Holliston School Committee Meeting - 4/7/2022

001oh there i am all right good evening and welcome to the school community meeting of april 7th 2022. i'm calling this meeting to order at seven o'clock all meeting uh all members are present with the exception oh nope here comes mrs miss caution and ms naborski so everyone is here this evening and the first thing we're going to do is start the public hearing on the fy 23 budget is there anyone in the audience tonight who would like to have some input on the budget this year you have to open up the hearing first oh i have to open here formally do i have to get a vote for it i'm sorry i apologize okay uh motion to open the public hearing on the fy 23 budget move by stacy second invite sorry move by

002stacy seconded by john all in favor thank you all right and now the hearing is open i apologize robert do you have anything you want to share about the budget that was you yeah [Laughter] we'll start with you okay thanks for coming i'm ready to jump right in fantastic um thank you for the opportunity to speak um and and certainly thank you for your service on behalf of um all the families and students in the town i personally appreciate it and i know a lot of folks in town do my name is robert principe i'm here representing the diverse holliston education committee and we are advocating for redistribution of his existing funds for the critical work of social emotional learning and diversity equity inclusion in the house and public schools so if i could just

003get a little bit of a context for our advocating for that this is 2022 marks my 30th year as a diversity and inclusion um specialist i'm not saying that to brag i'm saying it because i just finished four trainings in a major private uh college in new england um and this this story could be in any sector in any of the hundreds of attorneys i've done around dei around the country essentially the topic for the staff not for students but for adults essentially was equity and belonging in the workplace your role and how to make it happen and constantly talking about people's sphere of influence the reason i'm referencing that is because when i say that too often i get blank stares i have influence i can make the change we need to make any

004sector i can say the same story we need vision for change in how we distribute funds for education in our schools change in educational outcomes to drive our decision making more context the challenge and urgency of now tells us that the divisiveness in this country is pervasive and destructive right here in holliston multiple incidents of racist anti-semitic homophobic language in the house and public schools which only mirrors the country hate crime reported in u.s surged in to the highest level in 12 years the fbi reported last year highest level in 12 years massachusetts this is just this last month has the fourth highest level of hate propaganda activities in the nation massachusetts the new york times the surgeon general warned in december of youth mental health crisis young people are facing devastating mental health effects

005as a result of the challenges experienced by their generation yes because of covid but the article states mental health issues among our youth were already on the rise in the u.s prior to covet so these are unacceptable outcomes for us let's be honest if we were talking about students and their capacity to do quantitative work in math or science or or write a paragraph we wouldn't be having this conversation these are other skills that are critical for them as citizens that i have experience to tell you adults are poor at we need better citizenry so that's how critical this work is the work of social emotional learning and diversity diversity echo inclusion is critical we need a line item in the school budget for sel dei work creating the needed resources for this critical work

006does not have to be a larger but about a larger budget diverse hollison strongly advocates for a redistribution of already existing funds to create this line item we need to take every opportunity we can to make a statement about prioritizing this critical work of teaching and learning for students as citizens in our town when i was here in october and and jeriel renee presented his wonderful vision for the work we were all wow this is great someone leave oh leaned over to me and said literally this is true story he's going to do all this without a budget it was that sinking feeling of saying wait you're right that doesn't make any sense this is great stuff but what we need to prioritize it in the budget so i don't know redistributing 25 of the

007of the professional development budget let school leadership and certainly the individual the director we hired for the expertise to to do this sel dei work to make decisions about how to best to distribute those funds but make it a light item we need to take this opportunity to change our practice and prioritize this kind of learning teaching and learning work and culture change in our school budget so that's basically it that's what diverse holliston is saying i'm here to be a spokesperson for that i'm speaking personally about it as well as a citizen literally um so thank you for listening um the challenges and urgency of now requires us to act based on our needs to change not do the same and we need to work to see our schools become more effective spaces for

008developing cultivating the citizens we need who develop capacity grapple with the challenges of building greater access greater inclusion greater health and well-being for all of holliston's children's all of tolleson's families community members and beyond so thank you for considering this and the larger context for this work and it's and it's a distinctive thing to prioritize it we know this you you speak when you budget so thank you for considering our recommendation i can speak to some of what you're asking about should i a confusion and i i think mr buday could also address we have certain line items that we have to put money in there is no bucket for sel equity work right so the money that can be accessed for this work which we've done with khalees warnham this year and other speakers

009is under pd which is can be accessed by both joanie and jerry l kelly it's all of us that need to plan pd we can access it there and then under curriculum materials so we have one bucket for curriculum materials which includes if there needs to be resources purchased by mr vernet related to this work as well so there is no separate line item because as far as i know it doesn't exist under the dusty codes and through a municipal system it doesn't mean there's not an ability to access those funds and then additionally jrl has done an excellent job of getting multiple grants which joni also does a lot of our pd money comes from those grants in in also comes from the work that ariel is doing with the mark bullying um i

010don't have all the lists but we have multiple grants that he's doing so that's typical it's not that we're not allowing access to this money it's just it falls under different buckets that are accessed by other administrators as well can i ask the question so if i hit you correctly there's a quote-unquote bucket buckets right for another line item of money yeah so so so so that that there there is professional develop money and that's one place where money is drawn to fund different things including the sel dei work potentially yes right so i'm i'm i love playing quote unquote i don't know i don't understand so let me just ask um as a what if kind of thing so you're saying that because of deci we can't create a line item for scldei we

011in general don't create line items for specific like projects by themselves so for example when we brought in the fonteson canal and we do training on that there isn't a fontes and pinell line item for the training on that that comes out of initiatives that we have for professional development yeah for if we're bringing a new math textbook series it comes out of a textbook line item not a math textbook okay i'm saying we don't get that granular because we do need to stay light and and you know and some and especially when you talk about professional development we do have limited opportunities for doing district-wide professional development as well so again it's all going to be part of an integrated plan district-wide it is not just you know one person's choice or one you

012know one single initiative just to even for example yeah it's my budget theoretically the town's budget but they call it superhero yeah i have no line items that i can access for specific things i go to mr gridday and say can we do x right because that's the way we have this checks and balances so there is availability in fact we're planning pd for next year right now mr renee already has multiple hours that he's putting in joanie's working on certain topics uh student support director is working on topics and we will then figure out how many what needs we are are we bringing in speakers and then we look at what we can fund throughout that but it's it's a all one place that we go for this all these sources so one more

013question is that okay sure um um is there a way to to to show to prioritize i don't i'm not on how you do that i hear i hear the structure as it exists okay is there a way for us to show it as a priority versus one more thought and i'm just thinking out loud that every year someone has to go and find money for this work that's the part that and and i'm talking now from experience when it's always well maybe we'll find the money you know and that's always a maybe because you never know what's going to happen in a given year is there a way to designate so that there's always funds so i guess i'm talking outside the box here but that's from my experience there are reinventing policies and

014practices for equity that's what you got to do you got to reinvent yeah but honestly i hope right now you've known that this is a passion of mine and that's why oh i know absolutely i mean honestly to be able to get this position in this budget in this year given our other challenges was a huge boon for the district right and that that was a full administrator year-round salary so i'm ecstatic and that is a long term to commit commitment to that the money that we have for all these things as a central office team we meet weekly and we meet as a team to talk about what we are prioritizing as a team which includes a ton of this work around equity so i i think the results are happening you just don't

015see it tangibly because at the end of the year we'll have him present what we've accomplished this year what pd and topics are going to be addressed for next year so yes there's not a specific line item but the work is happening and it's sustainable and you'll hear about in our five-year strategic plan on may 5th yeah um is it worth thinking about for the future um i learned this from you it's not about the person it's about the position you and you like this current i don't know administration has has dei as a priority if that ever were to change would we want to do something now to sort of write it in so that if well you don't you don't want to do that you can change you don't want to do that

016because that's not and i'm not saying it shouldn't be but if it's not where the next direction of the district is going to go you know you want to be able to stay light on your feet i mean the resources become available when the plans call for that when the available times and the programs and whether it be professional development or or again curriculum supplies or whatever it is again we we make the plan first and then worry about funding second we figure out the funding next it's not because we have available funds we're going to spend it it's how much does it cost to do x y and z and if we have resources we do x y and z it's that it's it's really that simple right and for right now i'll be

017starting to look for vendors for an equity audit i'm not sure where those funds are coming for but it is a huge priority because that equity audit for next year is going to drive all of this type of work so that is not right now yeah i was gonna it's certainly not just about professional development assessment excuse me it's so critical throughout everything because we have four pillars within our strategic plan and jerry ells is entitled help me out here safe and supportive schools safe and supportive schools and then you also see equity woven into teaching and learning too so it's woven through out so there is a huge commitment i think i think if you come may 5th you'll see we have four archers and one full arch out of that umbrella is dedicated

018to this work as well as a part of the second arch so it's time it's it's really embedded and jerry is also working on other grants that he can present when he comes back in june and he'll share with what grants he was able to that and grant is something we look for for all facets of all over the place in the district to help to supplement our budget as well so yeah and and that's great i certainly appreciate and representing the folks at first house and that try to you know move the needle on the stuff you're you're thinking critically about how to best position this my final thought is maybe there there's the the idea of better um branding meaning you know so so we know we got a lot of publicity around

019the hate speech stuff and and some very good responses okay we didn't just sit and go oh that's too bad we responded but we want to be able for people to say we're doing this proactively and here's what that looks like so i you know again i'm just considering and i'm i'm thinking on my feet here you know to try to continue to to reinvent i say this all the time we have to revisit to rethink to reinvent to change outcomes and and that's a constant especially with some of that data i just shared that's the real deal we got problems our schools need to play a different role in what kind of citizens come out of our schools it's as simple as that yeah and just related to that you'll see that we've also

020we have fully funded metrowest um much survey that was actually grant funded and we've made that now part of our action of the budget so there is a huge commitment to this no i i'm not doubting the commitment and the funding constantly yeah so so i'm gonna go because i know you're sick of hearing me but again i this the the one thing that sticks out for me is that branding piece because people know that that resource is not just financial result but but leadership researchers are going here and going there and focusing on this it's like okay the school is saying this is a priority right i mean we you know jenna semper sampa spoke before the school committee 2018 and said she was embarrassed by her education in houston she never had a

021black teacher she never had studied what racism was about she stood before the school committee i have the tape as a graduating senior when my stepdaughter graduated i stood and looked at this beautiful ceremony that was lily white it doesn't have to be that way so it takes change and i'm i'm i'm with you we're with you we're not saying fix it we're saying let's fix it let's let us fix it together as a community thank you for listening to me ryan ray thank you very much appreciate it [Music] all right um seeing no one else for our budget hearing i will close motion to close motion 2023 are you here for to do a budget talking no okay stacy did first hit anybody second second thank you amanda all in favor thank you all

022right um and then i'm gonna move on to our consent agenda all items are considered to be routine it will be enacted in one motion there will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the items will be considered in its normal sequence on the agenda in terms of warrants the details will be provided in the minutes do i see have a motion to approve the consent agenda moved by amanda seconded by stacy all in favor thank you all right communications our student representatives are not available this evening so i'll move on to school committee individual comments anybody have anything this evening don theater 370 is currently in rehearsals for the spring play which is called she kills monsters they also just returned from the

023mass educational theater guild festival competition and advanced to regionals awesome the act ii chorus recently completed or competed in the massachusetts instrumental choral and conductors association choral competition and was pleased to be recognized with the bronze award and finally the band and courses performed last week here at the high school and did an outstanding job and i believe you were there incredible yes um spring sports both at the middle school and the high school are well underway with um track meets and lacrosse games and all sorts of games um moving forward so okay so you stole my event the only thing congratulations to all the students um we're very proud of proud of you and your accomplishments and the only other thing i was going to add is the middle school has their production of

024mary poppins unfortunately they are sold out so i am not promoting it for you to get tickets but for those of you who got your tickets uh i'm so excited it's that's a great play and good luck to all those students break a leg the preview was fantastic last week so i expect yeah even better yeah my favorite yeah minnie did you have something yeah i just wanted to um give a shout out we had our first officers and my first office hours after i got elected sorry um and i have to say that it was a really enriching experience i wanted to give a shout out to all the parents who came and thank you for to everyone who came to meet us i also wanted to touch base and tell the community about

025the things that i heard and just to give a snapshot of the things that we discussed there was a discussion on environment people were talking about bringing in sustainability into the schools and i thought that was an extremely important topic that we could probably talk about later sometime and then um there were questions on uh nature's classroom and the things that the kids have missed uh but i have to say that the chunk of the conversation revolved around the school start times there were certain concerns that were brought forth um some of them i'll just go very briefly over them uh some of them were like kids were being left alone at home as young as eight because the parents were not able to rush back home on time the parents there were some parents

026were considering either moving out or having this school join another school there were concerns about family being affected as a whole because no matter what the age group the entire household ends up waking up um one parent informed that her class child had lots of tardy kits so the teacher is not able to start the class on time and they have they just do some worksheets and then one interesting point that came up was that there's a 109 days of dark r bus pickups for miller kids if and when the sunshine act passes um there was a conversation about the equity for all kids and 35 percent of all surveyed were never negatively affected so which they thought was not equitable so um besides this uh parents also have reached out separately and they have

027asked if this could be added to the agenda simply to understand where we are and what may have changed since this was debated last especially there's as there has been a significant change with the sunshine act coming into play so i would actually like to see if we could actually add it to the agenda the next meeting and just to get the conversation ruling and see if there could be uh something that we could do about the whole situation so that's me okay just a reminder that next week is spirit week at miller one of their days is tacky tourist day i'm excited to see how that happened and did you have something no i was just going to say that um don and i also had an office hour um we had a couple

028but we didn't get a big turnout at coffeehaven but we had a good turnout on zoom um and it was great to connect with folks in the community um i love hearing people's ideas and it seemed like what minnie said everyone just had a lot of like positive willingness to support us and help and share ideas i think school start times on the next at the next meeting will be great just to see where we're at and sort of inform the community about like how we are like discussing the process and looking at the data and um where we're at with that all right and then i just have one thing that i wanted to bring to the community's attention which is um there is a program for understanding teen depression it's a virtual workshop

029that is being run by the youth and family services and put together with jarrell bernay about your tween and teen and it is thursday april 14th via zoom through the hollistonlibrary.org so you can sign up there but it's on april 14th so hopefully people will check that out i think it's a very important program and i think a lot of parents could benefit from that so um anybody else okay so move on dr kuska i'm sorry yes yes i have two updates related to my student advisory work and actually this might interest mr principe as well so i attended i've been doing student superintendent student advisors at all levels last week i was able to do one at the high school we had a small group of high school students due to some other conflicts

030that were happening but we talked about some of the work that we're going to be continuing here at the high school we're having a teen truth leadership summit and we're having a speaker come in on april 28th so i'll be sharing more about that you'll hear more from the high school as well but the purpose of this teen truth assembly is to do empower student voice improve mental health and build school culture it's really about making this this is the students building and this is their school and empowering them to make the culture change and then following that they'll have i think it's 50 at least 50 students are going to be doing a separate um leadership summit portion and the rest of the students will engage in conversations in the classroom so i met

031with the students we talked about how to be proactive about this work and they asked if they could attend the staff meeting which at the high school which i attended on monday and two of the students that i met with spoke up about this work and gave suggestions to the staff of how they could help have these conversations with students so i'm thrilled to see the student advocacy happening at the high school especially related to this topic that is an ongoing need and then today i attended my pre-k to two superintendent student advisory with 15 pre-k to two-year-olds i mean grade two-year-old yeah and what a day i had talk about children say the darnedest things they were fabulous i think people thought that i would be panic-stricken with 15 children running around they were

032not they were so well behaved we had a very diverse group we had students of all shapes and forms and they were even our three-year-olds were answering my questions and giving me feedback about how i could make the district a better place so i can't tell you i think i got more out of it than them but i just want to know that this work is so important pre-k to 12. because my hope is that we start these conversations in preschool about a safe and supportive environment as they move on to mueller and then to the middle school and the high school by the time they get to high school let's hope we're in a much better place community wide so can you give us the highlight like what was one of the things that

033they said so when i said you know i asked about what i could do to district-wide as the because i said do you know what i do do you know who i am and they said you're like the principal for all the schools i said you're right i helped oversee all the schools and one little one when i i asked for a little more advice said well you should meet with kids at all the schools and hear what they have to say and i said i actually do i've been meeting at the high school and all these and this child said oh my mom works at the high school and i said oh who's your mom and she said mom and i said oh i was wondering if she has another name well i call

034her mom and she did she had the first name but i still quite haven't figured out so i won't mention it right now but you know out of the mouths of babes so this is like like i said i'm very excited to continue this work even though that was my first at the preschool grade two level this year i will be doing one more hopefully by the end of the year and this is going to be embedded as we go on into next year and i did say to them i hope you're going to go home and tell your parents what we talked about today so so stories could be happening at the dinner table that's great and that's it for me all right mr buday actually have a few things tonight um first i'm

035glad they didn't say they wanted pizza every day which usually i was thinking like donuts you know when i when i'm down there they find that i'm in charge of food and all hell breaks loose i just want to inform you um in case any of you have heard uh the boston public schools received a milk delivery that contained a solution of water and some sort of sanitizer um in the cartons we did not receive anything like that we received assurances from garelick that that was not our delivery so um so in case in case any of you were worried or so you don't have to call me tonight at like three in the morning or something so can i ask a question yeah did you find like how did they find out do you

036have any information on that like it was it was just reported through i i found out from our food services director um susan paleski so um i assume she found out either through her chain or watched it on the news i mean it's it's it's going to be new so yeah the concern being that it shouldn't be like a children finding out but yeah we get we get up we do get our milk and garlic yes so i i i asked susan point blank i said you know was it you know if it was sabotage or whatever and i they haven't heard that yet so and what kind of assurances are they giving us that it's not going to happen here um that the peat that uh milks that the milk supply the run of

037milk that's the one transaction one milk that goes through you know and gets populated there was was checked once they found that out so um the the miss the misdistribution of milk into those cartons or what wasn't milk into those cartons was remedied for us so so just uh this is really a question but um so they're saying like there's sanitizer in it like as if it was hand sanitizer put in it or was it that they were sanitizing the bottles and something got messed up in production and just put sanitizing in with the milk does that make sense it doesn't like i'm thinking to myself it was hand sanitizer but that doesn't make anything it doesn't make sense i assume that i would assume that it was because it was water with the sanitizer

038i would assume it was a cleaning solution going through the line that again they started it too soon before rinsing it down that would be my guess but that's again that's why it's not ours because again they caught it at some point and then ours came subsequent to that so so okay yes um i uh since it wasn't mentioned we were at the select board the numbers went to the select board on monday night um to talk about capital um dan did a nice job presenting again and uh um there were a number of questions which were which was good and uh we made it through that unscathed apparently and uh and susan gave an introduction as well of the uh what you're gonna hear tonight gave them a little preview of the sli process

039um just to kind of fast track that piece of it because we're coming up to a deadline so and then um finally um just because a lot of questions going on and this happens nearly every year and um i just want to highlight or address three things that that we're in talking about the grounds and again this this happens every year everybody sees a lot of trash usually early in the year because snow's gone and you know you can't do much for trash you know when the snow is here and in general the snow the trash also gets plowed from the parking lot to the fields and so that's why it ends up there we've had our cleaning crew we pay them extra when they do this i'm going out and picking trash we're trying

040to create a more regular routine with them it's unfortunate that again a lot of this trash comes from our own students in our own parking lot and i can tell you it's from the athletes as well there was one day i was down at the high school for something else outside and i saw our cleaner going outside and i saw this one particular portion of the old the old middle earth field i can't remember what we call it now but it was middle earth under construction times um like when you guys were all in like elementary school and um uh and it wasn't a thing on it and i happened to be down there the next morning i said let me just go take a look and it was covered with water bottles so it's

041all it's our own students doing it to us and it's not to us but it's the ones who are doing it which is creating the problem so again it's being remedied as it is every year um that was one piece um i know amanda asked about this with the um the ground firmed up enough mostly they did have a little bit of problems with the dpw but we had the dirt there and they brought in some extra um but this was again always the plan it's just that again we had a wet fall snowy winter had to let the ground firm up for us to be able to do it they took care of that the extra turf i i negotiated a reduced price from our vendor who put the turf in so we finally

042took it and put it into got a container to do that i was kind of waiting for them to kind of finish their project they never finished it i told them i'm doing it and that was the end of that and then um question about the baseball field again baseball unfortunately being a spring sport on a field that is high water table um to say the least the the thing i the the story i always mentioned about the high water table is i don't know how many it's probably 10 or 12 years ago now we actually had water coming out of the volleyball sleeves in the field house that's how high the water table gets at times so um again that that field takes a long time for it to dry up so we can't

043do a lot of work on it there was some work done on it this spring um at our late fall into spring um uh hipster paid house and youth baseball softball association got some dirt in cut it out parks department has a new piece of equipment to continually edge the property so again for the infield so we're in good shape there moving forward dpw has been there doing what they normally do to get the fields open so again we're moving forward um you know the the the fence thing again reliable fence is waiting for some part to come in to take care i mean again all this stuff happens it's just that it again springtime is tough everybody wants to run out and do things and you know unfortunately the field is soft right and

044we go from like winter to spring like that and again the field is soft it is a high water table there and it also prevents us from doing a lot of other things on that field i mean i've had requests over the years of people wanting to put turf on the fields like i can't put turf on top of the leaching field for us for our wastewater treatment or our septic system here so it's things like that where you know again that's it's just a tough spot you know and and and i've had this constant refrain of when people say well what can we do about it it's like across the street it's across the street we could build a proper baseball facility but um that being said just know that we are working on

045it it's been a partnership between us and dpw and parks as it is every year we all play nice in that sandbox and just you know again if they're scheduled to be here one day and it rains like a banshee they're not going to be back for three or four days because first that's the dry out and second off they have other projects to do they schedule us on a tuesday and they may not be able to get back to us they'll say next tuesday you know and and construction is starting by the way back down in mudville i found out today on monday so yeah but can we i would like to request that the administration look at what are we going to do about these kids being slobs and not having any consequences

046because it's irritating to me that you are now paying extra for someone else to go clean up after that so when i went to school and you were a slob detention got you outside to pick up the bottles and the calves this is disgusting and the same thing with all the stuff that went on in the fall with the damage to bathrooms etc i'm fed up as a taxpayer that i have to pay for our kids being disrespectful and i really would like you to consider that not tonight not a discussion but really consider that because it's shameful well i think this is to the empower powering student voice this is their community their schools they need to take better care of it i think that should be embedded in some of that work but

047i also do want to comment on the fact that it is not just a school problem as well because the community the full community uses these buildings so this is not just happening when students are in session or during athletics it's recreation department i mean there are there are multiple groups that use our facilities and that's where we run into that it's weekends it's ongoing so there's not one answer but i do agree with you that we need to put some more effort into empowering student voice to take the role that they can for the high school for the middle school and all the other buildings amanda as a tiny tiny positive step could we maybe like send an email to all the field coaches that use that turf and say please remind your athletes

048before they leave to pick up their trash that's so funny that you asked i did ask mr buday to draft a memo and i wanted him to talk to this tonight and i did ask him to draft a memo that he could send out to our principals to the staff and and specifically coaches as well so i think that'll be an important next step we great minds think alike thank you is that it stupid all right thank you thank you tony holliston had our student-facing systems target review last week it was held monday through thursday um just to remind you it was focused on curriculum and instruction assessment and student report so they went to all four schools and actually went into classrooms did observations so i wanted to do a huge shout out to

049all the teachers for having outsiders come into their classroom classrooms for observations as well as district leaders and building leaders as they all were part of focus groups and interviews for this group to compile this report once we receive this report we will use this information to use the data to drive change that we need to drive that's it i actually have to do that public comment yes all right so i'm going to move on to public comment i think we have two people here for public comment so i don't know who wants to go first um but you have two minutes to or sorry three minutes to address the school committee on whatever subject you'd like so come on up to the podium and say your name and address and thank you for having

050me i'm james jacobson 12th katy way holston so i'm the father of three children under the age of 10. i also attended halston public schools from elementary montessori program through high school graduation i'm here to ask you to continue the conversation related to the health and welfare of all of our students with regard to the early start times it's commendable that we were able to follow the science and allow high schoolers the rest that they require the question is does that progress need to be detrimental to our elementary children a boston children's hospital study published in october 2021 showed that children ages 9 to 11 who don't get enough sleep suffer from adverse effects to their developing brains and incur other neurological problems this past year i've seen the suffering firsthand although i may be

051one of the few to speak directly to you on this the recent survey illuminates the overwhelming feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction recently the sunshine protection act unanimously passed the senate this means there's a good chance that starting next year there will be over three months when miller children are physically at school before the sun has risen in effect making school start times an hour earlier for much of the year children being schooled during the graveyard shift does not strike me as progress i implore you to use the same outside of the box thinking that you use to get our kids back to school during the pandemic to find a solution where no child in holliston is starting school before 8 am let's research the efficiency of starting miller and placentino together consider the traffic reduction

052from fewer trips for families with multiple children and those who drive let's look into hiring an expert to evaluate the woodland campus surrounding area to see how traffic flow could be better designed to accommodate the buses cars and pedestrians the three schools have a lot of land let's be sure we're using it as efficiently as we can for the safety and benefit of all students many of these solutions could include expense cuts as well as other tangible benefits the current situation may have been cost free on paper but there are real dollars being spent by our administrators directing traffic while mostly empty buses deliver kids to miller as early as 705 am the 2019 school start time change was in many ways a step in the right direction but let's please consider it a work

053in progress until the health and welfare of all of our students is respected rather than the issues being transferred to a less vocal cohort we must do better by our children thank you is it tracy yes i didn't realize um i'm going to be saying a lot of what you just said so thank you um just give your name an address okay i'm totally gonna say okay i'm um tracy cohen i live at 58 indian ridge road south and have two children one at placentino and one at miller i'm here tonight to request that the conversation continue in regards to the safety and wellness of our children specifically the challenges that exist on the woodland street campuses for the school start times yes this was an issue that was discussed way back before covet but

054at that time the acting superintendent had two feet out the door when such a major change was being debated that was my personal observation and opinion when i attended those meetings thankfully we now have dr kuska and new faces on the school committee so i'm just asking for your time to hear a few of the challenges that our children and families face one the gap between the school start times of placentino and miller i'm a working mom and i show up late every day to work due to the huge gap between my two kids start times for school i'm also a mom that made the decision once the school start times passed to drive my miller child to school every day just so she could sleep in asking her to walk down to our bus

055stop at 6 50 a.m in the dark just seemed insane to me i peel her out of bed daily despite religiously putting her to bed before 8 o'clock because she requires a ton of sleep miller's school buses arrive at 7 05 7 10 am kids have to then wait 20 to 25 minutes to be let into school and are then given sheets of paper as busy work until 7 50 am because so many kids trickle in late i usually drop my daughter off anytime between 7 20 and 7 45 each day yes i'm horrible i admit it i'm doing this because i just feel like it's my only choice to get her to function at school um so yes i send early i see a ton of during this time i see a ton of

056kids trickling late and wonder just how many of these are documented also an employee from miller once told me the kids are zombies getting into school i was driving my daughter's friend to lacrosse the other day and she was saying in the car that her teacher yells at them in the morning for never raising their hands and saying that they're all still asleep also placentino buses arrived late from the last bus run from miller so school is starting for them after 9 a.m i can attest to this because one time i dropped my son off to school at placentino late after his dentist appointment and we were shocked to see that a bus had just pulled up the drop off kids when i was signing him in late second point is the traffic in the

057morning at miller the traffic has quadrupled since the change of school start times families like me are doing anything and everything to get their kids to get more sleep so they skip the bus and they get driven to school having mr crime and miss linares direct traffic in the more direct traffic in the morning is impressive as to the commitment to their jobs yet it's horrifying as i feel it's a huge waste of talent having our most valued and highly paid employees direct traffic one could say that they are there to meet the kids and parents which i get perhaps once a week would be sufficient for that but there must be a better solution for this another issue is the multiple bus runs are polluting downtown and the increase of gas prices only confirm

058that we need to explore other options also there is a traffic study it is my understanding correct me if i am wrong but there were funds allocated for a traffic study in the january before the pandemic so i'm curious as to the status of those funds are they still available please consider a traffic study to one analyze what might be possible at the woodland campus for drop off and pick up two possibly utilize the road behind the school or three start placentino and miller at the same time tracy have about 15 seconds okay even organizing a subcommittee to gather more data on our options finally the survey when will the results be provided to us and is there a way to get the teacher's feedback can we contact the union to provide them with a

059survey as to be so we can hear straight from the teachers how these miller children are faring handling early morning hours and then the 10 to 10 30 a.m lunch it seems odd to me that the most accurate resource of the people that our children see daily day-to-day are not consulted on this to conclude dr kuska you came in as an acting interim superintendent during the most chaotic time and forgive me for being blunt but you and the school committee kicked ass navigating the coveted pandemic and getting our kids back to school there's no doubt in my mind that if you revisit the school start times issue you will not only keep this conversation going but you will find some alternative solutions for our community that is well devoted to the safety and wellness of

060our children thank you thank you okay seeing no one else for public comment i'm going to end that portion of our meeting and we're going to move on to presentations we have a technology update from mr mcleod our director of technology and digital learning thanks for having me again all right so tonight i wanted to provide an update on the goals that are related to technology in the district goals and then share a uh hopefully a comprehensive comprehensive replenishment plan for all phases of technology so feel free to stop me with any questions we'll go ahead and begin here with the goals update all right so the two goals that include a lot of technology are the innovative learning opportunities for obvious reasons and communication so some things are going really well and then there's

061some things where we really need to improve so i'm going to discuss those two things right now all right so some great news our computer science endorsement program which i believe is two years old we launched in the middle of the pandemic we had only a couple students graduate with that endorsement but since then we've really upped the numbers i mean the numbers were low so when i say up the numbers it's not like super high but we're really proud of the percentage increase so the momentum is there i want to thank sarah kuhn she's really been the driving force behind that so part of it is this maker space over here so we're really excited about the work she's done there too as well so we're happy about the enrollment in the computer science

062endorsement program we're also really happy about the blended learning that's occurring this is placentino so i wanted to show you a quick video and thank winnie kerry for taking this video and the families for allowing us to show it so these are first graders in our french immersion program [Music] wow [Music] so they're using seesaw on the chromebook so that's a great example of the french speaking the french learning the french standards then also there's a digital learning standard which is creating artifacts using digital tools and audio in that case and they were using seesaw and the chromebook flip that we provide to elementary students in k to one which i'll speak to in a little bit mr mclaughlin so they're practicing enunciating their front vocabulary in french correct and getting corrections from the computer

063or just taping it it wasn't clear um i believe they're just taping it so it's it's it's a digital portfolio the seesaw platform offers digital portfolio and then that's reviewed by the teachers so it's all saved to the cloud reviewed by the teachers so they can give them feedback and that was just that was not choreographed uh winnie carey just actually was walking the halls went in and this was happening in lindsay st alvin's classroom uh for those navigating prezi this is the back button this little arrow just a little tip sometimes it takes so those are the two things that are going well some of the things that are going well this touch screen is going around what needs to improve there's always room for improvement uh we heard this loud and clear in

064the strategic planning survey um sorry we have a lot of communication tools but uh the navigation is a challenge for many folks and so we already know there's going to be some changes with powerschool our student information system in the fall so the parent portal and the teacher portal are going to change we think it's going to be a better change as far as navigation the website we just trained additional users yesterday on the website so we're going to expand who can access the website and keep it up to date the navigation of the website uh we're also going to work we had three people attend training sarah kuhn uh winnie carey myself we just went to website training so we're learning all the tips and tricks to make tips and tricks to make the

065navigation better the mass communication system is bright arrow so we're looking for a way to align that with our website and powerschool bright air sits within powerschool but we want there to be alignment between all these products i don't know if it's going to happen but that's we're going to shoot for and then social media we're going to expand our use of social media we currently post some things to facebook but some of those things aren't built for facebook like an email newsletter and that's not built for twitter either so we're going to look for other options with the social media so anyway this is what we're going to focus on in the future is improving navigation consistency alignment with our communication tools again stop me if you have questions all right so those are

066the district goals the big some of the big ones um so let's dive into our devices student devices we currently use chromebooks in k to 12. and with kovit it was a one-to-one model so we had a lot of coveted funding to help uh get us to that point well now we're kind of going back to i wouldn't say reverting completely to our older model but we're just purchasing new chromebooks for grades six and nine and then every five years we're going to purchase new for grades k and one the flips chromebooks that they will share so what that means is there'll be one full cart and it's it's not a full cart they have 12 on a shelf in each classroom so that's how those classrooms will look so if they need a full

067cart they can just grab the 12 from the other classroom we will have a card of chromebooks that is mobile and that will be used for science classes so that's the plan for km1 and we met with placentino administration we got some feedback from the teachers and we feel like right now this is the best model that we will share the chromebook flips and that also lends to the stations and the centers that occur in those classrooms all right um i'm going to talk about the replenishment plan i will launch it but i can come back and dig into that more later so i'll pull that up because i'm guessing there'll be some questions about that let me go back here and just show you quickly what the budget might look like for student devices

068this is just the forecast again with our current model so 2324 we're already planning for devices for then so we're hopeful that we get a grant which is called the emergency connectivity fund it's a federal grant that parallels to the e-rate program and except the difference is with e-rate we get 40 funding this one we get 100 reimbursement so the reason we qualified is we send devices home that support remote learning and that's why only grades six and nine will qualify elementaries we don't send the devices home uh the other piece of that is we actually get reimbursed for staff devices now we bought staff devices we're in our second year of staff devices so we don't need to buy new but we do need spares so we get four hundred dollars back per spare

069so we spend about 900 on a staff device excuse me so we only pay 500 the grant reimburses 400 that 900. so we're hopeful that we will get that grant if we do that then the cost in the capital project in the fall would only be 40 000 and that would be for the software that manages the chromebooks and then also pc lab at the high school so the pc labs are currently desktops we're going to a mobile cart model for the labs here at the high school as well and then looking ahead it's going to be the next year again two two grade levels of chromebooks and then another pc lab at the high school and then year 25 26 we do chromebooks and ipads and then chromebooks and the k to one flips

070the following year and then finally max lasts a long time we'll do the rams math lab that following year and then the high school math lab after that tony have a question dan what do we use the pc lab for and and what does how much does that entail like what do we have there in terms of you know many of our kids all of our kids have chromebooks so why do we have a pc lab right so the pc lab we need the pc lab because of the resources that the programs use for example autocad is a very resource intensive program and also our digital art classes require adobe products so they don't run on chromebooks so we just i feel like it always will be a component having uh pc laptops or windows

071i mean or macs i guess if we wanted to but it's always going to be part of the high school i feel because of those programs i was going to say to piggyback off of that i'm presuming that you would need like the pc lab for the computer science track correct right like do you need towers for for the computer science class with the different software and now we've we've the laptops that we bought a couple years ago to augment the computer science program those are actually our best performing devices across the district better than our desktops so if you spec out the proper laptop it will do everything we want and then these days as you know the laptops are getting better and better so we just need to invest i won't say heavily

072but we need to make sure we get a robust device to do all these things so this is going to show my my ignorance about it but like could you so a lot of kids have like gaming computers where they need the towers are are the laptops like that powerful i guess i'm trying to compare like uh yeah sort of i hear what you're saying about the gaming well i'm just trying to like i'm trying to wrap my head around yes you know um someone in the computer science track really doing a lot of different software data et cetera so i'm just trying to it's it's heat it's heat that comes off the video card that's the thing they're having all off the processor you have the tower to create more space for heat to

073differentiate yeah okay thank you very much okay no now i understand but the autocad program that takes a ton of space right isn't that one of the reasons we need it it does the projects take a lot of space although there's you know cloud versions now but it's really um just example those laptops about two years ago have 32 gigs of ram so [Music] the staff laptops we have have eight gigs of ram i have a staff laptop i'm fine i do a lot of stuff on my laptop but it's absolutely fine so 32 gigs you can imagine the students are not running into any issues so maybe pc lab is like a misnomer because they're not really pcs they're all laptops or do we have actually some pcs they're pc laptops okay sorry i

074should have clarified that they're pc laptops yeah all right so yep and then the mac mac labs come later questions okay again it's just a forecast with our current models we should hear about the grant i was telling mr bidet we should hear about that by june 1st and that will impact our capital request can you just say the name of that grant again it's called the ecf emergency connectivity fund yes dan the grant i i saw the number 152 000 but then the actual number assuming you get the grant would be about 40 000 for a capital request in 2324. you also anticipate that that grant would be available in the in the additional years 24 25 and ongoing uh no i don't anticipate it's a coveted related grant thank you to support remote

075learning yes wish it was all right so that's a snapshot of our student devices quickly the staff devices here's what we're forecasting again just a reminder laptops are provided to basically everybody in our school system that requires one so instructional administrative staff all have laptops including our office staff so part of that is our disaster recovery plan like if something happened to a building the staff could move to another building and work on the laptop without reconfiguring a desktop so and then chromebooks for support staff so the classroom technology just to give you a quick snapshot of where we are there because that's part of this equation we feel like right now the model for teachers to be successful is a high quality laptop so we're going to make sure that happens and then we

076found the new projectors that we're purchasing they actually have built-in wireless technology so what i'm doing right now with my laptop connecting wirelessly to the board the projectors come with that and the really nice thing about that is the chromebooks will connect to that and the ipads that we have in the buildings we'll connect to that so any device that the students are using they'll be able to share to the screen it'll be secure too the students need a pin from the teacher to share to the screen but it really reinforces that sharing and presentation of content can the teacher change the pin absolutely the teacher is total control what's the name of these projectors is our name i hope i don't get in trouble for this but yeah it's it's epson is the model

077we buy and uh we have a lot of luck it's called the eye projection app that's built into that product amanda's looking for her district i was going to say that she was like how do i use it we buy dell computers okay it's no secret so yes we buy epsom projectors um sorry i was just being weird about that i didn't want to go there i want to go back here we'll come back to you later all right so what does the budget for staff look like for the next few years so the good news is this 16 000 for projectors we buy approximately 30 approximately 32 projectors every year so approximately eight in every every building that costs about 16 000 which we pull out of operating budget it's not a capital request

078so we're forecasting we don't want to take out projectors that are working so we're just going to phase in every year 32 classrooms are going to have this new wireless technology so it's not going to happen in every classroom every night but it's the most economical approach and then in the year 2627 we are this is going this is a large chunk of money that's going to be required for staff laptops to be refreshed and i'll speak to it's the school year 2627 so the funding request that was my elbow the funding request will come the year before so just everyone knows it'll come in the fall spring capital before that year and then after that we'll refresh the paraprofessionals and the office staff stacey no i'm just looking at you with a sad face

079because 27 is when our babies are graduating like you just spent that really like that's right it's going to be here like that i know it's just like wow your baby no not your baby yeah no it is you might not oh my gosh sorry it just it you really see that number something that's been planned out yeah that's as far as my mind could go any farther no anyway that's that's going to be a large cost you know maybe there'll be some grant that'll come around who knows but um hopefully we can prepare for that all right leave my elbow this time all right so that's a snapshot of the classroom and the staff devices all right infrastructure i spoke to this in middle of march so i won't spend a ton of time

080but these are all the pieces of the infrastructure i didn't touch on broadband and firewall because that's covered in operating budget but we have two new firewalls this year in case you're wondering because of cyber security i wanted to make sure we upgraded to the latest and greatest and we did and so far so good but one thing to consider is um and i've talked to mr bidet about this our currently we have multiple one gig connections into our schools again with the new fiber i'm proposing and the new wi-fi and all of that that one gig is eventually going to need to be upgraded uh the cost of fiber and and these connections is coming down which is very nice so i feel like in a couple years we will upgrade our broadband connections

081to match everything else we're doing i got stop my my wife says that my elbows are really sharp [Laughter] all right so i'm gonna stand out here so anyway those are all the pieces um the one thing just uh that we're scoping out right now is the high school auditorium this is not going to be on the spring capital but we're looking at the lighting system in the auditorium and we um the the ceiling lights are led but the spotlights and and all the color lights are not led so we're scoping out a project for that because uh the lighting is a challenge during the shows and the good news with that lighting is it's all going to be portable we've been told by the vendor so we can take it to the next building

082whatever even the dimmer panel which we're going to scope out as well needs to be replaced that will be portable as well wow is it portable in the way that it could be taken to the middle school if they needed to use it or to miller if they need to use it um that's a great question not really because because all these banks of lights are way high in the ceiling and it takes like a scissor lift to get up there and get them portable like portable meaning like the entire structure of these banks of lights can be delivered to a new stage yeah meaningless which means if we had a new project like i asked dan this question of you know if we ended up investing a lot into the high school again we

083have to kind of think about that when we do it so i just sorry where is i interrupting you just not from the auditory perspective because more than likely you would still be the same that's maybe possible but i just asked the question as to if we did have another project and you know we'll be able to take that with us any of these things with us and that was what they were auditorium right okay that's not big enough but whatever anyway i asked the question that's it that could change though that could change though well anyways right now right all right so here's what the capital budget again all these projects come in a capital a lot of them are e-rateable um but here's what i'm forecasting so for next year and this will

084be the fall this coming fall i'm forecasting 150 000 and that's that's the high school auditorium basically they gave us a quote for a little over a hundred thousand but then we've added the dimmer panel so we're waiting for that quote to come back after that the capital oh geez is a little slim on the next two years and then 26 is 250 000 and that's going to be i got to get back to my list [Music] secondary wi-fi and the phase the next phase of the switching project that's right so again much of that is eradable so that doesn't include the laptops right correct this is infrastructure separate and i'll put it all together in the next slide okay so dan the 26 27 250 000 figure that would be reduced by 40 or

085is that the reduced e-rate figure the 250 uh good question um and you can get back to us on it too yes uh that would have been a um already reduced by 40 okay so that's the actual cost the 250. okay so this is a summary of what i'm expecting as far as total cost of all projects this is student devices staff devices and infrastructure all together and again none of this is covered in operating so for 23.24 which is going to be 2223 funding which means fall capital 192 000. so that's the auditorium that i just spoke about and then the 42 000 for the lab and that's assuming we get ecf funding which i am confident we will so this is what i would be recommending in the fall just right now preliminarily

086and then the following year we had the chromebooks and then the high school pc lab um that's the price tag for that and then chromebooks and ipads chromebooks and network and then chromebooks lab and network questions lisa do you guys i guess this would be either susan or keith do you guys communicate these numbers to either travis or the vincom i mean i know we're just getting them and they're new but would it make sense for us to communicate them to the town it's just a heads up kind of thing they'll be part of our next five-year cycle i mean that five-year capital uh plan is ever evolving i mean we keep moving things back truthfully because we haven't needed to fix x y and z so you know we are stacking things up a

087little bit but again we break things when they're broken fix things in the broken you know break things we fix things when they're broken but yes no we would be adding this now that dan has put this together we will be adding this and it adjusts because there are pieces for capital already for technology in the capital plan this just shows okay i'm going to try to align it to the 2022-27 strategic plan so we'll probably go out to the 27 year with pd with the capital and with um what was the other item with that mini i'm trying to align all of those buckets for five years thank you anybody else have any questions on this slide thank you we're good so you just want to move on to that do you want to

088see the spreadsheet yes do you want to go in there can you mind not at all i was ready dan this was a really great presentation though i'm really the fancy prezzi [Music] because this was where i was getting totally confused but i think now i get it okay and then dan i just wanted you to just to preface this with i just wondered if you could just talk a little bit about how this has shifted since you had done this presentation in like the spring of 2020 before everything kind of shifted and i just didn't know if there was sure major shifts in what you've done uh differently yeah so so great question so this is our refreshment plan although it's more detailed now so our refreshment plan before covid was a gradual phasing

089in of the one to one sort of really slow economical [Music] kovid turn it into one to one so now the magic wand right exactly so from that uh do you want me to zoom in or is this hard to see i'm sure it's hard to get it i'll zoom in a little bit more see anything so basically this is uh this is where we are right now 2122. yellow is grade six and green is grade nine although we found a lot of success and this was coveted this was just by accident so kova we were delivering chromebooks you know quickly constantly and we were delivering them mid-year and we actually um reflected on the mid-year process it's proven to be very effective in many ways because we have a lot of staff and we

090don't have to have these large family events and people miss the family events we can get the chromebooks to every kid quickly like the fifth grader gets in the middle year they get really excited about going to sixth grade they hit the ground running when they get to sixth grade and the same thing with our eighth graders we refresh their chromebooks and then that eighth grade device will last four and a half years which is a half year longer than what we've you know originally forecast so um we're kind of pleased with the results of that so that's even though it says six and nine it's really handed out in grades five and eight so that's the uh secondary plan and again this is just if we keep our current model swinging down to miller

091and placentino i'm going to go to my computer shortly because this is not working all right hang on all right so the plan for miller is um it's going to work like this so this is grade five grade four grade three so as an example grade five is going to have a five year old device halfway through the year and then middle of the year they get a brand new device so that's what the five and one means so they get a five-year-old device half the year and the devices are much better quality than it used to be so five years is really not pushing it uh as a matter of fact the neighboring district is using six years as their max for chromebooks so that's why this could change if our chromebooks are going

092to last longer so right now this is what i'm forecasting but again the fifth graders get a five-year-old device which will perform fine and then they get a new one the third graders get a three-year-old device which is coming from the eighth graders and then the fourth graders will have a four-year-old device so that's the plan for miller we will not be buying right now any new devices from miller but i'm very confident the devices they receive will be except for the fifth grade the devices will be will perform fine based on our experiences and then second grade we'll be getting a five-year-old device again i'm confident the performance will be fine again the second grade was not planned to be a one-to-one initially but after covid we found the digital resources have been very

093effective and we can teach our digital learning standards effectively if the students have access to a device so they're not going to be taking them home they're going to have access to devices in the classroom and again we have we have enough devices they're five years old yes but they'll perform fine and the students will have access to these digital resources did the miller students take their devices home the fifth graders take them home right now the third and fourth do not we are having those conversations because we do have a lot of digital resources so we wonder if you know taking them home would benefit many students so they could do have additional practice and additional enrichment so we're exploring those things right now to see if that would be effective but we will

094so done the grade one it said it's five so that would be a five-year-old device then the grade k is just one you know i should have froze in that row but uh i would ignore that five because that's um that's this year that is a five-year-old device but um next year when they start sharing them they're going to share new devices okay or not new devices but only two-year-old devices so we do have five-year-old flips but those will go away so the ones we bought last year during covid the k and one will start sharing those okay and then the third year fourth year fifth year and so we refresh those flips in that year got it other questions okay i have staff infrastructure and then a summary do you want to spend time

095on those or i think now i guess i think now it makes sense to me so i'm good okay and just uh notice the ipads are mixed in here so we have for example 60 ipads at miller for refreshment so you'll see pockets of ipads mixed in because we do find those very effective for content creation and green screening and imovie and all those fun things can you just touch on this just to like briefly touch on the staff and structure stuff all those just in stuff everybody didn't get a chance to see them real quick correct so again kovid we were able to refresh a lot of our staff last year and so the staff devices are fairly new the teacher devices like the one that you have up here it gets a lot

096of i won't say abuse but a lot of use the teachers are taking them home they're using the classroom these things are constantly moving around the room so we're forecasting that we need to refresh teacher devices first the paraprofessionals and the office staff will go the next year and these are the cost again right now current cost for that laptop is about nine hundred dollars do you expect those costs to go down or stay about the same um to mr bidet's point like last meeting they'll probably stay about the same uh the quality is getting better in most cases so any questions about the staff infrastructure there's a lot of numbers um what i did was i kind of listed all the projects that would fall under infrastructure in holliston and how we kind of

097break them up so for example elementary wifi and rams and high school wi-fi are separate because we typically don't do all of that at once first it's a lot of a lot of work for our staff to do all that at once but it's also a huge cost to the town to do that all at once so we try to break that up so right now for example our wi-fi is relatively new so here we are sitting uh the high school middle school only two years old elementary is brand new and that's that number is driving a lot of the infrastructure project because the technology is so good uh there's the cat6 cabling i'm not going to unless you want me to list all these [Music] that's so this is the year that's been abuse

098and all the greens and ones is where we have to buy new and again many of these projects are irritable so we will get that 40 reimbursement the exception would be the auditorium projects and anything with phones so do we know ahead of time how long would these be readable um we don't it honestly depends on the presidency so whoever is president hires the director of the fcc and that person is the kind of the decision maker but in my experience e-rate has stayed pretty consistent and mr bidet was in this role for some time it's been pretty consistent so unless something crazy comes along i expect i expect it to stay the same the big thing they look for is is affordability so what they look is what you know what do poor communities

099poor areas of the country what do they struggle with and that's where they struggle with internet access and that that's where this program changed from things like telephony over to internet access and so that's where again until basically we've got wi-fi in the street um you know they're going to continue on this path so that you know the next three to five years i don't expect too many changes um beyond that we'll see you know by that time we only have chips in our heads or something so we don't even need computers all right all right summary tab again is a combination of everything all together and the projected cost so you'll see so that would be funding for this fall or funding this fall i'm projecting 192 110 000 will be covered by the

100ecf funding so that would leave 82 000. um and then all the other years combined you'll see the numbers i had in the other presentation so the 432 269. i wish it was consistent but that's technology right so this is great thank you this is yeah yeah this is very good this is excellent thank you thank you thank you thanks for having me back appreciate it any other questions a lot of work no thank you all right and we will move on to ms menard with the review of the march 16th professional development day i will take you on a very brief journey okay of march 16th i'm just going to mention are you getting up on the big board too or yes okay no i'm not going that way obviously not water i can

101hold up my computer [Music] stop sharing reminds me of when we used to book the math lab and you'd go to put the kids in all day and the internet would be done oh absolutely the best way and it was the one day you could do this project oh boy we're not quite there nowadays but i'm dating myself so dan maybe this is a question with you're talking about hardwiring so that you could you know put onto a screen is that something that would happen to this screen too where we'd be able to project without him plugging in like that or no you just did but we're plugged in now no the end was not though but you weren't plugged in before okay so it already works that way yeah i just see you plug

102in all the time so i didn't know that i was up earlier just he was having a little bit okay and the zoom remember didn't work well no it does not work because you can't hear that again so please keep in mind this is not all the options these were just some of the options can you please move forward thank you because we've been here in placentino we invited dr calise warren back she was at miller and placentino she was continuing holliston's journey this time she was making authentic connections by exploring race and culture some of the placentino teachers had additional star assessment reporting training really digging into that data our occupational therapist had a training on the occupation of worry training which really looked at their increasing their understanding of how anxiety is developed

103in the brain and also evidence-based treatment strategies and interventions our school adjustment counselors and psychologists looked at school refusal avoidance behaviors and interventions and our science teachers looked at digging into the engineering standards thank you miller also joined police as i said um they also worked on grades three and three and four montessori working those next two bullets and the guided and independent reading work they were looking at use of lesson cards stroke skills and strategies targeted for small group instruction oral and reader response providing textual details and graphic organizers for responding we also worked on unit work in literacy for the next two grade four concentrated on the book club work really looking at the materials and the scope and sequence for book clubs and also looking at how to apply independent learners looking

104at their reading behaviors and skills and strategies grade five ela and social studies looked at analyzing paired passage results science teachers dug into those science standards and engineering standards and special educators had some more professional development on reading instruction what are paired passages so it's a a reading a type of reading resource that they use so it's really looking at the results that the students they get from taking assessments and then trying to analyze those and looking at how they can make improvements at rams they really dug deep into mcas training of vocabulary did it matter your content area or grade level really looking at how they can help support students in mcas testing and then everyone also in addition dug into vocabulary training for specific content areas ela teachers are very skilled in that

105in programs such if you're trained to be a science teacher or a social studies teacher a lot of programs do not concentrate on that so we really need to give our teachers extra support in helping students understand reading in the content areas and finally at the high school their departments continue to work on the standards the discussions of the standards and aligning those and finally some of the district work that happened this is not certainly all of it but our slps are speech-language pathologists we're looking at alternative communication device training that could be an ipad that could be many different things right or safety care training the nurses have been continuing continuing to work together taking classes nurse-based classes from northeastern our performing arts k through 12 are getting together and having those rich vertical

106alignment conversations and talking about the standards the fine arts continues to get together pre-k through 12 and they're really really looking at planning that curriculum out studio habits and at the high school arts saves lives our librarians are continuing really digging deep into what we have in our libraries kind of breaking it out into genres and making sure that we have a diverse library collection and then also our english language learning teachers they've been concentrating on really getting more enriched in the that are for else students so we continue to offer our wide variety and next meeting i will tell you about our last pd meeting that our last pd day that just happened this week you're welcome thank you you're welcome you have questions all right so do you have a question yeah i

107just wanted to uh if you could touch base on what kelly's born uh you know the full content she uh works on a little bit right so this time uh she did we broke it up into secondary in elementary so what she just did yesterday wow okay yesterday with a secondary is what she did in march with the elementary so she's really continuing that conversation on authentic connections by really exploring race and culture so she's giving a lot of the teachers diving deep into how you support students from different cultures how to address it appropriately in classrooms not making anyone feel marginalized how to have difficult conversations in classrooms if something arises so a lot of the the pd also revolves around getting in small groups teachers to teachers and kind of practicing with each

108other if teachers witness something they're uncomfortable with strategies that they could do to help you know one of their other teachers or what strategies teachers can use and they're also then using the strategies with students thank you you're welcome all right we're going to move on to policies so there's four different policies this policy subcommittee prepared to review over these okay yeah yes and if you're not just connected wirelessly thank you all right so we're going to start with staff funds yes so you should be on your packing everybody yes gb ebc i know stacy ain't going to do this together but um is an existing policy and there are some slight changes that we'd like to vote as an amendment tonight we're deleting that first paragraph and you can see i think that was

109the only change in this one wasn't it so a couple of things that i noticed were things like where we have school district like we generally say lee calls in public schools and then say hps anywhere that that's in like an masc policy just to you know make it just to change it so it's more hollistenized than that here's the proposal for the rest of the year yeah um because quite honestly we have new school community members a new superintendent we did not do policy last year in terms of you know we were focused on covid policies right so we are trying to get through some things that have come up this year but we're trying to move away from that reactionary focus on these policies as a reaction and move towards um starting again

110from the beginning with the a's yes because we're trying to reconcile our policy manual with online um and that is when we will focus on more hollis denies stuff as well so okay we're just trying to get through content let alone really like that's you know and i'm being honest about that like this we're we're trying this year is not a normal year so we're trying to get through it so i agree but i did just make the hall i made the two edits on the hollison public school district and holliston school committee yes but my personal plan is that we can spend time starting this summer to really reconcile the online with this and then make sure that it's all in the right format and saying all the same things so i hope everyone's

111okay with that because that's and also lisa was making lisa erroneous i was making copies of the policy manual so that every school community member has one because typically it's only the subcommittee that has them and then we have access to online but right we feel like it's finding discrepancies right because those haven't been reconciled with each other for several years yes many so um when you say holliston employee are we included as subcommittee yeah so we are not right so we are not covered by this number one now the teachers like many students give them gift cards on valentine's day so do they have to declare that how does that work so that's under class gifts right here this is the existing language we didn't change any of that that's under math state ethics

112so if it's worth fifty dollars or more when the teacher knows how to get this from the class it's fine for a single class to donate up to 150 dollars but she cannot accept here she cannot accept fifty dollars more than fifty dollars from one individual in the classroom so say if my child turns up in the classroom giving a hundred dollar gift card she'll not accept it so i just also know maybe this would help many so all the public school teachers we have to do like an online conflict of interest training so the teachers all know this like it's a mandatory training that we have to do every like three years or something at the beginning of the year but the amount seems to be higher is that right amanda like it used

113to be for like a class gift there was you know if somebody gave a certain amount so it's always been 150. yeah because that's i don't i i don't the teachers know it but i don't know if the parents know it right so the reason that's why um we wanted to bring this front and center because the next 1gb ebd we did not have and that's a new policy so we it relates these policies are connected and that's why we wanted to uh i think that we talked about removing the language at the top because we were not going to be collecting money that way in student activity accounts to begin with so it's been so long since we had this if you took up the top because it's law i'll say that's fine um

114but it still is illegal to do that you can't maintain non-student activity funds in a student activity again right actually i think this was our recommendation from our legal counselor and we put it down in why legal references so you're being redundant but if you wanted to kind of wear suspenders and a belt um you know then it's fine no we don't like that look we don't like the outside of that so um would it be something that maybe send out to parents like do not send in individual gift cards to teachers and i mean that is uncomfortable i don't know that's our purview to do that it's really if the teacher receives something they're supposed to disclose that right it's on the individual and that's why we because whether we send that out or

115not it can't be our situation to manage because the individual has to be compliant and that's why ev by annually we have to have all staff do the math state ethics so last year i did have all in the new staff and then we'll be doing it again in the fall i see now i i okay i see what you'll do it's like teacher licensure we can't monitor all teacher licensures it's on the individual to do their professional obligation catherine so i wasn't able to be at the last policy meeting but at one before that we um we were looking at these numbers and we're going to check with the legal counsel i've gotten those numbers yeah so just so i'm understanding this correctly every parent in the class could give a teacher 50 but

116if everybody gets together to buy one gift it has to be less than 150. is that correct yeah that's correct all right i'm understanding that right correct and that's state ethics that is yeah no i just want to make sure i'm understanding it because there's no logic to those numbers right but that's how that works that's why we verified with her because the idea is to keep it like if it's a if it's a class gift you don't know how much each one the premise behind this is if i want my johnny to get a better grade i'm going to give a hundred dollars right so it's to avoid that thought process that someone might be trying to buy a grade which i'm not saying they would but that's kind of the thinking behind it

117i i understand what you're saying and i which is why they try to they really prefer the anonymous piece for that reason and i i hear you right right so again so again i think that answers my question so 15 kids can give 50 dollars to their teachers but together they cannot give more than 150. do i read that right yeah yes that's pretty much it right but but i also don't want to be encouraging gifts at all because as a teacher i worked at a very poor school and i i i never wanted gifts for my students but i would rather adviring you know so i don't want to start getting into that yeah no i just wanted to clarify yes that is correct all right so okay so are we comfortable with just

118voting as amended well can we um accept joni's change of taking deleting that first paragraph because because it is the law that we have referenced down in them yes and i just made the two edits on the hospital so yes it'd be voted as amended in this version okay and we have cross-referenced this with kha public solicitations in the school and we added the um the reference uh from masc as well right you're adding in today's video yes okay did you want us to vote for these individually you want to do them all at one time um i well i think we have to do it one by one because one of them will be a first one okay and just in case something goes bad okay so i would entertain a motion to um

119approve the revision of policy gb ebc staff funds as amended can someone on the policy committee do that you just have to raise your hand thank you all right next up states or skip tv evd just because that's the first reading and do the ones that are revisions if you're okay with that okay um so i kfa i'll jump that one's an easier revision so let's do that one yeah okay so this one really is just cleaning up language instead of calling it early graduation the following or list of criteria for consideration of early graduation and we added that line against the exceptions to this requirement may be considered because if you recall we had this situation arise last year a student who was very very close we had a letter come from the guidance

120counselor to clarify while they didn't quite make the gpa right they were so close and had other commendable qualities and experiences and that's why we wanted to have this in there moving forward and change the gpa from must you should right if you read the rest of the policy it talks a lot about leaving the district early because we can no longer offer it you've sort of gone um their skills and talents are extraordinary they we can't offer them more does it make sense to hold the line at some sort of level and if you don't like 3.75 is there a different level or do we really want it to be we'd like you to have 3.75 but we can have exceptions but we don't really delineate why or or what we would consider for

121the exceptions it's just a thought or to to talk about i hear you i think at this point in the world where we've experienced this global pandemic that totally um brought in a layer of social emotional issues um i think first there could be exceptions where the student may not have the 3.75 but we have exhausted all that we can provide for that student um i just think i think we've i think we had the example last year quite honestly without i'm trying not to go back to a personal but but some students it's about their maturity level and where they are in their future and their five-year plan until you know so it it to be really hard to capture that and know for certain what that's going to be but i think that's

122where it gives you the discretion that we they have to come present um i have to approve it the principal this um counselor and then you get the final approval just along those lines um the last sentence it says students guidance counselor and or the principal's designee also provide a written support shouldn't that she be an and i feel like if we're gonna allow people to leave then shouldn't the principal also yes not just or but an and like counselor i mean the the last we had isn't that what happened last year no i think it was just the counselor the principal i believe nicole spoke directly yes but she didn't write the i think the counselor won't go better okay okay well could we consider requiring it if we're going to waive this gpa

123environment so we have two people looking over and assuring that you fit within this exception you've exhausted this um what we can offer here and you've had those two conversations um and recommendations well that is i mean that conversation happens if you want to capture that i just don't know that i want to have both people writing the letter that's what this is who's writing i think i'm just looking for them to have support that they're speaking you know what i mean like i want to know that the principal supports this decision just like you know ms bottomley did last time so that's inhabit as an and not an or that's all so you want them to do two letters or sign the same letter i just don't want to have two full letters because

124if we write end then both people are going to write a letter yes i want to make sure that both people have had the conversation and and agree with the recommendation and and we've right especially if we're looking at exceptions we can have that without two letters that's what we're trying to get we could we could add something collaborate and collaborate in our agreement with collaborate with the student and are in agreement with the recommendation okay so questions and um you want it principle of principles designated because it could be the assistant principle it could be the principal or the and you know or the principles doesn't so i don't get too much in the ways but you i can what that will well because i mean the principal makes the recommendation we can say

125must review we'll review don't they have to review every you know one that comes through there anyway right i just want to know that the principal is in support of this and that they you know they must review to make sure that all of these things this might work then the students guidance counsel and the principal's designate will review and must also provide written support okay it's not saying that it's two letters yes but there's a problem okay are you okay with that capturing it in writing um yesterday nicole made the change and said it's school counseling or guidance counseling okay so we have to oh okay okay that's right i changed that right yeah all right that's my fault i did that sorry i got in trouble last year on that one when i

126was still principal like i'm a school counselor not the guidance counselor didn't it wasn't it just students council that we left it for that reason not school counselor the students there was there was stuff in there and it was confusing me so i just nicole students counselor the [Music] but they're no longer adjustment counselors are not school counselors correct no okay yeah i want to make sure we had the right ones i was wondering susan if you want to add provide a written support because there is some ambiguity and say if everybody on this table changes and somebody is looking at that policy they would be like they need letter from both school counselor and principal designers right average before i don't think that i've written that's okay we can fix that okay do you

127need the also yeah mustang also you just take the one of them out you must provide you must okay anybody oh more questions about catherine um at the bottom there so you made a comment that said we're going to add more language here where it says academically talented oh yeah that's that's what we were just talking about but we didn't i don't know if we need to add something more well i'm just actually just the word talented talent is an inherent quality and i think that there's a lot of space for grit and persistence so i was just wondering if maybe we could use the word accomplished instead of talented sure yeah where are you hold on so you're down and thought she's down in the requirement so then you want to do that you'll

128vote in one minute yes okay all right so i'll move down okay okay all right let's do both this is all one isn't it it's all on one it's weird because it's all in the same thing because one's a policy so one of the other things is i'm reaching out to masc because there's policy and then there's a procedure right which we are going to ask if we are supposed to have procedures in the policy manual sometimes we have a section for procedures on the back sometimes they're required by law but not this is probably not the problem i have with that is procedures and not policy but if ultimate policy and we they don't work for our procedures in the schools we have multiple procedures we then have to go through policy just to

129update our procedures and they could i i saw some in there that were completely updated outdated yeah and if i have to go to a policy meeting with that we're really stuck and then you could also have a situation where because it's so outdated a parent can come back you say but that's part of your policy so you really shouldn't have them in there and well okay yeah but there's some that have to be there by law like the whole one about like physical restraint things like that or avoiding physical resting like that has to be in there i'd have to yeah i just know because we worked on it like a lot many years ago so so let me get to that one we'll get to that one but that's like we already reviewed

130that enough at this point i'm sure there's not anything we have to do about it right now but okay so do we need to vote for this right now um yeah yes so um i would entertain a motion to approve um the update or the revision of uh policy i k f a early graduation as amended by stacey um sorry just question but not r we're not doing it all right no one's all in favor okay all right r stacy yeah hold on i'm letting susan um okay make all the edits etc so that only one person is touching yes too many hands and then cause problems okay thank you okay now the um requirement okay what did we change here a spelling error yes um mm-hmm yeah i'm not telling you i'm not touching

131that one um [Music] okay so let's go down so it's just grammatical and changed some hps all right let's go down to this last paragraph the early graduation policy as an option is offered as an as an alternative for those students who are okay this is where we want to right yeah change this accomplished yes why say anything who i think that keith's going to have to join policy [Laughter] okay so we're saying as an alternative for those students who have effectively exhausted the academic opportunities that works does that satisfy you catherine okay excellent yeah now this is but there's no we have no place on here to note the date so i think i just would reference it at the top but yeah just we can reference that something down there i'll have yeah

132see again that was one of the things like well it's because it's not apology right that's the tricky part now this is just this policy but once you put it in the manual it makes it a date the one before it it is yes no no but a dated word says uh uh procedure reference where it says attachment blah blah blah and then you put dated in there oh yeah procedure references [Music] because she actually um worked through this with my note legal console so i am gonna actually i think we need to read it all the way through though right there's so many changes in it you may want to yeah okay i will happily read it for you so all right okay so it is the correct title is home schooling oh sorry

133is it yes yes yes not home education okay so we're taking out this section of rationale um and then we didn't need the word policy for that reason it went right into the policy right so the and this we can word smith later because i know this goes against what we've said but this was actually the attorney's recommendation so this is why it looks a little different than what we normally would say the school committee of the holliston public schools recognizes um takes away authorizes the right of a parent or imprints parents or legal guardians herein after known as parent to provide their children with a homeschool program as an alternative to public school education as required by law the holliston school committee has established standards for approved home school plans approval of a home

134school program is subject to the following requirements number one a parent must submit a homeschool plan to the superintendent or his or her designee here and after will be known as superintendent for approval on an annual basis the homeschool plan must be approved prior to removing the student from school and commence and commencement of the home school program the district accepts applications year-round but ideally the homeschool plan would be submitted and approved prior to the start of each school year two the school the homeschool plan must contain the following information in order to meet the minimum standards established by the school committee a the proposed curriculum and number of hours of instruction the student will receive in each of the proposed subjects b the general qualification supporting the competence competency of the parent who provide

135the instruction c the textbooks workbooks and other instructional materials to be used by the student and the lesson plan and teaching manuals to be used by parent and d a plan for periodic standardized testing or portfolio evidence of the students oh wait a minute of this well you go students modifying the standardized testing apartment right they plan for these students periodic standardized that might be better right yeah i agree thank you don it helps when you read it out loud um okay plan for the students periodic standardized testing or portfolio evidence that demonstrates educational progress in the attainment of minimum massachusetts state standards three the superintendent has the right to approve or reject the homeschool plan within 14 days of receipt of the plan the superintendent will either approve or reject the plan if the

136plan is rejected the superintendent will provide reasons for the rejection and allow the parent the opportunity to resign revise the proposed plan if the revised plan is rejected by the superintendent the parent may appeal the rejection by petitioning the school committee for approval if the home plan is rejected and the student is not in school an appropriate referral will be made four the parent must provide a portfolio of work and assessments related to the academic areas outlined in the home school plan by the end of the holliston public schools academic year five if a home school program is inadequate or assessments show insufficient progress a conference between the parent and the superintendent will be scheduled to find mutually acceptable ways to correct any deficiency if deficiencies are not corrected an appropriate referral will be made

137six if a student who has been educated at home under an approval i'm sorry under an approved homeschool plan wishes to enroll in the hub in the holliston public schools the decisions on course credit and grade placement are to be made by the superintendent on the basis of the home study course content in test assessments to measure the student's academic achievement seven a student's home school plan may include school-sponsored courses and services eight a homeschool student may participate in school-sponsored activities extracurricular activities and co-curricula in which the student might be enrolled and yes i need an a for reading that between all the colors and all that sorry why would you say home a home school student versus home school students yeah maybe i don't know because they're um what i do is quote what

138they did not meet in the policy i literally take the whole line out right so which is why on number three and six you need to put our designee superintendent down here no it already set it up henceforth no okay sorry i didn't see that i thought it was interesting that it has to be submitted to us i think we should change it to there though it should be there yeah let's get away from the his her she was saying she didn't want to let me come back we talked about this yesterday though there's several of them that should be there i wrote it down to you because it says uh superintendent or designee and it also says appearance or guardian right yes it does both on 2b on the other one on 2b you

139talk about the parent doing the teaching exclusively and i don't care with a parent or guardian but it still could be a third party that a parent engages with no it can but okay can you go back to the general exploring the competency of the period because that's usually who it is but you're right we could put it in there you're right i'm just saying that you know again right but i think the point the hard part are we now going to do it on the rabbit hole of now ensuring who the vendor is that they're hiring to supplement because they are still the home school person but they might supplement with the trader online yeah i don't know i'm saying but they're talk this thing specifically helps the competency of the parent i know

140they have to submit that though we now want to have to worry about the competency of the vendor online that's how can we go down that rabbit hole i i i don't i just it's it's on the parent to determine that amanda and then yes just to that point i think we sort of view it as the parent or guardian is like the principal and if they're using supplemental like vendors or tutors or online curriculum then that still falls under the umbrella because they are the director and the chooser of that that's how i would look at it like if we have a school um what do we have the pt and the pta if we have the physical therapist and then a pta working under them the pta is working under the license similarly

141this they would be working under the parent who is the overarching educator okay does many satisfy your concern no noise i i i don't see it that way that's fine that's the way i mean interpreted so that's why i feel okay about it it's a good point i'm just curious why the guardian is crossed out it's up at the top it's just so that you're not spending the whole policy writing out superintendent and his or her designate parent and or guard says here and afterwards it's referred to as parent yeah so every time you see it just like the superintendent and then we did um put the legal references in there as well that updated that right um i was curious as to why it said that they needed to petition the school committee for

142approval instead of because it talks about the superintendent throughout and then suddenly it says the school committee has to approve that that's if it's rejected correct okay so there's an appeal okay it's a peel process okay correct got it goes up the food chain i'm not eating anything because you guys get the big bucks one last quick question when we say referral what does that mean like appropriate referral will be made what another which one oh it's a referral can we make referrals number five it says an appropriate referral will be made every student is required by law to be in school either physically in a public school a private school or home school and so if they're not then we're responsible as a public school to report that i see right so the referral

143would be the dcf or truancy right yeah okay but it's our responsibility to do that we are mandated to do that okay okay any other questions all right i would entertain a motion to approve policy ihbg home schooling as amended move by stacy second uh move by stacy seconded by minnie all in favor thank you all right and one more i think so but this is the first reading exactly the first meeting so who yeah amanda why don't you read it can i read it oh absolutely gb ebd online fundraising and solicitations crowdfunding helson public schools hps employees shall comply with all of the following provisions relating to online solicitations and the use of crowdfunding services for school related purposes as well as all applicable laws regulations and district policies no online fundraising may occur

144except as provided below the superintendent or their designee shall have final authority to approve any online fundraising activities by the hps employees and shall determine and communicate to principals the circumstances under which online fundraising proposals shall require superintendent or school committee approval in accordance with law and school district policy kcd the principal of each school shall approve all online fundraising activities within their buildings prior to any employee posting any such fundraising solicitation any solicitation shall be for educational purposes only field trips supplies supplemental materials books school sponsored events and activities etc the solicitation of personal items coats nutritional snacks etc shall only be to benefit students directly to the extent and approve the extended employee solicits any technology or software the employee shall secure the prior written approval of the director of technology sorry i

145lost my place or a software director of technology or their destiny prior to any solicitation an employee seeking to display or post a photograph of a student in conjunction with a fundraising solicitation must first secure the written consent of the student's parent or guardian employees shall not use a crowdfunding source or set up their appeal in such a way that they are asking for donations directly from people over whom the employee making the request has authority or with whom the public employee is having official dealings such as parents or guardians of the students of students in a teacher's classroom the solicitation can say classroom x needs tissues and crayons but it shouldn't be directed to parents and guardians who have shared email addresses with the teacher for purposes of communicating about their student employees using

146crowdfunding services shall periodically disclose in writing to the superintendent the names of all individuals whom the employee has directly solicited in any manner including but not limited to oral written or electronic solicitation the superintendent shall maintain these disclosures disclosures as public records available for public review employees may only use crowdfunding services that send the items or proceeds solicited by the employee directly to the employee's school or to the school district employees must verify under the crowdfunding service terms and conditions that they meet all requirements for such solicitation items or proceeds directly sent to employees are considered gifts to the employee and may result in violation of state ethics laws if an employee's proposal is approved by the crowdfunding service the employee agrees to use the donated materials solely as stated in the employee's proposal if

147a solicitation is not fully funded within the time period required by the crowdfunding service or if the solicitation cannot be concluded for any reason every attempt will be made to return donations to the donors donations unable to be returned shall only be used as account credits for future future solicitations unless otherwise approved by the superintendent in writing all goods and or proceeds solicited and received through any online solicitation shall become the property of the school committee and not of the individual employee who solicited the items or funds the employee is prohibited from taking any such items or funds to another school or location without the superintendent's written approval and then we have our legal references as you can see it's what you read those numbers no no but um just the note cross references and

148the source and then the note crowdfunding services are defined as any online service used for the solicitation of good services or money from a large number of people via the internet or other electronic network examples include gofundme kickstarter indiegogo you caring and donors choose so this policy was came down from mafc so we did not draft this or write this because quite honestly it certainly could use a little help and i always actually brought it for because i've run into this in other districts and when you get into the ethics people that do this if they're not disclosing it to the schools we are now culpable in this process and could be they could be asking for things that we should be funding in the budget and we're not giving them the authority to do

149so and then because they're doing it as a school professor school employee we own that property so just because they did it individually but they did it as a school employee it belongs to the school right so we can't have them doing it on their own and then taking it with them and we need to track it but quite honestly it's a it's not something we really want to do because it's it's very hard to manage oh it is really bad so really we're trying to discourage it by doing that because we want people to be trying to go through the we have the hef that's doing the you know there's other things that there are other grants available well the next number of years you talk about somebody think of their properties x number

150of years ago it's got to be 17 18 years ago a teacher had gotten some video equipment through a grant that they had written and they left that year and planned on taking it with them and needed to say i held the final check until i got it back and that because again if it's my grant's like no no no no no no ours thank you so but you know that's the type of thing this is just to have you need this type of policy to really establish kind of the the rules of engagement here with these types of services and what it really means yeah and the other issue we run into is as a teacher i want to do this great activity so i request through crowdfunding or some other solicitation for certain

151technology it's never come through our technology it could be clogging up a server and now they come to you and say i need you to work on this for me it's not working properly right we can't be managing devices that we didn't purchase and that we haven't logged in and don't have the appropriate oh yeah yeah okay john you had a question you would agree because we're only referencing employees that this does not apply to student fundraising correct correct and that's why the first time i've read it i we had amanda and i were talking about that and we questioned that a little bit and then we realized because it's not employees that would not students are doing their volunteerism and they're doing raising money for different projects related to um service learning and things

152like that this would not apply to approval but nicole was with us yesterday at our meeting and actually if you look in the i think it's the yeah the section there about school sponsored events and activities that is for like the fundraising for prom like that is something that would be the class you know we were trying to come up with the right word for it but because the advisor would be actually doing the fundraising right right and it has to go directly back to the kids so that's why we wanted to add the school sponsored events and activities because if they're fundraising for one of the class trips as a result yeah because he also wanted to put school sponsors so then that covers if there was something [Music] an organization was doing that's

153not connected to the school so to protect the school committee so first uh so last year the parents arranged for prom for all the kids that was not a school sponsor there wouldn't be a school sponsor so that would be covered yeah that's a good example so at the very end uh the last paragraph it says it shall become property of the school committee shouldn't it be of the house in public schools it's not really going to us is that what it says in the masc policy that's the policy everything here is under your character because you all right ultimately you approve the budget yeah but so that's why it's okay absolutely again carrying custody no i know that i just um it just probably i mean i just feel like usually it's the property

154of the holistic public schools not the school committee i mean i don't know that'll be problematic but i don't think it matters we're not voting it tonight anyway so i just would like to check to see whether or not yeah okay two questions for the when the committee gets together again i i wonder if you want to include in the very last line examples include but are not limited to or something like that just because even though it says examples people will think that oh yeah but i found this other one so it's just it's just it kind of gives you that you know permanence but not limited to and then in the second paragraph i'm honestly confused i'm not being a jerk here i'm honestly confused on on who actually approves things because you

155have the superintendent and then then it's the principal then it says i i think i think through that i think the workflow or the approval flow is not workflow the approval flow just i just need to be a straight aligned yeah it's getting kind of matrix-like for me anyway so we we're going to have another policy meeting we could we could bring it back to the subcommittee too i don't have to come i think i would love you i'm just saying those who don't when you share sharing is caring keith i'm delegating you since you brought it up i'm busy i'm busy that day i'm sorry so we'll consider this our first reading so we have to have another at least one more reading um until we can approve it so thank you all right

156and is that it mrs raffi we did work on we have um two more that we worked on that we'll be bringing forward on april 20th just because they weren't already on the agenda we're moving along okay excellent all right i'm going to skip ahead um to new business because i don't want to leave out that i want to hear about the strategic plan the soi and the the news that we'll do off to but i want to i want to just skip ahead if you don't mind um strategic plan amanda and minnie i'd love to hear a little bit about what you guys have been doing and we were supposed to do this last time and we just didn't have time so so take it away as everybody knows the strategic plan has been

157meeting all year and this it's a the committee consists of teachers minnie and i the administrative team all the principals some parents some teachers um some students all different stakeholders the process is of developing the strategic plan concluded yesterday so we have it we're going to do a more detailed presentation at our may 5th meeting as you may know but what you'll see in that presentation what the components are are some more sort of general things like a mission statement a system of core values and a vision statement and also a set of four like arches or headings or topics of strategic initiatives that are going to be put into place over the next five years in order to help meet the core values okay um that we've done and those four arches as we

158call them our communication practices is number one which includes everything from updating the school's website to onboarding creating an onboarding process for new families to halton public schools to looking at better means of school to school to commit school to school communication as well as you know school to student things like that the second is social and emotional well-being that is going to include the equity audit that we talked about before tonight um as well as many other things including like professional development to support staff and meeting social emotional needs examining the current bullying program and several other things there the third is teaching and learning um so things like examining curriculum and course offerings to make sure it's reflecting social and cultural diversity examining the efficacy of the scheduling and programs so this would

159be everything from examining french and montessori daily schedules like the block schedule at the high school um providing more personalized learning opportunities for kids everything that would fall into the umbrella of curriculum is in teaching and learning and then the last one is talent and resources which refers to both the people that make up the schools and also the physical things so for researching ways to recruit and retain talented staff and more diverse staff um looking at our current work on the capital plan for facilities um what we're doing now and then the hopes we have down the road so lots of different things that pretty much covered all areas and came from this survey that we analyzed um throughout the year and lots of other data and lots of that survey the lots and

160lots of data sources um lots of thinking like you know did you find that there was a great consensus around or was there you know there was a lot of consensus like there was a lot of debate and discussion but um it was more like our major goals were aligned and the talk was all around like how do we get to those goals okay in the vision and the mission statement we spent a lot of time in the theater reaction so that you'll see that come out when we present there's a lot of cohesiveness i would say there are a lot of rich discussions and rigorous discussions and yeah it was good and my plan is to once we've been fixing the draft from yesterday we'll go back to the tla group they're going to

161put it together for us for may 5th and i'll be sending it out so that some some of the group are going to present okay and i'm hoping to get one of our students to present with us one of our parents potentially school community reps and not get too large but you know representation from the group one of our hopefully the teacher that was on the committee okay and then how do we plan to distribute it once it'll be well it'll be sent out we can send it out in draft form and put it on the website but then the final beautiful version that's going to be very fancy is is a next step that won't be probably done until the end of the year i think okay so then we'll update it at that

162point but we can put the draft out once they clean up the draft for me then okay we'll put that on okay lisa yeah just one question did you guys talk about um like various wellness issues beyond social emotional because i you know when i used to the wellness council sort of fell apart before you know pandemic and i didn't have a bandwidth to start it up again um but you know we used to talk so much about getting kids outside more you know um integrating physical activity into the day and you know things about it was mostly around i mean there was a social emotional part which i know you guys covered but there was also a lot around physical activity and nutrition and things like stress relief which probably still falls under social

163emotional like meditation and things like that did you guys cover those sorts of toxins that's really yeah um just to be clear the things i outlined were just examples yeah so that wasn't really comprehensive um we i don't think we really talked much about nutrition that would be covered in the wellness standards there's massachusetts state standards that we need to follow that go around the nutrition so we're required to to teach those standards and none of that specifically came up anywhere in nigeria so that's you know we tried it really was driven by the data and the information that people felt that we should be focusing on between the community representation and so forth so that was not a topic that came up through all of this i'm surprised there's a lot of there was

164a lot of energy around getting kids more physical activity throughout the day and getting kids outside getting them you know sunshine that sort of thing we talked a lot about you know working with the farms downtown but i wonder if covid you know i wonder if covet has burned some people out and i think focused on more of the social emotional well-being and diversity i think those have been the two i hear lisa i'm not disagreeing with you what i'm saying is i think people could only handle so much you know so many topics i know i just think people are but actually you're very right if we're if we're talking about a five-year plan though i mean i think it's so those things physical activity and getting outside are so tightly tied to social

165emotional wellness i mean that was you know a lot of what and i feel bad bringing this up now since i mean i have not really been involved in the strategic planning process i've been you know mostly thinking about the budget um but i just i just think that you know if there's still time to think about that at all i feel like the only thing i can caution here is that we cannot reintroduce a topic i mean we really went through we took the we had six focus groups of parents educators community members um town administrator and it came from the school committee all of you that never came up in any of that so to introduce something that was never part of any data i mean when we do our equity audit and

166we have our under the umbrella safe and supportive schools we will be looking into wellness it's just that that not it's not explicitly written in there yeah that doesn't mean that the wellness council can't still exist lisa but i agree with you i think it just sort of like fell off the map with um you know and this was pretty comprehensive like this room was full i think people's focus changed a little bit and shifted and maybe only focused on some of the things that were more top of mind this year or just more broad yeah just a bunch of broader broader i think it was much better to me that seems really broad yeah i'm just gonna say that sometimes the things that come up from like when you when you sort of crowd

167source them are when the one put into practice from an implementation standpoint like practitioners take those things and implement them in the what the best way possible right so i don't know necessarily people meant to exclude wellness but that like we can still do that on the practitioner side right so like right right getting outside is hugely important to well to social emotional well-being sunshine is very important to that nutrition is hugely important to that so just because it didn't come up doesn't mean we can't talk about it yeah we don't talk about it we're more addressed because we did expand recess and we have labs for lunch and there's a lot of these initiatives that they're starting laps for lunch right now okay but we have been doing something the initiatives are the five

168year roadmap right it doesn't preclude the school committee from going back and saying we want to revisit the wellness policy which would then potentially reopen things and we are working on the wellness curriculum correct no but i just said like from like the same way that we're not going to have a line item for social emotional like it's going to be integrated we can integrate the wellness piece and and i think it already is i think it was not something we're going to do and it's not you know a creative point like if you're talking about someone's social emotional well-being fresh air is part of that sunshine is part of that so as long as we you know keep it as part of the discussion and part of what does the implementation look like then

169i i do think that you know this all happened during a pandemic so i think a lot of people are still kind of in panic mode of you know there's a lot of things that we need to be concerned about in terms of mental health but social and emotional learning is not just about crisis management and how do you handle stress it's about how do you be proactive about your health and how do you you know eat better so you're not going through sugar crashes and thinking that you're actually you know having low energy and depression when actually like maybe it was too much sugar at lunch those are just examples but that's also like you know the way that you that you structure the day like having a recess after lunch is actually really

170important because because of the way that your body uses glucose in your blood like you need to move after you eat so those are things that we can consider in the implementation without having to have without having you should resurrect the wealth oh this has been nominated we've been we are technically we're supposed to have a welcome we are but every district it's not a school committee it's not something it is i did it and i'm done and i don't have any more bandwidth for that but i hope like i'd love to see us i don't know i hope the community someone catherine the president as i'm over here without my bag of tissues so all right so um okay so we can thank you for that update man i appreciate it that just gave

171me some highlights that i haven't really had much um information okay so we're going to move on to the soi discussion and vote dr koska so last year i presented the updated soi statement of interest related to the hope to build a new high school i have not substantially changed the presentation that i'm presenting tonight from last year and it's by far and large it goes back to the original presentation from brad jackson this is the fourth time that we're looking to move forward this soi to msba so i'd like to go through some of it quickly and if you have if you've had time to look at it because i did want to highlight the slides that change which are slides 11 and 12. so if anyone has if you don't have any objection

172i was going to move right to the change you should just get to the change we should all be there you can read if you're not familiar with what most of us have said through this so one of the things that keith and i have talked about this year is really in addition to the outdated inflexible science labs the classroom spaces are inefficient um the lack of the black box theater is limiting not only productions for theater but also speaking events we can't bring people in on a smaller level if they don't have the right venue for that so not having that creates limitations to what we can offer for students as well that's that clearly you've seen the gridlock when we're trying to exit the campus or getting onto the campus and it impacts

173all the way downtown sometimes this way but more downtown i have myself mistakenly tried to get to another building during that time and gotten myself stuck in there and it's like you cannot get out it's it's crazy so there's just no getting around it the collaboration space is for student i mean it's all about innovative learning right we don't have those spaces available a lot of the buildings and i've been in districts where i had new building projects and a lot of times what they do is have these little work spaces in between the two classrooms and you can send five six a group of students to have a private space to work on where the teacher can still see them we have none of that if you look at the second floor actually on

174the interior classrooms we have one dozen interior classrooms that have no windows or air conditioning there's nothing we can do about that you cannot change that in this day and age the storage with those meeting spaces for students and teachers physical education athletic while we have we have a nice field house it's still insufficient to meet the needs of today but the two i wanted to highlight are the ones that are bolded there one of the things that we're seeing trend up right now and you saw this last year if you remember last august we had to reach out to you and i think we said communication to parents we had to close the library this lovely library for two plus weeks the first couple weeks of school because we found out because of the

175humidity in the building because these there's no air coming in and filtering all summer long we don't have air conditioning going we don't have air conditioning here we sometimes have air coming in but it's not air conditioning so the humidity got in and we ended up having mold in the rugs mold in some of the rooms here mold behind the auditorium correct and we had to shut down those areas down until they could abate it we were fortunate that it was limited to that because that could also lead to the closing of school and that's what you're hearing more and more between the flooding that we're hearing we've had significant climate changes throughout the country but in our area it's that humidity level and that climbing temperatures that we're not seeing um we're seeing them

176earlier in june and and we have nothing to do about it if you go to that second floor of the building again the heat index on that second floor is formidable and i worry sometimes we have health needs of students that literally cannot be in those rooms we've had to relocate classes last year as you know we did a lot more of outside learning and that was a way to mitigate some of that but it's sometimes too hot out there as well to deal with that and we have no place to send them so i really think that really needs to be a huge focus of this application because it's something realistic people don't always understand what innovative learning means but you do understand that if students are fainting in our buildings or we have

177to shut down the building for two to three weeks and time on learning is impacted that's that's a significant concern so if you go to the next slide keith put together this slide so why don't you talk to this keith um basically uh what the slide shows is i just picked four months the last two months of the school year and the first two months of school years obviously it's the warmest and so what you're looking at basically since from 2015 i went further back and i got a little carried away um but if you look at it most of the months are within a reasonable range and what i mean by that is not necessarily the temperature but the range is fairly consistent over time you look at the top bar there the green

178bar which is august you're seeing you know 82 83 to 80 to 85 but it's staying in that range the purple one which is uh september again that's about 77 bouncing around that 75 mark back up to 77 smaller range may had a big dip but may's big dip was actually getting cooler so hey good for us um except when you're trying to get the baseball fields ready from an earlier discussion um but the the one that's alarming and that we lived last year if look at that june one which is that kind of that reddish brownish one which you know in in 2015 was like 72 and then it went up and it was like staying between 75 and 80 up until last year where again we're talking the average temperature temperature for june

179was seven you know seven degrees higher than maybe where it normally has been kind of residing and as as susan said you know the the problem with the the things we've changed now procedure changing is this april as opposed to doing some of our other normal work from from a school vacation week we're going to be shampooing the carpets in here in april not doing it in the summer like we normally do we're not going to be adding moisture into the space at the time we have no way of getting rid of it so that you know again that was the recommendation from the contractor we had to come do work with us so but not full proof but it's not but that's one step in this process the other step is we're going to

180leave the ventilation on all summer so it's higher costs of of electricity and where's our motors out faster et cetera those sorts of things but again as another avenue to the challenges that we have in this school to address climate change with a newer building or at least a completely renovated building say where you had ventilation that involved dehumidification which is usually air conditioning that is something that's going to be needed going forward as the climate change continues to accelerate the the things susan was talking about i gave her an article this week or last week on the on the crescent new jersey schools who had a relatively new uh high school and the floods that came in this past year and they lost everything and they were closed for a significant period of time

181and crescent new jersey is an affluent community smaller than ours i know it's worked kind of near where i grew up but again it's it's one of those things that you know again these climate changes now we're not going to have floods in house and we're a little far away from water but that being said you know the climate change does impact us and it is significant here and so you know again it wasn't just us when the contractor came here he said yeah i'm working in 32 different school districts in this area with with mold remediation so it's we were not unique in any way shape or form but if we can get ahead of the curve on this one let's do it and as you know with the also with all the calendar

182holidays that we've added we're getting i mean we could go as late as years because of that so the other thing that begs the question though is that we do have a very high water table that is that just getting higher or is it does it come to a point i'm just wondering like does it make a point to us to say we're not going to want to build a new project on this space because of the limitations of it like do you think that might come up it doesn't part of the study i i don't know i mean i you know in the springtime you don't put a shovel in the ground in the back um you know because the whole fill up that's that's my point though like should we be saying things

183to that's something that would be when when they do a feasibility study there was a cycle that they would say there is a site study okay there is a site study now i would guess again knowing what they told us that uh the if we built a new building if that was the recommendation yeah it'd be going to where the parking lot is right and attaching itself to the field house because they don't build field houses and attach to the auditorium because we won't get the same auditorium so that that area where the students currently leave to head to the parking lot would become a courtyard so it kind of fits in nicely it's a little bit further away as well from the wetlands that we're having so but i don't disagree i mean if

184the water table is getting higher you know from the little brooks back there it's it's possible that this site may be unsuitable it's clearly going to be unsuitable for a wastewater treatment facility because there'll be no place to take the you know the gray water out and honestly the only reason i was thinking about is because when we went to the select board meeting on monday they were talking about a dpw site and they were showing like the different wetlands and things like that and i thought to myself oh wow like because we know our table is pretty high here and we have issues you know yeah this isn't going to declare wetlands otherwise we wouldn't right but from the dep yeah to to allow us to to keep our existing septic system back in

18598 i think wasn't 99 so again do i think they give us another wave or no um but if we were wetlands that waiver wouldn't mean anything either so that's they would they would declare title pools like vernal pools count you know my husband owns a property that abuts conservation land he's he has conservation land on his so he had to go through a tremendous amount of um conservation meetings and so forth but he ultimately was able to build seven units on his property for his business he had to follow certain guidelines and you get into the irrigation and retention ponds and stuff like that and then we planted thousands of plants that are now just there so i mean yeah that all factors in and that's a whole that would be part of the

186study he had to have an engineer come in we would have to do all of that so okay sorry i didn't mean to no but that's just a small small example on a big scale but okay but i do think that should be a strong focus moving forward of how can we get ourselves closer to the top of the list right oh and there is one other slide i did change the one on um the different ones that got approved if you go down further catherine do you have a question i do like those that are so this is so these are the forced buildings that received um so our next step would be to get approved for feasibility study so msba gets all these projects and it was delayed last year because of usually

187this year by april 29th last year we didn't have to submit till the end of june and then it was delayed and they didn't let us know anything until after december 15th so these are the four projects that got approved i did talk to carol kavanaugh yesterday when i was at a meeting with her and asked her how how long did it take you and how did you get to the top of the list now one of the things that keith and i have talked about too is some years they focus on a huge project that's a high school that might be a multi-regional high school that's millions of dollars and it's a huge project when they fund that that might be the only one that year so this year they're funding funding the feasibility

188study for three elementaries and a middle school they don't know all the details but they're probably smaller and they could do four and that would be their limit so they break up the pool the way they feel like in different years but for hopkinton they are going back to neighborhood schools they're actually and there's an enrollment issue so they actually had um buildings i think she told me pre-k one two three multiple transitions because of the enrollment that's been blossoming so what they're trying to do is go back to the neighborhood schools that would be pre-k five or pre-k four i forget exactly how it's configured which means they need that elementary school back so that's the reasoning behind it there's a they're busting at the seams which pushes them higher to the list we

189don't have the enrollment yeah there was i checked the msba site and there was 118 sois submitted last year so four were selected right for the core program but there's others that were the accelerated repair and things like that and again we don't have an enrollment problem or an enrollment issue here which is that number one because they know that if you don't have space you can't educate children so you know or it's a danger it's it's falling down you know an old building or something the slide says over a dozen interior rooms without windows obviously it's different type of ventilation but out of how many how many classrooms roughly do we have i mean it can't be more than fifty or sixty eighty or seven oh it is yes so it's so over a

190dozen is a significant portion of windows without oh no and again [Music] when we when we did the walkthrough with them four years ago i think it was three years ago um they were surprised again we we talked it was a walk and talk and um they were surprised at the number of rooms that again had no windows and it was especially telling for them because you know we walk through it's the science wing right behind us and you know we walk through the the workspace and they say oh this is a great space great space except no windows and both for additional ventilation and this is before covert additional ventilation or just sunlight coming in or whatever it is it you know again you have rooms that have no natural light and no you

191know wind i mean again you are right if you look out over the the roof you or if you look from like google earth you'll you'll see you know a series of ventilation hoods that almost no school has because you don't need them you can use a unit ventilator well unit ventilators don't work in an inside classroom so um it's it's you know again it's different and and you pointed out too about the fact that of the rooms that have windows that are getting the heat off of the black roof so even though they have some windows the heats some of the english rooms in in this wing um overlook the science wing and so they you know again when the sun's hitting that those rooms get toasty and not good toasty so uh john

192asked john cronin announced a question monday night about um he's like you know you hear that it typically takes you know anywhere from five to ten years or seven to ten years to to be asked to partner with with the msba um and so he you know wanted to know if that was still the case but it actually the question actually prompted me to think about this a little bit and i asked cynthia the other day at what point do we determine that maybe we have to go with this alone so for example if we start and i'm i'm not asking this to change the vote or anything what i'm saying is if it really is five to ten years okay so we hit year 10 and we still make a no problem make no

193progress at what point do we make that decision to say we got to go with this alone or we need to do something else because going that alone is like leaving it's living 50 but at the same time i don't want to hear there's a high school project coming and so will will update the science lab like at what point well i think that's what happens i mean if the roof fails if i mean if we have major major problems and we're out of compliance if we can't get approved by neos because of the facility i mean there's so many things that could factor into that we have we don't have those things happening that would be as we know we've taken good care of the assets that we were given um when this building

194we opened in 2001 so we've taken good care of it it served its purpose um the the the challenge that we have is when it's really holding us back academically right and how much weight is msba you know putting as that one as that it wasn't as our major factor it's the fact that this building is holding us back and so you know you are right stacy i mean at some level when are we willing to say we're tired of being held back i agree with cynthia i mean 50 is a big number absolutely you know 100 million dollar project that's a lot of money to walk away from that being said um you know at some point you know it's it's you know again it's it's a tough call we are in the process

195of the strategic plan i just think we need to have this in the back of our head like because we need to answer to the the taxpayers the parents at some point like you keep telling me that you're going for this high school yet pick it pick an issue but my kid is suffering because you are not i'm just i would say we're not there yet i would i mean the next couple of years you see no progress then we might have to have another conversation about it we're adapting and just adjusting things all the time we're reusing classrooms or being creative with furniture we're you know creating more outdoor spaces we're doing we're doing all the good things we can with again this property or this building right i mean and i think we

196need to promote that because they think the public doesn't may not see that and so it just it was very like john's question really prompted me to think like yeah at what point do we say right it's a tough argument though in all honesty because people are going to have a belief and it's and you know we're going to we can talk about the facts in the matter but they still have a belief that it's either not enough or it's not this or not that and again and then it's going to be challenging enough even if we get through this process to get the town to fund the percentage that we are trying today right so the answer is when the community wants to to fund it 80 or 50 million dollars into a project

197that's already costly and i just don't think you're going to get that support you'd be looking at a building in disrepair falling down if you partner with the state and they see a significant savings in order to acquire this but we to your point we are not wellesley or newton i understand that i'm saying i know that it's the public that doesn't and so i just i'm i still think we're within that framework though i mean like if brad was saying it's going to take 10 years this is our full submission so we're still within that window like even if we don't get i mean we're hoping that we get into the process but ideally that 10-year window should be that you've started the project and you're well into it not how i remember it

198well i remember being like the full project being like the conventional wisdom when we started this was it'll you know it'll be three or four times before you get accepted by emma so this should be our year two years now but you know like over the years so just it bumps it off i think yeah and it all depends on who's submitting it it does yeah so you might we might we might have been really close last year we won't know that but new cases come in this year that's pull ahead of us even though we weren't really older than some other buildings and we just you know we're just going to keep trying so if there's no other questions um there is specific language i think that's all sorry i was looking that up

199but did you have it because i didn't have it in my life or specific language that we need to use when we give a vote back up school committee thank you sure lock me out access denied dinner okay maybe we should have put that in the slide i was like going i should i think there's language i have to say specifically but i'll get it up for you one second away yeah okay [Music] i have to read the whole thing yes okay bear with me everybody absolutely resolved having convened in an open meeting on april 7th 2022 prior to the soi submission closing date the school committee of the town of holliston in accordance with its charter bylaws and ordinances have voted to authorize superintendent of schools to submit the massachusetts building authority the statement

200of interest form dated and i'm going to say it's going to be what it is it'll be april 29th 2022 for the holliston high school located at 370 hollis street holliston mass 01746 which describes and explains the following deficiencies and the priority categories for which an application may be submitted to the massachusetts school building authority in the future priority area number five replacement renovation or modernization of school facility systems such as roofs windows boilers heating and ventilation systems to increase energy conservation and decrease energy related costs in a school facility and priority area number seven replacement of or addition to obsolete buildings in order to provide for a full range a program consistent with state and approved local requirements no no but we may want to say building jeopardizing student health poor health and learning

201environment based on the heat thing that's not in there it's not in here they don't have the that's in the application i would list that right but you're listing you list out which items you're doing rarity areas what's that priority priority area one priority area one which is building a building jeopardizing student health poor health and learning environment okay so that's based on our heat index and hereby further specifically acknowledges that by submitting the statement of interest form the massachusetts school building authority in no way guarantees the acceptance or the approval of an application the awarding of a grant or any other funding commitment from the massachusetts school building authority or commits the town of holliston to filing an application for funding with the massachusetts school building authority uh do i have a motion to

202move by stacy to approve the soi language s language and second okay second by mindy do we have to do it okay we have to give you permission to give permission for susan to submit yeah to submit this that's my emotion okay okay i'm gonna let's just roll call vote anyway just because i don't want to be an issue okay roll call vote i'm going to start all the way at the end dr savard yes miss caution yes ms gupta yes ms bigelow yeah this is raffy yes ms naborski yeah mrs stepnick yes that is a unanimous quote thank you so much does it go before the select board because um yes so one 25th the 25th yes okay she was saying trying to decide between the 19th and the 25th yeah they told me

203the 25th i thought so yeah because i it was getting close by the 29th she just she didn't ask me the other day i don't know whether there was a i told you it didn't matter to me one way or the other so well if they do if she updates it sooner then we'll do it sooner so but that's the end of the indicated plan that i did tonight okay i sent them your earlier pdf but not this one that you just did okay um let me go back to we'll go back to the newsletter i didn't even look at it uh communications from the subcommittees and then we'll move on policy do you guys have a meeting date uh not confirmed um budget we just had a meeting um keith and susan administration everybody

204answered a bunch of questions from fincom um we haven't scheduled our next meeting um that's it okay um okay yeah and then superintendent evaluation so uh everyone should have received um evidence from dr kuska and so now the clock is ticking you all have a copy of the rubric um and if you can fill that out and submit it to me [Applause] i feel like it was april 22nd dish but are we doing this on april 28th are we doing this may 5th no we're doing it in may but the subcommittee has to meet and combine all the data because i'd like you to be able to conclude the strategic plan after may 5th as evidenced towards the okay and then also um so what's the when school vacation is over when would you like

205the evaluation to occur after after mayfield the strategic plan yeah because that's a huge piece of the work and right and then i'll also be able to probably share with you where we are with the curriculum proposal that i'm putting together that i discuss before may 5th but we also need to get this done before may 24th yep well you can start here's the thing we can all start working on it it doesn't need to be complete yes it doesn't need to be complete but you should have a majority done by the end of april so that you can see the presentation on the fifth and then that weekend it would be great if you could get it to us because we'll still have to meet and combine it all okay wait so what's the

206date first of may no saber we need to consider the strategic initiatives as part of our evidence however everything else you could start to prepare in advance of that but you'll hear about that on may 5th so would it be fair to say if may 5th is a thursday that by monday may 9th you could uh provide your completed submission and then do we have a meeting on may 19th uh we have a meeting on may 5th and may 19th yes the 24th uh we'll move to the superintendent's update dr keska did you have anything more to update us two quick things world language that i know there was some confusion about some information that went out because we have a an agreement to explore collaboration with um i can't remember the name of the

207school i don't have a friend makes my computer just shut down but um we have a collaboration with a place in france and um we're looking to do an exchange program again next year which will be wonderful and i completely support that but it's informational right now and it's to gain interest and see how many families are interested are interested in joining that's not how it was proposed inadvertently which i did discuss with joni and nicole bottomley there was a little confusion around it so we are going to have the um world languages department leader come to the next meeting and present this to you and go through the process so and i did ask them to send out us an explanation that that was really the informational piece because it looks like it's a

208done deal and it certainly wasn't i don't foresee any problems with it but that being said it is it does have to be approved by the school so that should have gone out is just information we're hoping to put together this but so i will get that to you and as soon as we have it and we'll have him come and answer any questions for you and then um i did want to just tomorrow i'll be sending out the covet updates and we did have 31 positive cases this week 20 of them are at miller i also have the update from chief cassidy we are back in the yellow as a community this is the new strand it's considered to be more transmittable but also not dangerous like some of the past so i'll have

209that in my communication tomorrow but i know people will be getting anxious when they see those numbers and it just happened very fast the 20 at miller we believe may have been attributed to an outside event but it is what it is but we are we are still with colvin did you see clusters within classrooms that knowing i'm not hearing about clusters in classroom it appears to have been based on well let me say small clusters i did hear about like a few in a classroom but not like a large cluster out of that 20. okay and were any of those identified through the pool testing program at mill yes yes i just don't know the numbers of how many but i i would think a lot of them probably were because that's really a

210huge thing right now and we've had the home testing going for quite a while as well and the home testing program is going to continue right with the rapids being sent home and uh in fact they just asked us if we wanted to order extra i'm not really sure why or how but we may want to just get ahead of the curve in case they may be they're swimming in it i know we have a lot so they do in july that might be why they want us to order extras um is there okay just to throw them out like is there supposed to be a way we're supposed to dispose of them because that's a good question we haven't had to is it flammable it's going to be it's got a chemical in it

211so yeah you can right but it's like there's a chemical biodegradable expired drugstore maybe we can is there a way to include in the communication when you talk about the 31 positive cases this week an additional link for people to sign up for the take-home rapids because it really is one way to stop it yeah and i've actually had that in last week it's the first time i don't think i had for a while because nobody else was signing up but i am going to put a reminder that they should be looking back into the pool testing and or home testing thank you okay i won't take any more time but i did i had some lovely slides from rams that they've been doing some wonderful things that they wanted to share but it's it's

212more of a presentation and it's a little bit long so i'll see you here yeah is it the carnival just different things that they've been doing there they're they're trying to get back to normal right and it was just they've been daily made a lot of effort so i wanted to share that at some point okay all right um i think we're down at newsletter now if you haven't if everybody hasn't had a chance to read it it's like not do we want to pause for five minutes i mean i know it's late but we'll probably move through this quicker if we actually get a chance to read it before probably right or sad yeah i like that idea i think it's like two full pages single space i think we just need to read

213it before we do we wanna we do we wanna re we're not really recessing if we're just reading it are we all right we're [Laughter] silent reading everybody okay did you just send a toast on um no it went i shared it five or six o'clock [Music] can only have one person in there actually can you just add in the part about what susan just added into um the application about the the student health and email oh yeah priority number one yeah we should add that down here to people's i don't know what you meant by thank you do you have the language for the priority area one number one keith that you can send to him oh well she can't now her thing's dead i'll send it to you okay i'll put it into

214that i'll put it into the form for you no she wanted to did you want to add that no just read it as as it's fine it is and tell me i mean do you really want to get into the meats of what the specific three priorities are let's type in okay nobody said the queue send it to me keith thank you seeking a grant of 31 to 50. didn't they estimate that we were going to get over you have three kids aren't you used to the den sorry i can't say hear what i would say at home silent thinking [Music] a great television bruce got going right now i know well i was asking whether i should recess but he can just look somewhere else okay this is too long what the heck it's

215too it's too long there's a lot to say oh my god wrote that part just link link just links links here's the presentation you can link our presentations how many single ping windows do we have oh my god stop yeah do you want to just link them okay i counted them one dozen they're in that they're in there they're in the actual i think i think a little summary makes sense because you know a lot of people aren't going to click on it and i wouldn't say i would click on it i always click on it okay but you were quicker all right susan but i did count one time but the first time we did the soi i walked around this could we make this like a thousand i think it was eleven hundred

216twelve something so it's something crazy but he's sitting at this table well nearly here also the only oh right right so uh we good you guys would totally not pass the star assessment because you cannot re read quickly i'm reading on my phone just stop i didn't get to read this at all beforehand okay because it didn't arrive in my inbox until almost there's a lot of information to get together this was long this is long but there's a lot to cover i mean we're talking about a strategic plan that's been put together since september the only thing i would say when i looked at it in all honesty i was thinking they're going to get in a couple of weeks a full presentation to be able to see the draft so do you really

217need to put that much information when they can actually read this you know and just trying to save you some time so is your suggestion to admit that whole paragraph because i feel like we've been they've been waiting since september and it's i think if we have a preview it i just i just tend to be very i try to be people don't read a lot about that so my suggestion i hate to see you do that much suggestion i have is that maybe move the entire budget thing up because people generally don't like they click on it and then they scroll down and then that's about it so i would think that move the budget up and maybe put these down because they will come up with those presentations so if you if you

218have including prioritized budget and then yes um yes strategic plan and then soi yeah i would put strategic plan last just yesterday yeah like in every newsletter right we're gonna have a good okay like a robust write-up on it after we get the full correct deal right i don't even know if you need to they i mean it's gonna have everything in there they'll read they'll see that they're gonna and you know we are coming up with a detailed presentation right yeah because you'll have a presentation link and you'll have the actual draft at that okay so this is good check so it says please join us for a more detailed presentation on our may 5th school yeah i think that's yeah that's good and i just you know there's a couple of typos or

219something i guess those will be cleaned up all right um i would entertain a motion to approve the school committee newsletter are we reading i'm reading we're going to read the whole thing yeah i think we have to read the whole thing hello no but so don is taking control of the the newsletter can you copy and paste strategic plan down to the bottom i can can i do you want me to read the whole thing or not no maybe just what you're changing first regit plan i think that's the only let me make the change right now yeah the ones who make videos does anyone have changes other than moving this no okay so i'm just asking for a motion to approve the newsletter as amended is that okay no why because we're we

220haven't amended it yet she was just amending it right now did you read the whole thing yes there's a couple of typos and stuff in here but it's seriously can't fix those does anyone else have well if you see a typo you should just fix it or ask them to fix it well no if you see a typo they'll mark it we may have missed it yeah i know i just i've changed one okay good sorry even better no but then that's the soi process so first of all i think we need to be careful about the heading um saying new high school because again it's where we don't want to set the wrong message we're looking to partner with the state for a feasibility study to see what to do with the high school

221and we have to be really clear about that we can't be walking around saying we're getting into high school because they could say renovate too that's right seeking a state grant of thirty one to fifty percent foreign i don't think we need the amount we don't have to say that we just have to say it feasibility so seeking a feasibility study instead of seeking to partner with the state okay with the msba yeah we don't have to put that in the headline no seeking to partner with what would you like the headline to be because i think that's the issue seeking to part i even i like seeking a state grant yeah because that kind of catches your attention right away yeah what does partner with the state mean does that mean financially yes with

222the state for a grant for what what would you like to how'd you like to explain that we're partnering with them for a feasibility study for help with or help with the pulse in high school building how about we say the statement of interest soi process explained or something like that i think it buries it a little bit that the the reason to engage with this is in the pursuit of a grant that could be as much as 50 percent and for their guidance on where to go what to do whether it's a rebuild or a renovation seeking to partner with the state for a grant to help with the new house in high school if you guys will just trust me to do a headline tomorrow i'll do it tomorrow i promise it will

223be okay i'll do it i trust you lisa i do too okay but i do think this needs to be not saying new high school i i even are there other comments stated that you have yes so i think we don't need to put in all of this data and it's long in the part about our neighbors the medway ashland natick welcome new high schools like you're you're not sharing the that's not telling the process that's that would make me say well how come hollywood doesn't have a new high school and then you have to just link her yeah her slides to it if you want to learn more about the process you can hear it is and then we can just link it it'll be a lot faster i don't think the community understands

224the why i guess it's the why and the how but if but that statement's not helping either though so i if i was if i was not educated in this i would say well how come natick and wellesley and medway and hopkinton are all getting new schools and we're not because they pursued the soi earlier right well so stacy so if i may say something i haven't been like you know i actually don't know anything about this process and this paragraph was pretty helpful to me to understand it so i don't know if that helps because honestly i just this is the first time i've read about the details of what what's going to go in so it does make sense to include some of it because i think people are interested maybe if we

225can just put in as how we are going to address those that's about it but i think this is great i really loved reading this the import i think it was also to your point before or um catherine's point before about the we keep doing this we're on our fifth year of doing this um that's why i thought it might be important to know in 2021 there were this many that were submitted only four school districts were picked to advance forward with the feasibility study i just don't i we come from this understanding it and being having gone through it and the majority of people reading this have no idea what this is about i didn't so i mean this is all because they're just kind of saying but they didn't move it forward i'm

226not sure we really outlined this much in newsletters and i think this is really great because people go ahead and go ahead it's fine i'm not going to argue over it it's fine yeah but i agree with you i think you got to be careful about putting in information that's going to cause more questions than give answers that's all i'm saying i think we can feel those questions i'm not concerned about a conversation about it i mean we we voted in favor because we unanimously feel strong about it i think any one of us here can feel the question or or at least get more information and respond to it okay anything else that anybody has comments on thank you can we just say a new or renovated holliston high school well what else would

227we do what what falls what outside outside you would say you get nothing well i know but we're not seeking nothing i know we're not so i think new or renovated covers i think it's okay to say what i think that's okay i think you can say new or run today yeah yeah yeah i wasn't even supposed to be sorry no it's my my fault um i've questioned the word i'm sorry i had to do this uh underneath the budget i don't even know where it's before that first bullet i guess it's after you talked about new costs and it says we tried to be conservative in budgeting for new costs i'm not sure that's the right word we were trying to do target it was like targeted it wasn't there where is it what

228paragraph for you want um it's i don't know it's the very very top of page after operating budget it's under the highlighted section it's right after the highlighted section i don't see a highlighted oh this one says oh it's important to note that our estimate okay how about we try to budget for only essential new costs right like it was you know targeted essential something conservative isn't really yeah i know i know that brings up no yeah um tried to budget but it's just not that's not accurate that's all i'm saying that's just for only essential new costs we're not putting up with this i think what we're trying to say is we're not doing wish lists here we're doing yeah targeted that have a absolute purpose and need in the district we tried to

229budget for only essentials that were essential okay all right that's all i had anybody else have anything else oh now it's a long sentence right you know what lisa i trust you to fix it to make it look the way it's supposed to all right are we good now okay i would entertain a motion to approve the school committee newsletter of april 7th as amended by the subcommittee and lisa ocean is going to you know clean up something as i did by lisa we won't have a meeting tomorrow right did you i was second date who first started okay vinnie and catherine minnie and catherine all in favor okay all right um items of information there is a tech proposed fy23 budget is not something we are voting on it's just for your information our

230next meeting date is april 28th um which will be after school vacation so for those of you who are here there and everywhere enjoy your school break um enjoy the musicals this weekend and i'll say good night move to adjourn move to a journey all in favor and we're adjourned thank you everyone have a good night you