001Good evening everybody. Tonight we have our school committee reorganization meeting. So I'm opening the meeting and we will be designating new committee members to take the roles. So I would welcome nominations for chair or vice chair. I have an interest in in being vice chair. Um, and I I would nominate Sarah FZ if she'll accept for um the role of chair. I would second that. Acceptance. So the motion by Don and second by Hillary. Yes. And Susan. Yeah. Susan, do you want to take the the the vote? You just call each name so we can vote on the chair position and then um the chair can take over. Okay. Roll call. Tracy, yes. Joe, yes. Frank, yes. Hillary, yes. Sarah, yes. Dan, yes. And Don, yes. Um, and can we get a motion to entertain
002for the vice chair? No, now that both of us now do the awkward walk. See, I already screwed it up. It's okay. [Music] I want the gabble. Happens. [Music] Okay. [Music] [Applause] So now I would entertain a motion for vice chair. Second. Yes. I accept if you if you vote that way. Does that have to be a roll call vote as well? No, we can all just Yeah. Yeah. Oh, just close nominations now. Okay. Tracy, wait. It is a role co-o. Yeah. But are there any other nominations? Oh, are there any other nominations? Nominating Joe for secretary? No. Oh, for this position? I thought we could vote collectively and move this along. All right. Crown. Got it. Okay. Anyone else? Close nominations. Okay. So, now roll call, please. You can do roll call or you
003can just do it by hands. Okay. Hand vote. All in favor of work. I know. [Applause] I I'll nominate Joe to be secretary. Yes. Second. I accept. Good job. Keep saying all in favor. Yes. All in favor. Okay. Car 7. Carry 70. just at least here. Got it. Um, so now do we move on to the consent agenda? No, we do need and then the leaders on yours. Okay. So, we'll go to budget first. Oh, no. So, I would nominate Don as budget chair and then I'll nominate Don as a budget member. Who else? And Frank is a budget member. We're just gonna I Yes. Is there a second? All in favor? That passes 70. Passing seven zero. It's weird. Um Um So Joe wants to throw a wrench into things. um sign up for
004everything. Oh, okay. He solved the problem. Okay. So, I'll nominate Hillary's chair, Sarah, and as a member, and Tracy as a member of the policy sub. Second by Don. All in favor? That passes 70. I nominate uh Joe is chair, Frank as a member, and Tracy as a member of superintendent evaluation. Second by Don. All in favor that carries. I'm so sorry. I nominate Frank as chair. Hillary is a member. Joe as a member of communications. Second by Don. All in favor? Carries have nothing. Um, I'll nominate uh Hillary and Sarah to remain on the uh leveling uh subcommittee. Second by Don. All in favor that carry seven. I nominate um Frank and Joe as leazison to the PTO and let's just go through we and Sarah's leazison to the coalition against hate and bias.
005Frank as uh Frank and Sarah, no wait, Frank and Tracy as liaison to the equity steering group. Uh Hillary and Tracy as liaison to CPAC. Uh Don as liazison to Hava. Do we know normally have two for Hava? We do. Does anyone else want to be We can do Hava. Okay. And Sarah. Um myself and normally someone else who else went for HMAPA. I would. Okay. Myself and and Don as leazison to HMAPA. Um Hillary and Joe as liazison to the vers Hollist. Don as liazison to uh flag at the flag field. Yeah. Project. Building project. Y Tracy as a leazison to youth and family services. We knew who's doing wellness. um someone who's been on wellness, what's the commitment for it? How how or maybe four times a year? Four times a year. What
006kind of meetings? Evenings or 6 to 7:30 or might be 5:30 to 7. I can do it. Okay. Don to wellness. Anyone else? Okay. Um 3A is that is that still is it still needed? Where's I don't know what 3A does. I don't know what that is either was on last year. Okay, we I guess we'll we can hold we'll just hold off figure out what that is talking about there. And then um what we normally don't do that in not not in nonbudget year non negotiations years we we'll do Dan Don and uh Hillary as leaison to the to the HFT. Is there Oh no second. Yeah. Second for all of those. All in favor seven. Good job. Okay. So now consent agenda. Um we have the minutes from the May 29th um school
007committee meeting and a number of grants gifts from mostly PTO stuff. Um are there any questions about those? I just you had a question. No. No. Okay. I I make a motion to approve the consent agenda. Second. All in favor? 70. Um we don't have the student representatives here. Should we start with the playbrook unity plan? Yeah, I think that's a great idea. Okay. Okay. So, we'll move things around a little bit and have um you can present the playbook unity plan. I don't know if that's who is running it. Do you guys want to come up um and gather around these these mics? Couple chairs. Let's see. Thank you guys so much for coming. Um it do are any of if if you want um the slides to just move forward, just ask us
008and we'll we'll make sure someone moves that forward. Just let me know and I will All right. All set. All right. Thank you for having us. My name is Jay Patel and I'm a current junior at Hollston High School and this would be my second year of leadership in the playbook initiative. Uh my name is Sarah. I'm also a junior at HOL and this is my first year doing playbook. So throughout the year, we've been doing extensive work at down at the middle school about diversity and identity. But in order we can for us to get into that, it's important we explain what exactly playbook is. Next slide, please. So, playbook is a program that is a partnership between the nonprofit project 351, the Boston Celtics, New Balance, and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendent
009aimed to eradicate identity based discrimination. There's 28 participating districts including Hollist. And the targeted demographic of the program um is students, middle school students that promote Playbook's teachings of inclusion, diversity, and equity, safe and respectful environments for people of all backgrounds, and the necessity to stand up against daily injustices. Next slide. So to understand how playbook achieves its mission, each district selects an outstanding group of 20 to 30 middle school students to attend three workshops that are facilitated by high school leaders such as Jay as Jay and myself known as trainers. So with each workshop, students work through an agenda of interactive activities which deepen their knowledge and perspectives of diversity's role in society and our personal lives as well as what we can do to be more respectful and appreciative of each other's differences.
010Each workshop builds on the last, promoting teamwork, collaboration, and familiarity in partnership with new information each meeting. After all three workshops are done, the group meets one more time for a day of action in which students brainstorm and begin to execute ideas to implement playbooks teachings to the larger school community under their own vision. If you could go to the next slide, please. So to take a step back from the day of action, we have a sample workshop agenda. This sample was taken from our first workshop which was a combined workshop with the Lowel public school uh system. Um students from our middle school were uh with students from the Lowel Middle School as well as trainers from Lowel High School. So um they started with the pregame which uh was the personal and program
011introduction and then jumped right into the F game which is an icebreaker. Um and in this icebreaker they really jump right into what playbook is all about by coming to experience how people have different perspectives and how they can learn from them. Uh after that they do participant introductions and leadership definitions to kind of reflect on their own definitions of leadership. And after a lunch they go to agree disagree unsure which is a recurring activity across the workshops in which students are given purposely vague statements um that have to do with identity and are asked to go to the side of the room corresponding to their belief. Uh during this activity, students hear from across the classroom and they get to consider uh not only different POVs perspectives but also how they might change. Um
012so after that they watch a quick playbook initiative overview video now that they have a better idea of what the program is about and then jump into scenario discussions. um scenarios come from a playbook which are made by other middle school students who have also completed the program. These students um they created scenarios about identity based discrimination where the reader is put in the place of a bystander. Um students talk about these scenarios in their groups and go over discussion questions that guide them um to question the roots of the issue as well as their steps as a bystander. After that, they watch a um or not watch, but we explain to them the concept of kaizen, which is really important to the Boston Celtics. Um it means continuous self-improvement, and then they show gratitude
013and think about their next steps. So, each workshop utilizes Celtics and Project 351's resources provided to trainers. The trainers learn how to effectively facilitate these workshops by undergoing an extensive certification process prior to the start of the season. So now we move on to the unity plan which is the main reason why we're seated here today. The unity plan is our experience at the day of action in words. What we came up with, why we feel each idea we came up with is important and how we plan to make our visions a reality. We're guided by four stages or words. Imagine, reflect, build, and create. So it's at this time I'd like to introduce our student perspective. So, we're very grateful to have joined with us here today Porter, Graham, Anna, Julia, Logan, Cella, and
014Quinn. So, uh, next slide, please. [Music] The playbook initiative helped me to understand how stereotypes can make someone feel less themselves and suppress their emotions. It also trained me how to intervene with racism and homophobia to help people be able to feel safe and welcome. Playbook initiative was a positive experience for me because the overall goal of playbook is to welcome others and make people feel safe, which is a super important part of making a good environment and a welcoming school. Its ideas have opened my mind to different perspectives and different beliefs. The playbook initiative introduced me to the different perspectives and thought processes people have, the hardships many of us silently face, and the growth we can achieve together. I learned about how to become a reliable leader, how to become emotionally intelligent, and
015throughout this learning curve me and almost every member of the playbook faced. I was able to feel a sense of community and friendship. I came out of Project 351 with an open mind, a few new friends who I still talk to today, and a strong drive for change. The lessons playbook teaches are extremely important. They teach students how they teach students that everyone has different perspectives and ideas. They also teach us that everyone is different and we need to understand their differences. They teach us how to be open-minded and understand others ideas. The world isn't perfect and if in a perfect world everyone might be happy and everyone might be the same but everyone has different ideas of a perfect world and that's something playbook can help students understand a playbook school would have diversity,
016respect, passion and so much more. people in our school would be able to feel safe with who they are and passionate to be in a school which is able to support it. We would respect people for who they are and who they want to be. We would all be able to speak freely and express ourselves. And we if we disagree, we can do so civily and respectfully. Even if the world isn't a perfect place, we could make it as close as possible in our playbook school. Our school culture is generally positive and supportive with most students being kind and respectful toward each other's race and ethnic identity. However, we do face challenges particularly particularly regarding homophobia where some students make jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ plus community, often using gay as an insult.
017While the majority of students are supportive, there are still some who aren't. We've had a few fights between students, but they were smoothed out quickly. Our teachers generally foster a kind and helpful atmosphere and they are always there to help out. Overall, our school is a safe and supportive place even if we do have a few things to work on. Mom Quinn in my category was build. A shared vision for what we want Rams to be is a place in the community where everyone is welcomed and treated respectfully no matter who they are or what hardships they have faced. We are working towards teaching the students of Rams what we have learned throughout multiple workshops with workshops with project 351. Example, learning how to be empathetic and to be emotionally intelligent leading to what to
018do in certain situations. Starting with the sixth graders on June 17th, we hope to plant a seed that will grow into a tree for the benefit of rams in the years to come. Thank you all. So, we talked about the imagine, we talked about the reflect, we talked about the build. There's one word missing and that's the create. This is our actual Unity plan. It's broken into three stages, two of which have already been completed, indicated by the green check mark. The first pillar is creating posters,formational posters to set up around Robert Adams. This these posters aim would be to educate on the impact of diversity, playbook, service, being kind to one another, anti-bullying, all fundamental aspects and lessons that playbook teaches its participants and this ensures that students can learn even while walking to
019class. The second pillar is student participants of the playbook initiative learn how to become effective facilitators of many playbook workshops to be uh experienced by their peers. And I'll jump right into the third pillar, which is these facilitators then going out into their middle school classrooms and facilitating these workshops in front of the in front of their peers. The effect uh the aim here is to create a ripple effect of playbooks teachings that will spread throughout the middle school and as these students graduate and head into the high school, bring those teachings and those expanded perspectives into the high school culture as well. So that will be taking place on June 17th, the actual facilitation of these workshops. So next slide please. Thank you guys so much for listening. Um we are really grateful for
020the opportunity to be here and to be able to see Playbook continue and grow under your support. This has been such a great program. Um the kids are so passionate about it. It is incredible and I'm really happy that our district has the opportunity to have such a great program. So, thank you. One thing I'd like to add to that, this program is more than service or education. While fundamental in its creation and its intent, this is about ensuring every student can go to bed and wake up and feel like, "No, Holl is a home for me. I do belong here, no matter of their identity or their background. It's something we all care deeply about and we're so grateful that Holl can be a district where this type of work is endorsed and supported
021and that's a testament to all of you. So from the bottom of my heart and all our hearts, Thank you all for this. I I love that you're a part of this and that you came to talk to us about this. I know it's not always easy to come in here and do a presentation like this, but it's really important because it's also a way for the great like the larger community to hear about it. Um, and I I love I think both, you know, the belonging and the respect that you are are modeling and bringing to um, Rams, but I think the bigger lessons too um, in terms of bystander and the the interactions and and how to deal with things. I think I I I probably just don't speak for myself on this,
022but even as an adult, we encounter that. So, these are lessons that you're learning now as middle schoolers that will carry through a lifetime because I can I mean, I I'm in my late 40s and I still get put into positions sometimes where you need to say something, do something, this will continue on. So, I I really appreciate that you at this young age are doing this and that this model is also to have the ripple effect and share it with others. So, great job, guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. [Applause] Um, [Music] should we do? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, we can do the HF Spotlight Awards next if you if you'd like. Heidi. Do you Heidi? Heidi. [Music] I think our HCAP presentation is first on the
023agenda. Is that right? We can do whichever. If you'd like to do that first, that's fine. Do that first. Okay. So, I have a handout. Um, instead of presenting a PowerPoint, just the handout with our information. So, uh, I'm here to talk for a few minutes about Holliston's local cable access television studio. Basically, Holliston Hub HCAT is a community nonprofit news connection and we are in an interesting position now. Um, many many people have cut their cable cord and yet they may not know where our studio funding comes from. To begin with, we're a nonprofit media company whose revenue dollars come from a small percentage of your cable subscriber bill. And as people cut the cable cord, our major revenue source decreases. In the last 5 years, HCAP funding has been reduced by over $100,000
024or 30% just in the last five years. And that decline continues. But despite our shrinking budget, there are ways that we're serving the community and we help this school committee to get the word out about key school investments and initiatives. Since November of last year, the Holliston Hub HCAT has produced a total of 243 viewing hours. It included 93 hours of fundamental town government meetings, including school committee, select board, and finance committee. And for this group, our outreach to Holliston High School students is accomplished every year with extensive coverage of school sports, concerts, events, and graduation. We partner with the high school guidance office to support communication internships. There are many opportunities for experiential learning for students interested in media and broadcasting in our studios and also the Holliston Hub HCAT scholarship awards to seniors
025are given every year. We continue to produce key community programming with minimal staff, but we need community support to continue our mission. Our value is that no one else provides this live and recorded news coverage of the people, organizations and events in the government uh and the government of Hollist community. We can provide a valuable learning experience for students and community members who want to volunteer. So, we're sort of appealing to the board and the people, you know, and the connections you have to help volunt develop more volunteers in our studio so we can teach people how to do these things and improve our coverage even further. So, with that, um, that's just an intro. I'd like to have Aaron outline some of the new opportunities for learning and community involvement as we all work
026together to keep the studio resource and build upon it in new ways. Hi, uh my name is Aaron Shakar. Heidi and I are board members for Holliston Hub HCAT. Um and I think you get the point, but I just want to make sure you understand we're not asking for money. What we are what we the reason we're here is because we want to we want to spread the word. We want to make sure that you guys understand what a resource this is for the town and um what a resource it could be for the school and the students. Um my son Lucas Shaker was a soccer and lacrosse player and had a u a knee operation in the summer before his junior year uh which prevented him from playing soccer. Um, and I don't even
027know how he heard about HCAT. I didn't know it existed, but he heard about it and he ended up broadcasting the soccer games uh because he couldn't play in them. Uh, then he did basketball games and then he did lacrosse games and the following year uh he was still kind of injured and and so kept broadcasting. He's now a journalism major at uh the University of Denver. Um he didn't quite realize that doing actual journalism required writing, but anyway, he did get he thought you just got in front of a microphone and talked, but anyway, he did get fantastic experience and he's hoping to do um sports journalism. So, one of the things we hope is he he did an internship, I think both semesters, right? Or just one? just one just one semester. Um
028we're hoping more kids take advantage of what we do. We can help uh students learn how to um work cameras to to to speak in front of cameras to do podcasting to do interviews. Um it is a really incredible resource. My sort of dream for all this and and I'm kind of new to this is to create more of like a journalism class at high school at this school. I know it's happened before. Um I would I I think personally I I'm a journalist. I work for GBH um the public radio show. Um, and so I think it's an incredibly important time for us to uh build a new uh upandcoming journalist. It's a tough time for uh my profession and that is something that that the house and hub hcat can do and um
029I mean this is us right here up on the the television screen. Um there are some number of people watching now from home. There will be probably more uh who will watch it after the fact. Um I don't know if if you guys went to town meeting or not, but uh some 2,000 people uh sorry, 200 people watched town meeting from home. That was uh more if not as many as the people who were in the room. So, you know, that's twice the participation uh in our town meeting that would have otherwise happened. uh being in the schools, you know, we do lots of events from schools, graduations, performances, um news programs from students, uh like my son Lucas did. It is it is a really terrific opportunity. Um [Music] you know, it's it it
030is experiential learning before kids go out into the world. And what we we'd really like is for you guys, as as Heidi mentioned, to to spread the word about what we do, to tell uh your friends and neighbors, you guys are people of influence in the town. Um and so we're trying to get in front of all the different groups um like you, the different boards and committees and organizations in town to just ask everyone to spread the word. the more the more people watching, the more people taking advantage, the more um material that we produce that you want to see. Not that what we produce isn't good, but um you know, input is always welcome. Um we are an award-winning organization, the uh Chief Cassidy, I don't know how many Emmys he has for
031his uh story hour with Chief Cassidy. He has um for us he has learned to read upside down and he's done a really good job of it. Uh if the awards say anything about it. So u thank you so much for your time and um this is Bruce the manager of the station. You probably know that. Um you can always ask him questions or send notes to anyone on the board. And uh thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I really do appreciate everything you guys do despite the fact that you can't cover our meeting. Well, just a bit of a conflict, but uh I'm just teething. No problem. Thank you very much. You really This is I mean this is incredible that you every one of our meetings you cover. I you
032know but for the last two years I had to reach out and say we actually don't need coverage if it mean you know it was just assume that you would you would automatically automatically do it as you know much as as if we're able to do it we had a man file and other staff will certainly cover anything it's greatly appreciated and we'll be there for the forum next week. Yeah, we we need to ensure that we keep, you know, HCA and all local. Yeah. All right. Sorry, quickly. Uh we are we are trying to use this room behind us. Um we we have a a short-term dream of creating a podcast studio um that students could use to create their own um podcast. I mean, you could do podcast, videos, whatever it is they
033want, but it will be a broadcast quality facility that um that they would be able to use. And and I hope my goal anyway is to bring in some trainers um to teach some courses. We have, you know, no loads of people who work with uh in the podcasting world and uh hoping they'll come in and teach the kids. Yeah. And I don't know if you remember, but the high school did have a podcast class in the English department for a year or so. And uh that students learn how to write scripts and prepare and do their research instead of just pulling up the mic and winging it. So um there's I think a lot of educational opportunity with that. And I did want to thank you for everything you do for the schools, right?
034I mean, there's many grandparents at home or that live afar and you're always here broadcasting band concerts and chorus concerts and scholarship nights and the athletic events. I mean, I know our our Hston athletes are incredibly appreciative because it's often things like lacrosse or basketball or football. Those kids are taking those clips and putting them together and and trying to pursue their dreams beyond high school to play at whatever level at school. But they wouldn't have unless they had a lot of money to hire a videographer to come in and grab those clips. They rely on what you guys do and and that takes a lot of time out of a a busy week. Most of our sports games happen during the week. So, we do appreciate it. And Bruce, I don't want to forget
035we may end up moving the forum to the cafeteria just based on numbers and looking we're going to do it in here. And so, I'll I'll touch base with you. Sure. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay, thank you. I'll stay here and talk about the Hollist Education Foundation for a few minutes. Um, I want to thank you for the invitation to come to uh the committee and talk about the Hollist Education Foundation. We'd like to call ourselves HEF. Um, HEF is an independent nonprofit organization just like HCAT was. Uh we are we were established to raise funds to enrich, foster and enhance and support public education in the Holliston school district. We raise funds annually and our last parent prom we did in May was quite successful and I think the parents
036want to see more of that sort of thing in the future. And with those funds um we we have operated an endowment for the benefit of public education. Our largest donors, the Middle Sex Savings Bank, who contribute well over $1,000 each year, and they have for over 20 years. They do this for many education foundations around the area, too. Um now our mission is to catalyze excellent and innovation in education through support for outstanding teacher initiatives, recognition of teacher achievement and by assisting Holliston High School seniors in their pursuit of higher education. Now you as a board have been reviewing our applications to provide funding this year to enrich educational efforts in the schools. And so I just wanted to review those um for a minute. Um, first I want to talk about our mission
037to fund our intensive study grants. These are particularly directed towards teachers and teams in our schools. And through these grants, we seek to enliven and improve the quality of classroom instruction. We hope to enrich children's lives and contribute to the overall excellent of our schools. So the grant for intensive study acts to encourage educators to expand and be creative and take a risk and affirms that teachers good ideas are supported by the community. This year we are funding five grants in the schools including STEM kits for Placentino's maker space. Uh these are particularly for the youngest students at Placentino. The maker spaces well equipped for some of the older, you know, second and third graders, but they they wanted some kits for uh more introductory level. Also, um improve the chill zone room at Miller.
038Um and also to fund the use of language translation aids for teachers in Miller classrooms. Um, and specifically one teacher was working with Portuguese students who needed more um, help with reading and uh, she needed translation aids to assist with that. Also, teacher training at the Miller School to enhance literacy teaching strategies. This is going to be online training done in the summer in the summer to the teachers. will get this training uh learning more about the use of the morphology of reading and decoding. Um and then their plan is to um to spread their learning to other teachers and uh help them understand this new strategies for strengthening reading skills. And finally, um we are going to be um providing some CPR training support for sixth sixth graders in Adams. Um just buying some
039of the equipment needed for wellness instruction, CPR um introduc introduction for the sixth graders. So we expect to be funding these grants in the next week or so. The second reason I'm here tonight is to present the results of our teacher spotlight on education awards. Half likes to recognize teachers in our school who exemplify our mission to impact and advance the future education of the Hollow student. Teachers and staffs nominate an educator, a team, a member of our school support staff, even an administrator in their building who has gone above and beyond the call of duty and had a profound impact on their peers. Who built important relationships, pursued excellence by using innovative techniques and/or technology to inspire students to create an imaginative classroom space, or advance the curriculum. This year's spotlight shines on the
040following teachers. Julie Lesbro at Plantino. The team of Ashley Droy, Carolyn Johnson, and Kristen Dennison at Miller, and Edith Nelson, a French teacher at the high school. So, uh, we want to congratulate all those teachers because their colleagues really thought they shown. And in conclusion, he will continue doing whatever we can to support our schools and our educators. Thank you very much. You guys do a lot of great work. So, thank you very much for all your efforts. You do a lot of great work. So, thank you for all your efforts and and for all the the work that our teachers do. [Music] You can come. Did you fill out those? Did you you wanna Yeah. Hi. Um I have the uh student advisory council updates. Um sorry about timing. I'm still getting the hang
041of it. Um so Wednesday, June 4th, um we had the senior scholarships evening here at the high school. um which was held in the auditorium and many seniors were recognized and awarded with scholarships. On Friday, June June 6th, uh there was in-house graduation and a graduation march. So, people received department awards for their outstanding achievements in every uh subject area. There was a video yearbook that had skits, footage, events, interviews, performances, all the stuff about the year and specifically highlighting the senior class. Um, and then after that, there's obviously the walkthrough of all the seniors through all the schools um to cheer them on and congratulate them. Um, then graduation was this past Sunday. Um, and there was like memorable performances and speeches to commemorate their time at Hollison High School. Uh, this Monday was
042senior step-up day. So, for all the rising seniors, uh, we wrote positive messages on uh, some of the walls on cars. Um, it's a good celebration for the next year's seniors. Uh this Wednesday, June 11th, uh was the Sabor Latino or Latin flavor event uh organized by by Senor Himenez where students including myself, Hi. Hi. Um performed songs in Spanish, did dances in Spanish. Um and there's also a demonstration by a recent alum on some Latin drum rhythms. So that was a very fun event like midday uh outside, lots of music and dance. Um then today, this morning was the junior book awards. So this is juniors recognized for their great work in classes and dedication to learning over the past uh three years. Do you uh Yes. Where are we? Okay, I'll go on
043to tomorrow is the pops concert, the final concert for band and chorus. Um this one's a little bit different. It's pop music and uh there's also an opportunity to have solo and small group acts. So that'll be going on tomorrow at the high school at 6:30. Um students will be finding out results for class elections tomorrow. So for the reelection positions, it includes class officers, student council leadership, and new student advisory council members. Um club leadership is also being decided for next year. So clubs like DECA, Leos, and Best Buddies are currently deciding who's going to leave next year or setting up the clubs for a strong year in the fall. Um a lot of sports banquetss are happening right now. Um the track banquet was on June 10th. The I know the boys lacrosse
044banquet was today. Um the outdoor track team I know personally um has had a very successful season and Caitlyn Quley and Connie Connor Teague are still um competing and they're going to be competing at New England Championship. Um, it was also the first time in program history that two, a boy and a girl on the Hollson team won TVL's MVP. Um, final exams, the first AM block exams will be Wednesday, June 18th. Um, C and D block exams will be Friday, June 20th. And Mr. Marsh, a gym teacher here at Hollston High School, is starting a weight training program for teams. And so that will be starting over the summer. and you can sign up for a day of weight training a week um just to prepare for sports next school year. Thank you for
045having us. Thank you. Um we can continue on with um school committee comments. Tracy Joe. Um, yeah, I just wanted to, uh, once again say congratulations to the class of 2025. Um, sorry I couldn't be at the graduation on Sunday, but I heard it was great and um, I look forward to seeing what you all do in the future. Um, echo that phenomenal graduation. Um, excited to see where all the the uh, seniors are going. Um, especially touched by the the speeches that were given. I thought they were really thoughtful. I probably can't come up with those some of those topics uh myself right now. So, it was um really insightful to see. So, again, congratulations to class of 25. I'll echo that. And I was I was very impressed by all the speeches, all
046the individuals, um students and staff members who took part in and had different uh roles leading the graduation. It was just a really special ceremony. Um, I also want to say thank you to uh Dan and Don for all the work that you did as chair and vice chair last year because that is a huge amount of work and thank you to Sarah and Don for your willingness to do it this year. Appreciate it. You're welcome. I will echo everyone's comments on on graduation. I love three performances too. I think it was three performances which were exceptional. there were some some really great talent and uh you know um that was really those that was uh pretty pretty neat to to to watch and um and I just want to congratulate Sarah and and thank
047her for for for taking on the role and I I know for without a doubt that you're going to it's going to be great and you're going to have lots of fun. We'll see. Um and um so yeah, it's uh and you too. When you come back, you don't get it. Thanks. You continue on. I'm I'm loving this chair right now. You're going to be an instigator now. We'll talk later. Just wanted to give a shout out to um all of our teachers who attended graduation um teachers and staff. And I think one of the really special things about a Holl High School graduation is that our graduates get to um pick a faculty member that's meant a lot to them. Um and they hand them their diploma. There's a big hug. I I think
048that speaks volumes. I mean we as families are there. It's hours long. Um and of course we're thrilled to watch our graduate, but for teachers to take like three, four, five hours out of their day on a Sunday and come come to that and it means so much to the students. So I wanted to say thank you for that. Um, I know it's a super busy time in all our schools, but shout out to all the field days that are going on at the elementary school. It looks like you guys have some a really busy week or two ahead of you. Um, the Pops concert is this Friday, I believe, in the evening and that's always a really awesome event. And then like the last thing, and I know the students brought this up, but
049I just want to reiterate and thank the community. Um, I mean it is just it's an awesome night um to attend. But the senior scholarship event that the school puts on um through guidance, but really through this whole community um it's it was 116 scholarships for our graduating seniors amounting to $172,000 that they were sent off to. Um and and guidance had mentioned that there was more than any other year and that means so much to families. um and for kids to be recognized like that. And again, HCAT was there live streaming it for the families from afar that wanted to tune in. But to make that possible for our graduates, it really takes a lot of community support. Many of them are memorial scholarships. It's also sports groups, theater groups, lots of groups that
050support our students. So, thank you. Um and I will echo everyone's comments on graduation. It really was. I I feel so fortunate that I had a graduate in that class and that will be my very happy memory for many years to come. Um it just it was such a wonderful day. Um and one thing to mention as well, um all of the the performances, speeches, everything was wonderful. Also, Mr. Rivera's um uh presentation on the the students going off to military service um was especially um touching and meaningful. Um so that meant a lot to all of us. Um and then again the scholarship the the community really coming together and supporting all of our kids and their futures is really tremendous. So thank you everyone. So Um, let's see. I don't believe we have
051any public comment tonight. Um, okay. Look at that. You're already running faster. Well, we're jumping around a bit. I want to make sure I haven't missed anything. Um, so I think we can move on to the end of your gold presentations by the principles. You want come up and join us? Yes. [Music] Don't be so eager. Congratulations, [Music] [Applause] Dave. Did you let the end know? What's that? The mloud. I texted him. Okay. He said he was right there. You got this? I sure can. All right. Well, we get started. There he is. Right here. So, as you recall, in October, we presented our school and district goals. And then mid year, January or early February, we presented midyear updates. And now we're going to update you to some of the things that have added
052on, some gains and opportunities that we've had this year. As always, we tie everything back to our mission, vision, our strategic plan, and objectives, and our four arches link in here. Um in the blue you'll see that the link will take you to our document that will have the more detailed information as far as all the different strategic initiatives and the work we've done in the last column for end of year. So please feel free to look at that. This presentation is really just trying to put some highlights in there or else we'd be here all night. So feel free to look at more detail at that link as well. So we were thinking of our cycle of continuous growth and we were trying to think of you know even though we've described it differently
053in the past we try to come up with a different way to really celebrate the gains but then identify opportunities for growth and then we would be implementing changes and evaluating outcomes. So this is a new um symbol that we put together for this year and we want we want to model that going into next year. So next year from the discussions that we have tonight, we'll have identified our opportunities for the fall when we present our goals to you and then all next year we'll be implementing changes and evaluating outcomes which is what we're doing right now. So for arch one, Deian is going to um go over that for us. I do want to point out that on the slides for the district, we put in our presentations in the corner. So, we
054we're trying to be very brief and give more time to the principles tonight because we have done a ton of presentations um at at this district level as well on technology, safe and supportive schools and all the arches. So, you'll see all of those linked in there because they have a lot of this information in there as well. All right. Thank you. Uh so, I'm just going to pick out certain highlights of the table, but um in March one there's a data governance u initiative. So an Air India aircraft bounced from London crashed short. There's a cyber training component obviously that we we trained all our staff this year and we now have an incident response plan fresh off the presses. So uh we're we're putting the finishing touches on that. So that means if
055we have an event, we have a a rock solid plan. Not saying we're going to be perfect throughout it, but at least we have a plan in place. The town has a plan, too. So both entities now have incident response plans. Uh the challenge is going to be sustaining cyber training. So we're hoping for a grant uh that we'll hear about next fall to see if we get it and that will allow us to train teachers uh next winter. Uh teaching and learning newsletters via S'more. Uh we've expanded those. So those come out quarterly and SM'more, as you've seen, has become our aligned communication throughout the district. It has translation capabilities of course be quarterly next year. It was only three times this year. Sorry. Quarterly next year. That's our opportunity for next year. Um
056and then for multilingual learners, um we had the multilingual learner night, I think it was called. Uh we had 16 vendors. I think many of you uh were there that night. And so uh that was a huge gain for us. And we're planning on rec recruiting additional vendors for next year's event. [Music] under Arch 2, social emotional well-being. Again, you'll see safe and supportive presentation in the student services presentation which is tied to Arch 2. And if you look at some of our action steps, some of the things we highlighted under safe and supportive school, I'm sorry, social emotional well-being, district-wide attendance team, and datadriven engagement. They've done a ton of work this year. Um I think all of our principles could speak to that and they spoke to the attendance and the work that
057we've done on that at the middle um midyear updates. We really have improved our attendance going from 94.1% to 94.8%. So that's you know that we're moving in the right direction. Our attendance is significantly gaining. We've also reduced chronic absenteeism from again 16.7% to 11.2%. So again this is really huge and significant. We just started using open architect last summer, right? And we really didn't have it up and running is to really effectively until late fall. So that has really been a gamecher for us and we've talked about that in multiple presentations and that's really going to help us longitudinally to look at the data year after year um and and be able to assess the growth that we're making in in many different ways. However, there are still opportunities. We want to continue to
058work on our tier 2 and three attendance. We still have those small groups of students that still have challenges with mental health and engagement and we really although we're gaining in that area, we are still behind and we still we need to make progress and also particularly looking at our English our multilingual learners and our special ed students whose progress has trailed district-wide gains. Again, these are areas that we will highlight in other places that there are are our our significant populations are still struggling and this is an area for an opportunity for growth. In addition, data has become a daily conversation for us and and we're d we're actually building it into the culture. We had shifted away and we're really trying to get that balance back looking at data doesn't tell all of
059the story. We need other pieces to the puzzle, but the data has really helped us expand our thinking and improve as a district. So, really having that culture of really being using inquiry during our our common planning time. We're having lots of data conversations around safe and supportive schools. You've heard Jarielle talk about the presentations he's done and and the work he's done with our counseling staff. It's been great. We have done the climate surveys and we're using that data year after year to help improve and listen to how we're working on the culture and also the MCCAST vocal survey as part of the assessing the climate in schools. However, opportunities here would be really being more fluent with the data, launching our altitude data guide, and establishing consistent inquiry cycles to connect key data
060sources. And this is going to come back to how do we use our culture and climate survey data for 2526. We'll be looking at the data that we gathered this year and making sure that we're also combining our Metro West health data in the as we plan for our middle and high school students. So really, even though we've done a lot of work in these areas, there's still room to uh improve and have some gains in that area. Across the district, we've done an incredible amount of work on teaching and learning. Um, I'm just going to highlight four items, but just make sure to check out the curriculum presentation, student services presentation, and the school rankings presentation for more information there. So we're really working on increasing AI literacy at all levels and Dan's done
061a lot of work on this. He's had policy adoption. He worked a lot with the policy subcommittee and also going around to every school getting feedback from teachers. Um he guidance drafted um admin gave a lot of feedback to that too. We use a lot of admin meetings to kind of draft different versions and give feedback. He's also been working with teachers, curriculum people, and tech integration specialists to pilot AI tools within the classroom. So, what are we going to do? We want to still um continue and improve upon AI um efficacy and then also expand that into lessons. A second area would like to highlight is implementing the new math curriculum. Remember, we hadn't had a shared math curricular resource, excuse me, a resource, not a curriculum. um for many years. So we have
062Eureka math squared for prek through 5 and then 6 through 12 reveal. So an opportunity that we have, you know, we've gotten feedback from teachers and we know that we need to continue to provide professional development and help and support with those new resources. Math and literacy invent interventions. You heard a lot about that of the curriculum presentation. It's expanded all the way throughout and it's databased and what we want to do is really continue to refine how we're documenting those interventions in open architects and um we'll really find that a lot as students are moving from one school to a next. Those receiving interventionists will give us feedback to how we can improve and offer more information for um current students. And then finally we have created internal task force for both standardsbased report
063cards um and professional development committee. So we're having subcommittee that really is digging deep into it. Um standardsbased report card committee we have both elementary school principles on it as well as Miller's assistant principal teachers represent represented myself and United unified arts teachers also represented. really looking at um how a lot of other districts in the state have done it and really holistanized it and we're working on mock-ups of the final product um later this month. And then professional development, we've broken out into a subcommittee and really um collectively gotten together with all the admin leaders as well as tech integration specialists and curriculum interventionists and decided collectively on our focus which I talked about earlier in our presentation um as well as um items that we all want to see in the next one
064to three years in the district. Uh this year, uh we've made great progress in updating, maintaining, and repairing the facilities that exist in our our our districts. Um we are lucky enough that uh in both the fall capital and the spring capital, we were able to finance the uh Rubs Middle School roof. um that is in progress right now as they're staging and doing the initial work before kind of hitting the heavy work this summer. Um uh similarly on the rammed roof is the we had um a failure of the rooftop unit uh above the auditorium and we were able to and I and I thank again the the fincom and past school committee and select board on creating the district HBAC reserve fund uh that allowed us when when we did have um complete
065failure our ability to replace that um in a time of need. Um, so we were able to replace that. Look forward to our scheduled uh ret track repair this summer. Um, high school track repair and uh refinishing. Uh, we look forward to that for for our athletes as we go into the fall. We have updated uh all of our district entry alarms uh as well as uh are in the process of um either repairing or replacing our fire detection alarms at both at the on the entire Woodland campus. Um uh so far so good with the completed high school auditorium wall project that was completed over this summer. Um, you know, we the water does like to find new places to move once the once the walls are protected, but we are uh figuring that
066out as we go. But so far uh so good with the high school auditorium walls um within capital. Uh as far as opportunities, we are we are awaiting uh decision from the MSBA uh for the Placentino Miller uh roof project SOI and our uh Hollist High School application um as well. Uh, and we look at uh while uh we're appreciative of the HBAC fund, uh, you know, the the middle school um, uh, uh, rooftop unit was a nearly $400,000 project um, and does warrant kind of the replacement of uh, or replenishment of that fund as we look at similarly aged HVAC units across the district. Uh going into our budget cycle, uh a long and thorough but comprehensive and uh positive end to our uh budget at town meeting uh went through at the uh
067school committee voted 3.26%. Um uh that said uh you know we look into the future with uh continually rising costs in special education tuition um transportation not just in special education but uh all transportation costs um rising utilities specifically on the dr delivery costs uh of utilities that exist um everywhere and then rising costs in um athletics uh in the in the district. Um on the operations end, uh we're excited to to have uh finalized uh the process of a a high school a new high school schedule for FY27. Um we are also looking at um uh new start time, district start times and bus run uh times for next school year, FY26. And this will yield a transition from three the historical three bus runs to creating a more efficient timeline of two bus
068runs uh for us for next year. Um when we cautiously look into uh next year um we are eyeballing and watching every day that goes by with the Woodland Street Bridge uh timing um any unanticipated schedule and start time costs that might exist uh as well as the the new implementation of the walk zones and transportation policy uh and what that may cause as far as uh bus routes and timing of bus routes going into uh the new school year. And I will just point out we did this year create um a budget booklet that some of you had seen during budget sub. We want to improve upon that and enhance that. Um but all the stages were in there. Um we do want to make it a flip book DM. We're looking to get
069a a tool to do that. So next year you'll see hopefully some improvements to that as well. So I'm going to pause there for these are the the district slides for um that we can answer any questions before we move on to the schools. Can I had a question about the uh previous slide on the teaching and learning? So um I'm excited about the math curriculum. That's a big lift. Um prek through 12 new curriculum across the board. It's huge. So I was wondering if you could share like what's an early early success that you're seeing in the adoption of the new math curriculum. I'm seeing buyin from teachers and the excitement for teachers um at Pleasantino. Um Dr. and we're talking about um I work a lot with Christa Marino and she's just gotten
070them really excited and supported them in a way that they're very comfortable moving forward. So, um as you all know, I mean it's curriculum adoption can be made or break made or destroyed the first year and it's the most important thing is to get that teacher buy in and we're seeing that. So to me that's a huge success. And then as you move forward into the next year, how are you identifying where to support teachers for deeper implementation? So they are helping identify what their needs are. So the four STEM curriculum coordinators are asking teachers what they're looking for and what they need. And so it's being met in different ways. Some is just being given extra support from the curriculum coordinators. Um, some is coaching from the curriculum coordinators, some is other equipment that
071they might need. Um, we've gotten feedback that classrooms are moving around at Pleasantino and Miller and we are getting more manipulatives for them. Um, some is how they can differentiate more within math classrooms. So it just all sorts of different needs are giving us and that's what we're basing what the PD should be for them. [Music] Okay, there's no further questions. We'll move on to the schools. Again, linked here is Plantino's goal. So you you'll see all the links alive in the presentation. Dr. Slaney. Hi everyone. Um I asked for more information, good news about implementation as too. So hang on. Um so next slide please. So just kind of bigger picture. Um when we think of arch 2, I'm going to go more into detail uh in arch 2, one, and three, but kind
072of merged together. So this is just kind of zoomed out. Um we have really been working on implementing ruler, which you've heard a lot about, and PBIS. And um this what we need to work on is how we assess it a little bit. We have math assessments, we have reading assessments, but social emotional learning at our level, it's really observational. So um that's an opportunity for us for next year that we're talking about how do we really kind of um look at and evaluate is our tier one effective and is it um cohesive across all our grade levels both horizontally and vertically. So that's something that we're going to work on. But um one way that we do have data is the May institute comes in and they do a tiered fidelity inventory. So that
073really talks about do we have consistent behaviors across the school. So a part of our PBIS program and really excited that um our staff knows the expectations 100%. Um and they reported all the expectations were taught. So that was good news. Our students um 16 students were randomly chosen. kind of want to know what grade levels because that would be interesting. Um but they um 69% of them could acknowledge and share out three out of the four of those expectations of care. That's an opportunity for us to increase. Um 100% of our students reported receiving a care card in the last month, which to me is one of the most important markers that we have. So our TFI score is 77% which is greater than the 70% criteria that shows what the May Institute says
074is successful for implementation. So we're really happy about that. So as I mentioned next year we're going to be working on deepening um how we look at PBIS data and evaluation systems and continuing ruler um alignment across our grades. Next slide please. [Music] So, thinking about attendance, we have some wins and some slight gains. So, our attendance rate has increased 5.5%, so we're at 94.5%. Our chronic absenteeism is down 1%. Um, it's a slight move. We we want to do better on that area. Here's our biggest win. Our tardies have dropped 28% this year. So, that's huge. Um, I want to give a shout out to Brenda Morrow. She has led our district attendance team um really taken a lead. So I think weekly I get charts from her about um attendance across the district
075and that really helps us give um an idea of where we are at Placentino in conjunction with the other schools and we're going to keep working on that. There's work to be done on that. Um specifically around unexcused absences, 87% of our absences are unexcused. So opportunities around that is just some education for families, reaching out to families um and trying to find out more about that. Next slide, please. Dr. Just a quick question. Sure. Have you seen a trend a change in the trend of of EL absenteeism? It's it's it's worse. And that's my next slide. I can show you that. Yeah. No, that's okay. Great question and nice segue. Um so that you were just helping me out. It's good. Um so when we look at our subgroups um chronic absenteeism for our
076students with disabilities um has um slightly decreased by 1.5% and um in our subgroup for Asian students has decreased from about 34% to 25 um% but our chronic absenteeism for our MLL students has increased from um about 3%. So it's a um we we are consistently working with that group. I think current trends um these days of things happening um in their world in different um places is is contributing to absenteeism to be honest with you. Um and while our special ed population has um their chronic absenteeism has improved, it's disproportionately high compared to our um our aggregate. So there's work to be done. Next slide, please. So the top chart negative is um good. Yes. The middle one negative is bad. Yes. The bottom one negative is good. It's a it's a decrease. Yes,
077I know. Just don't I'll work on my slides. Feedback received. All right. So, around reading um 70 So, this data is from I Ready. 75% of our students on our end of the year benchmark are reading at or above grade level. Um, we just met with I Ready, our representatives who came in and um, what we're really proud of is across our school for students who took I Ready in the state of Massachusetts and nationally, our school is actually doing better in all those grade levels. We have more students who are testing at or above grade level. So, that's a real success for us. Um, 56% of our students met their typical growth. Um, so it's a little misleading. um at first when I kind of thought about growth, you have to kind of do
078that in conjunction with um where they are placed. So our biggest need is actually students who placed um at the higher end above grade level um that we need to grow them more. So there's opportunities for some of our highest um performing students. They they grew, but they didn't grow what grow what I would say should be their typical growth. So they're still on grade level or above grade level but we need to do some more growth around that. Um some of the opportunities around that is around the my path which is the individualized learning that students can do on I Ready. Um I Ready suggests 30 minutes a week. Um well they want really 40 minutes but minimum 30 minutes for both reading and math. And we're really working on where we can get
079that in. We don't want our students always on a Chromebook at our level, but where can we have those opportunities for them to be able to have that? So, that's an opportunity for us for next year that we're continuing um to be able to do that. Um the next slide is around our subgroups. These are averages. Um so, um I presented this in midyear 2. This is our dibbles data. Um we have for each grade level a predominant measure. So for kindergarten it's phoning segmentation, for first grade it's um really phonics and for second grade it's oral reading fluency. Some of these subgroups we have students in all four and our highest um change in who are members of that group is our reading intervention. Kids test out, kids come back in or they qualify
080through. So um this is an opportunity for us to be able to continue to grow. I will say that when I look at our um growth rate specifically for our MLL learners, there is the biggest range. So we have some students who are making um smaller growth which is related to their access score where they are um as an English language learner. So we have to remember that these tests are for mono um lingual English speakers. So we have to look at some other data to kind of see where they're doing and where their growth is. Our biggest opportunity um for reading is around an emphasis on fluency instruction. So um two years ago we really worked on phmic awareness. This past couple years it's been phonics and now we're moving into fluency. So for
081the next year we're really going to be working on um tier 1, tier 2, and tier three um building students um fluency while they're reading. Next slide please. [Music] for math. You ready, Hillilary? It's very exciting. 74% of our students are at or above benchmark on I Ready and 61% of the students met their typical growth. Um we're really excited about that. Um our opportunities um the students who the grade level and the students category that didn't make their typical growth were actually students who were scoring above grade level at the beginning of the year. still above grade level, but we have to just work on stretching and being able to meet the needs of our highest learners a little bit better. Um, some opportunities for us is really progress monitoring students um, a little
082bit more. We have really, I think, mastered that a bit more in reading. And now, um, Kristen Reno, as um, Joanie mentioned, she's actually identified different measures to help us benchmark students a little bit and progress monitor more frequently. Um, another opportunity is the 10 extra minutes that we now have to our day. That's going to be really used um, in the area of mathematics to build math fluency. So, there's an area of Eureka um called their fluency flight and they just haven't had time to be able to fit that in. And for the classes that have figured out how to fit it in, we are seeing their um their fluency numbers much higher. So, that's where we're going to use that 10 minutes across the um school and we're pretty excited about that. Next
083slide, please. Our goal was really around number sense. This is our we're most proud of this. Our growth was 24% to 77% of our students are now at grade level or above grade level at the end of the year. It's incredible, incredible growth. And I attribute that to our teachers really embracing our new math curriculum. Um Kristen Marino really getting in there and coaching and supporting and coming right out of the classroom herself. She really had um knowledge of how difficult it would be as implementation. So, she tried to keep two steps ahead, creating slides for them, being able to do some of that heavy lifting for teachers so that they could really work on unpacking the curriculum um instead of kind of creating some of the instructional pieces. So, we're really proud of that.
084That's it for Placentina. How does the math grow to previous years? we seeing higher growth numbers and I guess percent of students meeting the expectations and growth two different metrics I know how those compared to last year so unfortunately we had a different measure last year all right so this is the benchmark yeah it was a different benchmark so um I will say that just where we were at the beginning of the year that's why we identified number senses it it was it was very low and we knew that we had a weakness um from our our past math curriculum And I I feel that with Kristen's focus on number sense and now we're going to be really moving to um algebraic thinking which is that next step. Um I I feel that it's just
085going to continue to grow. Awesome. Yeah. [Music] Nice job. Hi everybody. Welcome new board members. What's that? Got a lot to compare to. I know. You know, she sets the bar. Next slide, please. So, as Dr. Slaney did, uh we're kind of doing an overview on two and four. We'll go into more detail on kind of attendance and what our teaching and learning was. Um some big takeaways here. Um, every month at our at our um staff meeting, we had a culture and climate committee put together a culture and climate calendar that was presented with uh different um days to celebrate different um um just things um that the school could do, but also looking at equity and and um cultural diversity and how that fit into uh each on another big thing uh with
086our PBIS um we are going to care as well. Uh so Plastentino was care for a long time. Middle school didn't have any. We were shine we were rise and next year um we are going to care with the with with the work of Brenda and our student advisory committee. Um they're shifting over what our matrix looks like. We're now uh getting a uh and we're voting on what that picture, what that symbol is going to be for Miller uh for care. Um another thing that we've been doing uh over at Miller, we've um gone off of our uh district admin walks and we've taken that actually to our grade uh leader level. Uh so with an administrator we walked around and did some observations in classrooms together using the same rubric we were using
087as an admin team when we did our district walks in the building. The purpose of that is so that the teacher leaders could see what we're looking for in the classroom. And our hope is that we can expand that to more teachers next year. the teachers would want to go see other teachers uh and and observe and and um at first they were like 10 minutes that's not enough time. They all saw that 10 minutes is enough time to see some of the things that we were looking for uh in our walkthroughs. Next slide please. [Music] our attendance. Also, uh our target was 7.1. Um when we put this together, we were at 8.6, but as of uh today, we're at 7.7. Uh so we're closing in on that that mark. Um we've got 47
088students who have 18 or more uh absences. Uh and that can be 18 to 60 absences. um 57 students in total uh are chronically absent and as Dr. Slaney was saying before there's a large portion of that 57 are students on IEPs and so we've got to take a look at that and see how we can support those students. Six out of the 57 are multilingual learners. And because it was um a little um uh abstract or or it stood out um eight out of the 57 were multi-racial. And when we did our climate survey uh a year ago, we found there was discrepancy or um there was some lower numbers that our multi-racial families had in our school. So we really have to take a look at what are we doing there? How can
089we support um those families uh in our building? Next slide, please. And again, it it does go back to um the district um really getting on the same page and doing the same thing with our attendance monthly letters every 45 days, every 90 days. And it really makes parents aware that we're watching uh and you know, we're we we want your child in school. So, here's um our reading. I know it's tough to see. um 62% of our students met or exceeded their typical growth goals. Um you can see in uh grade three and in grade five we've got you know the the median is 145. What that means is half the kids are above the 145 and then half are under that 145. We had 67% in grade three meet that goal and we
090had 69% in grade five. Grade four, we checked um when we were looking at I Ready, we had I Ready in this past Monday and looking at those uh results, our grade four is lower, but nationally they're lower in grade four for both the ELA and for math. But it is a grade that we want to see if there's something going on uh there. Uh question why why that's happening. Um, one of the things with the my path uh data um what we're finding is um we have found that students who are on it for 30 minutes or more scored 20% higher uh in uh an increase in their growth. Uh so if we can get the students on uh for um that 30 minutes a week and again that's 10 minutes a day, 10
091minutes a day. It's not like they're on on that computer um a very long time. What we're finding though is our special ed students aren't getting as much time on my path because they're going out for services during that time. So that time that other students are using during when um they don't have that as much time. Where we saw an increase was in grade five and grade five gets to take the Chromebooks home uh in the evening and so teachers can assign my path 10 minutes of my path at home and so the students can really um up their minutes there. So, one of the things we may have conversations about next year is do we want the kids to be able to take their devices home to be able to do the my
092path in grades three and four? Uh, and so just something that we're taking a look at. And one of the other things that we're going to be doing to help with some of these numbers, I know that um Ilsa O'Brien was a part of um the um dyslexia institute this year and there's a lot of skills and strategies she's found from those courses that she's going to be bringing back and doing some PD with our special ed teachers uh so that we're able to identify dyslexia earlier, but there's five different kinds. And so, how do we are we um using the best strategies with the students for what their disability is? So, that's an area that we're going to continue to work on next year. At the mid level point, I showed this graph before
093uh on your thing. It was the red that we would have shown at the mid level. Um, now we're showing you the growth that they've done from the mid level until nine uh until now. If you look at that gray bar that goes across, that's the grade level benchmark. And so we want the students to reach that grade level benchmark. These are two third grade um reading intervention groups uh and their scores. And you can see the majority of the students made great progress over the course of the year. This data is available for all classroom teachers because um the um ORF is done at every grade level. Uh and so the oral reading fluency uh and so teachers can see how their their students are doing throughout the year. Next slide, please. math. Um
094we had uh 60% of the students met or exceeded their typical growth. Um we talk about Eureka squared and what are some of the things that we're going to do this year with the first year of implementation and when you are implementing a new math program, you typically see uh a drop in the first three years. Um, and part of that is because teachers are getting through the material, but they're not getting all the way through the material because it's the first year that they're implementing it. They're figuring out what things they can pull out and not use, uh, but doing it um, in a strategic way that they're all doing it the same way that Ashley Buchard is advising them to. The other thing that we're going to do next year, all the the
095students are taking the benchmarks assessment, but it's paper pencil. There is an online version of it so that it will automatically sync up to our open architect. And so we will have that data uh as another data source electronically instead of having to um go in and input it uh differently. Um trying to see where else we are. Um one of the things we worked on with ALN this year are kind of math games during the win time. Uh and so um coming up with different activities, not just during win time, but it could be with center time so that students are having fun uh with the math and getting engaged uh with the math. And our teachers really bought into that. If you go around to the different classrooms, you can see that they're
096using those uh in their classrooms. The other thing that we noticed was in our special ed um population, those scores um were a little bit lower than we would have expected. And so it is a different math program. Uh and so we're going to do some specialized um professional development with our special ed teachers on focusing in on how to modify um and what we need to do uh to support those students um there. Next slide, please. And this just gives you a rundown of how our multi-ingual learners are doing um from last year to this year. Um with um their scores a a I mean big shout out in grade three 92% to 315 uh%. Um which is great. Um, and that's really, you know, out of six because three didn't take it. And
097so, you know, um, but trying to figure out why there's a 0% in grade four and what we need to do, um, for those students. Um, and this just gives you a rundown on the right. One of the things um that, um, we are piloting at the end of this year is Imagine Learning. Uh it's a software or program that helps students in their own language pick up um uh different ways um to learn the materials that the the classrooms are doing. And so what this did does is um because they are scored, it gives teachers a way to help and strategize um the different areas um the students are weak in. Um, so it was a pilot. We started at the end of the year. We have, I believe, six to nine students piloting
098over the summer. Uh, and we're looking, we're going to carry it out, um, with our MLS next year to support them. And that's mine. Questions for Mr. K. In case I missed this, I apologize. I stepped out for a minute, but where are your 15 minutes going? Mine um is probably the science uh piece um because we were trying to cram it into a writing spot or here. Uh I'm just finalizing schedules now and they're a lot more clean than they have been just for that wiggle room. Excellent. Yep. Thank you. Moving on to the middle school. Hi everyone. Congratulations on the new roles and new members. Um so our first slide you know if you click the link it has our very long version of many things we've been doing but um next slide
099please. We um going to just give you the high level on arches one and four. Um just some some big highlights um for arch one communication practices. Um in our kickboard unified behavior we have over 22,000 now we actually have over 27,000 um comments. Parents received the login info at open house. So this has been going great. An opportunity for growth here is to improve early identification of students with low positivity rates and really formalize some intervention plans for them um and add more targeted moments to use the system which we have plans for next year. Um student survey data used to update our rims care messaging and material. Um so we did use some some information that we got from students um and families and the opportunity for growth there is to create a
100shared space for some tier one care lessons by grade and also review them annually for relevance. Um I'm sure you noticed the the project 351 students here. We also have peer leaders. Um we have some teacher lessons that are coming into our care lessons. but really making sure we have kind of a library or a hub of those and that we're um using the lessons that are most appropriate for what is going on in our building at that time. So, we can also use our kickboard data to inform that um kind of seeing where and uh what behaviors are happening most commonly and really target our lessons around there. Um, we also updated our stage 1 curriculum documents um, posted online and we're planning hubs to align our created goals um, for next year. The
101reason our unit our sorry our stage one documents needed to be updated is because um, some things changed and so I think looking at those every year is really important as we move into our stage two documents for next year. Um, and then we have our bimonthly newsletters and those go pretty well, but we do have an opportunity for growth there. Um, kind of seeing not only how families are accessing the material that we're sending home, but um, how they're using that information and we want to really um, improve on our equity piece there. Um, and then Arch 4 talent and resources highlights. We've um expanded our mentor program so we have new mentors trained for the fall. Uh we do need to build some consistency with onboarding especially for midyear hires that we had
102um quite a few of this year. Um not not even always hires but sometimes people leaving on maternity leave and subs coming in or leaving unexpectedly. Um so we really need to tighten that up. Um we did complete uh four district and one school-based learning walk. But where we see an opportunity for growth um on both levels, district and schoolwide, is where um we're talking about student engagement versus student compliance and what that really looks like to all of us. So we're deepening those conversations for next year. Um PD aligned uh to goals across ILT town halls and curriculum Tuesdays. So this year uh late in the spring with the help of Dr. Manard and the the curriculum people throughout the district, we're really aligning some um district-wide goals and we're having through lines that
103um pull all the way through the district and strengthen that. And then um we did have our unified basketball team formed for March 2025 through Special Olympics, which was awesome. Um and next year we are expanding um that program. So we're hoping to do botchi in the fall and then um track in the spring. And then we want to continue to expand our student leadership in that area to provide more opportunities for kids to be involved. Um next slide, please. [Music] So we're going to do a deeper dive um into arches two and three. So into the social emotional well-being and then into the teaching and learning. Next slide, please. Um for the social emotional piece, we're we're sort of highlighting again this big district practice of aligning our attendance practices. Um we review struggling
104student attendance weekly. We follow up with daily calls and unreported absences. And then we provide direct outreach. Um we've had some significant gains. Chronic absenteeism decreased this year from uh 13.2 2 sorry in 23 13.2 in 24 9.6 and then this year uh 6.5%. Um attendance rates um improved from 94% in 23 to 94.6 and now we're 95.8. So that is steady progress in that area as well. And then tardies have decreased. Um, in 24, uh, there were 5,229 tardies, which is staggering. I don't know what happened. Um, but this year, we were able to kind of return to where we were in 2023, which is somewhere in the 3,000 mark. Um, still way too high. So, we we're going to focus a little bit more on our tardies for next year. Um, opportunities for
105growth. Uh, we want to continue to build this proactive family engagement. So, we want to leverage the success of the monthly things that we're sending out. Um, and one thing that we do um our guidance team works um extremely hard on individualized plans for kids that are struggling to get to school. So, um, in addition to all of the things that we're doing as a district, we meet on Fridays and we kind of talk about kids that are struggling, um, in the first part of a meeting and then in the second part, the counselors, um, BCBA, our SSA sit down and develop plans for those kids to get into the building, um, and attend school. We are still seeing some big um attendance issues around um holidays and school breaks particularly um with extended vacations
106and um we don't really have a solution for that but that is an opportunity for growth. Um one thing we we noticed um we're like sort of promoting the positive attendance culture and we're seeing an overall improvement. I'm psyched about our really low rate as is everybody. But all of our subgroups um are higher than our our you know than our chronic absentee rate which is very concerning. Um they did all improve. So uh the chronic chronic absenteeism rates for um our ML students is 7.1. For our special education students it's 9%. Um for our low-income families it's 9%. Uh for our historically marginalized students it's 10%. And just for um just because we can I checked the female student versus the male student um and the females were 7.2%. The males were 4.8 and
107our again our overall is 6.5. So we have some work to do to kind of um dig deeper into the wise about this which we've been good at doing and we've seen improvement but um we certainly have more work to do there. So that's an opportunity for growth. Um, next slide just shows uh the picture of this. So this is just where we can consistently track our data um in open architects. We can open it up and look at it, you know, any given day. We can see um we can pull down and I I kept this sort of big picture so you guys can see what we can do on a daily basis. We can pull down from our school. We can pull down ethnicity, gender, um ELLL status, 504, special education status, and
108then our um low income. So, you can track different chunks of dates as well. So, um this is sort of our overall and where we are right now, but it also gives you a sense of what we can do with the tool um at any given time to pull out certain subgroups. Um, next slide, please. So, now we're going to just talk a little bit about teaching and learning. Um this is this is always something that we are um all cylinders are fired up every day. So I'm only going to talk about a little bit. Um going to focus heavily on the math and the ELA. So the action steps that we took this year um we've been administering the LL um three times a year having kids step into the arena in math and
109then having kids do the diagnostics in ELA and seeing steady progress. um we have aligned the plans, the skill plans that we can find from this data with our units. So teachers are using the data to inform their instruction and plan what they're doing. Um and then we're also using the EXL data in our um places where we get together to adjust our instruction in the moment and identify students below grade level and plan interventions. Um so some gains that we've made students that are on or above grade level increased from 40% to 58% in math. Um so that's a a very big gain uh 18 points and students far below grade level uh has decreased from 48 to 32%. Which is a 16 point drop. um and over 100 students move to higher performance
110bands and those bands would be um you know far below grade level below grade level proficient and and so on. So those are the big jumps in ELA um students on or above grade level increased from 38 to 43%. Um and this is this is even as the diagnostics diagnostic expectations increased. So as you move forward in ISL, they're not testing you on the same material. At the beginning of sixth grade, for example, they test you on the beginning of sixth grade material. In the middle of sixth grade, they test you on the middle of sixth grade material. So um these gains are in both math and ELA. They show that our students are not only making progress, but they're making progress at their grade level. Um, and then there's some unpined students that dropped
111from 14 to six, and that's significant. Unpinpointed students are students that did not answer enough questions to get a target. So, I think we're moving in the right direction there. Um, students practiced over 21,000 skills uh with 16 over 16,000 proficient and over 7,000 mastered. So, we can track that in our work as well. Um and then opportunities that we see. So we um have added a math tutor when we're launching a math lab to support students still below grade level and also to enrich some students throughout the day. We're incorporating grammar units into all of the ELA courses because one of the things we can do with our data is identify what bands or what strands we're weakest in and we're very weak in grammar. So, that's a big opportunity for growth and the
112um English teachers are excited about that and doing some summer work. Um we're expanding our landmark reading strategies across all grade levels and core content. That was some training we received last year in professional development and we're going to continue that this year. um providing targeted professional development for tier one instruction engagement and particularly differentiation and um establishing some consistent pacing and curriculum through lines across all the grade levels. Um we're aligning skill plans with our units. Um we're using EXL data to monitor subgroup growth and adjust supports for um English language learners, special education, and high need students. Um and we're increasing time for curriculum team collaboration, peer observation, and crossgrade alignment. Um the 15 minutes that were added to our schedule, that 15 minutes is all being added to our core content classes.
113We were also able to adjust our schedule and find um additional time that was there that we are adding to our RAMs block. So the 15 minutes and then some was added to the core content classes increasing those from 51 minutes to 57 minutes each and then the Rams block um we added 7 minutes to that but we were able to curb all of our passing time and some of our break time that was for some postcoid ads. Next slide please. Um this is sort of what we can see on our data and this just again is sort of an overview and it gives you both um the English and math version. So the EXL is a place where we go all the time um as teachers and as curriculum coordinators and administrators to see
114how our kids are doing. Um on the left of that mountain you see the mountain of um things that our students accomplished. Um and on the right is the ELA. Um over on the left hand side you'll see grades 6, 7, and 8. Um the top number in grade six on the left is the total questions answered for ELA by sixth graders. And then the bottom is the total questions um in math. And as you sort of proceed to the right, you can see how many skills they practiced, how many skills they became proficient in, how many skills they mastered. Um, and if you kind of look all the way over to where it says assessment growth, the middle column, it's showing you these numbers. 672707, that's the average grade level of the students in
115sixth grade. For English, 600 is sixth grade level. Um, 700 is 7th grade level. 800 is 8th grade level. So, as you kind of scan down, you'll see that we are on um course with uh just our overall student growth. And then you can see the average monthly progress for students. Um so, the average monthly progress kind of when you add up all those points over the months, every 100 points is a grade level. So, these are some of the big things we can see to celebrate successes in EXL. But then we can also very underneath that very small and I cut it off. It says that you can export the student level data. So now you can break it out by student by strand in for both English and math. Um and those are
116some of the tools that we're using to kind of identify identify trends and target supports. Um celebrate progress and then figure out where we want to go next. Next slide please. Um, and this is just another tool that we use. And I just threw some samples up here so that you could see this is our open architects dashboard. And this is how we another way we monitor um proficiency and growth. We have um over on the left just our our overall view of where we landed in ELA. Um we stayed pretty steady at um we were 63% 65% now 64% at the year's end. We do aim to improve that. Um you can see sort of where we are by strand on the right. Um and there we are with bands of students on the
117left. Um, we didn't get our end of the year data uh from my into um Open Architects yet, but we did go from 40% to 58%. Um, and then over on the right is just some um comparison data that you can take a look at from 2324 to 2425. And again, we just started using EXL this year um with Fidelity. So, um, this is our first year of baseline data. Um, and that kind of brings us to the end. Do you have any questions? Um, I think we have different slides, but I was looking at one. Um, that's I didn't see up here, but it showed a pie chart of EXL data in ELA. Um, so kind of looking at I'm trying to make sense of the progress shown here and the progress we have
118in our slides, but it looked like on the EXL ELA data from fall to spring, the same number of students are below and far below grade level. So I just wanted to clarify that with the data you shared. Yeah. So, so I changed I changed the data so I apologize. I thought I still had some time to tweak and I clearly didn't. Um, so I think when we're if we're looking at that data and we're looking at early in the year, midyear, and end of year, even though we're seeing the same number of students like in those bands, they're being tested on different material. So they're being tested on at the beginning of the year, sixth grade material for students in the beginning of sixth grade. in the middle. They're being tested on the middle
119of sixth grade. If we tested those same students on the same material instead of on the progression that we want to see, we would probably see them in different bands. We'd probably see some different growth. So, does that make sense? It does. So, I I can't see the slides from here, but um is there a way for you to measure the growth of the students like you can with I Ready? Yes. So, we can pull out every single student by like an individual student. Um, I just didn't do that here because we would see all the names. Um, but I think like I guess as we go further into our presentations of data for you, that would be something you would want to see and I can incorporate that into my next series of presentations.
120Sure. I'm just I would just be curious like for those students that are like our tier two and tier three, are we seeing movement? Where are we seeing movement? Like what level? But that's just a question I have. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Just had a quick question about when you're talking about talent resources and mentors. Are those teacher teacher mentors? Yes. teacher mentor. Um, so we actually for our paras, we had one of our teachers create a landing page for them that kind of takes them through like the the pathways they can um where they can find more assistance in maybe becoming teachers or getting help within the district and kind of commonly answered questions. So that's something that Tessa is going to launch next year with all the paras. Um, we do have
121a par liaison. Um but that is an area where you know we see a lot of turnaround or we sometimes add or lose people midyear. So it's definitely an area where we need to continue to grow. [Music] All right. So the link like everybody else is the walkthrough of all of the the goals for the year. Um before we get into the data, I just wanted to sort of share um the few different things that are happening at the high school at the end of the year. Um it's kind of been a tale of two years. Um and I'll say that the the last like three months have been crazy productive. Um the first uh you know, twothirds of the year was, you know, full of some stuff. Uh but no, the no but I
122just want to say like o overall like the the staff this last few months has been amazing and we've done a lot of great work moving forward. Um so a lot of what I talk about here um on the the non-data side is going to be focused more on like it's it's really over like think about it over like the next two years with the shift into 26 27 with the new schedule. um within the communication practices piece. Um you know, we talked a lot in the beginning of the year about how do we how do our eighth graders know what's happening at the high school? Uh how does the community know what's happening at the high school? So on Monday, um thanks to one of the grants that we received, we'll be partnering with
123Elro Inspires, which is a marketing firm in town. um they're going to be doing um a I I don't never done this before in my life, but a branding workshop um with us to help talk about what the you know what what is the high school, what are our values, how do we share them out, how do we talk to the community, um how do we work with the middle school in and kids coming forward. Um so that's going to be happening. That's thanks to um some of the grants um that we brought in this year. Um this year we're able to bring in uh $50,000 in grants um through uh the innovation pathways. Um and then um then that's what helps to um part of that grant is about marketing about talking about what
124you do in your school. Um really because it's about engaging all students in the work. So that's really exciting moving forward. I'll let you know how how what I've never been to a branding workshop so I'll let you know how that goes. Uh they don't teach you that in in teacher school. Um but uh what there's a joke there somewhere. Yeah. Um so and then thinking about the uh the talent and resource piece, as I said, we're we're really working on ways to support um our programs at the school. Um we brought in another grant um that is uh $48,000 over the next three years to support our science programs. Um, and then we're waiting on um the state for another grant that we applied for uh which could be up to $75,000 um again
125to support different programs in the school. And we'll be continuing to apply for those grants each year. Um this year it would support um our business, economics, math. Uh next year we'll be applying for IT and data science. Um and then the following year we would be um applying for uh biomedical program. Um so just trying to find ways to support the programs um that we we want to grow. Um so the other the other pieces that are going on um is that this leading into 2627 new schedule has really opened up avenues for us to um really look at our our curricular programs through and through. Um, so we have many of our teachers this summer um are going to be working on starting to sort of like the scope and sequence piece of
126what what does it look like now? Um, most of our classes now have more time on learning than they had before. And so what are we going to do to our curriculum and then also um working with um our uh curriculum and interventionist to look at u sort of what are those instructional practices that we want to highlight when we talk about moving our work forward. Uh so we're doing some really exciting work and so the goals here are you know some of them kind of shifted once the the schedule piece shifted as well. Um so that's it's just really exciting work that we're doing. Um finally the last piece before we get to the um the data piece is looking at we've talked about this before a way to shift DSB. Um, so we
127implementing a program which will allow us to uh provide more targeted supports for students. Um, so it will allow us to really have students scheduled in. Right now DSP lives in its own little island, so it's hard to track students. Um, but the new program that we're bringing in will allow us to actually track, place, move students around um, within P school. Um and that will allow us to help with the interventions um for students and really bring DSP back to being a directed study block where students are getting the supports that they need. So um that's really exciting moving forward and and Dan and I will be working on that this summer uh to get that all rolling. So all right, next slide. Um, so this is where getting into really the the data
128piece and and hearing a lot about the um the attendance side um the the the the data that we have at high school which is uh actually much harder to to to to get and so looking at how how we can start to find more ways um to understand where our students are and what supports they need. So next slide please. [Music] Um so looking at attendance this year um you can see that we you know we're making gains um in the chronic absenteeism rate. Um unfortunately the the way we do tardies confuses um the system. Um but uh t overall the the unexcused tardies are are down when we look at it overall. Um but it just yeah the system doesn't like how we how we do tardies. So, it just has a really
129hard time pulling them and we still don't know why, but hopefully that'll be fixed one day. Um, but overall, our chronic SMTism has gone down um 2.1%. Um, our overall attendance um you know is a little bit better. Um, we still have some work to do there. Um but when you really start to dig into it, we see and you'll see this through even our um when you look at our academic data as well that u special educate students uh 26% um of our special education students are chronically absent. Um so and we have to dig into why. Um we don't know right now but we do we do need some work there because that really when you look at the data overall like you're seeing that that skews our data a lot. So you're
130looking at, you know, non-special education students are probably upwards of like 98% and then everybody else, you know, and then these the the chronicity rate for special ed students are a quarter. So um we have the same thing going on male and female for some reason female students there's it's 15% uh chronic absentee um chronic absenteeism and then 10% for for males. So not really sure. So we have to start digging into those pieces as well. Um, this absenteeism data has been really helpful for us in terms of looking at just where students struggle because if you look at that top chart there, that's just a sample of student growth and students who are chronically absent, you can see where their growth goes over the year straight down. Um, and so we have a lot
131of work to do on on attendance. Um, we've been working hard to ident uh identify and notify, but now we need to engage that. So like parents are getting notification. um we're talking with parents but for we just haven't we have have to do more work on on re-engaging those students. So um and then sorry one more thing down there. Um and then finally that last piece there um the we have the 40 students who uh fall below that 80% threshold. Um and a lot of those have to do with some of our students and and hospitalization um and long-term absences. But, you know, that that piece is um just important for everybody to know that that that group exists and that we need to make sure that we're engaging with them as well. Um
132and we have, you know, a great program for students come back in and and to re-engage with their learning. But it's um but just understanding how we can support those families and those students. um just in the social emotional well-being piece. One thing we added this year is that um the New England Center for Sport and Society um really working with our athletes to be able to um talk about antibbias um anti-racist work um because that is an issue that we've dealt with here um have our coaches, not all of them are teachers, and train our coaches into how to respond um when that happens on the field as well. Um we also are working with Jerry um and our counselors in Jerry are creating modules um small group modules with students to um on
133social emotional wellness um in areas just to be able to support students and so they'll they are started this year with small some small groups um and we'll continue that next year as well and then with our new schedule it'll be much easier to do a lot of that work um moving forward. All right. So, this was this was like an interesting data dive to go into because you're going to see three um sort of pieces of data here that don't match. Um so, if you look at that middle chart and the bottom chart, you see that that's students on grade level. um if then on ELA and math and you see that there's this huge this huge amount of of special ed students who are not on grade level. So you see only 10%
134of special education students are testing at or above grade level in math and 24 in ELA. So if you go to the next slide, that doesn't align with really what our M our MCAT scores aren't great in high needs, but it also doesn't align well with that. And then if you go to the next slide, which is our PSAT scores, those don't align either with what we're seeing. So it's it it's it's really what's going on. So we're looking at what's happening here. So, and Daniel, you'll like to hear this. Um, so when we require them to take certain tests, you start to see uh and when they have meaning like AP, PSAT, SAT, ACT, all of a sudden our scores are going up for all students across the board and we use something like
135we're struggling. So, we interviewed a bunch of students. So if you go back to the other slide, so we interviewed all of the the special education, like a bunch of special education students to understand like what was going on with EXL and why because didn't match. Um, and what they said was they got really frustrated when they would miss a question and then all of a sudden they'd be like down to like grade school edition and they had no real reason or want to like do any more work on it. So like they were like we're done. So, so we're going to be shifting how we work with EXL more focused on strands. Um, so what we'll start to do is really push out like we know that in this class work on this strand.
136We're going to push out so the data that we're going to start looking at is more not about a totality of on grade level per se because when we do those assessments, the kids are like, I want nothing to do with this. Um, but when you look at the skills practice and the skills that they're becoming proficient in and mastering, those numbers are really good. So basically what moving forward is we're going to start to focus in on strands versus that overall kind of who's at 950, who's at 1050, who's at 11:50 because those assessments the students aren't engaging with. Um and it's not great data because that's what you end up with which doesn't match what we're seeing across the board. Um, we're also going to be requiring, not well, we can't really require,
137but we're going to be making it so that every student can take the PSAT next year. Um, what it's been so far is it's like anybody who wants to whatever. So, we have we're going to have the day that all students in 10th and 11th grade are going to sit for the PSAT. Um, more colleges are now requiring SAT again, which is now making the SAT uh the PSAT more popular again. So our hope is that by you know having all students sit for that that we'll get some real they they have good data that comes out of that for us for 10th and 11th grade. Also we know that MCCAST is going to be a crapshoot and because of it no longer being a graduation requirement. So we need some something to measure and
138the the PSAT and SAT and AP those all still hold weight. Um and so moving forward to um requiring students to to take those tests AP when they're in those classes and all students will take the PSAT. Um and we'll start that this October um with students. Yeah. Question. So when we have our kids take the AP exams, they they practice practice practice and practice. And then when I when I hear that, I think that's I I think that's a great move, but I do worry about the kids that choose not to do it from the test anxiety about it just the it it it's hard. Are we also doing something to help prepare them a bit for it um with a few weeks in advance like this is what you can do to practice
139or have having them take parts of different sections so they have that confidence and we're bringing down the anxiety levels on a test we're now making them take. Yes. So what we'll be implementing is that when in in certain classes obviously it covers certain areas is that you can do something as simple as like exit tickets of like here's a question that you'll see on the you know on the PSAT or worded in in a test question kind of way. I mean that's the reality of it when you're taking a standardized test like that there's a way to answer some of the questions there's a way to read some of the questions. So having our stu having our teachers, you know, at the end of an assessment, you throw on a couple of questions that
140they're going to see you learn about how to answer some of those essays in a certain way. Um the the reason that we're going to, you know, as I said, moving to like something like the PSAT is that kids will still take that seriously because colleges still like to see that. Whereas the MCCAST, as soon as they took away the graduation requirement this year, we had kids finish in 15 minutes amazingly. We did, you know, and all of a sudden we had a bunch of kids who were like, "We're done. We don't have anything to do." Um, and so I'm not really sure about that data, but we know when we have kids sit for things like the PSAT, they're actually taking their time and doing it and we can offer that in school. Um,
141you know, unlike the SAT where that's only, but the PSAT is something we do have a little bit of control over. So, um, we'll still have the MCCAST data, but I'm looking forward to be able being able to have the data on, as I said, the strands in ISL, so that way we can look at specifically, you know, what the teacher was working on with those kids, what that data then tells us, and then like something like the PSAT where we can have them sit for an exam that they they feel matters um and we can prepare them for that um within our classrooms as well. I can understand um students the high school students perception of ISL and you're certainly not the only high school dealing with that challenge. Um but I'm wondering um
142is that's as ready are primary progress monitoring tools of the younger students. What are teachers using at the high school? So, I mean, we we've been trying this year to use as this progress monitoring tool, and the the problem is the kids they're they're writing it off, but what they're not writing off is when it's practice on what they're working on. Um, and so there are there are different tools within that we can and I'm forgetting the the small groups that we do and I'm forgetting the name of it. Um and so within that we can then use that to identify where students are struggling and then have that use that space for intervention. But we're just really struggling right now with getting good data on the students and like if we were to do
143intervention on students it's like it was some of it was like they were in grade school edition but they just didn't want to deal with that and then have to work because it's um it's really hard to work your way back up once you get brought into like that question you get wrong. Are there common formative or summitative assessments or writing prompts at the high school? So we do have we're so yeah. So that's so one of the things that we've had with reveal which has been really nice with the math is that's where it brought us back into like common assessments there. Um and then ELA as well does that as well. So yeah, so they have they have their own data in the classroom that they're using. Um but we were looking for
144something that we could you know have this way but we're not finding success on one part of it. The part again where they're doing their skills practice that's getting used. Um but the other side of it is they're struggling with it. So sounds fantastic. Is there is there a reason though? Now I know the jump to high school is big but why wouldn't we see this like later in middle school? Like it seems like it's okay when they go into nth grade. This is what happened. While in the middle school seems to be working and we're not seeing the same cuz Karen Mannings is that much better than I am. So they they have the same struggle. Okay. So, we're seeing the same thing. Yeah. And they comp they will come and talk about it
145and and I'm like, well, that's when you dig deep and you know, we talk about resilience and here we go, man. It's just and they suck for that. Well, you also have the struggle with the schedule as far as benchmarking and the intervention. Identify them, they might already be done with the class. I mean, yeah, there's that. Yes. I mean, that's the reality too with our schedule is like we had kids. So like as as Karen said like our our data isn't uploaded yet fully into open architects but we had kids who were doing like end of year benchmarks that finished English in January. Oh yeah. So [Music] question about DSB. Um you mentioned that you were restructuring it this summer and working on it. Are all students going to be re assigned so that
146there's more structure to that block or are you targeting certain populations and the rest still have a study? So it so it so the system the way the system works is is basically I uh DSB lives right now as second period in the day. So you're in your second period class and that's just where it is. Um this basically creates it as a whole new period um allows us to track students into location. So if like a teacher needs you somewhere and assigns you in there and that's where you are for attendance. Now, um, again, who knows why P school doesn't build this in on its own, but like the you have to use an outside um software. And Dan, you probably know more about this than I do, why, but you have to use
147the outside software and actually to create this other period in there that then allows you to assign or students to then assign themselves as well. But once a teacher assigned to it, locks you in, but the students can assign. So like what'll happen is every day um in the the morning the students are going to be asked to to either pick where they're going and sign up or they will have already been assigned and then our interventionists are making sure that the kids are are going to where they need to go to get the interventions that they need or being assigned to them during that DSP and you'll have the ability to move kids around so like so one teacher doesn't end up with like 25 kids and with one you'll pick and choose so
148that kids are ideally getting some sort of Yeah. you limit you limit them. You can have them sign up in different places, but it's just a it's it's a need at the high school. So, that's what I got. [Music] So, Dan, everything you ask me about, I've addressed from the beginning of the year. I did some time. I looked I watched all videos, tape, you know, made sure and I hope to see you all at Pops. It really is a cool concert. Um, tomorrow night is outside. It's outside. Yeah. And uh and thank you all come to graduation. It was awesome. And yes, Amanda Rivera rocked it up there. She was awesome. So yeah, I heard. Yeah, she did. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, moving on to um central office
149updates. I think you highlighted most of the things that I would have um spoken about, so I will reserve any comments. Um I just have a couple different things. Um the summer curriculum work opportunities have been posted. So really excited to offer um something at all the buildings and also this Tuesday I went to Desi's Federal Grant Professional Development in Marboro. It was uh quite depressing but we will see what ends up shaking out. Um they went over what President Trump has proposed and as we all know we'll go through many iterations and probably not get passed. Um what he did propose though is eliminating Title 3 grant totally and um combining all the grants together and cutting the totals by 70%. So yes, so we will see what ends up happening. So, [Music] uh,
150one just, uh, we had, uh, kind of continuing down the process of our, uh, student services director search. Last night, we had our kind of open forum with good attendance, uh, of about over, uh, 40 individuals um, in participation to watch and listen in. Uh, we had over 20 different community questions that were posted to the Google form. Um and we are the feedback on the candidates is uh rolling in as we as we speak uh dayto-day uh on that. Um I I too uh you know really appreciated the high school graduation um weather held out. It was just you know gray enough and not hot enough to really sweat it out. So I was excited about that. Um pops concert I'm looking forward to to that. Um and that we um we also had
151the earlier this week it was the Miller music concert. Um really excited about the progress that that program has been been demonstrating and and looking forward to the next several years is the continuity that grows within the music program here in Hollist. Uh lastly, uh Jay Patel is a rock star here in Hollist, the student who presented on project 351. I can remember him when he was a fifth grader visiting um up at the middle school for sixth grade. Uh quiet little little kid um poking around um you know you couldn't you know at all but ultimately progressed and led and began to lead and uh at the middle school level was named our eighth grade project 351 ambassador as well. and just watching him grow over these last several years has been a fun
152site to see. And then lastly, uh following the lead uh of project 351, um I would be remiss if not this our last meeting to be acknowledged Junth uh next week. Um and want to recognize it as its significance as a remembrance of the end of slavery and a celebration of freedom, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit of justice and equality. Um, I also just want to reinform the dis reaffirm the district's commitment to human rights and fostering um inclusivity. Uh, and just a special thanks to some of our community members and administrators and teachers that have been actively working that uh over the last uh couple weeks as we kind of continue to um not be as a community sheltered from the impacts of u of um some of the things going on in our
153country. Thank you. [Music] Can I just add on the project 351, the Celtics playbook? Um, I applied for that three years ago and we had two high school students that have since graduated. Jay took it on last year um as a sophomore. He asked to do that um work and I went to a bunch of the presentations and he's a very different student now than he was then. The program really fosters that that public speaking, the growth. He's done an amazing job, but also he spoke at my legislative breakfast this year to a room full of well he he actually ended up having taped it because he ended up having um he was at DECUP but his plan was to come speak with them, but they could not believe just on video how impressive he
154was. So I mean this is these are the students we're growing here and these programs do matter and just that whole um you know as you talked about sprinkling the work the middle schoolers now coming up we've had this is our third year of it so you're going to see this program grow and those the peer leaders grow as they enter high school as well. So, it's really a great program. Since I'm here, I can share auditorium update, but sure. Uh, we met with the vendor to do the high school auditorium. If you're recall the lighting project, so it looks like that's going to happen the end of July. It's going to last about a week and then the project will be finished. Uh, the theater director is extremely excited. There's a student who does
155the lighting now. Extremely excited. So, it should be really neat what what we end up with in the auditorium. Is this a two-part project or is it just a one? This is a one part. They did inform me. It might as well lay it all out there. The uh the dimmer panel is this is uh not a complete overhaul of the dimmer panel. It's going to be uh he called it sort of a band-aid. So he said it should give us 5 to 10 more years based on his experience. We got to get a new high school by Yeah. [Music] I don't think I mentioned um just the date when I mentioned the coalition meeting. It's June 17th. We are looking for we already have people signed up for that. I think I I have
156it set so that the reminder is going out again a couple more times. So it's our first community forum where we're partnering with the town. So we're excited about that. And then um there's nothing else. I'm okay. And I was going to move on to um celebrating our retirees. So, let me just pull that up. [Music] Okay. So, you will see a list popping up here of our retirees for the year. I want to wish best wishes for your next chapter to all of our retirees here at Placentino. Winnie Kerry is having um finishing 20 years here in Hollist. At Miller, Dan Jwitt left earlier in the year, 20 years. Kelly Higgins, 21 years. Jen Roland, 14 years. And then at Rams, John Powers left midyear, 28 years. Amy Watson, eight years. at the high
157school. Bal Camille 14 years. Christine Espila 26 years and I believe she was midyear as well. Maryanne Scoffield just let us know that she's leaving in August after 10 years. Greg White has been with us for 32 years. And at the district level, as you know, Mr. Beday left midyear after 25 years with us. Bobby Cedra around the same time, 24 years. and Cheryl Kelly will be leaving us June 30th at central office with 20 years. So this is our list of retirees and anyone that left midyear we celebrated with them then they received a nice Holliston blanket and we went and gave certificates. I actually went to give the certificates and the blankets and we are having a celebration this Tuesday which I think Lisa had invited you so I apologize if you got
158late notice but you're more than welcome to come on Tuesday morning. Hopefully you got the email for that. No pressure, but we'll be celebrating a few of those retirees that morning for a little bit breakfast and and thank yous. So, [Music] um, so next we can have reports from subcommittees. Did the new chairs do this? I don't know if there's been any meetings other than budget. Other than budget, no. Um, so might as well just Well, you're the new budget chair, but I will You're going to do your own. This is completely good. Yeah. Yes. Um we we did a review of next year's budget. We um we I guess we've gone back and reduced on the Are we going to go through each of the the positions as well? No. Yeah. We're going to
159vote on them. Yeah, we have to vote on it. So um the e elll position um we had come in before at a 1.0 and because of some uh reductions in um student enrollment and numbers uh it was a recommendation to reduce it down reduce it by a 0.42 down to 0.58. Um we would still have the 1.0 Oh, kindergarten teacher and the um the six-hour math tutor. Yeah, six hour math tutor at Rams. Um so we had why don't we do two separate motions and explain well so you want to get a little more background. Go ahead. Um so so Dr. Jordan has been doing a lot of deep dive and digging into, you know, our budget and as we learn more as as time goes on. Um, we we've got a little bit
160of favor extra favorability. So, some of the priority needs and then some of the enrollment stuff led to the need for an additional kindergarten teacher. Uh, we we really needed the the ELL position. Uh, and then the obviously the the the tutor at Rams. And so, um, that is essentially what you know what we go to to support to just sort of make it official. Uh, that said, when you sort of all take it all together, uh, our overall budget is still going to be within the town's appropriation for for these for these items. Uh then there's one other position that we're going to sort of talk about and and have a separate motion on which is a um which would bring it closer to sort of the the town's appropriation maybe you know slightly
161above it at this point but as Dr. Jordan will tell you the number shifts minute to minute. So, you know, you never you never know what's what's favorable one day could be, uh, you know, unfavorable the next. And so, um, but these are are important positions for for the district. And, um, you know, so we voted to to support 58 for for the ELLL, um, 1.0 for the kindergarten teacher, and um, 1.0 for the 6-hour math tutor at Rams. Right. So, so motion. [Music] Well, I'll make a motion. This is our recommendations. I'll make a motion to um approve those those uh positions and second by all in favor. That carries seven. Um do you want to go kind of go through it together? Um [Music] there was a a 1.0 OFT the bridge program
162is something that had um come forth I guess about two years ago and that um was really at the high school and looking at the enrollment on that there was a recommendation um to make some changes for next year uh including so it was it was both bridge and so yeah okay um and it was a recommendation to bring a bridge teacher down to the Rams level uh based on enrollment for next year and then there would be a reduction in the the sore program at the high school from two teachers down to one teacher and four pairs so an adjustment of staff um and then I guess we overall we looked at the enrollment you want to talk a little bit more about where I think there's still some some questions that we have
163um you know one of the things um While only I think Don was on the committee when this position was initially sort of supported by the school committee for an additional six-year special education teacher for the sore slash really for the bridge program uh was to sort of you know if if you build it they they will come kind of thing. So build for the future to be able to support uh our students uh with with special needs and to be able to help also retain them in district. So it's it was was both you know good for the students and good for for the district. Um there was there was some difficulties filling that position for the first year. It's since been filled and um when we were going through the budget there was
164a you know there was a recommendation to to move a special education teacher down to the to the middle school. Um but I think that as we look through enrollment we still have a lot of kind of questions about that and we we had a detailed conversation um at budget and what we're sort of asking for right now is we've asked the administration to go back have some more conversations talk with the uh the special education department at the at the um high school and also uh look at some of the pair requests and what exactly it is. I mean, there's there's a lot of details, some of which we can't really be privy to because they're kind of IP specific, but as much detail as we can get. Um, and so what we're we
165recommended and what we're looking for so we don't all have to meet again together is to sort of have this the school committee vote to um authorize the budget subcommittee to sort of work with the the the um administration on whether we should support you know keeping the high school position and also you know filling a RAM's position for for next year or go forward with the current plan. We were provided with a lot of information, but we still have some ongoing questions. So, we're not ready to make a vote on it tonight. Um, we want to follow up with that and and have an additional meeting. It would be good to share. So, budget subcommittee takes we'll have the ability to to vote on it, put in play. How what would be the financial
166impact if a teacher was in just for the full committees? Well, we're I mean you you budgeted it impacted is about is budgeted 70 some odd thousand. Yeah. But but but as far as whether that that brings you above or be below the 3.26 it's we're still going to be right around the appropriation depending on what you build in. It's either like slightly below slightly above. It's it's right we're still in the ballpark of where of our of the town's appropriation. So just to be clear right away if nothing else changes which we know could be a minute from now changes but right now as of now if it new teachers added for bridge program it's 75,000 increase which would put us slightly above that 3.26 depending on what you include in that number. Yes.
167Yes. Okay. Um get it. But Dr. Jordan has also, you know, been been very clear that he has been finding a lot of savings, but that we are taking a lot of the we're we're taking a lot of the we're increasing the risks to the budget by by cutting to sort of not cutting, but but making assumptions that sort of, you know, are I don't want I don't want to say very aggressive, but they're just they're more aggressive than than we normally budget. So, we're we're increasing the risk that we we spend more than the town's appropriation and potentially have to to dip into the um circuit breaker reserves or something like that. Yeah, you are um you'll see a lot of favorability towards the end of the year as people resign, retire, those types
168of things. And your risk is limited towards the very end of this year and then risk picks up when you switch into the next fiscal year and you ramp back up. So it's always it's my recommendation while we see all this favorability is not you know get too excited about it either. I think we learned a lot this year. Question. So if I understood correctly it was one teacher currently with par professionals that are currently in that role. No there's two severe special education teachers in that role and the proposal is to move from one special education severe special education teacher and four parents. Are there currently any parents? It's just the two. I'm just wondering that's what we're trying that's what we're trying to get a little bit right but that's an issue of
169keeping um and qualified profession professionals and you know getting them into our system and sticking around and got a lot of turnover in those roles. I'm just curious about the um the logic behind putting four um into that. So because I don't have the details on the IPS I would have to rely on our student services director. However, the way it's written my presumption would be that they are actually tied to the grid of those students. So one, you could still have two teachers and the four paras because you might have a one-on-one or 211. So just adding the teacher doesn't negate or necessarily take away Paris. And Tracy, that's exactly to the heart of some of the questions we still had about this. We were provided with a lot of information, but still digesting
170it and asking more questions about it. So, we weren't ready to make a So, I guess the the the motion that were the go that we'd like would be to authorize us to sort of the budget subcommittee to make uh you know to sort of the school committee to uh authorize the budget subcommittee to sort of make the the decision um once we get more information. Just so we the alternative is we we have a special meeting of of the school committee and budget school makes a recommendation and then we all get together and and vote on it. So it was an attempt to try to limit the number of meetings especially so we can [Music] how do you feel about that? So so is there a second on that? I can second it and
171then we could talk about it unless you don't have any questions about Okay. It's a second by Don. All in favor? That carries. 70. Um, [Music] so I think the last thing is are we just going through the meeting schedule for next year? Speak just a little bit louder. It's really hard to hear. Um, the meeting schedule for next for the 25 26 school year. Yeah. Yes, it should be in your folder, but this is the draft. I'm looking at this and I'm very confused. It's Thursday, October 20, October 19th, and Thursday, October 23rd. Oh, I don't know what that is. Yeah, I think we're bending. October. Yeah, I think that's a typo. Uh, that that makes sense. Yeah. Um, see if I can I still I don't love one meeting in November or December.
172What? Oh, yeah. It's not Thanksgiving all month. Not the 20thgiving Thanksgiving when on the Grinch Christmas, not Thanksgiving. We're really good at setting up more meetings. I know some wiggle room anyway. Okay. April meetings. No, October. I think it's I think it's supposed to be October 9th. No, the 19th is No, 9. Sorry. Normally, that was fixed. That's good. Um, sorry about that. Did anybody Did we cross check these against holidays, too? Um, Lisa Deluzio. Okay. So that she took this based off this year's code. The only thing is that I somehow thought that we had one more meeting this year and we don't well we do but the meeting that we had the 26th and I just I wonder if it makes sense not now I just to at least create a tended meeting
173through the end of June just to sort of wrap up the year before we you know you really like hanging out with the you know I just again D we And but but we have a lot of you know of our administrators and staff who plan around the schedule. Fair. Maybe we should add I think what I like about this cuz I don't remember doing this last year like what the priest we did and all the presentations. I mean I shared it but it was done. Okay. We usually talk we usually kind of take the draft of the presentations from this year and pop them in and then we share it out and see if there's things that change. They they definitely changed quite a bit but we have a Mhm. Because you had some
174suggestions too on when on the timing of the ranking. Yes. The ranking presentation we want to do differently because we'd like to do that in the fall after we have our MCAST data which we may not want to discuss based on the high school sharing but look at it should be similar. Yeah, it will be similar. when priority needs is at the 22nd. That is uh yes, that would be January 22nd. So, what I'll if if these dates are okay, then what I'll do is I'll I'll have her go back and look at this years and kind of pop in what we had and we can move things around. I guess the only would we be doing the three parts of our budget? We would be doing the part one as early as December 11th.
175No, part one would be November 13th. Oh. before the January 18th. So that does seem a little that's based this year. November 13th. I don't think we did it that early for budget part one. I thought budget part one was like it was it was late November, early December. Oh, we did have the November 27. Payroll for for fiscal year 26 was uh November 14th. Okay. Okay, then it worked. Sort of. Yeah, we did have a November 27th meeting. We We did have a November 27th meeting. I'm just saying. No, [Music] start. I'm good with this as a starting point. We can always reate September. The school days, start and end dates cuz that was where we messed up this year. Yeah, we should. Let's make sure that's like the first plan the calendar much
176earlier. We haven't put that in there. you you we should put that in there as a a particular night that you want to do that. It all depends. It all depends on how much people want to, you know, shake the trees. Well, if we want to shake the trees, let's shake. I don't want to shake the trees, but if other people maybe shake the trees, I don't know. I got to stand with Cynthia and say, it might matter how the holidays fall. Yeah. For that year. So, Mhm. maybe put it in in October to start the conversation. Sure. You want early? August. Welcome back. Here's next year. All right. All right. Is there anything else? We're meeting again 17. We are at 5:00 before the coalition. Apologies. And and just Yes. back as as Bruce
177and I were were uh jabbing back and forth, it will it will not be on the HCAT because they will be covering the the coalition meeting later, but but we can make it on Zoom and record that and put that on the website. Okay. Okay. Well, then with that, I guess the meeting is adjourned. Motion to never get this right to executive session. Just read. We're motion to adjourn. I I will entertain a motion to adjourn to executive session to discuss strategy with respect to a collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares from which we will not return. From which we will not return. Moved by Don. Secondary second. Second by Hillary. Is this
178a roll call vote? This is a roll call. Tracy, yes. Joe, yes. Frank, yes. Hillary, yes. Dan, yes. Don, yes. And I'm a Yes. Thank you very much. Good night.