MGRSD School Committee 10/14/2021

001oh cool thanks jake good you're welcome nice to see you you too thanks there's curtis hi joe carrie hi curtis hello hi carrier so we're waiting for jose and then we should be good to go good christina uh molly's here so i think we're did i just see her name oh there you there you are you actually showed up so we have our student representative how you doing molly i'm great how are you guys good good thanks we so jose where's jose um curtis carrie and steve oh there's jose great um just so you know ursula is not coming tonight i think you guys saw that email and julia will arrive around 7. but we're all here so i think we can get started i'd like to call the mount greylock regional school district school

002committee to order it's thursday october 14 2021 and it is 601 pm we are meeting remotely via zoom this meeting will take place virtually pursuant to the law signed by governor baker on june 16 2021 an act extending certain coven 19 measures adopted during the state of emergency which includes an extension until april 1 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of his march 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law this meeting will be broadcast on willy net tv channel 1302 and posted to the mount greylock regional school district youtube channel 24 hours after the meeting 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

003responsibility through high expectations and cooperation resulting in lifelong learning and personal growth next up on our agenda is public comment and i had two um folks sign up for a public comment today ann o'connor and susan abrams just a reminder there's three minutes per car comment please state your name town and the agenda item to which you'll be speaking and if anyone else who's here would like to make public comment why while the two that i call on next um are speaking you can raise your hand using the reactions raise your hand button so ann o'connor i'm going to call on you first because i got your request first thank you christina thank you for taking my comment and i want to preface it by saying i know what it's like to serve on these

004committees i thank you for your work the many volunteer hours you're putting in uh and i know what it's like to have people um come to your meetings and be mad at you um but that's what i'm going to do tonight i'm mad um i'm speaking so i'm ann o'connor i'm from williamstown and i'm speaking to item number eight on your agenda uh the discussion of the um your next steps on the artificial turf field i understand there's not a vote tonight but i thought i would address the concern anyway um because i am concerned about the decision and i think it's an irresponsible one um last month i watched you debate and vote to carry on like lurch forward with the next steps on this project that has been under discussion for years i

005want to say tonight that it is not too late for you to pause for you to change your minds it is always an open question and i would urge each of you to consider to reconsider and ask yourselves why you're so convinced it's the right project for mount vraylock at this time we are seeing day to day the effects of the climate crisis i consider this decision an irresponsible one at this time in the face of the obvious evidence of the climate crisis uh i would also add the growing um omnipresence of plastics uh as something that we have to actively work to reduce the amount of plastics in our environment uh at this time so i see our children of today being more engaged on climate issues than even many adults they can see

006that it's their future that is is threatened i it's not that i don't understand why you might in in normal circumstances have wanted a playing field an artificial field at mount greylock it's really in the face of the environmental impacts the known environmental impacts the carbon footprint of this kind of project that i i just don't understand how you can even advance this project now um i feel like there are children in our world who are dying from the effects of the climate crisis and you are telling our kids that what they need is a huge plastic field i um want to say that many of us have been engaging on this issue for years and we have consistently talked about organic natural grass natural turf management as a viable option and you your as

007a whole your committee has never seriously engaged with that um i do want to recognize that even your past votes have been split so not all of you and even some of you have gone taken one position and then switched um and i apologize you're at the three minute mark i think um thanks i think others will address a few other of my specific points and i think i've made my sentiments clear so thank you thank you very much okay next up on public comment we have susan abrams mute sorry about that hi there uh i want to um reiterate when ann said about your service to the community and i also uh i hope you've all at least seen that i sent a fairly long letter with a lot of research and details about

008artificial turf fields and i apologize for making that letter so long there's so much material that i've been finding about the risks associated with these fields i am a former mount greylock sports parent so i'm very familiar with the concerns about playability and about um you know people wanting to get out on the fields and but i would also say that our population the population at least when my kids the 15 or so years that i was experiencing the school um was not an unathletic or under under active group of children so i think that the with the very poor field that was there right now children were getting a lot of outside time a lot of activity and with a improved natural grass fields i think that could be better i don't think it

009takes an artificial field to do that um i wanted to also remind the committee that this community williamstown made a commitment to net zero um carbon emit carbon equivalent emissions by 2050 which means we need to include that consideration in all of our projects uh moving forward from starting now we won't get there unless we start right now taking that into account and artificial fields do have a significant contribution to um greenhouse gas emissions whereas a grass field is sequesters carbon even with the mowing and the um other care that it requires it still comes out beneficial to the environment i've also recently since your last discussion discovered that pretty much all of the um artificial turf carpets the grass blades and the backing because of the way they're made the extrusion process they all

010pretty much have some kind of pfas material that is needed to help them not stick to the equipment and i know the measurements of that material once it's made is debatable but um looking at the the scientific reports about that it's pretty clear that every single carpet has some kind of pfas associated with it which potentially could leach into our water system and the soil around it into our environment and i think that we all know from our unfortunate neighbors in hoosick falls that that's a pretty serious consideration the last thing that i think where there has been new development since the last time you guys discussed this was about the rate of injury on fields like this um both uh orthopedic like lower extremity injuries and concussions the recent it's hard to tease this

011out because the old fields were definitely harder and more important newer fields are definitely better in this regard but a lot of the comparisons have been made with very compacted and poorly maintained grass fields so when you really compare the new fields with a really good grass field what i'm seeing is that there are more concussions and there are more lower extremity acl pcl type tears um with football with lacrosse actually more abrasions with lacrosse which is also raising the nature i apologize susan you're the three minute mark okay so anyways thank you i hope you'll read my be able to read my letter and thank you very much for this opportunity to share the information i appreciate all your work thank you susan uh stephanie i see your hand is up i there hi

012thanks i i'm not really prepared every month i say i'm finished with artificial turf but i'm so inspired by my colleagues ann and susan and others who continue to talk about this issue i've been working with a group of people who are working on developing support for pfas legislation in massachusetts we're trying to get it banned in a number of products it's amazing how many products include pfas from food containers paper food containers clothing carpeting artificial turf fire fighting equipment it's it's ubiquitous and it's terrible and even if it doesn't contaminate the site at mount greylock which it may very well do there is contamination where those products are made and where water is polluted and we will be contributing to that i i i just can't see how our community really thinks that this

013is so important that we are willing to do that there's no way that we can ask for a field as susan said that doesn't contain pfas it's the way they're manufactured and the united states has been trying to ban pfas but there's thousands of those chemicals and the way that we regulate chemicals in our country is is ludicrous like we wait until harm has been caused and then we tried to investigate it anyway the new legislation is trying to look at pfas as a whole class of chemicals rather than one chemical that then some minor molecule gets changed and it's back on the market the other thing that we've recently done in williamstown is ban plastic bags but somehow the school thinks it's okay to put the equivalent of millions of plastic bags on the

014field we will not be able to recycle this i know somebody mentioned at the last school committee meeting that hey you know it must be a good business to recycle these fields it's not and recycling markets are a mess and uh they're just not it's so much cheaper for us to make new products that there isn't a market for used products and we are not going to have any kind of recycling facility that's going to make it a viable option in the near future when it's time to recycle this field so it will either be incinerated at a waste to energy plant in pittsfield or it will be uh left in a landfill um and i you know i don't know i wish and hope that you can find a way to not install this

015field not send the message to our kids and our community that this is the way that we feel we should deal with the environment thank you stephanie okay i do not see any further public comment so um up next we have our student representative update which is molly sullivan hello um thank you guys for having me i'm excited to be back um i will just start up with a quick update a couple updates like um our sports teams are heading into postseason playoff kind of um area time um we have a couple teams who are pretty high seated so that's really exciting um the shakespeare um performance and practices are up and running so it's really great to see them around and they've been kind of doing a mix of inside and outside so it's

016great to see them um a lot of our clubs have been meeting for the first time there was a book club meeting tonight um student council is up and running we have a lot of sub committees going right now um and i want to thank mira for coming last time um that was really nice for her to step in um in terms of what you guys talked about with mira last time you guys had asked her um what she had brought up um school start time and how that's like that we're kind of looking uh to pursue this year um and you guys had asked her if um we would be talking with other schools about um this and seeing what their start time is and what their perspective on it is and um mount

017anthony in bennington vermont had actually reached out last spring to us about um kind of just the student council's meeting and talking about all topics um and we kind of that's last spring had said like hey like we're we're definitely willing to do this now it's not the time we were a little bit flustered with just being back in school um but we're hoping to reach back out to them um and meet and then um we're hoping to also reach out to some berkshire county schools in the coming um couple months to talk about uh their start times and other things um going on uh and then we kind of just have our eyes the student council their eyes focus forward a little bit we're looking to do a community service project which we haven't

018done in a really long time um due to the pandemic so we've kind of been brainstorming that um but other than that that's all i have it's been going really well and i'd say school has been pretty smooth recently so thank you guys great thank you molly any questions for molly molly i would look into dover sherburne regional high school because i believe they went did a whole thing on students on early start times and i think they have a wealth of information that you guys might be able to uh go through if you're interested okay awesome thank you so much you're welcome okay no more questions for molly so we're moving on to approval of minutes and we're starting with august 12 2021. do i have a motion to approve the august 2021 minutes

019some move miller moves do i have a second open vine second open by in seconds any discussion carrie so i have um two general comments and then a couple of specific um comments my general two comments are that it would be really nice number one to standardize the way we use names in minutes uh first name initial period last name and just leave it at that it's all over the board and it's really disconcerting that sometimes mr pratt is nolan and sometimes he's dr pratt and sometimes he's pratt and just as an example so um i just find it um unsettling when i'm reading the minutes that there is no standardization and that's through all the sets of minutes the second is that this is and i'm gonna channel julia here but this reads more

020like a transcript than a set of minutes and i know we've had this conversation multiple times in school committee where if there is a recording this should be a general summary and not a line item detail of everything that went on in the meeting so i'm going to leave it at that for that particular comment um so then on page four um at the bottom the second pair or sorry the last paragraph over 24 credit in-person students were taught by mount greylock's staff and america in the world i don't know what that last reference is in america in the world i am not sure either carrie we'll try to track that down if that was part of the summer school conversation and the name of a course maybe that was offered during the summer program

021but we'll try to track that down jake i don't know if you have any insight into it i was just going to say america in the world is our u.s history course um right i don't know the contents in which it was used here but that's what it is maybe someone needs to go back to the video um and see why that's there in that in in that way um so page five the end of the first paragraph the very beginning of the second um mg mount greylock maybe we should refer to mount greylock as the district across the board again standardizing how we reference the district would be really helpful so people aren't trying to i mean again i'm thinking if someone comes to these minutes a couple of years five years from now

022um it would just be helpful if there were some systems um page six to seven i think it might be helpful to remove a part of a sentence that just doesn't make sense i i know what it was because i think i said it but the way it's written here doesn't make a lot of sense so viewers were reminded that the j policies on the website are the policies that would be pertinent to this conversation and then i think this part can just be removed as there was work done during full regional process to make j policies relevant pre-k to grade 12. i don't think it was that they were made relevant i think they were made i don't know what they were they were um revised they were [Music] um joe do you remember

023i mean maybe just say that they insured coverage of all i mean i would probably be too worried i would say they yeah they covered all the needs of a pre-k through 12 school district okay so i mean i think that phrase could just be removed or or it could be revised but it makes it right the way it is um [Music] page nine at the very top i know jake um used the opportunity to announce that lindsay was uh named the massachusetts interscholactic athletic association board president but that's not her actual title when it comes to these minutes her title is you know director of athletics and co-curricular so that should be changed page 10 um the very middle of the page regarding face coverings um the last acronym um is mea it should

024be majia i believe mg ea i don't know if you want me to go on christina or if i should just what i'm wondering is because i think we generally accepted in our last discussion about minutes that it the minute should be more of minutes rather than a transcript um do we need to go through these line by line because if these were written differently well we've already rejected these ones so i think it would be good to approve them so that there is a record a written record of the meeting moving forward we do have a set of minutes that is also more of a transcript so those are the minutes from september 9th so if we want to reject those we could do that okay um so would it make sense to um

025accept this motion with changes and you can provide any additional detailed changes sure i'll provide them to um the superintendent and yeah and you get the gist of what i'm i'm going for so i will just ask steve and curtis if they are okay with that i'm fine with that okay great thank you so we have um a motion to approve august 12 2021 minutes um with changes um by miller seconded by elfin vine um we've had our discussion all in favor uh conray i have to go first green oh curtis sorry go ahead sorry no i don't i don't like it's jose first jose go ahead it's been so long you've got to remember the order again all right constantine eye elephant by an eye green eye okay great those minutes that motion is

026passed uh moving on to august 24th 2021 special session do i have a motion to approve the august 24th 2021 special session minutes camilla so move miller move so i have a second elton buying seconds discussion carrie yeah so i would just say the same thing that moving forward maybe we could standardize the names to first name initial and last name so it would be like c green and e or what you get the idea my only act my substantive comment is on page four at the very bottom um accepted as a friendly amendment i think i learned in an masc workshop that there's no such thing as a friendly amendment like an amendment is just an amendment so we could just strike the word friendly okay so if somebody does not accept the amendment

027they just can't the rest of the the rest of the committee cannot override and accept that to the original motion it has right i think you'd yeah you'd have to vote down the whole motion you'd have to go down the whole motion and then and then someone else could amend it and then move it as amended kind of thing yeah you'd have to just you just move it anew because you voted it down and then you can just move it with that already incorporated so i just went online says in parliamentary procedure a friendly amendment is an amendment to emotion under debate that is perceived by all parties as an enhancement to the original motion often only as clarification of intent so you know okay yeah so then maybe the the um maybe it's not

028specifically robert's rules i think we'd have to look that up right um but that does have a meaning outside the meaning is that there doesn't seem to be anybody present who's opposing to and it's more than just the person who i guess is right the original shaker mover so the thing is that we don't take i see so it's an amendment that isn't voted on essentially so now we're getting into the the weeds of it but if you move emotion and then there's an amendment to it you technically should vote on the amendment and we don't do that because unless there's like a dispute over the amendment and that's the whole point of the amendment that's the whole point of the friendly amendment there's no vote okay right okay so we're keeping the friendly amendment

029sure okay so um i have a motion moved by steve seconded by curtis any further discussion all in favor connery i constantine i opened by an eye green hi okay that motion passes do i have a motion to approve the august 28th 2021 workshop miller so move okay miller moves elephant bind second open thine seconds any discussion is that a question it says that the slides will be shared were the slides shared from the workshop did you ever get them we did yeah we did receive them from stacy i can forward those again to you okay now if they're there they're somewhere back in the emails i just didn't see it thank you are they are they posted on the district page under the uh meeting packet i don't know i didn't look there i'm

030checking right now what was the date of this 28th august okay workshop with msc all right so i see some slides there i'm trying to see if i'm trying to see if everything is there my internet connection is slow it doesn't look like the whole it doesn't look like everything is there so it would be good to add that to the meeting documents online okay all right any other discussion all in favor conrie eye constantine eye elephant eye green eyes eye okay it actually might be there i did see something saying evaluating the superintendent so that is there so maybe the stuff is all there great okay do i have a motion to approve the september 9th 2021 minutes i'm going for the clean sweep no miller moves alphabet seconds five seconds any discussion so

031i'm gonna suggest that we reject these minutes based on the fact that they're not that they're not the format that we're looking for and that julia has been advocating for in terms of um summary of discussion rather than every detail um but that's just my opinion um if i do have um edits to them so if the committee passes them i will pass along my edits to the superintendent any jose i'm i'm uh going back and forth between the cartoon hand and the real hand um yeah i i agree with uh with carrie um but there's there's an exception that you know the the meetings that we had before us for september 9th um are more functional or at least more functionally effective i should say than the previous and edited meeting minutes from august

03212th i believe so i think my concern is if if this goes back for editing you know will we get what we just received as edits like i guess i'm confused about what's going on in the process or what is going on wrong in the process of editing meeting minutes yeah i'll jump in here jose and say we we do have a new person who is the minute taker and it is it is very complex work and i think she um is uh working hard to try to get the committee what they want and we refine it a little bit every meeting um and so and then stacy jumps in and and is has a has a heavy hand in some of this re-editing to get things a little more to the form that you

033want um because she's full-time and the person that actually does the minutes is very part-time got it thanks jake i mean in in that regard i mean given that well they seem functionally effective and in the informative at least more so than uh minutes that we just we just approved um i i you know i would argue or welcome a vote to approve these meeting minutes and then to accept the amendments that kerry [Music] will recommend to us hopefully so i i would support that um i actually i'm you know different than most people i actually like the detailed minutes i think a lot of this is not so much of a discussion but there are huge parts of this that are just you know enumerating facts facts facts there are other parts that could

034be trimmed and i would just say i would support these minutes and then just tell the minute writers in the future that they can you know condense them a little bit further but this is a nice you know this is a good easy summary and there were a lot of points of substance that we did discuss carrie curtis are you okay with that okay so we have a motion from steve seconded by curtis um and we will um carrie will send her edits um out so um all in favor henry eye constantine eye elephant eye green eye miller eye okay that motion passes thank you okay moving on to principal updates um we have lanesboro elementary up first good evening everyone um i am a single dog parent this morning so if my dogs interrupt

035i am sorry they've been pretty quiet so far so hopefully they keep up the trend so i have two pieces for you tonight i have an update for the school like what's going on at lanesboro elementary and i have some um a brief mcas update so at lansboro right now we have a wyvern week coming up if you do not know what a wyvern is it is the school mascot you will also see them in game of thrones game of thrones has it wrong they are not dragons they are wyverns and each class does a small project uh the art class a couple years ago if you ever walk into lanesboro there's a huge color wyvern right on the wall right as you walk in that was done by the art class two years ago

036uh there's coats of arms there's coloring it's just a great way to build school camaraderie and to you know reinforce our principles of what it means to be at lansville elementary next we have a grade four split happening we have 24 students in our grade four class and a lot of move-ins over the summer really tipped the flow of the need of the class we're gonna break it into two groups of twelve the interview committee has met and we have started the process of bringing in a new fourth grade teacher field trips to hopkins forest we have three classes going to hopkins forest the science curriculum at hopkins forest that it offers for the williams college is great so we're excited to have students get out of the building for an academic experience for the

037first time in a you know a really long time upcoming events we have the pumpkin contest so students carve paint pumpkins they bring them in on october 27th they sit in the main lobby and then at the end of the week they go home they're judged they get awards for most creative best you know best etc etc on october 30th the pto is doing a trunk or treat uh from i think it's three to four it is people decorate their trunks they hand out candy it's just a really cool event that the pto does and then last two pieces we've had eight wyverns of the week so far so we've had eight students of recognition for being just academic excellence and a good friend and then conferences are coming up on november 11 um november

0384th and november 5th the 4th is 4 30 to 7 30 and the fifth is one to four pm before i dive into the mcats data what questions do you have for me on this first part i can't see you no nolan i this is carrie sorry did you say that the grade 4 split was so that there would be 12 students in each of two classes yeah so the break is from 24 to 12. the the need of that group is significant so being able to break it down into two groups is really going to allow these students to be successful great thank you are there any other questions i can i can only see jay christina and jose all right i'll move on so the mcats last year we kind of answered to

039do two things one just have the students successfully take the mcats given the circumstances of last year everything that the students went through having them prepared and ready to take the mcas was one of the goals we had um and that being said we had all the two students participate in the impasse uh the remote piece of it all was another monster that students had to conquer which they did so i the fact that teachers and students came together and got this done was amazing and the second piece was to determine the gaps in learning that were caused by the disruption of last school year and the previous school year uh so to really look at what happened we i'm going to use 2019 versus 20 21 so it's a two year gap it shows

040the trends uh one thing that is important to notice that if you look at our like our current grade five class each student is about worth four percent on that graph so two students could swing that graph completely in a different direction um but i do think if you look at the grade five ela graph that's kind of what we wanted to look like very little red if not no red a little bit of yellow mostly green and blue and that's what we aim to do with each group so with that that's how we that's why i looked at the data the data i also did an item analysis to really see the specific gaps that we missed but we do not have time to get into each and every single question that we missed

041however i will gladly go over it one-on-one with anyone who wants to so here's how we did we're a school of recognition um so we had a great growth for our students and it's just awesome this is you know i think the second year that we've had school of recognition in my time at rainbow so it's just great our grade three and grade our grade three ela and math uh they had no students they did great i think they had only one student in the in the red grade four ela had no students in the red which is really what we aim to do and grade six had uh math and no students in the red which is our main goal going into mcas is to get all of our students to partially meeting or

042better obviously we want every student to be exceeding expectations but getting them to not pass is also a great goal for us so areas where we need to grow we need to minimize our not meeting expectation numbers uh to back to what they were on in previous you know 2019 we had a little bit of a bump last year fractions in the item analysis that we did um the majority of the math questions that we missed were based on fractions ratios and division and the majority of the ela questions that we were missed on were drawn more on drawing inferences from the text so the good news is we already have some things in place to mitigate these gaps our new ela curriculum is comprehension first which is going to really help make inferences from

043the text that they're reading the images that they see i was in a class the other day and they were talking about inferences already this early in the school year so i think that's really going to help close that gap we are doing we are piloting this year data meetings with grades kindergarten three and six so we're looking at student work to really be making to make real-time decisions and how we can adjust our practice to make sure students are learning and lastly we're utilizing the benchmark fast bridge benchmark which is a way to get a snapshot of each student on each individual standard what they have mastered what they need help on and what they've completely missed one thing i should mention is uh the subgroups uh students that are economically disadvantaged students of

044color we have a hard time like so i the numbers are so few that the state does not give us a report on that however i know how our students that are students with disabilities students of color and economically disadvantaged they all were with their peers in performance however the state does not give us those numbers because they don't report on subgroups less than 10. if that makes sense if you so what questions do you have for me oh thanks nolan i was um on i don't know if you could reshare your screen and just looking at the grade breakdown um and i can't recall whether it was fifth or sixth grade i'm just just curious about the grade by grade um well let's go back before i before muddled on the last further there

045was like the bar charts i think this is the one there's a lot to look at so that's right um and do you have a sense from these data i mean because looking at it you know one might be worried about you know how our sixth graders um coped and and were able to maintain learning through the pandemic looking at you know how the how the bars have shifted from 2019 to 2021. um you could argue you know that it's maybe you know the fifth graders you know coped or or responded better but is there is there any concern when you look at it from grade to grade that individual cohorts there's a there's a [Music] differences between grade cohorts in terms of not just their response or their their um [Music] you know how

046well they they achieved or performed in the mcas but you know but also how well or how well they coped during during the pandemic in terms of learning learning loss so if i think i'm hearing your question is how did like how did each grade differ compared to other grades and yeah and maybe maybe more importantly i think for me is do you have any concerns about how individual grade cohorts um how about how each of them not just performing the mcats but how uh you know differences in learning loss you can see these individual cohorts so the i think going into looking at this data i was expecting to see just like the grand canyon of gaps um all like just everywhere and it's really just potholes for instance like um i was talking

047to the teacher the other day students were doing great like four digit multiplication but they didn't know where to put the comments so they actually had to go back and re-teach all the common lessons so it's it's a hard comparison to make grade level to grade level because each little pothole is different at that grade level if that makes sense but it's not as expansive as you thought it would be yeah it's it's it's great and it's you know it's all reassuring and i think um especially you and your staff and the teachers you know the the the fact that you can pinpoint you know where those where those shortcomings occurred and can address them effectively i think you know is is good news to hear you know going forward it's great thank you you're

048welcome i think i saw steve's hand up uh no he basically asked the question i was going to ask all right any other questions all right thank you so much have a great evening thank you nolan and now my dog is misbehaving so i do apologize for that um next up we have williamstown elementary good evening everyone um i am definitely going to get into information specifically about school and what's happening in mcas but i definitely wanted to take a moment tonight at the start of my presentation share the news that many of you are already aware of but last monday night we lost one of our sixth grade students tristan lawson tristan was diagnosed with cancer in his brain stem in may of 2020 and was undergoing treatment up until the time that he

049passed away um tristan was a triplet who leaves behind his two sixth grade siblings at our school as well as a senior sister at mount greylock and you know i ask you all to continue to keep this family and these children in your hearts as they navigate this really difficult time i am incredibly proud of the staff and the students at the school our students are really struggling with this and have been able to really grieve together but also to remember tristan and tell stories and all of the best pieces of him and i know that in the sixth grade the sixth graders have definitely you know basically made an edict to all of us that you know they are going to continue to have tristan's desk stay in the sixth grade classroom but that

050tristan will also be someone that graduates they will have a spot for him at sixth grade graduation and this is a student that was loved by all and we are definitely feeling the loss of you know a valued member of our school community and i just ask all of you to truly continue to keep them in your hearts and in your minds because um i i can't imagine and my heart goes out to them um it seems a little difficult to make the transition into now talking about the school and mcas but i also recognize that's you know another piece of what we do um in our school right now we are looking forward to bringing back words are wonderful this upcoming school week we weren't allowed to do it last year just due to

051all the coveted restrictions so i'm grateful that we're going to continue to try and forge ahead and continue to try and bring back something a little bit more normal bring back a little bit more fun through this program and what that will look like is we have two authors who will be visiting us via zoom next week um robbie bear and matthew swanson uh they will be presenting to our pre-k through six students and then they will follow up with some individual grade levels on doing you know work studies with it with two particular grades we will have a character parade on wednesday and we will also are going to try and do a coveted friendly book fair from wednesday through friday within our school and it's something you know we're really looking forward to

052to continue to bring back the programs that we really hold dear to us um and to try and do them as safely as we possibly can so that's something you know i'm grateful to the pto um especially geraldine shen and carrie honaker who have really championed this words are wonderful program and trying to do the best on bringing it to the school making every adjustment possible to have it you know have the normal things that quote normal things brought to us um because it definitely takes a lot of work and a lot of planning and i'm so grateful that we have a community that's willing to continue to work with me and with the rest of the staff to infuse these things back into our curriculum and back into our normal school year i'm going

053to go ahead and share my screen to dive into all things mcas and very similar you know i'm going to obviously go through slides fairly quickly the the good news about the mcas graphics are that they are self-explanatory past this first screen as far as looking carefully you know at the colors that you're about to see so i'm going to kind of go through quickly but when you're looking at the different grade levels the data on the left is williamstown elementary school the data on the right is the information compared to this state so at a very cursory glance you are looking at blue being students who are exceeding expectations green students who are meeting yellow being partially meeting and read meaning students who are not meeting expectations at first glance you'll notice in you

054know third grade in language arts students did really well we didn't have any students who were not meeting expectations which we're pretty happy about and similarly third grade math again at a cursory glance you're looking at the colors that we had a tremendous amount of students who were either exceeding or meeting in the third grade math which is great um fourth grade language arts also very similar you'll notice that this one especially what was really good to see was the number of students meeting expectations compared to the state and i will say fourth grade from a level of um just curriculum in general our students are really transitioning from learning to read to you know reading to learn and so the content and the things that they're expected to do at a fourth grade level

055are much different than what you would see in a younger grade so we're pretty proud of our students in the middle of a pandemic you know being able to attack this test and you know come out with results like what we're seeing fourth grade math um you'll notice what we you know stood out to me and stood out to staff members was both you know we have kind of a stagnant you know area of colors with meeting expectations and partially meeting this does not surprise us we are continuing to look at our math programming um we are looking at all things curriculum this year happened to be the infusion of a new language arts curriculum but that does not mean that we are not at all focused on math it means that we completely recognize

056that we will be looking at new math curriculums down the road we just know that we can't do everything at once and want to be able to focus fully on language arts and adopting a new curriculum before we head into math but this is an area you know we know that we want to be supporting our students in based upon the data from the mcas um grade five language arts again you know we have saw good results compared to this state as well um exceeding expectations and meeting was we're really proud of um the number of students who were not meeting expectations i think is worth mentioning um there are upper grade students we have a lot of students with a variety of different learning needs and based upon what they were asked to do

057we're pretty proud of you know that students were able to do as well as they did grade five math again big gains as far as students that we're meeting expectations which we're always happy to see science if you've ever seen the science mcas i feel like science is probably um the most challenging as far as in terms of end mcas and what students are expected to recall and remember throughout the school year but our students still despite the myriad of learning models that we did all through the year our students did pretty well you'll notice here that we had 13 you know that we're not meeting expectations and again it's something that it's an area that we are aware of and an area that we are going to continue to try and bolster our curriculum

058and our interventions that we need to make sure all of our students are you know getting what they need to succeed and to access the curriculum our sixth graders big jump here you'll notice we had a lot of students exceeding expectations which is amazing again given what these children will put through last year you know to see this is pretty great you know this would have been the group of students that we sent along to mg so um we're pretty happy with where their data came out similarly with math um and this was an area we had a lot of students who were meeting expectations but also a lot of students who were exceeding and again looking at the conditions at which you know they were working in throughout last school year to see them

059have this kind of data is something that we're really proud of big themes across the board i know the big pressing question is is what gaps do we see and how does this compare to other years and what are we going to do and i have to be honest it's really difficult to take a look at this mcas data and compare it to anything for a myriad of reasons not just that we were in the middle of a pandemic not just that learning models were very different but this mcas also looked very different than in previous years this mcas was an abbreviated version um and so it's kind of comparing very very different things what i will say is despite it being abbreviated despite it being a different type of mcas we're still seeing very

060similar trends and what does that tell us what we're really looking for is we're examining all of our system of supports we're looking at our tier two and tier three interventions but we're also looking at our tier one do we have general education curriculum that we are giving to all students and providing access to a curriculum that's meeting all of our students needs not just our students who might need additional interventions in reading and in math that's ongoing work that has been happening for the last two to three years but it's something that we are going to continue to make sure that we are truly meeting the needs of every student in our building um something new especially to williamstown elementary is we do have a math interventionist and the math intervention interventionist actually started

061at the beginning of last year so she you know worked and then met went into the pandemic and so it's been great to watch her be able to really grow this program that we've never had before that's something we're looking forward to seeing growth from kindergarten through sixth grade but she's not also just the interventionist for students who need assistance she's also providing enrichment to students who also need that end of the spectrum as well because again ultimate goal no matter what we're doing is to make sure that we're meeting the needs of everyone not just one particular group of students similar to what you heard with nolan we are using fastbridge as a new assessment tool we're definitely muddling our way through that a little bit it's new to us we know that we

062are going to learn a lot as we go along with the reports and what we're seeing but it's something that we feel like is going to be a good assessment tool that we can use with our reading interventionists with our math interventionist but also with our classroom teachers to give them a really clear picture of different students strengths and weaknesses throughout the school year as i mentioned witten wisdom is our new english language arts curriculum i will say our teachers have really taken a new curriculum on by storm it has not been easy it has not been quick and it has not been something that has not taken them hours and hours of planning every single day and i'm grateful that they are willing to stick it out because it's really hard in the situation

063that we're in to try and do something completely different than what you're used to similarly to that some that the whole basis of it is that we really were looking for consistent programming and common language we've not had a consistent language arts program that ran from kindergarten through sixth grade the ultimate goal is for children to be exposed to language and a system when they're really young and that that's something that's built on every single year where it's not a new teacher and a new grade level starting something new and we're looking forward to seeing what that data and that growth looks like across the next several years um similarly we were able to do fundations at grades k through three to really enhance that language arts curriculum and also hegerty which is a program

064that focuses on phonemic awareness for our grades k and one all three of these programs really work in tandem with each other to address the five components of reading instruction that we want all of our students who are going through kindergarten through sixth grade to have and lastly as i mentioned i want to make sure people realize we still have that negative wanting a new math curriculum and examining what's best for our students and that's something that we're hoping that we can continue to look at and when would we be able to you know have a committee get together and be able to start looking at programs we know that it's not this year or next year because again we want to bring in a language arts curriculum you know work with it to fidelity

065but also put in the time necessary without trying to throw in something new for our teachers that's important to give our teachers the time to be able to work with one thing before we throw in the next thing but you know ultimately the gaps are consistent with what we've seen before am i worried about our kids yes but i'm worried about our kids social emotional skills and our social emotional gaps more than i'm worried about any gap that the mcas graphs have told me um we're going to be able to as i've said before in previous meetings finding the gaps is what we're good at assessing where kids are is what we're good at and people are masterful at that and that's what we're going to continue to do for the entire rest of this

066school year and for 20 years after this year because that's what we need to do to make sure every kid in our in our school is being successful any questions yes so um thank you for the presentation but i first wanted to just add a few brief words on tristan i was fortunate enough to know him in the family for quite a while he was a remarkable kid with lessons for us all too often we focus on all the problems and all the places where we come up short tristan showed us how high we can reach he never complained and he never stopped fighting i'm a math professor williams and in two decades of teaching our nation's finest i've really seen anybody who's had such a desire to learn as he did and it was

067truly truly inspirational to know him and so going forward each semester i'm going to give an award in his name to my student who best exemplifies this passion for learning for fighting to seize opportunities i also wanted to just you know follow from what you said that it was so moving at his service to hear the efforts of his classmates to preserve his memory they showed the best of our schools and i i thank them i think the teachers i thank everyone for what they are doing and i look forward to working with the districts to find additional fitting tributes thanks steve any other questions jose thanks cindy i've got a cartoon hand up and a real handout look at the cartoon hang down yeah i'm just gonna i've got a question uh uh a

068tough question um to pose i think to to you and into jake but what i'd like to first say is is seconding steve steven you know as a parent of a sixth grader um i i am so grateful for your your leadership your compassion cindy is our principal at williamson elementary and for your staff and teachers um you know i think i think uh i'm sure this process will will continue certainly through this year and and and hopefully as we remember tristan for many years to come so i i i can't tell you how much i appreciate the space that you gave you gave our students this past week the question i have is one that is in response to what seems to be a step change in the number of racist incidents that are

069afflicting our children in williamstown you know they seem to be occurring on a near weekly basis either at the elementary school or or the youth center um and that is no reflection of the school district that i think is instead a reflection of the wider values and culture of williamstown but as the town continues to diversify i think there's fear and concern of families of color that these incidents are just going to continue occurring um which leads to the sincere and real need for professional development to support our teachers um it was you know in the incident that occurred in um in the second grade cohort uh you know that the parents brought news to us that um you know the imperfect i think we could acknowledge response by in in difficult incredibly difficult um

070you know in a difficult circumstance a response by you know by some of our staff at williamstown elementary may have placed students of color this particular student of color in a in a compromising position um and so the question i have i think for you for you cindy and for for jake is as we move forward and that's why i think we can sadly um expect more of these incidents to occur um what are we doing in terms of helping prepare our teachers for those next incidents so that we can better support not just them but i think most importantly that the students of color who are having to deal with this firsthand so jose definitely a great question um and i will say you know we all have a lot of work to do

071um and what i will say is that one of the great things about elementary school is we have this incredible opportunity with the youngest students in the district to make an impact and to be teaching and giving knowledge and giving children experiences and room to have these discussions and that's exactly what we're going to do i've been working with dr joshi had a phone call with her this week because my assistant principal travis and i have been talking about you know what do we do how do we make a difference where do we start um and we are going to be going into classrooms and reading stories to the children to really start to have discussions with our children but part of that it the secondary part of that is preparing our staff and that

072professional development around around our staff having conversations with students in the moment when something happens and you know and speaking with dr joshi she is going to be coming to a staff meeting in about two weeks and the goal is to be able to talk about this very thing what happens if a situation comes up and there's going to be role-playing so that teachers have the opportunity to be able to talk something out to be able to navigate a situation because that's what we want to be able to give kids the space we want to be able to give staff the space but we all know that it also takes training and it takes having someone lead us and guide us through that and so our first step is going to be this meeting with

073dr joshi where she's going to be leading us staff wide through a variety of scenarios where every single teacher will be able to do that role playing with her guidance so that it's a starting point um it's something kind of like what you said do i think that this is an isolated incident no but we have to start somewhere and this feels like a good place to start to be able to empower our teachers to have difficult conversations but that you know the other piece of that is we have to be able to give our students knowledge and we have to be able to talk to our students about differences and what that looks like because they are little and they have the opportunity to learn and hear different things and that's our job and

074that's what we're going to hopefully continue to do thank you cindy thank you yeah and jose i'll jump in just briefly from a district level all of the things that cindy said one of the things we hear consistently from our our faculty and our staff is um there is a a general lack of knowing exactly how to respond appropriately and there is some concern about stepping in and saying the wrong thing and making things making the situation worse for a child or making the situation worse for the school um that's one of the reasons we entered into to really a lengthy relationship with dr joshi it's one of the reasons we we did the work that we're going to hear about on october 19th um [Music] yeah i will say our work with dr joshi

075is certainly and i've been doing this for a long time uh but but but i am continuing to learn how you know starting with my part of the organizational chart how some of the things i do are less than helpful uh and that certainly then extends through the rest of the organizational chart and how how from from our office on through the district we can all do better we can all communicate better messages and more appropriate ways and we can support our our students and our families by supporting our staff to be to be better responders and by helping our students learn that there are different ways of operating with among one another than to be this way if there is any i think there's two pieces to be really optimistic about one um my

076assumption based on my experience uh both as just a person and a neighbor and a friend and a resident in pittsfield and as a leader in in pittsfield and now here is that these incidents do occur in the lives of some people daily uh part of our work a vital part of our work is establishing enough trust and lines of communication that those of us with power to do something are actually hearing about them and moving to do something so that's good news the other good news is we we you know we had when you count teachers paraprofessionals and administrators we had 60 people from this district with about 254 employees we had 60 of them um spending serious significant time with dr joshi over the summer doing this work having the difficult conversations she'll

077be back uh later in the month and you all will be spending some time with her and getting some insights into who she is what she's about and what she's doing with us and for us and um and so we we keep working on it but but really i think we're starting with all of this work starts with recognizing our own biases and the things we see the things we don't see the things we think the things we don't think but but that that immediate immediate response and then follow-up response and communication is really where we're putting our efforts right now because we know our community expects it and our community deserves it so thank you for giving us the chance to talk about that no thank you jake and thank you cindy for your

078leadership and work on this any further questions for cindy okay so moving on to the mount greylock regional school principal update good evening everybody so i'm gonna i have a little slideshow um that i'll go over to first i just want to say thanks to molly um she did a great job welcome i know she had a stand-in last time who did great for but moving forward most of the time you're going to be seeing molly as the the student representative so before we get to the the slideshow a couple notes on on mcas our accountability classification is substantial progress towards our target so this is where the state puts schools in two boxes um one box that needs intervention and then the other box is um schools that are making progress but need varying

079degrees of support and they use progress towards the targets accountability percentiles graduation rates and assessment participation rates to determine what classification you go into and substantial progress towards target is a pretty is a decent place to be overall you'll see we have a great participation rate this fall we only have one student taking a retake and one student doing a makeup we also have several students this year seniors that are participating in this year's november retake in order to contend for the john and abigail adams scholarship award so now i will share my screen here here we go presentation mode i am not a cool guy so i'm just going to leave it in this mode so here here you see the two categories i was talking about and where we've fallen the substantial progress

080towards targets and right now i'm still just seeing a drive yeah jake we're just seeing your drive home screen yeah yeah okay do you want me to pull it up and uh share it from mine and you just tell me when to advance yeah sure if you don't mind jake no i'm happy to of course just give me one second i'm just happy i'm not on my phone tonight and actually able to use the laptop that's probably the best i'm going to be able to do is to show the pdf and you just tell me when to move that's okay jake perfect do you want to zoom in a bit yep so you can go to the next slide uh steve i'm gonna struggle i yeah i'll go to the next slide and then i'll

081do i'll try that if you want i can if i'm gonna go to the grade seven and so these um can you go to the grade seven yep just give me one second i'm gonna i'm gonna open this up yeah you should have permission steve go ahead and try i'll stop mine okay apologies to everyone on the committee and watching this thank you steve you're welcome all right if you want to go to the fourth slide steve right there so we have three grades taking the mcas the seventh the eighth and the tenth and these basic graphs uh much like cindy's compare the uh the the school averages to the state averages and you'll see on average our scores of exceeding and meeting standards are above the state average and our scores of partially meeting

082or not meeting are lower than the state standards so overall that's a good thing so you'll see in math [Music] we are this is uh as far as the meeting standards this is the one area where we're the closest uh but the rest we're definitely um above the state so if you go to the next we have seventh grade math moving on to the eighth and again i'll go through these pretty fast so if you go two slides forward steve eighth grade ela you'll see the green and the blue on the left are higher than the green and the blue and right and the yellow and the red are lower for the ela and this is eighth grade and if you go to the next is math and for the 10th grade so if we

083go no next two slides 10th grade is what students take that they need to pass for graduation so all of our students graduated last year however there were modified certificates of um uh opponency cds modified what uh what's the d stand for jake uh it's a it's a it's a certification of of competency it's um anyways competency determination yeah what is the competency um and so anyways it was uh modified so as long as students students did not have to pass the senior class last year did not have to pass mcas in order to graduate although most of our students did it wasn't a requirement um so 10th grade ela here's 10th grade math so these scores we just got the hard copies in from the state they're being processed and prepared to be mailed

084home they're sent home via regular mail with students a regular mail to to students homes also any students who struggled who either did not meet we we only had one student that did not meet um and any students who score in a certain percentage of the partially meeting are they meet with their school counselors and they develop plans to make sure that they're prepared for their retest and so those those meetings have already started to take place more specifically where the real work is done is on the department level so departments have already had one department meeting to take time and to do an item analysis like nolan mentioned so oftentimes there are there are very specific themes so we do we do pretty well that's one reason why we're at substantial progress towards goal

085and not uh you know exceeding standards because when you do well it's just that it's that much harder to show growth so we really get into the weeds when we do this item analysis to see where we need to focus and where we need to uh do any remediation and we do both teachers assess these questions and see what they taught or what they how much time they they spent on certain concepts and where students did well and where they didn't do well and they cross cross level that and to see where they need to spend more specific time on the other side with the guidance counselors we see if there's any certain students um that did um that didn't that didn't do as well that doesn't really fit the themes of the item analysis

086and those students get more specific remediate or more general remediation in the form of skills classes or or tutoring just a plug for our tutoring we have more more tutors more williams fellows tutoring and more mount greylock students participating in tutoring this year than we've had in many many years so that's that's a great thing too um so any questions on mcas and i can only see christina and jake got a question jake yes sir um and this is probably a question for for all of our principals including including uh our elder statesman jake but uh the in terms of what success looks like when we're looking at these numbers it's certainly great to see the number of students or these high percentages of students who are exceeding and meeting expectations the students that that

087i am curious about are the students who who are considered not to be meeting expectations and i'm wondering how you know how what happens to those students as they leave sixth grade um and i'm only recalling the the graph that cindy showed us and there's a significant percentage of students who were not meeting expectations in sixth grade or then go on to seventh i assume lanesboro elementary is you know is a similar similar pattern um what in terms of process what happens uh next and and how do we how do we work to to to making that number as close to zero as possible by the time they they graduate well i i can tell you from i know you mentioned sixth grade but from a high school perspective we take that student and depending

088on where they are in their course of study and what their areas of difficulty or success are um they have a couple options of when they can take that retest they can take it say if there was a significant life uh event last last spring when they um were taking this um it might make sense for them to take the retest right in november um because they were just not not mentally available to participate um or if they were behind a year in mathematics for some reason because there was other priorities that we were focusing on um in their eighth seventh eighth and ninth grade year um maybe they take the retest at the end of their 11th grade year after another year of uh additional mathematics um so so it all is very individually

089tailored for the 10th grade student but i really can't speak to the the right right so the so you know one way to frame it is that the you know the score is a reflection of you know the the time that a student took took the test um i think i'm worried about when those scores reflect real learning challenges or or learning you know hurdles that students might be facing um that they actually do reflect a student who who you know is not you know performing or not who hasn't learned um to a standard set by set by the state so for those students for whom you know there are serious challenges as they enter the middle school high school and as they progress through the middle school high school um can we say with

090confidence that we have a process in place that helps helps those students um you know overcome and and the challenges that they might be facing definitely so um kind of like what cindy said is what our teachers do is at each grade level really is there there's this informal assessment that happens in intrinsically during teaching and learning where teachers review what their set standards are and because of our our collaborative learning her collaboration um vertically with with the grades of beloved above and below us we know what the standards are below and we know what the standards are going to be later on and there's always this remediation sort of teaching that happens during during the first couple weeks of school and then if if a teacher is ever worried that they're not going to

091organically be able to get that student up to speed we have our our student support teams and our student study groups that um that teachers reference these students to refer these students to for them to get different tiered interventions like those tier two and tier three things and that that happens very organically and very naturally and i would say a lot a lot much much the proof um is is almost is in the pudding so typically we have not had a student um not graduate because of mcas scores um since i've been here um so whatever you know this this organic system seems to or a group of systems seems to be pretty effective and that's heavy handed on a teacher's ability to deliver an effective instruction and to measure um and to know what

092the standards are yeah thank you yes sir so if there's no other questions on mcas i need to give a shout out to the alice shaver foundation um annually for i don't know maybe 15 years they have been giving us a gift of five thousand dollars this foundation is it's a trust based out of williamstown some of you are probably pretty familiar with it and what started as i believe a benefactor for our annual gettysburg trip transitioned to general support of student activities and activities so we we use this money it's a five thousand dollar donation to offset different learning up learning opportunities special student programming and speakers so i'm i've written a um nice thank you letter to the trustees and we are very thankful for their contributions and it really goes towards us

093striving to build and to to build our students uh cultural capital so whether it be gettysburg or wycma um we're trying to to increase the diversity of our our students lived experiences so thank you to the uh and i believe i don't know if you have to vote on it i didn't look at the um yes we do um do i have a motion to approve the alice shaver foundation gift i moved julia moves do i have a second curtis seconds any discussion carrie i'm sorry i just have a question um i i don't have it in front of me but i think it's specific to field trips still is that correct um does it say that in the world it says yeah funding your school trips funding school trips so um i wonder if

094that does restrict the use of the gift to field trips and if that's the case then um can you just give us a sense of what field trips might be on the horizon you mentioned wikma are there others that come to mind because i i yeah i'll think about that so i believe this the spirit of the gift wasn't necessarily um pigeonholed to just field trips i believe it was student opportunities um that that is you know not exactly what it says there so i i can see your um the the um clarification however um for example right now we were looking at a field trip to mass moca and we're also looking to do our annual hike of mount greylack for the ninth grade so definitely towards funding for transportation for that so within

095the next month um there's there's funding for our transportation to those events thank you any further discussion and if anyone wants a volunteer to hike up uh with the ninth grade cohort you are more than welcome it's um it's hard getting substitutes for teachers so i'm trying to uh to rally the support for some local um volunteers who would like to to help out the ninth grade class so i'm happy to volunteer subjects to veto by my son who's in ninth grade so it's a big mountain steve you don't have to be right next to him ah there we go then okay all in favor o and i connery i constantine eye elephant eye green eye okay that motion passes thank you jake okay moving on to our next agenda item we have director of

096special education services update good evening everyone um you mind if i share my screen go for it okay can everybody see that yes okay all right so i'm here to give the special education update for october 2021 mount greylock regional school district um so i'm comparing uh our this year's numbers to last year's members at this time i believe i pulled these numbers on friday october 8th at the high school we have roughly the same number of ieps from this year from last year to this year so we had 73 last year we have 74. um at williamstown elementary we had 56 so we've gone down a little bit um down to 50. and in lanesboro roughly the same we had 35 sorry 38 at this point last year and now we have 36 and

097across the district um we have 167 ieps compared to 166. mount greylock regional high school again just showing the number of difference uh in a bar graph i'm sure you guys have had your fill of bar graphs today so i figured that i'd add to it so again we had 73 last year we have 74 this year an increase of one we actually gone down in lanesboro by two from 38 to 36 and again it williams down from 56 to 50. so to show you the percentages of across the district and this year broke down to 14 percent which is roughly the same as last year at 15 um lanesboro was down to 12 compared to 20 last year williamstown gone up a little bit 17 compared to 15 of our students and at the

098high school roughly it's the same 14 students on ieps at the high school um a staffing breakdown in our department for special education and related services the faculty includes at williamstown two pre-k teachers uh one grade k through two special education teacher one great sorry three grade three through six special education teachers a developmental special education teacher for our central skills program there two speech and language pathologists which is really one and a half because one splits their time up to high school we have an occupational therapist again you know about a point for williamstown and spends a day day and a half at the high school we have a physical therapist that services all three schools so she'll show up in both buildings here we have a social worker at lynch elementary and one

099school psychologist slash counselor waynesboro we have two pre-k teachers one grade k through three special education teacher one grade four through six special education teacher a speech and language pathologist one occupational therapist one physical therapist again that shared among the three schools this year we added a social worker in lanesboro was providing social skills services at lanesboro and we have a school psychologist slash counselor at waynesville elementary i just realized i left off that we do have one developmental special education teacher in lanesville elementary who joined us this year and she's been a great addition sorry about leaving that off again at the high school uh mount greylock we have two um seven through eight special education teachers so we have one in each grade seven and eight we have two nine through twelve special

100education teachers uh so the two teachers in the high school one takes 910 grade level and the other takes 11 12. we have one life skills special education teacher a speech and language pathologist who provides those services so the students need is up there like one one half days a week depending on their caseload at the time an occupational therapist who spends most of her day most of her days in williamstown but is at the high school a day day and a half a week again a physical therapist who services the students at the high school we now we added a social worker so we have two school social workers and one school psychologist slash counselor and in our office of special education services we have one director of special education services one special education

101team leader who is starting this week i believe monday her name is destiny hicks i'm very excited to have her and we also have a new special education services administration administrative assistant vicki wenchell who's been a great addition to our team and has transitioned nicely into our role so we're formalizing our team and our office and we're ready to go running just some updates in our department we have currently have three out of school sorry three high school out of district tuition placements we have four elementary out of district services only students particularly these students do driving services uh if they don't currently attend our pre-k or kindergarten and then we also service a number of students in our either home school or private schools in the district we're in the towns of lanes around

102williamstown uh circuit breaker was completed um handed in july and i believe the payments are have started or are just about to start relatively soon all of our federal idea grants have been submitted every year we have the 240 and 262 which are entitlement grants this year we had the 252 and 264 which was a part of the american recovery plan monies that was distributed to the schools for special education purposes our parental advisory council meetings have started and are ongoing we've had one so far and i believe the the council intends to have another in november and professional development um years truly went away for a week about two weeks ago dr randolph to be trained uh for crisis prevention intervention skills and i'm able to teach our staff up to and including applied

103physical intervention skills for the students who require those interventions and we've also sent a couple of our teachers i believe in lanesboro to the wilson reading program the pilot giving our special education teachers that certification and how that may impact our students and we are working with the other districts in north county mccann clarksburg or sorry clarksburg northern berkshire school union north adams and we have jointly hosted the parents rights right to no night on november 9th and that will be a virtual zoom meeting that will post relatively soon and that's it for the special education update this year i'll start my share um so does anybody have any questions for me yes steve so uh thank you for the presentation i just wanted to um ask a timing question to just get this on

104people's radar screens so it's my understanding that the district and the pac have a community outreach uh towards the start of the year on basic like a basic right seminar where there's a representative from the federation for children with disabilities who presents an overview of the iep qualifying process and you know items like that is this correct and if so has the time been set for this yeah that was uh the parents rights to no night november 9th august yes that's what that is that we call the right right to know what you're right that's the process i i just want to get this advertised as many ways as possible so thank you yeah yeah julia i two math related questions just so i understand what's behind the numbers um i noticed that the district

105special of numbers are up but went just by one but when you add up the sum of the month greylock lanesboro elementary and williamstown they're down collectively so i'm wondering if that difference is uh students who are um i don't remember the term but older than like maybe there's they're over age or are those the homeschooled students for the difference i'm sorry what for the difference in actual hard numbers or percentages well i had another question about the percentages i'm just trying to get a flavor for where the students are that we're serving if you go back to the slide that you had of um total numbers the one slide that had all the bars for each of the schools maybe i was doing my math wrong hold on let me um can you see

106this right now or no no of course my mouse disappears on me i think by the time we all get it down we'll be back in person there you go okay so so the question is mount greylock is up by one west and less are down by six or eight but the district is up by one so i'm just i'm trying to figure out where those other students are yeah yes you're right the students uh there are some are driving services and out of history got it okay thank you the the next the last side slide also was interesting and i'm i'm sure there's a quick answer to this one um so let so lanesboro elementary is down two ieps but eight percent as a percentage of students that was a significant drop as a

107percentage of students is that just a lot of students coming in aren't identified uh actually i think it's the increase in enrollment okay enrollment would drive down the percentage right and the and the ratio of the new students is not as um high for special for special ed knees yes exactly um i believe last year and nolan can correct me if i'm wrong but i believe we had a i used a 188 count and this year i used the 209 count for the total student right right interesting yeah okay thank you sorry i figured that one would be asked [Laughter] yeah kerry so i have a question about 504s um i thought i remembered in one of the sets of minutes that we had for tonight that the 504s are now at the district level

108or did i misunderstand that but the 504s are now under the director of special education rather than in the guidance or principles offices no i the 504s remain with the principal's offices and tend to be guidance offices at the high school level and distributed among a couple of different folks at the elementary level theory so that that was okay we're working to sort of pull those away from the the director of special education services and i thought they had always been at the district level i mean the at the school-based level okay because it says in these minutes by desi standards the special education director oversees the 504 services which is when we were talking about the the changing the title of the yeah i i would have to go back and look at that

109kerry um it could be that for reporting services and for like the the the focused monitoring visits that that the coordination goes through tends to go through the special education director okay like the with the actual planning so i guess yeah yeah so the yeah so they they still actually live with the principals and the and then the buildings okay so then my question is would we ever see a report or hear a report on the changes in 504 the demands on 504 services the way we would ieps and the the of course the context is postcovid and you know the increase in social emotional um issues and and possible um challenges that affect how well kids can learn and i know i i believe we'll see this a little bit also in your presentation

110jake but i don't recall ever really hearing a report about 504s in the past yeah i think if the school committee desired that report we could certainly report out uh around numbers and and general general types maybe maybe not maybe not specific diagnoses right no i think it would be um particularly relevant post covit as we're talking about the needs of our students um just to see the trend perhaps over the last you know couple of years and then the next couple of years sure we would be happy to do that carrie curtis i was wondering if we had a a pull out of mcas data for our special education students if if that's something that's done regularly in our district or uh if not if that's something that we could do uh that would

111be some interesting data to see yeah curtis we're we're not showing that tonight i'll tell you looking at it on a school level it's often the case that within a specific grade level there is not enough of a cohort size that the state reports it back the the principals are certainly aware of their individual students who are on ieps and where they are and we certainly looked um hard at the district level data and what it tells us about the performance level relative to uh general education students so you know the answer is yes that gets a that gets a look i'll tell you it was it was much easier in some ways to look at in in places where there's just a higher percentage of students in larger grade level cohorts at least from

112an institutional level but the schools certainly look at that on an individual student by student grade by grade basis you anyone else okay well thank you and have a good evening thank you patrick okay moving on next up on the agenda is the finance subcommittee report and i will turn it over to carrie green all right thank you um so we have a motion on the agenda in anticipation of receiving uh documents from perkins easement we have not received those documents or had not received them by the time the packet was put together or by earlier this afternoon joe may have an update for us on that but um i don't think joe did you want to talk about the process at all i know we did talk about the bid process in an earlier

113meeting i don't think we need to talk about it until we're actually looking at documents but if there's anything else that you wanted to talk about around you know how the process is going so far this would be an opportunity to do that or you could pass you were expecting a proposal that would cover the design services needed estimation services and then the bid process for getting the field and track ready to go out to bid and then successfully bid that's the proposal that we're expecting we have not received it yet uh which is a little bit frustrating given that it was it was uh it's been weeks in the making so um that is all the update that i have right now but i can say that we're we're we're trying as hard as

114we can within the district to move things forward great thank you okay now great let's see that's great you shaved off nine nine minutes of that agenda item so we're getting we're getting close to being back on track um next step next up on the agenda is the business administration administrator report and i turn it over to joe thank you very much and i think i will probably end up shaving more minutes off of this if i'm successful here but we'll we'll see how that goes um so uh fy22 quarter one business office update um some things have proceeded this year as expected our local assessments with our towns thank you lanesboro thank you williamstown you have been reliable wonderful supporters and and that's continuing his plan states chapter 70 funding all per plan from

115back in march school choice enrollment and therefore projected revenue related to school choice all in line with expectations same thing with tuition and we're not currently expecting any surprises with funds that are still forthcoming related to transportation reimbursement and circuit breaker now the things that are not expected primarily are are positive uh grants last year or in the last fiscal year so in march of this year our budget plan for about a million dollars and grant spending that that we would that we would do um that was a conservative view we at the time did not really know what the arpa funds would look like we didn't know how all the federal grants that we're accustomed to receiving would play out so we tried to make sure that we were protecting the interests of the

116district by by conservatively forecasting that the actual funds available total 2.36 million dollars now there's a big caveat there in that most of those funds have multi-year availability which means yes the grants were awarded this year but they're available to us this year next year and the year after that commonly so so there they have three year windows which means it would be irresponsible for us to attempt to utilize all of those funds in year one so we shouldn't think that all of a sudden we went from having a million dollars to spend this year to needing to spend 2.3 million dollars it's it's nothing like that those funds are largely a result of the american rescue plan act arpa which we've seen in the in the media a fair amount in all kinds of

117contexts over the last many months and targeted state funding for augmenting all of our efforts to try to pull out of the pandemic stronger than the way we went in planning is underway right now for how we will present a budget for fy23 and how we'll look towards fy24 to incorporate the use of those funds um a lot of what our discussions center around within the district right now are what are what are one-time costs that we would propose incurring which is commonly where people say grant funding should go given that it cannot be expected to reoccur in the future but also what programs can we develop and then sustainably fund once these grant funds are gone in ways that will support the needs of the district for many many years to come so we're

118really taking that necessarily nuanced look at how to consider these funds to break them down a little bit we have sr2 and sr3 which were announced in the in the late spring as far as their amounts um both of them have multi-year availabilities um sr2 is a little bit north of 400 thousand dollars and sr3 for us is 937 000 um the the other federal and state funds that are fy 22 awards um the ones that are highlighted here are those that are really related to covid that the state or the federal government implemented in response to covet so these are smaller packages many of them have targeted or restricted uses so some for instance are only available for use within early childhood programs to pre-k type programs some are restricted to certain types of

119special education uses one one right here in in the middle of the 302 is related to uh only addressing the needs of of children who are homeless um so there are a variety of ways to look at these funds that end up leading to the analysis of how do they fit into plans that we already have or how do they allow us to create new plans that perhaps we did not think we would be able to put in action without these funds um the the grant lines that are down the five lines down towards the bottom are um are federal grants that we commonly see year in and year out they're programs that have existed for for many years um these awards as far as fy 22 are concerned are in line with with where

120we where we would have expected them to be they've perhaps seen a slight boost relative to prior years but but this is what we have typically seen within this district over the last couple years especially as a 1200 student approximately pre-k through 12 type school district and then the last bucket of grants these are grants that were awarded in fy21 and whose availability continues for another two years so these in terms of grant use first in first out is the way the federal and state governments promote use of grants so this funding that we were able to carry over from fy21 into fy22 will be the first that we are that we're making sure to fully utilize within the plans that we already had within the budget within fy22 so all in all those three

121slides this one this one and this one that's how you get your total of 2.362 million dollars in grant funding available now it's not all roses because the way is that we've already moved outside of the the budget as we had uh presented in march as the principals talked about lansbury and williamstown elementary schools are each moving to increase by one teacher one section it's about 150 000 total cost to better support student needs and in related requirements within those classes special education services many of our costs have increased student needs have have increased in ways that are triggering expanded spending within that realm and professional development that's another area where if we look back to march we already had plans for significantly expanded professional development but there are definitely areas where we are bursting

122outside of even that plan as we as we had created in march thankfully all of the grant funding all of the other supports that we have mean that we are well within our our assessed operating needs and well within the state funding that we have and we have plenty of room to to wiggle and move as we get through this year and we do have more continued uh covert expenditures than expected although they're they're not rocking any any budget lines at all um and then one to be determined item and jake i'm not sure if you're going to talk about this later but within the weekly coveted safety check program also known as the pooled testing program the state had really come in like a lion this summer with an attempt to fully support districts

123in implementation of this program throughout the school year and i think perhaps they bid off a little bit more than they could chew the staffing that they had promised has has not arrived in nearly the force that would be needed to implement it across our district we have been relying on really heroic work by a lot of people volunteering within the district across all three schools to try to make sure we we keep the program operating we are currently in the minority in the state of um schools that have been able to actually get it up and running and keep it running this year so um a big thank you to those staff but we also know that the way we're operating it right now is is not sustainable um not in its exact form

124and so we are constantly looking at ways that we can um create a sustainable model for the remainder of this year so we might end up proposing some increased staffing costs around that program if the state cannot cannot follow through with all the things that it's trying to do but that's the update aside from that we're we're on track things look good um and i think that from a programmatic and staffing perspective uh we're in we're in great shape given all of the all of the curveballs that we continue to see from coveted and everything else any questions joe i have a miss carrie i have a question about sr3 um that um application is due this month have we already sent that in yes that application was submitted a week or two ago and

125what kind of community input i know um jake talked about the superintendents having some um could you just talk about the community input that went into crafting sure carrie the the primary means of community input really across the state and i know here locally was by a survey all of our families were sent a very specific sr-3 survey i think we got about 400 back the the overwhelming and there's this shows up in the district improvement plan not by name but but in fact uh the the overwhelming um response was please take care of kids mental health and help them be well uh in their in their emotional and their social life and um we're able invest in the best curricular materials and professional development that you can so students have the best tools in

126their hands teachers have the best tools and their hands to uh to learn so we were we were pleased with the response rate that folks weighed in and and and a lot of like very specific comments on the open-ended piece of that that were helpful and that weren't to parents and guardians and caregivers did it also go to students parents and guardians and caretakers we had several respondents say they were advocates for for certain populations of students it did not go carried directly to students okay thanks all right i unfortunately do not have a student activity account update but i will plan to provide that in november i i need to do some coordination with the buildings on that so my apologies for not having that tonight great thanks joe okay so next up is

127the superintendent report jake you're muted okay can you hear me now apologies for that yeah i'm sorry um probably any time that we saved we'll now go into the abyss of the superintendent's report um so apologies in advance um just a a quick uh save the date and save the time as as our families in the community that we serve were notified via email and will be notified again tuesday october 19th at six o'clock p.m we will be hosting a special uh mount greylock regional school district school committee meeting where courtney tunis the consultant we've worked with to gather a voice of students and community members and families we'll present the the mount greylock regional school district listening and learning project so that's october 19th at 6 p.m the the link to the webinar is

128on all three school websites and the district website and we will certainly be sending that out again at least once between now and uh next tuesday and we're very grateful to have the the sobering opportunity to uh to look at this all together um just a couple of quick words on vaccination status i will not read through this whole thing but as you know the the state has put out there although it is very subject to change as we were as superintendents were reminded by the commissioner yesterday that um 80 of staff and students in an upper level school a school where all of the students are eligible to be vaccinated per age is sort of the number which the state suggests communities can start looking at at unmasking should they desire at mount greylock

129regional school if we look at everybody that is among our students uh 77 of our students have are either fully vaccinated or have their first vaccination or and are awaiting their second are fully vaccinated of our staff 74 of our staff report being fully vaccinated and i do want to just remind people the the the note at the bottom somebody failing to report and show proof that they're vaccinated does not necessarily indicate that they are not vaccinated it may indicate that they simply think this is none of our business and so they choose not to report and that can go for students and it can go for staff but at this point 74 of our staff report being fully vaccinated uh at mount greylock regional school 85 of the staff report and have proven that

130they are fully vaccinated uh williamstown elementary 71 of the staff have reported being fully vaccinated and at lanesboro elementary 60 of the staff report being fully vaccinated we continue to encourage our staff that one of the things that separates places like massachusetts from states that are really suffering from covid right now is the rate of individuals that are vaccinated and so we we certainly continue to support and endorse and urge all of our staff and all of our students who are able to be vaccinated to please be vaccinated we are getting close about greylock regional school to to reaching that 80 percent uh threshold at which the state says we can consider this which will activate the jlmc so that we can discuss this and come back with a recommendation to the school committee uh

131and i do want to you know on that last slide um joe is correct the the state made many promises about testing that that they were aspirational promises uh i think the the state and state officials are working incredibly hard to fulfill those promises um in the meantime it is people like joe who have made this work in school districts that are fortunate enough to have people like joe and the many volunteers who uh come in early and stay late to make sure that that our testing program continues we would like to just remind our percentages of students who are signed up for and participating in pool testing at williamstown elementary in lanesboro elementary almost 100 of our students that are signed up do participate at the middle in high school we really want to

132urge students to uh if you are signed up please please participate um we promise you that you will not be in trouble for being a minute or two late to class if you are uh so we encourage families to really urge their students to participate was the idea of your hand up i do jake yeah apologies for interrupting um but i just wanted to revisit the previous uh slide yes and i appreciate that uh you know what i'm about to say may be divisive but i find some of the numbers that you reported to us about vaccination rates for our staff to be troubling um in august it sounds like the mta recommended a requirement for vaccinations for for teachers and staff and and students who are 12 and older other school districts across the

133country have mandated vaccinations but with clear exceptions i'm curious about what justifies our our approach to um to vaccinations for for students and staff within our school district um uh if you mean like what what individuals would use for their justification that that's one thing no not no sorry jake the um you know as a district i'm curious about what our options are for moving these numbers yeah so and are we um are we what what are we considering in terms of the options that are available to us to move these numbers up yeah i got you thank you for that clarification um you know we certainly do have several staff members certainly doesn't account for for all of these numbers but we do have several staff members who um simply do not believe it's

134not in their best medical interest given other circumstances that they're living in to be vaccinated so we do have some people who really cannot be vaccinated right now for our staff for the moa that we agreed to in august the the options are proof that you're vaccinated or test weekly and that's and that's where we are and then we're encouraging folks to get vaccinated governor baker has made a mandate about employees that are in the executive branch of the government we certainly know that some of our our neighbors that provide health care professionally have have provided mandates are neither neither the department of elementary and secondary ed nor our own legal counsel recommend an ultimatum of do this or you can't come to work here anymore uh so we are we are continuing just and

135i know that our our union uh colleagues here locally are doing the same as is the state union of really encouraging people to please please get vaccinated um what you know what can we do to us incentivize this i don't know i'm not really there for for terribly negative or disincentives at this point or making it so painful not to that you must but we are certainly continuing to push that as many of our staff as are healthily able to be vaccinated are vaccinated that's it if i may interject there just for a second especially with with lansbury elementary where you see 60 of staff the number the percentage of staff there that are actually fully vaccinated is significantly higher um i i can't speak to the exact percentage just off of personal knowledge but

136um the number of people who have either just not taken the time to report it they have lost their card um or or they're not reporting it for for a particular reason um it is high enough on a small enough pool of people you know when you look at 40 people within the building is is a number where um i think percentages don't tell the full story there so i think that's another important thing just as far as perception to to know or to to take into account um it's that we don't have everybody reporting uh fully yet but that's another side of the effort that we're trying to trying to push more within all the balance that we that we need to thank you joe and that's a that's sort of where i would

137put the period on the sentence is you know the the deadline was was we need to know by october 1st we sent out reminders leading up to that we've sent out several reminders since and now we're to the point where we're sending out reminders to individual staff members and there there is a there is a degree and perhaps in some places a significant degree to which what is actually what what somebody's actually chosen to do in terms of getting the vaccination just we don't have the proof of it yet for a variety of reasons from forgetfulness to to the the proof is is not findable but we're working on it so thanks for that joe yeah and i'll just you know i i appreciate that joke for that that clarification i think unfortunately for the

138school committee our only ability to assess our situation is through the data that our administration report to us and that's what we see before us on the screen um i think as recently as april the cdc had an estimate that in terms of teachers across the country that they were looking at an 80 vaccination rate um these numbers are are much lower even for williamstown elementary um could we ask or i'm trying to think about the best way to phrase this question for both for both you joe or i guess this is the question for you jake um can you tell the committee um or offer some indication that these these numbers will be different in november hmm i can offer that i will i i can offer that we are pushing to have them

139better i am i am um loath to make promises around something that i ultimately do not have real control over but but i i can promise on behalf of the district the effort and i think we'll be we're we're joined in that effort by by many colleagues who do every kind of work that there is to be done in the district jose thanks jake you're welcome thank you um moving on to thank you for for those questions and those clarifications and and i dare say for that push for our for our staff that are not vaccinated but could be to please consider doing so um general personnel matters this first bullet requires a vote the second bullet does not it is informational i'm going to go through both and then if we can go back

140to the vote we we are moving tonight and you're in a possession of a letter from the montgrey greylock education association to accrete a physical therapist position into the mount greylock educators association i i have no explanation for why except for when this person was hired once upon a time they were not brought in to the district as being under the union umbrella this individual is really the lone person who holds a certificate a professional certificate is on the the uh the majia salary schedule she she is in all ways um should be in the union and and i would dare say as somebody that uh that values this individual and respects this individual and wants her to have all of the protections as she does her job well every day that she should absolutely

141um be in the union i think it was an oversight once upon a time that we now have the opportunity to correct and would ask you to vote uh in favor of this tonight and i guess we can pause there if if that's appropriate and somebody could make the motion if you're interested and then we can do the second bullet sure i'm happy to make the motion um i'd like to make a motion to accrete a physical therapist position into the mount greylock education educators association milla second okay any discussion hearing none all in favor o and i connery i constantina hi elfin by an eye green eye miller eye thank you that motion passes thank you and i i will admit i am not familiar with that word accrete and so i could figure

142it out by context clues as my elementary colleagues would say but if you had to go look that word up please know you were not alone you had company in me um the second uh thing that falls under the second item that falls under general personnel matters is uh our school nurse at williamstown elementary school carol stein payne um has given us notice of her intent to resign in about a week and a day and she is going to be moving to a school in a district that that she is excited about and as a colleague we're excited that she's going to have an opportunity to take on this new challenge this does mean that that cindy sheehy and her team will be running through a process to hire a school nurse but through a

143particularity of mass general law chapter 71 section 53 school committees actually are the approving authority uh in the hiring authority for school nurses not school principals as ed reform have vast powers of hiring but um you hire the school nurses so uh with your permission i am assuming that you would like to to delegate the running of the process to the principal uh in this case ms sheehy and then we will be bringing a a recommendation back to you for your approval to actually onboard a new school nurse for williamstown elementary and that may require alongside of the the proposal from the landscape architects this may require a very brief special meeting depending on availability of substitute nurses we we cannot have not have a nurse um providing health services for our students so this

144this may require a a brief special meeting for um forced for the school committee to consider approval of this position so i just want to give you that heads up are there any questions about that or concerns about that and take this carry i have a concern about the length of time that it might take to find someone and whether there is possibility of hiring a temp or a long-term substitute yeah we are we are moving uh in the in the temp direction because this is not going to happen in a week uh and we are very open cindy and jonathan i spent uh quite a bit of time today discussing options uh temporary in the immediate long-term substitute in the mid-range and perhaps if the applicant pool is not where we we need it

145to be for the good of our kids perhaps looking at a long-term substitute for for an actual longer term until we get the applicant pool that we feel is most respectful to the students and families that attend west thanks carrie okay if there is nothing else on that i will move into the the next piece of this which is the district improvement plan you all have seen the school improvement plans the the district improvement plan is i'm not going to read all of this it is a requirement of the department of elementary and secondary act i have always whether it was as a principal or as a superintendent a district improvement plan is really an opportunity to do more than simply a bureaucratic function of here's the plan you approved it now we can move

146on and go back to business as usual i don't see this as a just ticking the box exercise i see it an opportunity as an opportunity as i do with my own goals which will be coming next month which will support this plan as this plan supports the school improvement plan uh see it as an opportunity to share who we are what we believe where our priorities lie um and how we think we can better serve the families that are our clients our customers and that it's our honor and privilege to get to serve as public educators um this particular plan i think for for folks that that would like to see a um a hyper detailed road map with with all of the twists and turns of a country road may be disappointed in

147this plan that i would understand that this plan in some ways is is almost more of a vision than it is a step by step these steps do come through to some degree what's an iterative process and in some degree needs to be more informed by the people who will actually be carrying out the plan but i think this plan shows firmly where our destination needs to be which is creating a better school district for the good of children for the for the children that we're we're here to serve um you know as you saw if you look through the longer version of the plan this is the condensed version um without some of the supporting material uh i i really like this metaphor of building you know our students in this school district in

148all three of our schools get to go to really magnificent spaces for learning places that were well thought well designed well-built and that we take good care of because the work that they house is really important um i like this metaphor of building for an improvement plan uh because um you know like like builders uh their their job is to plan for and execute a space that is going to improve the life or the business or the well-being of whatever the purpose of that building is for our work is to build happy healthy ethical responsible and productive human beings who are going to be the leaders uh of of our community of our state of our nation and our world in the blink of an eye we work with families and our community to do

149this all important work so we're like a team of of construction professionals coming together and this work requires personal and individual excellence and dedication but it also requires a communal or or team excellence and dedication if you read through the actual lengthier plan i found the process of being a part of the the team that constructed the 121 million dollar taconic high school to simply be a transformative experience for me as a learner and as an educator the level of organization the level of teamwork actually people with close ties to um the community that we're sitting in right now um where i consider mentors uh and friends now because they taught me so much about this process and in doing so taught me so much about my own work as uh as a superintendent and

150so we're kind of using this uh this metaphor of building we're building community we're building wellness we're building opportunity and we're building uh ways of gathering information and if i had to do this graphic over again i think i'd have community wellness and opportunity and information would be the foundation of the building actually if as i as i continue to think through this because it's that information it's data that is both quantitative and qualitative that informs what do we need to do to build a better more cohesive more sustainable community what do we need to do to build students that are more well that that are happier that are healthier that are more productive and what do we need to build what information helps inform us about the opportunity gaps that exist here in our

151school district so moving on we are going to look at each of those four items as an individual building block because we're trying to build uh school and district improvement so the driving questions that we examined in terms of looking at community how do we eliminate incidents of hate mistrust and bullying that's the that's the what do we need to get rid of the what we need to be what we should aspiring to be is building a greater sense of belonging so that every student every family really knows that this place is their place how do we build a greater sense of empathy and being a responsible respectful neighbor how do we create introspective reflective practitioners who are constantly on guard themselves against entrenched and recognized and often unrecognized biases of all kinds and how

152do we finally become a more anti-racist community how do we become a community that better supports uh our our neighbor color how do we become and we could expand that how do we support our neighbors of of all kinds of the wonderful ways that human beings come so some objectives as we look at this building block of community we want to build we must build a better sense of belonging for all students families and staff through work to become more culturally aware or culturally competent and to be more responsive to challenges and events of hate speech and bullying primary right alongside this type of training is the development of a structure in a regular response plan that spans the an incident of hate and incidental bullying from from reporting to taking the report and means

153of delivering the report to the immediate response and care for the person that is the target of this to how we follow up both with a student and with a family but also with the community um the activities that we're working on along these lines we're working with dr kathy joshi um we have a three-year commitment with dr joshi to have the majority if not all of our faculty and staff complete the the graduate level course teaching for diversity and social justice we we talked earlier tonight about 60 of us or about 45 of us are going through the full course the administrators are getting a truncated version but but also having uh individual and group consult time with dr joshi so we can all improve our own practice and so we think over the

154three years we can really uh encapsulate almost our entire staff along with that uh ongoing activity already talked about this the admin will have group and individual consultation with dr joshi dr joshi will also be meeting with individual teachers and with with individual school faculties to address some of the challenges that we're just feeling like we need help and support with in real time and she is absolutely committed to helping us build a reporting and response structure that keeps children in the negative impact of these events at the center of that structure and so um we we are that's sort of our most short order immediate work you heard cindy talk about um her time with dr joshi and dr joshi's time that's upcoming with the staff that we really have to be for the

155good of our kids better responders as adults um we are working to recruit and retain a more racially and culturally diverse workforce across all of the positions in the district we are focusing on licensed educators we want people in classrooms and administrative offices including further consideration of a position that we heard about many times last year as we prepared our budget a director of equity and belonging included in this work is pursuing grant opportunities to this end we have applied for a grant from the state a very competitive grant i don't know that we have much of a chance of that but we um we're taking our chances as they say um you know you you can't win if you don't play so we did uh work on a grand and put a good one

156together and submitted it uh but we're also working with the community and organizations in the community and we'll be working with majia to explore means of incentivizing teachers who represent a variety of diverse communities consider coming from where they are to here we have a meeting next month with some of our colleagues from mcla to hear about some work they're doing to help promote and support this work in the county and um the measurement of that will be very clear it's it's what do our professionals look like in this district as we proceed from year to year to year and then of course the fourth activity along this particular objective is we are continuing to examine our curricular material whether it's material we already use and perhaps need to accelerate not using because of its

157inappropriateness or new materials we also are continuing to look at our classroom and library collections to ensure that all of our students see themselves in real ways in important ways in vibrant ways and most importantly in true and meaningful ways and the materials that our our students are exposed to or are expected to learn from uh and so you know our measurement will really be looking at continue continuously auditing and making sure that we are kind of out with the inappropriate and in with the more expansive and in with the more appropriate a second objective toward the building block of community is to build and implement a real and working system of restorative practices in grades pre-k through grade 12. so that students are required to move beyond personal actions lead to consequences and now

158we're done everybody goes back about their business we really want students to be in a mind of considering things from an empathetic viewpoint and to consider the value of restitution how to make restitution as a part of the learning process to to become a more full human being and a better neighbor uh we we talk about restorative practices in our mission statement uh i think we we have a staff from administrative staff to our teaching staff to our staff who who are kind of thirsting for now let's actually do this work we talk about it that's that's dig in a little deeper and do the work and that's going to require expertise so we are working at identifying key individuals within each building that we are going to have as champions for restorative practices in

159each building and we're going to be training them as trainers to do this work model this work and train others to do and model this work within their buildings so the measurement for this is um simply do we have these people doing this work and do we you know by the end of this year are we ready to enter into the 22-23 school year with a slate of restorative opportunities for students and get out of this notion of crime and punishment and actually help students use incidents as learning experiences i think we need to revisit some policies and practices relative to restorative practices and consequences through our our policy subcommittee i think there's several layers that we have to look through some policies not only policies we have but policies we don't have and should

160that will make us a more welcoming community and draw clearer lines in the sand of who we are what we believe and where we stand um and then the third activity under this objective is to consider with staff in each building the need and staffing of a student support center in each building so that students can be given directed processing time and facilitation in real time in each school mount greylock has this now greylock has um has probably the most fully formed restorative model in the district but but we know intuitively and we know because research tells us so that um the more we can get into these types of best practices with our younger students the more we won't have to do this work at the high school in the middle school which means

161there's less work to undoing certain notions because we're we're building at the earliest level so you know a student support center does does have budgetary implications so we will be looking at staffing and space budgetary implications and the data that would drive the need for this in all three of our schools uh the second building block we want to address is wellness and and not just wellness in the physical sense obviously as we've already discussed you know it's um the the one of the foundations that all learning is built on is on a a mentally well young person and that requires a real partnership between home and the school and in many ways it requires a real partnership among home school and the rest of the community our driving questions around wellness is how do

162we help students be happier healthier and more productive in their emotional life in their mind how do we help students balance what they feel they need to do and what they want to do and how and and while we're doing that how do we ensure they still have time to be kids um i i've had three children go kindergarten through grade 12 do the college search thing um i i can tell you you have your own experience as parents you have your own experience as educators some of you in different institutions the very real pressure that students feel particularly at the high school to pack in more and more and more in order to be as attractive and as appealing as they can be to selective colleges is unreal and it shows up in so

163many ways it shows up on college campuses and the number of mental health professionals that they're having to add to their um rosters of staff and that trickles to us and it shows up here some of you with with more recent elementary school experience as parents than i have know that some of the decisions you're making in elementary school ultimately are about filling up and filling in that high school resume for when it's time to go on to college and i think we really need to we know that that's a reality because we know what college admissions is and how it works but i do think we need to be a little a little bit more i don't know if it's thoughtful i don't know if it's caring it's something we want to offer more

164experiences that kids want the kids need but we also want to offer students you know the notion that you cannot necessarily be great at every single thing you do and be happy and that what you like to do and what your passions are matter and then how do we serve students who really really really need us in ways that go beyond academics and go beyond the teaching of subject matter i look at some of our students whether i'm at lanesboro elementary and talk to them or at williamstown elementary or over mount greylock some of our students quite frankly they would just be amazing and have amazing outcomes no matter where they are because they are who they are their families are who they are but there are some students that um that that you know

165school plays school plays an important role in the lives of all those students but for some students we're really the key we're the the keystone that is going to hold up the arch of their success uh academically and in life and we need to be thinking about those kids all the time heard it in some of your questions around mcas scores well it's great that we're above the state average but what about the students that aren't what are we doing for them so in wellness social and emotional wellness absolutely the foundation on which physical wellness academic wellness are built to address all of these different types of wellnesses the district will run processes to examine the potential for moving the start time of mount greylock to a later time and the the implications that this

166has on not only our elementary school families but on the rest of our community on our child care partners on the availability of child care if we move times for the high school and on after school life in terms of fine arts performing arts and athletics you know we use the same school buses i know this is really obvious but i'm going to say it anyway we use the same school buses to transport our elementary school kids once the middle and high school runs are done therefore whatever we do with the middle and high school start time is going to have an impact uh on our elementary schools unless we use different buses double up on the number of drivers and i have to tell you that's simply not a reality from a financial perspective

167or from a labor availability perspective so we have to really think deeply about this really looking forward to having an opportunity to empower some of our students across the parking lot here at mount greylock because many of these students are thinking deeply about this and where i see it academically and i used to see it as a parent these students are actually living what it means to start their day so early in the day so we're going to be working with our students in school council we're going to be working with other school districts thank you christina for directing us to our friends out east in dover sherbourne we're going to work with national organizations i've already done several webinars with an organization called let's sleep thank you to somebody at williams college and to

168gary another person from williams college for uh directing me toward those folks and identify the need and consider possibilities for a change to school start time um to me the case is really clear we have years of research that suggests this is better for kids and whatever is better for kids is generally better for families in the long run but we're looking at you know january february of to really just state the case that this this is something we should pursue and um and that will lead into activity number two which is actually getting some working groups together around the different issues and around the different ripples that this pebble of the time change will cause to look into not only how do we consider this how do we actually do it we want to

169have the work groups up in meeting by the end of january of of the the upcoming year and um we would we would i mean i would i think that um i clearly mistyped on this next bullet um december of 21. i think we were probably i think i just cut and pasted from the wrong space or something there i think we would really look at having maybe a change be ready for institution in september of which i think is really ambitious but i also think that this is a district that you know where eleven hundred students um were two communities that that clearly and palpably care deeply about their children and i think if any distra any school district in the commonwealth is positioned to actually do this while lots of other districts talk

170about it it's the mount greylock regionals another objective that falls under the building block of wellness is simply paying homage to the fact that that a lot of our students have deep deep stressors stressors that i struggle even to imagine what it would have been like when i was 15 or 16 or 18 or whatever or even 7 or 8 or 12. you know these are increasing these stressors these pressures and the nuances that in the ways that kids are coming to school are are also appear to be increasing you know we're we're having um students at very early ages some of whom are coming in having having experienced some really deep trauma some of whom are coming in with some really deep needs in terms of mental wellness and behavior and so we really

171have to pay close attention to the to the number the type and the availability of mental health professionals and services that our students have access to this includes people within the school system people outside of the school system and increasingly it includes mental health services that are really aimed very clearly in behavioral supports where where behavior is simply getting in the way of a student attending and a student being present even when they are literally present at school all staff on the organizational chart from the superintendent's office on through the chart have to be better positioned to understand trauma-informed instruction and trauma-informed practices we have to be better versed with the challenges that students coming from a from an economic economically difficult background present in school and we need to be better equipped to deliver

172a variety of services and supports across the district in each building and in each classroom a crucial piece of this work obviously lies in the realm of belonging which we you know will see spread throughout all of this part so we are looking at professional development for all staff and trauma informed practices and in the nuances of delivering instruction and services to the folks that are experiencing deep deep economic difficulties and the things that are related to that at home joe talked about the fact that our our pd package for this year was already a pretty sizable package we're looking at expanding that package even further not because we want to necessarily not because we have the spare time to do it but because we need to for the good of our kids and so

173we will be looking at the number of staff participating in this type of id of bd we'll be looking at and how we're doing and developing these resources um and we will be looking at you know there's there's clearly a gap you'll hear it from courtney when she presents on the 19th we see it in our mcas data there is there there is a gap here in our towns just like there is in every town in berkshire county massachusetts the united states and likely the world there's a gap between folks who really have a lot of support at home economically mentally physically nutritionally the list goes on and on and those who don't and so we really want to dig in and take a look at our numbers around economically disadvantaged students or students that

174are identified by the status i need a second of activity under this wellness piece is to identify the behavioral and emotional staff support that we need in each of the three buildings to ensure that we're offering the right kinds of supports that actually help not just band-aid students as early as we possibly can this will include an examination of staffing um our schools with with a person or two who happens to have the board who happens to be a board certified behavioral analysis a bcba where this is appropriate right now we use outside consultants for this work uh i my experience would suggest i think research further suggests that um having having this level of expertise right in a billion building so they can work with teachers coach teachers coach students work with families in

175real time as things are happening is a steep investment on one hand but it may allow us to keep our precious students here in our school district rather than having them out in day programs which are expensive which take them from their peers here at home or even in residential programs which then take them from their family so uh you know one of our activities is to look deeply at the need the appropriateness and where we would deploy positions like bcbas within our district obviously the measurement is looking at behavioral data for really a smallish number of students but but uh in some ways a deeply needy uh group of students for individual students in classrooms and school-wide data on discipline which is really obvious but then also where behavior impacts academic performance not only

176of the individual child but sometimes the children around that child because the behaviors can be so distracting and so time-consuming of the teacher and the paraprofessional in the room uh third building block and i do promise you we are reaching the end at some point um third building block is opportunity driving questions around opportunity do we distribute opportunities equally among all of our students i think we're going to hear from courtney that the answer to that many people perceive that the answer to that is a pretty strong no what opportunities are students missing out on all together there's some opportunities that some get some don't sometimes often that's quite appropriate sometimes it's just because we're not framing the opportunities or supporting the opportunities in the right way there may be some opportunities that none of

177our students are getting we're a rural district it would be almost geographically impossible for us to be any further in williamstown and lanesboro from where the center of energy money um time and focus is from the department of elementary and secondary ed in malden and in metro boston our students may be missing out on opportunities altogether can we expand opportunities in new ways we know that we can use technology to connect students from various places with teachers from various places can we expand opportunities in ways that are affordable but also create a better sense of celebrating what some of our individual students find really fuels their passion their talents and their interests and just really thinking about are there ways that we could be leveraging what students are able to do but we're not quite

178there for providing it could we fill that gap in this world decrease several participation and performance gaps that exist between students identified as having disabilities in their non-disabled peers and students identified as having high needs and those who are not identified so you know clearly we we do have um gaps that show up in perceptions of gaps which which are real to some degree or another between regular ed students general ed students and students who need a little more support to level the playing field whether that's because of a disability whether that's because of a linguistic barrier economic barriers or some combination of all of those so we want to work to identify professional development scheduling practices that will help schools in the district better and more fully collect and act on data and provide

179interventions and instruction to help close persistent achievement gaps between and among students particularly special education students for this activity and their education years um lots of data sources to measure this from you know sense of belonging and and where parents are with with feeling about how their kids are included and what the opportunities are to much more traditional mcas data grade grade level data formal formative assessment data and teacher impressions and teacher generated data and then the second activity under this particular objective consider what supports would allow for greater success for specific subgroups of high school students to attempt higher level coursework such as college course work or ap placement or ap classes work to identify budgetary implications that may be associated with this effort for when i was superintendent lee we were we were

180one of the first districts in western massachusetts they began working with a group that had a good deal of funding from the gates foundation to look at really widening um the gates for for letting students take ap and get out of having advanced placement be an exclusive club let more students in through a encouraging more students to get in and then b supporting the heck out of students that that needed support so that they could prove to themselves and and they prove it to their teachers they prove it to their parents but it's most important they prove it to themselves that they're capable of doing college-level work we did the same thing in pittsfield we we saw sar ap program grow it grew in all the right ways meaning that we had more economically disadvantaged

181students black students latino students and special needs students taking ap than at any time in pittsfield's history and our scores didn't go down in fact in some areas our scores stayed constant and in a couple of areas our scores actually went up but it took a lot of work to support students and it took a lot of work to convince students that this opportunity is for you so we really want to look at you know maybe it's through leveraging technology for some of our students to be able to take super low incidence courses with other students from here there and everywhere maybe it's opening up ap a little bit more it's just looking at things differently but we really want to start looking at this notion in a district that is so dripping with opportunities

182we want to look at having nobody be able to say at the end of their career i wish i would have had that opportunity you know we'd rather give them the opportunity have them say no for good reason then then to reach the end and say i wish you would have given me that opportunity or opened that door for me so we we will be looking at things like subgroup participation and accelerated uh academics when i look at at our percentage of students at the middle and high school that are taking fine arts courses i i'm a little bit alarmed um i suspect that alarm is shared by some others in the community and some parents in the community that's part and parcel of this too i think a piece of that is packing up

183that college resume which with as much advanced work as you can so maybe we need to allow that to happen because that may be what a student really believes they need and what they want but then we need to find some alternative ways for them to not lose out on the richness of fine arts opportunities or performing arts and we need to do a better job i i assume because everywhere does of really celebrating all of the success in all of these opportunities and really have um the level of excitement that goes into some athletic functions coming into some academic and fine arts functions opportunity and i got i got into this in the last slide so i'll go through this one quickly because i do realize getting late we want to undertake work to

184better ensure that academic fine arts and interest-based learning opportunities are available that they're advertised and where possible facilitated by the school in the school district we um the activities include looking at options for more students to experience more diverse and maybe more challenging and enriching academic and artistic opportunities using our own staff using we're in the berkshires we have arts partners um that are powerful that are world-renowned um i would love to see us leverage that even more we have colleges we know we have colleges in our community bcc down the road williams right here in town mcla just across route 2. we should be i hope we can find ways to better leverage giving our students opportunities using all of these partners in addition the district and schools will examine the value and appropriateness

185of a wider spread acceleration opportunities at our elementary school for students who would benefit from this you occasionally hear from parents whose students are very rightfully so ready for more but our structures don't necessarily allow them to get that more through school and parents are wonderful they provide those opportunities for themselves many of them but some can't um and so we want to take a look at that too and really wrap our heads around what does it mean to try to plan for an individual student so that they can really fly as as fast and as high as they desire to and as they're able to so we will be spending time documenting the actual opportunities that exist um and look at the opportunity gaps that and and trying to quantify where there are opportunities

186but we just for some reason or another aren't encouraging or allowing students to take advantage of them and then figuring out how do we fill those gaps uh and then lastly i'm sorry this is a typo this should say information where my cursor is right now i apologize i need to back up and i'm not quite sure how to do that when i'm in full screen so i'll just do it the clunky old-fashioned way apologies um information you remember when i talked about the graphic of building information is kind of the the foundation that we're building all of these thoughts on so you know the driving questions around information how do we best listen to the members of the school community including students engage and measure the effectiveness of our work in the realm of

187belonging diversity equity and inclusion how do we best gather input from students and the families that we serve that love them and honor us by sending them to our public school how do we gather input from them and from the teachers that dedicate their lives to helping these students learn and grow how do we gather this data in ways that are powerful meaningful and that let us have better conversations among ourselves and with the larger community and so really a loan objective here you did hear um cindy talk about earlier uh the move to get some tools to gather better formative data you know dipstick data about how kids are doing academically how are they doing in reading how are they doing in math we need to do that same thing with social and emotional

188learning we need to do that same thing with um with with the sense of belonging which i am still convinced is the the kids that feel they belong in public schools tend to thrive the kids that don't feel like they belong um i think there's a host of of implications of that and and a host of outcomes that could be better for that individual student if they don't feel like they're really at home here and so we have to have a data tool that allows us to do regular checking with students and with teachers and with families parents caretakers and guardians about how safe is their student feeling to what level do the students feel we are responding to their needs to to to what degree are students feeling like they really belong and have

189a place here and so the district and building administration will begin looking and exploring programs and vendors that are out there who can provide the tools we want in the pd that we need to make sure that this is actually valuable and that it's actually used presentations will be made to the staff and very likely you to gather feedback on the ease of use and effectiveness of any data gathering tool that we're going to use but i really think we need that data we can't just depend on the parents who are willing to call or email or visit or or that we run into in a soccer game or a cross-country meet or a volleyball game we we need to have regular um regular check-ins in ways that are really um quantifiable to to answer

190the question how are we doing in in this seo domain and so we want to identify a tool in time for budget deliberations so that we can put the subscription the pd whatever we need into the budget and ready to roll for when we open school in september of 2022. and um as you know i could go on and on but i i think in the interest of time we've shared kind of a big big vision for how we need to be spending our time uh next month i will be coming back with superintendent goals for my evaluation that you will see a lot of this showing up in because this is what my experience this is what my sense of our data this is what many conversations what you're seeing here tonight is where

191i believe we need to be where i need to be spending our time as i lead this very special district in the two wonderful towns and the thousands of families that comprise this community so with that i'm sorry i meant if i missed hands while i was presenting i was not looking very hard i apologize but happy to take questions and concerns now julia um thank you i thank you on many levels thank you for the detail of um what you've been thinking about um thank you for the deep thoughtfulness around what our students very much need um and i can see how so many of our conversations are kind of tying up in this district improvement plan um i i can so clearly hear or read and hear how you and your team have

192listened um and are and are really getting that information from the district and so first i just want to say thank you um i also want to make a comment and a point of advocacy um the comment would be this over the timeline that this district plan covers and during a pandemic that you know you are um leading through this is an incredibly ambitious plan and i guess my comment would be i appreciate that um and i know i feel like what you're naming are the most important things we need to focus on and it's really ambitious um and it needs to be ambitious because that's what our students deserve so my point of advocacy would be is to to really name the additional support you might need just to work through this plan and

193i i look at this and i say so much of this i love the measurements i love the data and so much of this i'm thinking who's who's managing all that data who's collecting all that data how are we and and it's going to be so important to have that data because that's how you know when you need to course correct so who's who's in that so for me the point of actually might be um i hope you're thinking about some of the grant money which it underlies all of these ambitions and all of this work that some of that grant money might be used um towards somebody who could support all the data work that's going to be necessary yeah thank thank you for that jo thank you for all of that joy and

194i as a as we're putting this plan together and then kind of had it where we wanted it and where i think we needed it it's like okay this is really more like a five to ten year but i i'm with you i would much rather be overly ambitious and think about what supports do we need to reach that ambition and and maybe realistically you know in a couple of crevices in my brain thinking okay we're we're not going to get out we're not going to get all of this but but but we're going to get a good bit of it if if we if we stick with that and and we'll be learning about how to do what's next the entire time so i i appreciate that thought and you putting into words the

195who manages this i was putting most of my energy into wishing that somebody would come up with some sort of you know lex luthorian device to slow time down or stop time so we could you know um or make the pan the pandemic go away instantly so we didn't need to manage that or um but but but thank you for that that's a very helpful bit of feedback thank you carrie thanks jake um wow i mean this is there's a lot of really great stuff there i agree with julia about the ambition but i also see um a couple of pieces here that would make really terrific county-wide initiatives and i wonder if we have our pulse or you have your pulse on the county in terms of things like for example school start times

196and expanding student opportunities those are some things that should be discussed at the county level if they haven't already been and if there are entities that would provide a venue for discussing those topics and others um it would be i think to our benefit to take advantage of of that yeah thank you thank you for that carrie and i i have a little bit of a notion of where that perspective comes from and and we we are engaged with um through through patrick blackman who is actually our representative to the the the the online learning community that that sort of falls under the berkshire county superintendents group um yeah and and when some of you as individuals have we as we've discussed you know that we have a student that wants to take this mount

197everett has three students that want to take this that that i think requires maybe a county-wide maybe even a larger um with with the school start times i and i i don't mean this if this sounds snarky i i really don't mean it to um we have worked so many i mean this is my 17th year as a superintendent berkshire county um i had hair and it was black when i started uh and and we can't even get our calendars coordinated so i think my thinking around school start time is somebody some district needs to be a leader and take it on and actually do it and then then maybe there will and and i you know i i'm always happy to be the the successful leader that does it the second time or the

198third time i'm not necessarily wanting to be um you know the first into space which is seems to be the metaphor of the day the first civilian in space but but this one seems like and this one what really drives the urgency around school start time for me is that it's our students that are talking about it it's it's it's it's not like parents saying oh man i wish you could or i wish you would it's like it's like the the closest level of our of our clients saying this would really be good for me and um right and it's actually it's it's the first time that i've heard it framed as not as flipping the start times but as moving the start time for the seven through twelve which is somehow more compelling right

199yeah my experience is um flipping it is easy [Music] but thinking back to my days of trying to get like an 11 year old and his nine-year-old brother and their six-year-old sister ready for school in the morning to three different sometimes three different schools in pittsfield at one point it's no easier to get a little person ready and out the door in the morning than it is for a high school student get up and get ready themselves so i i cannot i don't think our community will say yeah just flip it that's i don't think we'll get that feedback i think we'll get back thank you for ruining my life now now now my teenager is happy but you've made you've made the rest of the the family so i i think we need to

200think about it yeah i you thank you for observing that that it is not as simple as just flipping it it's it's a very nuanced complex challenge but it's certainly not an impossible challenge because people do it and have done it successfully and again i i think it may require a really deep thought about utilizing community partners that specialize in before and after school child care particularly for younger students so so we're not messing up the entire world and work world of families as we try to fix problems for their adolescents and early adolescents so jose thanks jake now as you described corralling little people tears were welding in my eyes that that's i think that's the story of my everyday no and uh the word ambition or ambitious was was uh um was used

201by both uh julia and carrie and clearly this is this is truly ambitious the question i have jake is is um in the i love your figure that has building community wellness opportunity information stacks side by side um and then you've got activities and and and ways that you will assess how successful each of these activities have been i think the my uh concern is not the right word i think it's um i guess i'm curious about how you would prioritize these individual um building blocks as you've laid out for us um would you is the plan to approach um you know achieving success in each of these activities for each of these building blocks is the plan to roll them out at the same time or are these going to be layered in in

202a certain way to you know to give you the bandwidth that you would need to successfully carry out these activities and and to build these building blocks yeah that's the plan that you well yeah that's a that's a crucial question and it's one we're going to set our minds to as an administrative team i i mean i i will speak for myself and i think i speak for the team and i will say part of the reason why this plan is so ambitious is because i believe in this team so much i mean this is a there's a remarkable group of people that that you all who were around when i got hired allowed me to come in and and work with and have his colleagues and lead um to me jose just very bluntly

203the most crucial piece of this the the crisis level piece is building community it's um i think you're likely to agree if you don't already agree i think after october 19th and and hearing about you know our listening and learning project you're likely to agree i think um if if we don't if we we've already started attacking that piece attacking's a really poor choice we've already started prioritizing and taking on that piece um because it's it's about it's about how individual people that we serve perceive themselves as human beings in relationship with the other people in the community that they've chosen to call home so you know i i was when you asked that question i started thinking about like this yeah i'm somebody that for better for worse i've gone to church my entire

204life and i put in enough hours in sunday school as a kid to um you know if i ever get sentenced for some crime i think i'm gonna claim that i already did my sunday school hours so i should get my sentence reduced but i i remember a song from when i was little the wise man built his house upon the rock the foolish man built his house upon the sand um to me the rock that we have to build on is that community if if we start anywhere but there where we're building these structures on a foundation that to some families they're gonna say this is not the place for me i'm not gonna send my child to school there um or uh this is not the place for me i'm gonna put my

205house on the market or pack up my apartment or my condo and i'm gonna leave and that that to me is the other stuff we do is is not nearly as meaningful or as important or as powerful if it's not done in the context and on that foundation of community so that's my priority um you know the the other stuff some of it is stuff that we that we should be doing or we already do do day in and day out um the school start time piece is is pretty i would rate that among the top of these priorities because i think there's enough research to say we're not helping kids be as physically healthy emotionally healthy or socially healthy as they could be when when we're not paying attention to the ways their brains

206work and the way their sleep patterns and their bodies actually work so so yeah i we we can't take this all on at once julia's notion of having the right supports may lend a little more ability to take on several things at once as we're trying to get through and come out of the pandemic and dealing with day to day kerry's notion of hey maybe some of this is best done where we're part of a group not the group i i think also lends some some wisdom to how and what we take on and when but but we're we're very vigilant about that and i i just you know i know that when the admin team saw this document you know and and wrap their heads around it all together in kind of one place

207and i thought as i was writing it like oh my goodness this is this is too much but it's but it is what we need to do thank you jake i just have just a quick follow-up in terms of how the school committee or the role the school committee can play in um in this development plan and it seems that julia curtis and i are nearing our one-year anniversary of being in the school committee i i certainly have much to learn it seems like the role that we can place is by holding helping to hold you in the in the administration accountable um so can we you know as we move forward in you know follow follow-up or subsequent school committee meetings can we expect from you some reporting for instance on on how the

208objectives and activities are being rolled out for instance in a prioritizing community or the school start time whatever that might look like yeah yes absolutely and i mean you know next month when you see my my goals which is you know for anybody that's not on a school committee my goals are sort of one of the the hearts of how i get evaluated in in my role here in the district um i think you'll see my priorities in in my goals um which are not gonna be quite as ambitious because um this is my livelihood and i don't wanna get fired um i'm just kidding uh that you know you'll see my priorities and my goals and then and then they'll the the school improvement plans informed this plan this plan will in turn inform

209next year's school improvement plans it will trickle down to individual educator plans and the plans that the administrators submit to me i think it will probably show up in the school committee goals the policy subcommittee has a role to play on this because some of this is about the policies that sort of um guide and and provide supports for for how we actually operate and why we actually operate so yes i think you'll see regular sort of check-ins on much of this um as we as we move forward together and and i and i think we're at the point and i find it really exciting we are at a point where all of these plans that we have to do from your level on down um through the organizational chart actually all work together and

210complement each other and support each other so that's that's where you move beyond that's where we move beyond just ticking the boxes saying okay we adopted a plan what's next you know now now we're actually now we're actually everybody's getting their oar in the water at the same time and in following the orders of the person at the front of the boat you know so so we're going as fast and as far as we can thanks jake thank you that's it for me christina thank you awesome thank you um we we need to vote the district improvement plan um so i would like to make a motion to accept the district improvement plan as presented a second was that julia yeah thank you any further discussion all in favor bow and i connery i constantine

211eye open by an eye green eye miller eye thank you that motion passes thank you jake for that presentation you only went like 35 minutes over your allotted time so now i have zero minutes for the chair report um i um so next up on the agenda is the chair report i i just wanted to um briefly talk about the workshop that the school committee had on august 28th with dorothy presser the notes are in our packet i'm not going to sort of rehash that um but i did want to thank dorothy for driving out to mount greylock and meeting us on a saturday um and spending a good good amount of time with us on a saturday morning and i wanted to thank jake and stacy for helping with scheduling and setting that all

212up and i wanted to thank the committee for taking time away from their families for us to really dig deep into our processes and the things that we need to do to help continue improve um the district um so thank you all for doing that um we had some action items out of that workshop um jake has just presented the district improvement plan and in november he will be presenting superintendent goals and we are working as a committee on set looking at our school committee goals um and that will be we'll be working on that soon um i don't think we have a set date on that yet um any questions there did i miss anything okay um the next um agenda item that i had was discussing the november reorganization process i was kind

213of hoping ursula would be here because i think she wasn't around for the last reorganization process it's it's something that we have to do per our policy is to do reorganization in november it's a little weird and a little clunky the way we did it last year um i called the meeting to order i was still chair and i read our mission statement and then i turned the meeting over to jake and jake becomes all powerful as he pointed out at that point um and he calls for nominations for the chair um so the reason why i mention this is to sort of like talk about that process a little bit and really just remind you that that's how it happens so it's not as weird and to really think about we have up on

214our website our current committee list and the subcommittees that we are a part of and so i think it's important for all of us to think about this before our next um regular session meeting where we're sitting in our subcommittee's the time commitment time commitment involved in those subcommittees and if we're comfortable in those places um because you know as we move around and change places there are things that we might have um different interests in or we might not be able to commit as much time to one thing um so just uh i just wanted you all to take some time to think about that currently our subcommittee composition we have three subcommittees negotiation finance and policy um steve miller has requested an education subcommittee and i think that's a discussion we should have

215we've had it we've had the discussion about an education subcommittee in the past my recollection is that um we as a school committee as a whole our whole purpose is education um if and not i don't know the best way to describe it but we as a committee as a whole are always taking into account education i'm not sure there's a need for an education subcommittee meeting but uh subcommittee but that's up for discussion julia is that up for discussion right now i have just or is that november no i think it's it's valuable to have that discussion now before november because whoever becomes chair if we decide that an education subcommittee is needed people will have to be um elected to or asked to be on that subcommittee so one uh what i have

216seen in many other educational boards um is something akin to um a program committee or a um almost like i i've been in places where it's been called an accountability committee not in you know more in the like how are we doing against what we said we were going to do in course corrections talking about course corrections and i'm just thinking about that fantastic plan a district improvement plan and thinking um you know a committee that is looking at some of that um at and i think it'd be super important um [Music] super important that that is the agendas and the conversation are driven by the school lest we confuse the line between governance and management but i think that i've seen that done a lot and quite effectively steve so the reason i brought

217this up is not to say that the creation of an education subcommittee is to take the you know focus off the school committee you know we are here for education it's because we are so busy with putting out fires you know right now this is what um you know three and a half hours into this meeting that i think it is very useful to have a you know subset and you're gonna i'm happy with the phrasing julia used that's explicitly tasked to be point to help facilitate some of these conversations and i think facilitators the right word and you we did have one before uh during the initial phases of the you know covert pandemic we were trying to plan for what would happen it was a useful place for the district administration for the

218teachers for the parents and for the school committee to get together and meet there's a lot of you know wonderful things in these district improvement plans there's a lot of really good discussions to have by having a committee this does open up some of these discussions to you know public comment and feedback and i think we have a lot of people in this community who care very deeply about these issues and would be interested in finding ways to be involved so thank you one thing i do want to point out about subcommittees is the amount of time it takes for the administration to plan for meetings which is something i think we always have to consider um the more sub-committees we have the more we're taking the administration away from you know their day-to-day tasks

219so just something to keep in mind carrie um so it seems to me that the education subcommittee is really the school governance council which is made up of the way stephen is envisioning it is made up of parents teachers community members and they're elected to represent the community and to support and work with the building principles on matters of curriculum and education um the way the education subcommittee was run before it was more of a community forum and i don't think that's something that the school committee signed on to it's not the way we run subcommittees i think if the proposal were to include sort of open forum we would need to decide as a committee that that's the way we would want to run it um or would want it run um and maybe

220um so i think it's more complicated than just do we want an education subcommittee i would want to see a proposal of what is that committee really intending to do and how is it going to be run and have the committee agree that that is a valuable exercise mm-hmm julia um thank you carrie and i and i agree with that um also having served on the school council um and uh seeing a lot of our work from school council reflected in that district improvement plan i think you're right carrie that's where that a lot of the that conversation should be happening um and it it made me wonder um at our retreat where are we monitoring do we have a subcommittee that um kind of monitors progress works with the superintendent on you know checkpoints

221throughout the year to see if we're on track to meet he's on track to meet his goals like a you know part of the evaluation cycle where does that happen and to me this is all part and parcel of like it's that accountability around the most important goals that we have as a district and for our superintendent and again not not for broad conversation but just as a place to be checking in and talking about course corrections if we're off if we're off track but there was at one point an evaluation subcommittee and i think that was kind of the purpose of it as i remember does that ring a bell with you christina you're not yeah yeah definitely yeah although i like the idea of accountability verse versus evaluation evaluation yeah so would it

222make sense sorry i was just going to suggest would it make sense for someone to draw a proposal for this subcommittee that we're talking about and present it at the next school committee meeting yeah i think that i think that makes a ton of sense julia's talking about this i am going to say having seen something of this sort i am willing to to take you know steps towards drafting something but i would love if possible christina to run that past you you know to work with you on that and certainly to work with jake as well absolutely i think that's a great idea okay the um next so as i mentioned earlier we currently don't have any liaisons um within the school committee another item that steve miller had requested was a liaison to

223the pack and i will let him explain that request rather than put words in his mouth sure thank you so in the past we've had a liaison with the pac and i think it's also been valuable to help you know keep the lines of communication open to also show the priorities of the school committee to just you know keep us in the loop and be aware of what's going on and you know given all the educational issues that are going on i think would be valuable to have that again and i would be very very happy to you know be a point person to attend their meetings and to report back to the school committee carrie isn't the director of special education our liaison to the pack isn't that the i'm i'm not actually sure

224i mean i don't remember the school committee ever having a liaison to the pack i i know there was one at west's and again this is one of the things when we merged the three different school committees different committees had different items in place we used to have i think liaisons to the different like the was it the we had one to the c fund i was going to say this i was trying to remember the name the c fund and then there was one uh he had one to the um it was like a nurse's committee at one point i forget the name of it but there was there have been liaisons i don't recall there ever having been one at greylock for the pack i might ask what problem we're trying to solve

225i i would just say keep keeping the lines of communication open and just you know there were a couple of advisories from the pack last year and i think it would be valuable to have more you know maybe more formal more frequent communication with them these are your very important issues and i think it would be beneficial to have you know someone from the school committee you know attending the meetings um sorry it seemed to me that the director of special education services could report back from those pac meetings um [Music] i i wonder if there's any kind of conflict with the school committee member being in attendance of a pac meeting because because of what they're discussing what they're potentially discussing about individual students that we wouldn't necessarily want to be involved in i

226mean i i'm happy to modify this to say that we make the offer to the pack and just ask the pack would you like someone from the school committee to serve as a liaison and if they say that they would like someone then we appoint someone but but give them the choice carrie does the does the pac ever come to the school committee to discuss issues i mean i i would kind of rather see it done that way um the pac should have an open invitation to the school committee to come and and present any kind of you know but maybe that's again maybe that is typically done through the special education director um who is the administrative liaison to the pack so yeah i mean there's a lot there are a lot of there's

227a lot of regulation around this and i i don't feel like i know enough to um know what's appropriate steve so i i don't see it as an either or i don't see having a liaison prohibits the pack i would be fine tonight with just investigating with legal and just investigating with the pact to see if they want someone and then you'll leave this to a future meeting and is that something that um that patrick would bring to the to the next pac meeting jake i don't really know certainly he certainly could i think they met a week and a half ago or two weeks ago so it'll be i think he said early november will be their next meeting i might i might suggest that we first speak to legal and or maybe the

228mass association of school committees to understand how those open lines of communications are managed um just because if we say do you want us to come and they say yes and then we say oh we're not going to and that just feels like a we're going in the wrong direction um so i think we should just really understand those things before we talk to the pack okay yeah i if i may um christina you know i i don't believe they're school committee liaisons to the school councils um i don't believe our pack is our pack as a organization whereas um individuals that comprise the organization are shy about reaching out to to any of you me patrick i would sort of circle back to julia's initial thought of what what problem is trying to be

229what are we trying to solve we don't have liaisons to the school councils i i think in some ways i i don't know i i i have to wrap my head around this a little bit and and i think starting with with legal and with masc is a good good advice on where to start to begin that wrapping process and jake jesse you know there did actually used to be a liaison to the school chemical at mount greylock and i think it yeah i think it was dropped at some point steve is your hand up sorry yeah the the lighting is bad sorry i'm i'm trying to remember and joe hopefully can help on this that when we were talking about regionalizing in the old days when you had a school district of just one

230building to some extent you know the school council on the school committee had a tremendous overlap but now that you have a school committee that has three buildings that made the school councils more important i think that's separated things out a bit whereas we don't have three different packs we have one pack for the whole district the state's advisories and what i recall from people advocating for as best practices is for you to have a strong [Music] special education parent advisory council three strong school councils they all advocate through the channels that they have as well as have official official ways to communicate you know submitting letters and recommendations and they have formal review responsibilities for various things formal formal things that they're required to produce having them be strong entities in and of themselves

231as opposed to governing through or working through liaisons is probably the best strongest most resilient organization to foster and so i think that's those advisories in that direction is to me that's the best route to go um but if there are specific problems or specific um pitfalls that we're trying to address then i think you know that's the only thing that would change that perspective i think okay so we're going to look into things a little bit further there um so i think we can move on to our next agenda item unless anyone else has any questions there okay so up next on the agenda are the masc resolutions delegate guidance um we need to vote on the resolutions vote on whether or not we're going to support the resolutions as provided um so we

232can direct our delegate who will represent us which is carrie um when when these move forward um i'm wondering if obviously you've all read the resolutions um but what i could do if you liked is read just the title of each resolution so that we have that on the record um and then if somebody wants to um i don't know if somebody has a motion that they want to provide to support or not support the resolutions if we feel we need to pull them all out and do it one at a time we can or we can support them all together does that make sense should i read the resolutions the titles or not i think it's worth stating it for the record okay so resolution number one is dedicated funding for school-based clinics and

233services resolution two is homework gap and wi-fi slash internet access resolution three is idea full funding act resolution four is recess resolution five is zero tolerance policies resolution six is alternative to mcas resolution seven is school committees and receiverships resolution 8 is electric school buses resolution 9 is prohibiting the use of native american mascots julia i i was just gonna ask if i could maybe just start the discussion move that we accept all um of the resolutions okay julia moves the exception of all resolutions do i have a second second curtis seconds discussion i would just point out for anybody who doesn't have them in front of them some of these are sponsored by particular school districts some of them are by the massachusetts association school committee board of directors um it is actually most

234of them are from the board of director i think maybe just one or two or from a particular school district it is um open to any school district in the state to propose resolutions so if in the future the mount greylock regional school district has a resolution they would like to propose at the state level um we are welcome to do so thank you carrie any other discussion questions okay hearing none all in favor bow and i connery i constantly die elephant by an eye green eye miller eye thank you that motion passes okay up next upcoming meetings and jose i'm gonna ping you for one quick second because i think there's a time an incorrect time on the policy subcommittee meeting but october 19th um 6 p.m jake already plugged this special session with

235courtney tunis october 21st at 4 pm there's a finance subcommittee meeting october 26th at 7 pm 5 pm is incorrect there's a policy subcommittee meeting and october 28th at 6 30 pm we have um the dr josie workshop and i think that's it for meetings and right there's nothing else that's what that's what we have so far um any agenda requests and i do not have any other items for discussion do i have a motion to adjourn um christina actually sorry look at that an agenda request you mentioned it but um we do need to talk about at some point what we want to do for school committee goal setting and us our self-evaluation yep so i would just put that if we can find a time to put that uh discussion about it and

236maybe even talk about a date that would be great great thank you for that reminder okay back to curtis's motion to adjourn do i have a second oh second steve seconds he supported me earlier all in favor o and i henry i constantine elephant eye green hi okay it is 9 48 p.m and we are adjourned thank you everyone for your time gold socks have a great night