either one of those weeks with spring breaks uh that would be occurring uh on the mcla or williams uh academic calendars um so i think i'm asking this question for the record it's not the first time it's
252come up jose it's it's it comes up every few years and it's not me that's asking us that's okay you're allowed to ask and and it's not trivial it's actually a really interesting idea and it would serve many of our families uh very well but uh and and jose just for the record i i got hit with this last year by a dozen different individuals um and uh you know i i think the the the breaks are where they traditionally are for for for some good reasons that that i think most families expect i do get the inconvenience for many families whether they work at mcla or williams or they work elsewhere and and sometimes that goes along alongside of that question is collapsing the two weeks into one week in march and i m
253my experience over the years suggests that by even though you know we've had the the december early january break by the time you get to to that end of february people seem to be ready-ish for a break um i know there are some folks who would say pre-covered that those are that's a good opportunity to get everybody the heck out of school during sort of one of the peaks of flu season although i'll tell you speaking very personally i would take a week in march starting on monday very gladly right now at 10 10 on on march 10th but thank you for asking the question i just just doing my job jake thank you get it steve see your hand up steve you might be muted we cannot sorry okay sorry i had actually lowered
254my hand because jake had said exactly what i was going to bring up that our health professionals had told us it's valuable to have the break in february although as somebody who teaches at the williams college i would of course love some alignment but i would prefer i prefer a later start to the day even more than that all right we need go ahead gary can i can i just circle back for two seconds nolan pratt was good enough to text me the the two day that the extra days the extra time for k and pre-k are for kindergarten screening and for pre-k parent meetings so teachers can have some familiarity with their kids before they uh and their families before they come in just because of the the big transition of not being in
255school to now being in school so thank you great thanks uh we need to vote so would someone like to make a motion to approve the calendar as presented i moved julia moves and ursula seconds all right um is there any further discussion saying none hearing none um roll call vote to approve the school calendar oh and i constantine eye opened by an eye green eye malloy eye miller eye that motion passes unanimously thank you all right upcoming meetings we have a policy meeting at 5 p.m on march 16th which is next week and then a finance committee at 4pm on march 24th um are there any other meetings that have come up since the agenda was printed great is there any thing else not reasonably anticipated not as far as i know and that
256brings us to our last agenda item which is a gender request for future meetings does anyone have any agenda requests curtis uh can i request of uh the superintendent an update on the crystallization of the job description for the uh position we discussed at length tonight and an end to winter also if you could arrange that that would be great all right are there any other agenda requests actually carrie yes so we've never really i think talked as a school committee of you know what to do when there are gender requests so for instance i strongly support curtis's request should i just say so now so that when the chair and the superintendent schedule this that they know that there's two people supporting this that's fine that's that that's fine we you're right we've never
257discussed it and they're not subject to a vote so right so it might it might not be bad just to have the sense of the committee i mean i think this is something that will be well received but i i think this is an excellent idea i i look forward to continuing such conversations yeah okay good all right so um unless there's anything else i will entertain a motion to adjourn who's gonna jump at that ralph i'm sorry we don't take public comment at the end we we only take it at the beginning so um it's not on the agenda to take it at the end you're welcome to write to the school committee though we would always be happy to receive your your comments uh who would like to make a motion to adjourn
258so miller i will make the motion with many things bye go ahead go ahead steve so i will second with thanks to everyone who's worked so hard preparing everything especially the budget and the work on these positions all right so julia moves steve second and this is um we're gonna move right to a vote roll call o-n-i dolphin by an eye green eye great thank you so much everyone and have a good rest of your evening it is 16 p.m and that motion passed unanimously thank you blink of an eye goodnight everyone