School Committee Video May 5, 2021

001okay we're live person are you driving you're mute i'm taking the call from my car in a parking lot until the meetings we saw you going sideways i thought this could be bad news i'm just trying to figure out where to put this that it'll be like appropriate but i'll figure it out dr antonucci can you promote um lisa dembowski or make me co-host i can make you ghost but i'll also promote uh hey lisa hi i like getting promoted and promoted congratulations excellent let me just danielle you're also co-host okay i think we're good uh call the meeting to order well stan pledge allegiance i pledge allegiance to the fight from the united united states of america to the republicans liberty justice okay so i'm just gonna pull up the agenda it looks like

002we have several meeting minutes to approve i hope everybody's had a chance to look at them april 6 april 16 april 28th april 29th all of 2021. um is it okay john if i ask for i guess i should ask for any questions on any of them the dates yeah i would just say on the um the april 16th meeting i made a statement toward the end of the meeting that's uh that's not reflected in the minutes i'm sure it was an oversight but okay so how do we handle that john do we ask for an update and have the meeting minutes come back to the next meeting for approval yeah we can or we can if matt can refresh us on the statement we can add it here and just approved as edited or

003something but maybe the smoothest thing to do would be to wait um yeah if you can send suzanne you know uh or just point suzanne in the right direction we can uh we can revise those sure i'd be happy to okay and that was the april 16th one yeah okay so we'll handle that at the next meeting um at april 6 any questions or concerns can i have a motion to approve the minute so moved second okay uh julia hi matt hi kristen i shannon i um minutes of april 28 2021 any questions or comments no it might just be worth mentioning that both the 28th and the 29th the videos are available on the website for people who want information or want to see the kind of training that we were doing yes and

004also for the 28 that i think the minutes should have been updated to reflect this the the powerpoint presentation and also a one-page takeaway sheet should also be available on the website if not today shortly it's up they're up they're up and um the minutes are reflected reflect that fantastic okay thank you um so can i have a motion to approve the meeting minutes of april 28th 2021 so moved second uh julia hi matt hi kristen hi shannon i and can i have a uh any discussion on the minutes of april 29th oh okay motion to approve the minutes of april 29th so moved second hi julia hi matt hi it's kristen hi shannon hi okay so now we are going to move to couplet comments from the public and bear with me as i

005had mentioned at one of our earlier meetings we're going to be revising our policy on public comments but it means for the meantime i'm going to make a little bit more of a um extended statement preparation just so that we're all on the same page um oh that's a good point yeah and i should sorry i should take a minute to um introduce our new student representative jake nelson he was able to join the committee at our last two workshops but this is our first regularly scheduled meeting um since he's joined so i just want to welcome jake and thank you for already being an active participant and we look forward to having you join our discussions in the meetings yes and thank you all for having me i appreciate it uh very much great

006okay so um the comments from the public section the opportunity for members of the community to address issues concerned about policy budget administrative matters or share ideas about how we can work together to improve the dexterity public schools we value your input and respect divergent views we only ask that you limit your remarks to two minutes and refrain from airing grievances with individual members of the school community i also just want to say as chair [Music] want to share kind of that improper conduct will not be allowed defamatory and proper abusive remarks are always out of order if a speaker persists in improper conduct or defamatory and proper abusive remarks the chair may terminate the privilege of address um of course we'll give a warning and conversation around at first defamatory mark should be remarks

007that have been adjudicated defamatory and proper and or abusive remarks should mean obscenities vulgarities threats and fighting words or remarks likely to provoke a violent reaction um we'll also not hear personal complaints regarding school personnel students or other which are outside the scope of the school committee's responsibility so again that's you know those are the type of things that we'll cover as we update our policy but i just thought it'd be fair to um share that language and um now we'll i should have said that before we're going to be doing public comments both at the beginning and the end of the meeting again to give folks a chance to um provide input both times in the meeting so um doctor anthony if you would help me with navigating bringing folks on board let's take

008a look and see if anybody's raised their hand yeah we do have uh one hand raised um ellen uh dean bros uh diambroso let me just bring her in miss dombroso you're uh with the committee now if you could identify yourself in your street address that would be appreciated sure my name is ellen dambroso and i live at 145 greenhouse lane thank you all right so um i was actually going to bring this up after dr klingman's presentation on the sexual harassment training but i feel like i just want to um speak now and just sort of um get into get it out there before the meeting starts um but i am a proud graduate of duxbury public schools i now have a son who attends chandler and two younger daughters who will attend in

009the next couple years um and i was just thinking about the sexual harassment training and i think that would be a great start um but i would like to see the schools go even further and adopt her like a formal sexual abuse prevention curriculum for grades k through 12. there are some really comprehensive robust curriculum packages available that duxbury um could incorporate into their health curriculum and i just think a sexual abuse prevention curriculum would in an age-appropriate way of course teach our students things like body autonomy how to identify an inappropriate situation or behavior and what to do if they're involved in a situation or if they see or know to someone else in a situation um i just think this type of curriculum couldn't just be taught in one lesson but could be

010taught in a series of lessons that are revisited and reinforced in every grade many states mandate this curriculum but unfortunately massachusetts does not there is a bill that's um being put forth into the legislation that um may mandate this kind of education but unfortunately it hasn't passed yet and i'm not sure if it will pass but um in the meantime i feel like um it's imperative that duck spray be proactive and you know provide this potentially life-saving education to our students um thank you for listening thank you for sharing that okay that's it right now shannon okay i don't see any other hands raised yet okay so then i will turn back to our agenda [Music] and next are reports for the school committee dr antonucci yeah good evening just to um kind of a

011few things um first is that um i just i know the school committee knows but i just want to acknowledge publicly that um pat dillon our our chief human resource officer is going to be uh leaving the district uh at the end of the year uh he just recently was appointed superintendent of schools uh in uxbridge um for the oxford public schools um so i want to say congratulations and just to reiterate what i've everybody knows how i feel about pat but in a very short time here pat became a indispensable member of our leadership team uh he's a great educator he's a great colleague and he's been a just a incredible mentor actually um to many of us um on the administrative team and and um it'll be certainly difficult to replace uh but

012i i knew it was inevitable that he was going to become his superintendent soon rather than later so uh we'll certainly miss him uh we wish him well and we also just so from a procedural standpoint we are going to be actively looking for his replacement and uh in the upcoming weeks uh jobs should be posted in um within a matter of days but congratulations pat and i just wanted to announce make that kind of formal announcement to the committee thank you thank you and congratulations on your new opportunity thanks a couple other sort of things um at the risk of really jinxing myself i just felt it was important to acknowledge that this week we actually had the lowest number of reported coveted cases since november we had one uh one reported case in

013the district and um you know there's certainly a reason for optimism right with a number of uh residents and faculty and staff have been vaccinated um and then with numbers like this it seems that brighter times are ahead but um again you never know um it's been an up and down year but uh that number struck me today when i had to make that report to the state so that's good news a couple of things because someone asked me today but we will be doing um a high school graduation uh as scheduled uh it'll be on june 5th um we obviously have to comply with um you know guidance from uh department of education in department of health but we will be having an in-person graduation on june 5th as scheduled so stay tuned for

014more details from from mr donovan but that's great news and uh related to sort of that and more good news um you know we can't have a traditional prom this year um guidance from the state doesn't allow kind of a purely traditional prom but we are scheduled to have what we're calling a senior formal um at gillette this year for our senior class and students will have a plea to dinner and they'll be dressing up for the event but um there can't be uh can't be for example a dance floor you know we can't have guests from other schools or other grade levels um and we'll be eating uh outdoors in in kind of two separate locations but you know what it's still good right it's still a great opportunity for our kids to come

015together at the end of the year and give them some sense of normalcy so mr dunman made that announcement recently and i just wanted to say again another step in the right direction and i think really important milestone you know milestones for our kids so uh we've come a long way still awesome ways to go and then um finally completely unrelated um i did want to um kind of announce that we're forming performing something that we're going to call an athletic athletic advisory committee and it's going to be a representative group that's going to advise mr donovan as high school principal and our athletic director tom holgate um on a number of things related to our athletic program um and it's you know it's going to be something that's going to be in progress and

016in development as we form the committee and see where we want to go with it but in the immediate short term we want the committee to do a few things one we want them to conduct a review of our uh high school athletic handbook which comes before the committee on an annual basis uh we want to look at the handbook to ensure that um skill development sportsmanship community building and respectful play among other things are our primary objectives of all of our athletic programs and co-crea really co-curricular too but specifically athletic in this case we want to ensure that all of our teams are promoting an athletic uh an inclusive learning environment we want to make sure that this vertical alignment amongst varsity and sub-varsity levels to support that skill development that i mentioned we

017also want to look at our communication protocols to make sure that um they're clearly defined for students parents and coaches um and we want to look at our kind of conflict uh resolution and mediation workflow uh so to speak uh again to make sure that they're articulated and defined so in the immediate short term the hand the committee will be tackling the handbook um we also want the committee to start looking at similar to what we're talking about uh in our profile of a graduate work that we've been doing all year we've had several public forums on that and we're we're doing some great work in that regard but we want the committee to look at um you know what uh we wanted to develop a profile of a duxbury high school student athlete and

018we also want them to develop a profile of a duxbury high school coach that we can use in the hiring and evaluation process so i bring that up tonight because i want to i want to make that announcement and share with you that we're going to be forming that committee but the committee will be a representative committee um there'll be some administration there'll be some teachers there'll be some students there'll be some parents um and uh i also want uh to make sure we have school committee representation so i will be asking for for a school committee member and i should have started this whole conversation um by saying that this idea actually uh came from one of our members julia adams and we talked about it really in kind of high level uh conceptual

019phase and once i brought the idea back to our team um they jumped all over it and uh so i have to give credit where credit's due um to julia and i just say there's a lot of excitement behind it i think it's going to provide great value again it's going to be an in progress and in development thing you know to see kind of where it takes us but thank you julia for your your as always your you know your kind of great thinking around things and um um coming back to what i started to say is we would love to have a member of the committee uh on on the advisory committee so i'll leave it at that um but i'm really excited about this great well i'm excited too thank you [Music]

020shannon that's all i have for myself okay dr klingman i i think you're next yep so i have a um a short presentation and while i start to share my screen i would just like to thank um our k-12 director of guidance lisa dembowski for joining me tonight um while i share my screen lisa would you like to share um a little bit about children's mental health um week and some of the things we have going on hey danielle yes i'm so sorry to lisa i'm so sorry to interrupt but um i did neglect to mention one thing which was like highlighted on the top of my uh notes uh this is also teacher appreciation week yeah not in the country and i hope it goes without saying uh that we truly truly appreciate the

021hard work of not only our teachers but all of our faculty and staff and especially this year i mean i cannot overstate uh how complex their jobs had gotten this year and the amount of work that they're doing so just a public thank you to to all duxbury faculty and staff for their work and i just didn't want to forget to recognize them um i i like to say them like they i think they know how we feel about them every day but this is a special week too so um it's a good time to pause and uh kind of share our gratitude to them so sorry about that and uh thank you teachers it's okay yeah and i think that's probably a great segue into mental health speaking of them but may in general

022is um mental health awareness month and the theme of 2021 has been um you are not alone um and then this week in particular is children's mental health awareness and so if you've been following sort of on twitter but we also put out in the newsletters all the different schools are doing some different things um we have mcas for example at the high school so you know against mental health but um it's it's been tough to do larger scale things but we're doing smaller we started with like a monday of move it monday talking about how physical activity and music and um meditation helps tuesdays talk about it tuesday you know the the value in talking to someone and being able to either see a counselor at school or someone outside wednesday was about right

023at wednesday we had some pencils and um and had people you know write some stuff and talk about journaling uh tomorrow's think about it thursday and we're gonna give some statistics and look at some articles and just send them out for people to reflect on and then friday's the the big day about face it friday and what we're really looking for in the community as well is for everybody to wear green which is easy for duxbury um and just support basically that idea that mental health shouldn't be a stigma and we should really be having conversations about it and understanding that everybody is impacted by it whether it's you personally or someone that you care about um is impacted by it particularly in this year so we're just gonna ask everyone in the schools and

024in the community to wear green and celebrate the fact that we're all in this together thanks lisa and so this evening i wanted to start off my announcements with just giving the committee and the community an overview of some of the trainings that we do on a yearly basis and i'm not going to get into detail about them um i certainly can get into greater detail at a later meeting perhaps at the beginning of the school year next year and as well as some programs that we started to plan for that will be coming up in the next few weeks and then the summer into the next school year so let me see if i can get my slides to in advance here so um i just wanted to start by saying that the recent

025events in our district have naturally caused us to reflect on where we might need some additional training education and programs for our students coaches teachers and families as well i just wanted to make a side note that anti-racism work diversity equity inclusion um and belonging has been a priority area for our district all year and i think most recently it's just highlighted our a need to do some additional a lot of additional work in that area i know that's also a priority in the town of duxbury and we have a lot of community groups that are working hard on these initiatives and are extremely supportive and willing to collaborate with the school district so right now we're proposing several programs and partnerships that are going to allow us to build capacity with our students um

026and district staff as trainers so that we can do some initial trainings get some trainers trained in our district to be able to carry these programs forward year after year so i just wanted to share this is an overwhelming screen of just this is what we on a yearly basis have for current mandated state trainings um mandated trainings for our staff i'm not going to read through the whole list but at the beginning of each school year each of our staff members needs to review the trainings on these topics and many of these are either modules that take you through a course of training for example the state ethics and conflict of interest training is something that um it's basically like a 30-minute course that you have to go through and answer questions some of

027them may just be a powerpoint that we've prepared or a slide deck that go through some of our procedures policies and expectations for our staff members so that they're clear on for example our physical restraint policy and that only members of our staff that are physically restraint trained would be able to assist a student in need during the school year there's all sorts of information in these trainings and all of our staff members read these ask any questions that they may have and then they sign off on it mandated reporting is something that many times you'll the principals on the first day of school will go through each of these um topics and trainings with their staff on a more in a more in-depth um way the dcap is a district curriculum accommodation plan and

028that training for example talks about all the accommodations that our classroom teachers are able to make for students without them needing to be on a 504 or an iep so we have a pretty extensive list of accommodations that we encourage our teachers to make for students as needed throughout the school year so i'll go through those a little bit more in depth at the beginning of next school year and we may have some additions on there or some adjustments the first program that i'd like to introduce is something called darkness to light or d2l the goal of the darkness to light program would be to um ensure that every one of our teachers bus drivers cafeteria workers custodians are trained in this program where it is aimed to prevent sexual childhood sexual abuse um and

029for staff members to really understand their role as mandated reporters and so i'm going to include this presentation in the school committee folder so if you want to explore any of the links that i've included you can click on them when you open the presentation but darkness to light is a non-profit organization and they're really wonderful they're committed to empowering adults to prevent childhood sexual abuse we would be training we will be training a group of trainers in our school district to be able to facilitate this training for our staff members on a yearly basis so our hope is to be able to train each staff member on the first day of school at convocation next year and so we have a group of trainers identified that we're going to be training in june of

030this year it's an eight-hour training to be a trainer and the trainers would be able to facilitate our staff members in going through the videos and training modules individually but it's something that you don't just want to send staff members to go do this training because it's kind of hard to watch some of the content is not easy they have first-hand accounts from victims of sexual abuse that are telling their story um it is definitely something that um it's emotional to watch and it can be upsetting to many people who may have been abused themselves or know someone who's been physically abused or sexually abused so i encourage you to visit the website our core team that we're hoping to train will be lisa and myself our assistant principals our school resource officers and one

031counselor or school psychologist from each school so our hope is that we'd be able to introduce this program ahead of time to the district staff so that they know this will be occurring on the first day of school and they would then be able to go to their own individual schools with their trainer who would be their assistant principal um and the counselor school psychologist to be able to complete the training modules in small groups in their classrooms and to be able to have that um the work framed by the trainer i worked in another district where we used this program and it was um very well received and the organization is a non-profit and they are just really wonderful to work with they also have the availability of consulting with school districts to look

032at our policies procedures and school spaces to make sure that we are doing everything we can to prevent opportunities for childhood sexual abuse and they can advise us and make recommendations and so when we met with them last week that was something that we told them we'd be um open to um working with them with as a not only training our staff to be able to be trained in this program trained as trainers but also to have them work with us on a consult concept consulting basis and again dr clinton along the lines of um what public comment you know about age-appropriate curriculum in this topic would this organization also would that be within there i think something separate yeah um i can certainly speak to them about that i think that that might be

033something that we could bring to our school wellness advisory council is a possibility but i i made a note when um the person came up with ellen d'ambroso came up and i can follow up with her individually to see if there's recommended um opportunities in curriculum for students um we can see if we can potentially have that be part of our health curriculum parents may or may not want their students to opt in or out of it i think that's one of those sensitive programs where we wouldn't be able to make a blanket decision for every family because some families might opt to do that kind of training on their own and others may say this is really important i'd like for them to learn our students to learn about it at school and at

034home but i will certainly follow up with um the person who made the public comment as well as the darkness to light trainer to see if they have any curriculums that they could recommend for us to consider okay and also um i see at the end the community training event oh yeah thank you for parents yeah that that sounds yes so one of the things darkness to light will do we ask them if it would be possible for us to do an evening training event for um any parents or community members who might want to be trained to be a darkness to light steward stewards of children certified person and so they're very open to that um so we hopefully will be having an evening event or over a couple of evenings so that anyone

035in the community that would like to to be trained in that could also do that thank you for reminding me of that the second program that i'd like to share with you tonight is something called um the northeastern university center center for the study of sport and society so this is a really wonderful opportunity that um we have so our goal for this was um along with the development of our new athletic advisory council we want to make sure that we're very clear and consistent with expectations for our athletic coaches and our duxbury student athletes and it should go without saying that all of our sports teams and coaches should be behaving in a manner that exemplifies our district values at all times on and off the field northeastern has a really amazing established program

036and they i'm gonna i wanted to share with you i'm gonna click on this and hopefully it will bring me back to my presentation but northeastern center for the study of sport and society here's a list of some of the organizations that they work with so you'll see that there's not only many massachusetts schools but major league baseball the nfl the army um boston police department dean college so you've got a real um variety of organizations that they've worked with we were really impressed with their presentation when we met with them and they have a lot of different kinds of programs so what they do is they collaborate with um our athletic teams to um basically provide some customized training and it's some of it is um just with diversity equity and inclusion and belonging

037but also with some of the toxic behaviors and language that you hear about in sports cultures and just making sure that our coaches are all using consistent language and have consistent expectations so our hope is that um we'd be able to have a long-term relationship with northeastern we were able to have our spring sports teams all the coaches trained with the northeastern center for sport and society and i believe those trainings are taking place this week but we wanted to do a more in-depth training again for a train the trainer program so when we've established some of our coaching staff for next school year the so the 21-22 school year as well as some of our student athlete leaders we'd like to train a core group of our coaches it might not be every single

038one of our coaches but if we have a core team that are trained as trainers they would have to do it's like two-day pretty in-depth training to be trained as a trainer we'd be in collaboration with northeastern they'd be able to every year train any new coaches and all of our sports teams to be able to have student student athletes and coaches trained in this program um so that again we're doing consistent work and expectations with um our athletics programs again i think this northeastern work hand-in-hand with that athletic advisory council and so i met with the def last week to propose a partnership for this because it would be an initial um pretty hefty cost for us to train the trainers and um although i haven't applied for a full um def grant um

039the new def president alison lindy seemed very open to this might be something that we should certainly pursue to partner with them um in the future on this work so it's kind of got a little bit of dei a little bit of anti-bullying um lots of good pieces and some of the things that we have seen as an area we need to provide further training in again if you get a chance to visit their website they talk about the values of their programs the different trainings that they have available and they have a lot of information on their website okay so this is where mrs dembowski is going to jump in lisa do you want to even just do the overview i have two slides the first slide is for the student aspect of this

040campus speak and the second one is of staff so if you want to um take over for a few minutes that would be great sure um canvas speak is an organization that mainly works with higher ed i actually started working with them back i think they were like two years old um when i got involved in them when i worked at syracuse and they do experiential programming so they put the students and at the time when they started they worked mainly with with college-age students but they put students into different scenarios and into different trainings and um even the way that the speakers do their um their their speaking it's about more that you're gonna feel something and you're gonna have a connection and you're gonna remember the content based on the feeling you get

041and having gone through um the experience and so i fell in love with them right from the start i actually consulted for them and did their um salad program which is like a seeking alliances through leadership and diversity that was one of their original diversity programs i mean back in 1990s um so and then since then they've obviously um expanded and one of the things they have done recently is started to work in high schools and so i had reached out to them to talk about what programs might be of interest um a few of the students were down in guidance um a couple of the football kids and they were talking like at the beginning about the old leadership institutes when i first started in duxbury we used to take the student leaders to

042um holy family and we did a leadership workshop with them and really talked to them about what it was what it meant to be a leader in duxbury um what it meant to lead an organization their responsibility to the students within their organization that sort of thing and so we had talked for years with student council and everything about bringing it back and it just for a whole bunch of reasons hadn't happened and this is like the perfect opportunity now um to look at it so this program we would ask for emerging leaders we're going to look at 8th to 10th graders basically we'll have a process for um for nominations and applying and really kind of making sure that we've got a diverse group who will go through this it's called elephants and onions

043um and it's really a simple in terms of what the programming is is the language elephants you know stands for the elephant in the room things you don't want to talk about but are always there and the onions part is about peeling back the layers so it takes students through um an experience where they start to identify who they are um what things mean to them and then how they view things based on that but it's all done through experiential education they send in two um highly highly trained facilitators and they work with us they're looking at somewhere between a 50 to 70 um person group of students and that group then in essence would become what we would look to to be within our community and and and working through the values that we

044want our schools and our student groups to do in athletics as well so i think our thought is to have that student elephants and onions training the day before our staff training in october and so um i won't play the video right now but that's certainly something that we can post on the district website as well as put in this put this in the school committee folder for this evening i just started it by accident let me pause that and we'll go to the next slide at least you want to keep going this is the campus speak staff training yeah so at the same time when um when when danielle and i were talking about this she said wouldn't it be great if there was they did something for staff and at the time i

045didn't have good recollection of what they did for staff but i reached out to them and of course they've expanded now into even staff training so they had recommended dr stacy who would come and train our staff and it would be district-wide so it would be for everybody and what she does is she spends some time ahead of it really in depth talking about the issues that staff is facing not just in the workplace but also in the schools in the community the different issues that they see coming up with students and staff and they sort of they look at ways that they can address those things ways to be more inclusive and she is a therap she has a therapist training she runs a counseling program so she comes at it not only from

046the research-based side but also from the counseling side so she's able to push appropriately and at the same time support appropriately which is what we exactly need for um the staff training like this so that seems i think that we have that scheduled for the same week that our student leaders are going to be trained and we wanted to do it on different days because we thought it was important for our staff to be some of our staff to be present during the student training because we wouldn't want them to hear the message for the elephants and the onions and not have us to be able to hear kind of what the message was and how we can carry forth that program in our school environment so we're looking forward to those programs and especially

047with the opportunity for the student leadership i think that um there's a huge need for that and we have a lot of students who are wonderful leaders um in our school district and this just gives them an opportunity to have more voice and say in everything that we're doing in our high school and i'm really excited to have some eighth graders be part of this so that they can move up and um have an influence right from the start freshman year so this slide has a lot of information on it too i just wanted to share um some of the dei work and again when we say dei if you're not familiar with the term diversity equity and inclusion training in curriculum work that we've been doing this year and what we have planned for

048next year um i've shared this at school committee meetings before and so some of this may be repetitive but last summer many of our staff members participated in an anti-racism book group so when we were doing all of that planning to return to school this year we had a big group of staff members that read how to be anti-racist and white fragility and we had meetings every week and it was really engaged work in the month of july i feel like that was my racing thoughts going through my head along with preparing for our hybrid or remote school year when we were doing all that planning we also participated dr antonucci made a statement and we participated in that duxbury for all event last summer i think it was like august 4th that was wonderful

049in our community last fall if you recall we had a huge back to school training boot camp for our educators that was a whirlwind so um we did a tech integration preparation for hybrid learning day where we had probably 80 sessions that were offered on all kinds of programs that our teachers use with the students this year to make sure they were engaged and able to access learning but we also had a district-wide anti-racism classroom and anti-bias education training that every district staff member participated in cynthia weeks bradley was our facilitator and she came to us through the math partnership for me for youth which is a wonderful organization that we're a partner district with and they because we're a partner district our educators can participate in a lot of the virtual trainings that they

050have throughout the year so cynthia weeks bradley did a wonderful job that kind of started off our school year and some of the work we've been doing we've also mentioned several times at this at our school committee meetings that we have a district anti-racism task force um so there's a core group of educators that have been participating in that and so um it's caitlin sheehan melanie levine and myself who are the facilitators of that group and we have about 40 to 50 staff members um teachers administrators instructional assistants that take part in that group so we weren't quite sure what that group was going to do this year and i think what we kind of settled on was that we had a lot of education that we needed um with this core group and we

051just needed it to be kind of a safe place for us to learn identify what we need to do in our school district and just really um focus on our learning so we have been reading another book that um melanie and caitlin wrote a grant for that just looks at some of the some of the unique situations that we might see in a town like duxbury in terms of some of these dei initiatives so that's something that we may not continue into next year because if you see further down i'll skip ahead we definitely know that we want to expand that committee so that it might not be exactly the same makeup but we know that next year it's likely that we would recommend a district-wide dei committee that's comprised of administrators teachers students school

052committee parent representatives and community representatives so that we continue our we can continue our work moving forward and making sure that we have all stakeholder groups involved with that so that's certainly something that we have an appetite to um to do moving forward um just a few more things that we have going on so spring of 2021 it says crosswalk of learning crosswalks of learning for justice social justice standards so what we're doing right now is um learning for justice used to be an organization called teaching tolerance so you might know this by teaching tolerance but we've been looking at our curriculum to make sure that the social justice standards from this program are incorporated into our curriculum um and it a lot of it fits into the social and emotional learning curriculum that we've

053already incorporated but we want to make sure that we're covering this through either social studies or english and reading and making sure that students are having an opportunity to participate in some of these social justice standards i can certainly share with you what these standards look like i could do a presentation on just those standards at some time at school committee if you would like me to do that we've also been in contact with an organization called facing history and ourselves currently we have some electives at the high school that use facing history in ourselves curriculum such as our holocaust course and that kind of um content course content but what we're going to be doing this summer is partnering with facing history and ourselves to make sure that there's curriculum in our core content

054that any every student would have the opportunity to participate in through their history courses that are um not just electives and so um i put a link to their website and they have some really excellent resources and we have a meeting coming up with them to do some summer curriculum work and consultation with their organization to make sure that where every student touches that um facing history and ourselves curriculum their website has a great information for any um school community members or parents who might want to look a little bit further into what that is all about we also have a really wonderful speaker dr adolf brown he is scheduled to do a presentation for us for all of the staff on the second day of school our second day pd day and i've seen

055him present before and i knew i had to make sure we got him in duxbury because he is just such a wonderful person to do on one of our back-to-school keynotes he um his presentations focus on a lot of things dei work closing the empathy gap and reducing implicit bias he's just so engaging when people see him they say he's the best presenter they've ever seen and so i'd love to invite any school committee members to that presentation if you're interested in attending so if you want to save the date um just let me know and i can let you know when he's coming he's scheduled to come in in person so a couple of these presenters that we're talking about today i'm hoping they can come into the pack and present to the staff

056at um all together but if we need to we can always on a moment's notice switch to a virtual um training which is a little bit less intimate when you are in your own classroom by yourself and you have a presenter that's here in district but um all these presenters are scheduled to come into duxbury in the fall so again i listed october 2021 we have the campus speak training with dr stacy we have the elephants and onions we have the dei committee that i'm hoping to be able to share as we finish up the end of the year school committee meetings and in november of 2021 i just wanted to share that duxbury for all committee is um we are going to be having a community movie showing of etched in glass which is

057um i'm just going to click on that link so that people can check that out but that is on steve ross film it's the luggage legacy of steve ross and it reminds me a lot of the story of unbroken but um this steve ross was just such an amazing person and this is a film that documentary film that is shown in many districts in schools we're right now doing it as a community event i believe it's november 10th that we have um the pack reserved for that i think it's november 10th it's either the 10th or the 11th but we'll certainly share more information and we're going to be doing um in the dis school district we're going to be doing a preview to see if it's something that would be appropriate for us to

058show at the high school level to either the whole high school certain grade levels maybe just in certain courses but um we're going to be looking doing they allowed us to do a private viewing of that to determine if it's an appropriate um video for us to show in class um in school so that's really um a nice thing that's going to be coming up as a community event dr dr clinton one question especially for the the dr brown presentation but maybe for some of these other ones as well is there an opportunity to record it and share it more broadly like on the website or is that something we can look into i always ask but a lot of times these presenters are expensive and hard to get so i i booked them so

059far in advance so dr brown was booked on the day we needed him and i was like oh where are you presenting and it turned out it was like mashpee or something and i'm like oh we're really close to match pete why don't you do duxbury and match people a lot of times they won't let us record them because it's upgraded content yeah but if there's anything that we can record oh i will always ask and we'll post it it's like when we had lynn lyons present um who was the um the psychologist who did some family training she let me post it for a couple of weeks perhaps um dr brown or some of these would let me post the duxbury event for like a week or so if families wanted to watch it

060okay that would be great thank you and just one last piece um we did get a lot of really nice feedback from our parents about the lynn lyons presentation and i think that um our hope is to continue to offer parent education events i was just talking to a teacher this afternoon so i know sometimes it can be challenging working with kids at home with challenging behaviors sometimes your kids will do things for teachers that they won't do for parents and so we love to do some behavioral training of how to get our kids to cooperate with homework um some of those pieces but um i do want to send a survey out before the school year ends seeking some feedback from parents about what kind of workshops would they be interested in attending just

061general ed it doesn't have to always be special ed but it could be anything like anxiety or getting ready for college or getting your students to be able to um work better at home with homework or executive functioning so we definitely want feedback from our parents about what sorts of parenting workshops would be most well received and people are interested in so that's definitely on my list before the school year gets out to ask for some feedback about that great so do you guys have any questions about any of these trainings or would you like more information at a future meeting about any of this well i think it's great go ahead julia so i think it's great that you're posting this to the website with the links so that we can just have a

062look through and see um get a bit more information about it yeah i think there's i mean i think there's i i would echo that i'd like to take a closer look at at some of the curriculum um the one thing i would suggest we think about is um sort of conjoining all of this into more of like a leadership and cultural training program because um there's a lot of there there so there's a lot of content there's a lot of different courses it seems like some are online some are going to be in person there'll be some facilitator training some are longer than others um it would seem that one way to try to sort of create some connective tissue would be to uh enforce more of just some cultural appropriation some sort of

063like how do we make duxbury sort of known for and you know a real sort of imprint as being sort of having this obvious and repeatable sort of culture of ethics um that's something that that i'd like us to to to think about um so that the you know the training is just more more of like an outflow one of the sort of the kind of the uh the results of that rather than just sort of like the answer because we already have a lot of training and i'm sure a lot of the training's good and it seems like we're going to do more training so i'd just like i'd like us to sort of consider how we can connect it all through more sort of cultural change at the school definitely thank you and

064i've also received some feedback from parents um especially parents at the younger levels um they would like to see more like um practical opportunities for their children um and some suggestions would be like pen pals with um children in different schools or different areas uh someone else brought up that they did a library drive for a school in dorchester and maybe they can grow that relationship and offer more opportunities through that another suggestion was um we have somebody in the community that works closely with the native american school is there something that we could do to increase that relationship especially at the younger levels to just increase the exposure of our kids to different cultures um when i was campaigning someone um brought up a really good suggestion of trying to coordinate like professional development

065days or half days on some um holidays that aren't christmas and um easter so that we can incorporate different traditions and holidays and try and help the kids learn about those so i just think a little bit more practical application might be easier for the younger kids to learn um about different cultures and incorporate diversity that way and that was just some of the feedback i received from parents so i definitely wanted to share it yeah thank you kristin i think that would be some good things for us to delve into on our dei committee and i think our current strategic plan does have like increased global opportunities for our students so that they can kind of experience um ways to be inclusive here in duxbury but also understand cultures around the world and so

066those are all great ideas that would align with our strategic plan so great thank you great i had one other announcement i just wanted to clarify um i had shared it our i don't even know if it was the last regular meeting that blew print for learning we were talking about how we were going to address um some unfinished learning and make sure that we have curriculum support for all students as we head into the next school year in case there's any gaps in the students learning and um so one of the things that i mentioned was a summer intervention camp type program we called it the title one summer intervention program so i just wanted to clarify i think there might have been um i don't know if i was clear probably wasn't clear

067enough that um we are going to be offering some summer intervention opportunities for our some of our at-risk students that will take place um in july for our elementary students k through five and in grade six to twelve it would be the two weeks before we come back to school and so parents should be notified if your child is eligible for that intervention program it's not something that we're able to have be a widespread program for students because we know that all students probably have some gaps in their in their learning from the past year of interrupted learning in terms of hybrids some of the students are learning some of the content at home on their own and didn't have access to their teacher at every moment that they need them and so that's where

068the long term how are we going to help our students make sure that they can participate in the rigorous course content without needing a whole long refresher of whatever they might have missed a year before so the summer intervention program k-5 is going to be three weeks and we are going to be notifying elementary parents this week if your child is eligible and we basically have identified students that are at risk in reading or math and we feel as though we could give them a general ed kind of refresher overview of some of the content they may have missed so we're using a combination of our standardized assessments and teacher recommendations so um it's going to be not a huge group of students that will be coming into this um so if you don't if

069you're a parent and you're very concerned about your child and they're not identified as someone who is eligible for our intervention programs i would encourage you to reach out to the curriculum directors supervisors at the elementary school or the principals to see what other options you may have to get some summer support for your child at the secondary level we're identifying students who might need credit recovery or also might not have mastered some of the standards for the um for reading or for math and so that two-week boot camp intervention would be right before school starts and we're hoping to get those um parents notified that their child is is eligible and so we know that some families have busy summers planned with travel or potentially summer camps and so we will have a wait

070list and we'll kind of keep going down the list until we can um fill our groups as much as we possibly can i also um wanted you to know that i will be on sue bradford i don't know if you're here in the meeting but let me see usually sue yep sue bradford is here i'm going to be talking to her on friday as well as sandy coonan who runs our before and after dark some of our summer programs so i do want to brainstorm with them any families who are looking for some academic um extra academic support kind of camps book groups math practice stem i'm going to talk to them to see if we can also look at secondary student offerings for academics that would be fun um and then i'll also follow

071up with the def to see if um it might be something that a families can't afford to send their children to these programs that they could confidentially reach out to me to see if there's any scholarships that we could provide for students that might be interested in the program and financially may have a constraint so those are some some things that i will continue to work on for any families that are looking for additional academic opportunities for their students this summer um and i do believe that sandy coonan who runs our before and after doc program was going to be going back to offering a menu of summer camp offerings the way she has in the past i know we had to take a pause last year due to cobid and so we we hope

072to be able to offer some of those week or multiple week summer camps for the students to be able to attend um over the summer i just saw the email go out today for that that they're opening up i think registration on may 11th i think it was yeah okay so that was my super long announcement of this meeting and if anyone has questions i'm glad to answer otherwise thank you and lisa i'm not going to demote you but i will release you from the panel do the same thing all right thank you thank you okay that's that's lots of good stuff thank you so if no other questions i miss blake you're next on our reports for the school committee sure hi everyone um just have two brief updates for you tonight um first

073in alignment with the adoption of our method signature policy i just wanted to bring to your attention the invoice warrants that have been processed since our last school committee meeting so we have processed two invoice warrants it was warrant number 42 which was processed on april 16th 2021 and the warrant total was 297 thousand eight hundred and twenty seven dollars and fifteen cents um we also processed warrant number forty and that was processed on april 30th 2021 and that warrant total was 247 thousand seven hundred and eighty one dollars and three cents um and so my second update i just wanted to mention just recently the usda just announced the extension of the free mail program for all students and that is through the end of next school year so for 20 21 uh to

0742022 and all of our students will have access to one free breakfast and one free lunch per day and so um that's really positive news in the district is going to continue just like this school year we'll continue to serve those meals in partnership with chartwells which is our food services provider great any questions from us like okay and i know we're gonna hear from you in the next section as well okay so now for the chair i have a few items let me pull up my notes for myself i think two of the items i've already been covered which was teacher appreciation week so thank you to all our amazing teachers uh we're very grateful um and i know each school has been doing a lot of activities around that so i hope you're

075enjoying that um and the second was the children's uh mental health week um and i was really excited to hear all the things that the school has been doing um i actually wasn't aware of most of them and i had kind of done a little bit of research and was going to pull up a kind of few things more broadly but um i think that has been well covered so thank you um [Music] uh kind of an administrative thing i sent an email out to members about um training to be completed that was a little bit highlighted in our workshop last year so if you guys could um and i i need to do it as well complete and return within two weeks and i'll send them to the town clerk for filing and um

076julia wins the award she's she's already submitted her certificates making the rest of us look really bad um let's see okay and so then i think the the last three items are kind of getting into the um talking a little bit about the timings and logistics of the parent forum that we've all talked quite a bit about um and um [Music] so i wanted to talk about timing i thought um glenn kutcher had a good point that you know don't just talk about one but maybe trying to schedule multiple um and then trying to find um you know a good a good moderator for it um and but i think the bigger question is you know i think we should the media itself should have kind of a focus a goal a topic and and

077each one can have someone different again i think that was mr kutcher's recommendation as well that you could have different topics for the meetings so um i wanted to kind of open it up for discussion um and also if we want to start you know picking a date obviously it'll have to be a date that works for everybody here and also whatever moderator we are able to find help us navigate the conversation um so i mean are we thinking you know we have our meetings typically on wednesday nights do we want to do this at a different time to kind of catch a different you know group of folks do we want to do people have ideas on that regarding the topics i would like to receive some feedback from the parents like what topics

078do you want to talk to us about and then let us organize through that and they could reach us through our school committee emails so that we're all getting the topics and then i mean the next meetings and next school committee meetings in two weeks so if parents could um email us their recommendations then we can you know or shen and you can correlate the main top ten and then we pick which ones or whatever we decide from there but i feel like feedback from the parents and if we have specific things that we think are are important then we can just group them together and then discuss it as a group okay i think that's a great idea so we'll just um do you think do you think we could um how do we

079get the the word out um uh the pto's yeah i wasn't saying the ptos probably or or the superintendents in the weekly newsletter maybe yeah that would be great with a link to our email like if that's i'm not computer savvy if that's something that they can do link our email so that all the parents have to do is click on it and it brings it right to them that would be great right dr anthony could i take that offline with you the logistics of that how what's the best way to approach it yeah definitely i think we need a little more clarity um on what it will look like because if we're talking about presenting on topics we're talking about school community meeting if we're talking about a listening forum yeah then we're just

080kind of listening for so you and i can talk about how to make sure we get the the proper uh kind of input you know from community yeah i think it's i think it's really i mean what my understanding is it is a listening forum not us presenting but us listening but we want to i think the idea is that the meeting itself should have you know a focus right um so it's not just a open meeting of course if people bring different topics that's fine as well it's not like it's going to be restricted but i think it's helpful to have it guided i and then people that sorry go ahead matt no i'm sorry go ahead i was i was just going to say if it's a specific topic meeting then parents are

081coming to that meeting with those issues and they're not going to be you know it's a more efficient use of time so that was my only two cents go ahead matt i'm sorry no that's okay i just in the spirit of just having some dialogue about it i would offer just an alternate point of view first of all i think that glenn was right i think small sort of bite-sized sort of a battery of sessions is helpful um i would actually advocate to make these listening sessions i would actually advocate to not make them topic specific um and one of the reasons for that is you know they're if if we start to sort of kind of come up with topics that we want to listen about we're sort of driving what we think is

082important or at least that's kind of what we'd be signaling um and also just without sort of splitting hairs about it if we do a battery of sessions and we say okay on this particular night we're gonna listen about this there are some people that might really have interesting things to say but they might not be able to make that so i actually think getting back to sort of this idea of like cultural change i think one of the things that we can get good at is like look we we're interested in listening to what you guys have to say no agenda um so yeah there could be a moderator to make sure that things don't go completely sideways but i would actually open it up to say you know we we're interested in listening

083to what your concerns are what your you know what your questions are what your issues are whatever um but i would i would actually open it up so that it's all inclusive so that people don't feel like oh i miss my i miss my chance that's just my two cents okay and and i would sort of really i'd underline the fact that this these are listening sessions so that we're not grappling with open meeting and and stuff like that that's a that is of course i'm a shorter statement that that we can make very obvious um but i think the more of these we do the better because then people start to really sort of get used to them and so anyway that's okay all right so any uh i'm you know i'm okay with

084with just it's a listening forum um as long as people understand that julia would you like to i saw you yeah i i like kristen's idea of actually asking what people are interested in i fear that um you know we're most people are pressed for time particularly parents of school-age children and so if they can identify a date in which a particular topic they're interested in is going to be shared by other parents then they may want to engage with that and there may be a topic they're not interested in and therefore they don't feel obliged to attend and so that seemed to me could be useful to understand what themes are people are most interested in at this particular point in time what what about kind of navigating a little bit of both right

085we'll ask people to give ideas and we could have um each form and forum have like a focused topic but make it very clear that anybody who can attend who has other topics is you know free to speak i think that maybe it navigates both both pieces of that because we would be basing the topics based on on input from the community in the first place right i agree i mean it's a listening forum so people can say whatever they really want um but i think to have a guiding the guiding topic i think that's good and then at the end if we you know i mean or whenever but i also think we need to limit how long someone can talk i don't know if that's understood but i think there needs to be

086like a two-minute cap you know unless you know or whatever is feasible just so that people everyone has an opportunity to express their views yeah we would follow we have a policy on hearing so basically we follow that policy in terms of how it's navigated um and then i think the other question is just logistics you know timing i think there's a oh yep after engineering oh no i didn't mean to interrupt but i do want to talk about timing because i might offer just if you want to hear my input i i don't i don't disagree with matt i i um maybe maybe just i i think we just need to be flexible and kind of like try it out you know try it on for size um and it might be that you

087know by the way we're running out of time okay so this school year people get really busy in may and june and then the summer but so if we want to kind of try this out maybe we launch it by just saying we're going to have an open forum and then from that first one we we learn something from it right we learn we learn what the themes are we maybe learn what the topics are i just want to put that out there as an idea because if we don't do this soon it's not going to happen this year right so i don't know so i just i didn't mean to butt in but i i i think there is some value in actually just seeing what happens you know we haven't you know moderated

088right and controlled that kind of thing but yeah yeah and i'm worried that's why i'm really i am same thing doctor institute i'm worried about the timing of it because i know we have um we know we have a meeting every other week at this point and we have a town meeting come up and we have graduation coming up so i think um in the and also in the interest of tonight's timing what i will do because we are we can do logistics over email as a committee so i think i'm going to do a doodle for everybody um as to some proposed dates and times for a listening forum and then we'll just pull the trigger and go forward with it um okay so that was that piece um then the next big topic

089that we've been kind of talking a lot about is you know policies and the general agreement that um we need to kind of refocus and i think for me at least and i definitely want to hear other people's opinions but it became very clear during our to work educational workshops that there's a path that most school committees in the state follow that we have not traditionally followed that um seems to make good sense which is a policy subcommittee um that would run with it now a policy subcommittee by the rules would be um itself and need to follow open meeting law right so the two members who would be appointed to it would um not be able to talk about policies unless you're in a posted open meeting law so it does make it tricky

090but i think that is from what both mr kucher and um ms mcnulty shared with us that is kind of standard practice so i wanted to open that up and and see what everybody else thought about proceeding down that path and i also just want to say i think i think when i look back and what we've been doing with policies and you compare them to the masc policies we're in pretty good shape but i think there is a general um feeling that we just need to take a look at few of them and maybe come up with kind of a structured um framework for the review going forward like the curriculum review right so we know we know that we're looking them as we need to um so i'll stop talking i'm talking too

091much somebody else please i i agree with that i think we could i don't know the process for it but i agree that a subcommittee would be fantastic i think i mean i have it all printed out in my big binder and i think that is a huge task for for anybody so i think i agree did you get uh i know you shannon you've been in contact with uh this group of south shore um school committees and maybe there are some hot ideas from other districts on how they run their policy subcommittees and that might be helpful in terms of for example how often does the subcommittee meet how do they manage their review cycle you know the masc has a policy review session every autumn and they send out a newsletter with all

092the policies they've looked at and reviewed so maybe we could kind of time our process to coincide with that process but it'd be perhaps be useful to see what other committees are doing yeah i'm happy to to i did have a couple of informal conversations around it and they all do have subcommittees basically but i'm happy to kind of drill down on best practices um and and bring that back for sure so when do we make a decision um on where we think the holes in policy might be ones that don't exist at all is is that part of the is that would that be part of like a subcommittee to sort of root that out or do we talk about that here in meetings or yeah i mean it can be a combination of

093both the policy subcommittee would look into it and make recommendations and then the school committee as a whole would make the decisions the subcommittee can't act on behalf of this community so they would you know kind of dig in figure out um what you know make recommendations where they think they're updates or gaps as you say i'll tell you one gap we have is we don't actually have a subcommittee policy yeah but you know as a regular point of regulation we can have a subcommittee right but so um so yeah i mean that would be the idea is that you'd have regular subcommittee meetings and work through um you know work through that and i think julia's point is a good point we don't have to rewrite the wheel we can go ask other folks

094how they're doing it yeah so because one of the questions i was going to ask um and so maybe this would be a job for a subcommittee a policy subcommittee if we make one but so for example we talked in a a few meetings ago about this idea of um because i just can't think of a better term for it just sort of like like whistle-blowing workflow so you know there's some sort of a impropriety or suggestion of an impropriety or a report or a width of an impropriety what are the what what are the triggers that happen throughout the system like you know like what's step one what how does that trigger then step two what's the review for step three like that sort of thing so is that would that be an example

095of if would that be an example of something the subcommittee would look at to say okay this is something that we think is important so we should create that i i think it can be part of the discussion i think one of the questions that comes to mind when i hear that is that is that policy or is that how you operationalize a policy but i think the subcommittee could dig into that and make a recommendation yeah i don't i don't know the definition of it either but like i looked at some of the sort of the handbooks and the policies that we have so for example if like if there's a i'm going from memory but if there's a report like if a kid makes a report if her kid claims something you go

096to the guidance counselor and then that's the end of it that i can see maybe more exists but maybe this will be what we do so you know i would be more interested to know what happens after the guidance counselor or should the guidance counselor you know where does the guidance counselor fit into that workflow how do you close the loop so yeah so i don't know the definition and it would i'd be way ahead of my skis to try to define whether that's an apollo policy or an operation but i just think we need it so yeah i mean i think again i think you know i think at a high level it relates to policy so i think the policy subcommittee could well and isn't it the case that at any moment in

097time a member of school committee can ask about a particular policy or the lack absence of a policy and start the process going um so i think that's always been the case uh if there's an issue that needs raising then you know there's a way to raise it which is simply to raise it in a school committee meeting and set the ball rolling i also think it's important to get some education up front about what we actually do instead of speculating so you know this maybe as it relates to policy development we can talk about what's our yeah ask our administrators what's our what is our practice what is our operation what's our procedure so a lot of misinformation out there so it's important to kind of tie the education piece to the policy development

098so yeah i agree i agree um so do we wanna and and i i think we're all ready kind of to take action i feel like we kind of touched on this topic quite a bit in the last few meetings do we wanna go ahead and and put together a policy subcommittee and does anybody wanna participate on that i think under our rules um i'm supposed to um as chair um appoint subcommittee subject to committee approval so at the end of the day you know the committee approves everything but the chair is kind of organizing it for lack of better word so do we want to move to create a subcommittee and then yes yes okay this is something we need to vote or can i just do it john dr anthony i i think

099you can just do it all right so we're going to move forward we're going to move forward with the policy subcommittee and um i think typically there are two members so i'd like to know if anybody would like to take up this work i i'd like to volunteer for it great i'm happy to do it unless kristen would you like to be involved i kind of feel the same way as you julia i don't know if yes so i feel the same way as you i can help it's up to you my other question real quick was if we feel like there's policies we would like the committee to review can we then hand them to them yes yeah so then julia i will allow you to work with matt on that and i know

100there's a few things that i'd like to you know review policy policy-wise so i will send that your way once you get the committees together and when we have a parent on that committee shannon who are you thinking yeah no so the policy subcommittee is strictly a school committee so just two okay so it's just two okay but then you know this that they you guys yeah so but that's why we use parent forums and we'd use other avenues for parent feedback and it would be we follow our typical process which is we read the proposed policy at a meeting and have discussion about it we have public comments in our meetings when we discuss the policies and then we post them and then we vote on them at another meeting so i i do

101think our kind of regular process of input as long as people are aware that that's how it works and we can kind of be better about um getting the word out there um and you know and once the policy subcommittee digs in and has recommendations on what ones to look at we can also take a further conversation around is there a need for another vehicle right but i just i just kind of feel like we need to kind of start to move the ball forward in a more formal way and what i heard last week was that this is the typical way that most of school committees manage this kind of work so i kind of wanted to try and follow that track perfect okay thank you okay um okay and then one last update

102sorry everybody this is what there's a lot here um the um select board is putting together a steering committee to organize a summit a town-wide summit on diversity equity and inclusion and they've asked for um and the the role my understanding and julia was there as well but my understanding is the role of the school committee is essentially planning the summit and then the summit which will have broad community representation we'll be discussing what will be the ongoing efforts of the community in this area so it's it's a fairly limited kind of logistical role um and they've asked for a school committee and um district administrative representatives to participate in the steering committee and i'm using that and that's what they're calling it but it really is just setting up this broader summit where the

103real conversation will take place um and the summit's scheduled in september september we i don't think there's a specific date but the target is september target okay okay so um so given the limited role and it's really an administrative piece i was gonna plan to manage that as the the chair um and just provide updates um and then the summit obviously i think there's broader participation okay okay let me just check my notes make sure i covered this sorry there's a lot of stuff um yeah okay so agenda what's next on the agenda um um sorry shannon sorry yeah no i typically open it up sorry julia yeah so if anybody else wants to share comments so just um because i'm supposed to be the legislative liaison i just wanted to draw everybody's attention to

104um the house the massachusetts house has produced its budget proposal for fiscal and there's a line item for what's called career technical institutes and initially governor baker had in his budget proposal had allocated 11 million dollars for career technical institutes and the motivation there was to allow to give the money to existing uh vocational technical schools so that they could add a second and third shift to their program so the first shift is their main vocational technical school program for high school students the idea of the additional funding is that they add an after school program for high school students at other high schools who might want a certificate and a technical skill and then an evening program for adult adult education so um in the house proposal the budget um is only four million

105dollars for this career technical institute's line and josh cutler who is our local representative as well as the house chairman of the joint committee on labor and workforce development uh produced an amendment to increase the funding back up to the 11 million dollar benchmark that governor baker had suggested and that was voted down in the house budget but um you may have seen that the senate will be um proposing making its budget proposal i think it's a next tuesday and then there'll be some discussion about the budget lines and various amendments in the senate proposal the week of may 24th so um there uh i spoke to um the researchers a research analyst for the joint committee on labor and workforce development who um just to be fully transparent is my daughter lila um and

106she said that she expects the senate chair of the committee to host an amendment to raise the funding back up to 11 million dollars but it wouldn't hurt if people in duxbury are interested in expanding opportunities for vocational technical education it wouldn't hurt writing senator o'connor and just suggesting that he support this because it could be useful for our students i don't know where we are in our discussions with south shore vocational technical but i i know that our students have had limited access because um of the program's uh capacity constraints so anyway um that's all i have great and also um jake we need to add you to the agenda um so if you have any um comments or also just want to encourage you as we're talking you know feel free to um

107interrupt us and you know comment when you feel like you have you know anyways oh yeah yeah no problem thank you okay all right maybe maybe for our our agenda going forward we should have that uh agenda item again doctor anja nucci matt yep yeah just to add um because i know we we you had asked on email so i don't know if this is the time to bring it up um shannon but i uh i had kind of this relates to the uh hopeful continuation of figuring out zoom or another platform so that we can do uh do virtual have a virtual delivery of the meetings even when we go back in person yes um so uh katie and i had traded emails a few weeks ago and the epiphany i had is katie

108i think that uh when i had asked the question about like can we continue to use zoom i think your i think what you were saying was that like the zoom licensing that we have is somehow plugged into the zoom that we're using for educational purposes is that right so you're nodding so yeah um so i was just thinking like zoom webinar which is what we're using right now at this moment a license for zoom webinar is fourteen hundred dollars a year and you can get up to 500 participants in the meetings you can have 49 panelists so it's exactly what we're using right now um i think that the finance committee there's been some discussion around them trying to purchase something similar so they can do the same for their meetings so i would

109uh again advocate to try to to do it um 1400 a year is isn't you know huge money um so whether it's a town purchase or something that we can do through the the district um i i really like to to look at that so that we can continue to you know to have the momentum of having more than two or three or zero um community members show up to the meetings when we go back to in person yeah no thank you matt yeah i think there's i think we're all in agreement that we would like to proceed in that way and i think it's just working out the logistics so um let's let's just work through that and maybe buy before the end of this summer i mean before the end of the school

110year we can have an update on how we envision that working in the fall but absolutely um 100 okay anybody else before we move over to discussion items okay all right so our first item is reading and writing curriculum review recommendations i'm turning it over to dr klingman and her and the team yep thank you very much um just like to welcome our curriculum supervisors tonight we have mrs sarah milner who's the chandler school curriculum supervisor mrs rita marie benoit who's the alden school curriculum supervisor and dr karen beans who is the grade 6 to english curriculum supervisor and we are going to go through some of the recommendations for our reading and writing curriculum review that began in the 2019-2020 school year and continued into the current school year because of some of the

111complications with last spring's interruption and some of our plans for this curriculum review we weren't able to wrap it up at the end of last school year um so i have on the screen right now just an overview um kristin i think this is your first meeting that you've had where we do our curriculum review report so i have on the screen our five year curriculum review cycle so currently for this school year we are reviewing social studies and health so we should be providing a brief update for you before the end of the school year and um earlier this school year we provided for you the world language curriculum review that was last school year and then tonight will be our reading and writing review which was our last school year review and um

112this is the plan so you can see on the screen which subjects come up so next year will be science art music and guidance and um every year of the review cycle rather whether it's review develop implement integrate or evaluate we do um different activities with the subject areas so we're always reviewing our curriculum it just um it's in a different aspect of the five-year curriculum review cycle sometimes we have outside organizations come in and do an external review in the case of this even this evening's presentation this was just on a local review of our reading and writing curriculum so our typical curriculum review process is that whatever curriculum area that's up for review we meet at the beginning of the school year or even at the end of the school year before to

113establish subcommittees that consist of curriculum supervisors me as assistant superintendent we also establish student focus groups and identify who's going to be doing the work of the review committee the beginning of the year usually begins with a swot analysis where we look at strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats to the curriculum area that we're taking a look at and so we also look at the reviews from previous curriculum review reports to see if the recommendations from the review from five years ago were all met or if we have anything that's still lingering that needs to be addressed so all of our previous curriculum reviews back for probably 10 years are available on the district website under assistant superintendent so if you're so inclined to look at some of our curriculum reviews and you can't find it

114on the website you can always reach out to me and i can show you the reports that we have from previous reviews part of the review process is an analysis of our assessments that we use in that curriculum area whether it's mcas assessment data or district common assessments and we determine if the assessments are adequate or if we have recommendations to change or improve or increase the number of assessments we have available to make sure we know where students are currently performing we are always reviewing our curriculum maps and this is some of the work that takes place on curriculum professional development days as well as department um meeting work and so professional development um is taking place throughout the year with our teachers on the subcommittee so we always look at our curriculum maps

115and we identify areas that may not be aligned to the current curriculum frameworks because sometimes those get updated within the review cycle and we also identify areas that need to be adjusted based on other factors for example in the last five years we've made sure that social emotional learning best practices and concepts are covered in all of our curriculum areas so that it's not a standalone topic where we're doing a lesson on being able to take perspective of others we want to make sure that some of those social and emotional learning skills are embedded across curriculum areas we also want to make sure that the digital um computer science and the digital literacy standards are embedded across curriculum areas and then earlier this evening i talked about the social justice standards are those aligned to

116all of the curriculum areas our subcommittees look at current research so they would be looking at current research and math instruction and make sure that we are always up to date with best practices so sometimes the curriculum review process will include reading scientific research or text so that we're making um research-based decisions we also um have opportunities for vertical alignment of our um curriculum to make sure that our grade levels are talking to each other and i don't know that if it's i don't think we recommend uh mentioned it here but most recently i think dr bain started this and it was a really good practice we make sure that we receive student and parent input on curriculum and suggestions from our parents and our students to make sure that we are asking our most

117important customers which is our students how their experiences with the curriculum um and so jake this is something that i'm definitely going to pick your brain moving forward when we do curriculum reviews and maybe you and i can have private conversation about some of these curriculum areas to see if in your experience and what you're hearing from your classmates if there's anything that we can do better in terms of different content area instruction jake is great at giving direct and honest awesome feedback and so i'm going to turn it over to the curriculum supervisors and they're not going to read every bullet on here but they're going to give you just a high level um review of um some of the conclusions that we came to as we completed this curriculum review so uh mrs

118milner do you want to go first with chandler yes thank you everyone for having me here um yes as i won't read through all the bullets on the slides but if you have questions about anything that i don't mention just uh feel free to ask so this review started two years ago we had a subcommittee that met monthly we mostly reviewed the standards and how they aligned with our current programming with the goal of identifying any gaps currently we're in our third year of using reader's workshop following a workshop model the teachers have created their own reading units using a program called making meaning and a book called reading strategies along with several other resources we're also completing our third year of foundations which is a phonics program that includes grammar and writing and based

119on our data and teacher feedback over the past few years we found this to be a very successful complement to our uh current reading units so go to the next slide please so as you can see at chandler we have many strengths and i will say that the highlight of that would definitely be the staff and that includes everyone from teachers the assistants special educators service providers specialists everyone really has a willingness to be open to change they share new ideas they work collaboratively they're always putting student learning first so this makes our success possible it really allows our program programming to always be evolving and an advantage to having our teacher created units i think is that we're always able to update them and fit the needs of each grade level additionally i want

120to note our strong protocols in place for assessment data and support this allows everyone really to respond in a consistent timely manner and to provide differentiation and intervention at varying levels okay next slide using a balanced literacy approach means that we should include comprehension vocabulary phonics and phonemic awareness in our regular instruction the fundations program is a structured literacy program which focuses on phonics but we have noticed that the foundational skills for learning to read could really be strengthened with a more consistent focus on phonemic awareness being included as well and this is especially important in our youngest grades there's a lot of research in the science of reading which supports this so we have therefore implemented hegerty which is a phonemic awareness program as part of our daily instruction in kindergarten this past year

121it's also used as a resource by our special educators and the reading specialists the reading specialists are actually the ones who recommended this program several years ago we are a couple rooms are piloting it in pre-k and first grade and if all goes well the plan is to continue implementing that program next year in second grade the program is called bridge the gap also by hegarty and it's only for intervention and we'll be looking that early looking at that early on in the year as well um our summer curriculum work this year will be focusing on writing and updating our units we have a real mix of several resources that are being used for writing right now that we'd like to streamline and update potentially look at some new resources also look at creating some

122benchmark assessments um which would include sample papers and rubrics and just to encourage the consistency across the grade levels and the last slide is just our priorities which i think all of them i have mentioned so if there's any questions i'm happy to take them now thank you miss milner great a lot a lot of good stuff going on yes thank you and this is benoit are you ready to jump in sure good evening thanks for having me i'm excited to report out to you on the work that we've done for the past couple of years at alden for the reading and writing review and honestly as happens every every time we do a curriculum review i honestly could say to what sarah said ditto for alden because we do you know collaborate across our

123schools to a great degree when we look at curriculum and implement curriculum so pretty much everything that she just shared with you is our things that we're working on as well at at alden with some different components of course because as kids develop up their reading and writing skills through the years the focus changes the shift of the focus from learning to read to reading to learn happens at our intermediate grades at alden school so for us some of the resources are slightly different and the focus of skills can be slightly different so i'm not i'm also not going to go through all of the slides with you um and all the bullet points but i will highlight some things that we've been uncovering and working on here at alden so at our school we've

124had a reading and a writing um subcommittee that has met monthly throughout the last few years actually and a literacy leadership team which has been active since we first partnered with teaching and learning alliance back in 2016 to start the reader's workshop model in terms of where we're at with our current status we too are using the reader's workshop model and we're very happy with the work that we've done with this program over over the past five years in reading it has really elevated students ability to analyze text across genres um and we're really pleased with how um we can see more in their output in their response to reading as well and richer responses there we support the reader's workshop model with several resources one is the lucy hawkins units of reading we also

125use the comprehension toolkit and strategy lessons from jennifer saravalo's book the reading strategies book that's used mainly for small group strategy lessons in these lessons uh the resources help our teachers to teach explicit focus lessons on specific reading skills during independent reading time teachers hold small strategy groups and confer with students to push their individual skills forward we also teach phonics through foundations in grade three this was our first year of full implementation in grade 3 with foundations phonics and we too have found it tremendously important and successful so far we're also using a book this year for the first time called the patterns of power by jeff anderson and that's helping with word work in grades four and five namely in grammar our writing instruction is based on the empowering writer's program resources as

126well as lessons from the writing strategies book by jennifer ceravalo we're also fortunate to have several additional resources and interventions that target specific reading skills and sort of personalize the independent practice for students so the the ones you might be familiar with lexia core5 ixl freckle and of course freckle feeds off of our star screening data which is important too because it helps us to identify the areas of greatest need and strength for students our reading specialists and special educators also have access to the hegerty phonemic awareness materials and our reading specialists have been using that over the past year and we also have spire materials and of course we have seven special educators that are in the process of completing their orton gillingham certification so those are all great ways that we are helping

127our struggling readers okay so if we could go to the next slide strengths um i'd say our greatest strength is you know as sarah indicated undoubtedly our talented faculty um you know additionally we are well supported with resources and technology the workshop model has strengthened our reading instruction over the past few years and i'd be remiss not to mention that you know our students come to school ready and eager to learn each day thanks to our dedicated families so that certainly positions us well to have successful reading instruction here and we can't overlook that so our teachers are focused on continual improvement and they stay highly involved in the curriculum efforts across subject areas but in all 16 alden staff members have volunteered their time to represent our ela teachers and keep our curriculum goals

128moving forward over the past two to three years through this committee work this year we noted that a special bonus so few special bonuses this year but was the collaborative wednesday planning time that teachers had to work together that work has yielded consistent rigorous delivery of skills and content and teachers have shared with one another their best teaching practices which has proven to capitalize on the collective strength of their talents providing greater equity for all students so we've enjoyed that this year our partnership with tla has been highly valued and most impactful it has shaped our direction and helped us focus on goals each year that push our instruction further and keep us aligned with the most up-to-date research so we looked at so the next slide you can see that we looked at what

129are our upcoming needs and our opportunities and i won't read this list to you because on the next slide i'm going to talk to you about next steps which directly relate to the needs so for us our next steps in reading and writing will include summer work and professional development scheduled for june of this summer and august and will extend into next year and the work will focus on two major areas one is reading we too are going to review the latest research on how students learn to read so like the big five components of strong reading instruction and simultaneously we'll be working on beginning to set our course for improving writing instruction we aim to add to our writing curriculum over the next year to revise a clearly articulated set of unit plans for

130teachers that will specify which lessons they should teach and from which of our resources we have several resources and we want to unify what we're doing across grade levels we have the opportunity to include a grammar scope and sequence skills progressions writing rubrics and we'll be working on calibrating our scoring of student writing uh that work will obviously continue for a couple of years it takes a couple of years to really dig deep into calibration of scoring we'll also continue to explore core writing programs or additional components that will round out our current materials word work and vocabulary are two such components that we will continue to plan for we're eager to schedule some cross school meetings and communications will allow for clear vertical alignment and to review the skills we teach in writing grammar

131and word work at each school and then finally we did request a literacy coach at alden something you know you're familiar with we've requested this in the past but we really do feel like a an in-house coach that stays with us all the time would be someone who could work directly with teachers to plan together model lessons and reflect together much like the relationship we've benefited from with tla but this would be somebody who's um available to us more frequently so we always put that in the budget and hope that someday we will be able to have a coach like this help keep us on track and help with data analysis protocols and assisting teachers with planning interventions and adjusting to student data accordingly so thank you as always for the support we receive from

132our school committee and our community at large and um i have to thank the subcommittee members who've been shaping this work with me over the past several years so if anyone has any questions um i know that was like kind of a lot in the fast time but i'm happy to answer questions it is it is a lot i mean i think one of my i just do one question for both schools i think probably one could answer it there are so many different tools and so many different topics you know for for somebody who doesn't work on this in a day-to-day basis it's a little bit overwhelming so how do the teachers kind of organize themselves or is it when you're doing it on a day-to-day basis it's clear what to use when but

133that's the kind of for me that's there's just there's a lot in those slides right there's a lot of different right so you know sort of your choices in curriculum are buy an all-inclusive program that's a bazel reader and the program has everything in it it has the writing it has the reading it has the word work it sometimes even has the penmanship and whatnot or to put together the highest quality components that research shows are effective and sort of create your own units using those components and we've done both over the years right it depends on the need so in in this case right now where we are at um you know readers workshop resources from lucy hawkins are great for comprehension and deep level thinking but we need to address phonics and we

134need to dress address phonemic awareness and vocabulary in a strong way as well so that's how you end up pulling in different other pieces to supplement it so yes teachers that's the purpose of teachers mapping and creating these unit plans because the people that do that work say okay use this lesson from jen ceravalo for this lesson because it's you know hers is the best use this one from lucy caucus don't forget to do this phonics lesson in third in third grade right so that's it it sounds like a lot but it's all it's not sort of multiple choice to do the same thing they all have their purpose purpose interesting okay thank you and um rita marie when you say word work is that different from vocabulary it includes vocabulary but it include word

135work also includes sort of the phonological components and so forth that are appropriate for the intermediate grades right so word work at the primary level is mainly phonics and phonemic awareness but then as they move up now you need to start branching out into you know suffixes and roots and word derivations starvational relationships between words and the languages they've come from and so forth they start to get into that level of work when they hit fourth grade great thank you thank you rita marie great job dr baines i can't see you on my screen but i hope you're there i'm here um right i'll turn it over to you okay thank you and uh thank you for um allowing me to present uh this evening um and so uh as dr klingerman mentioned uh at

136the beginning um of this presentation uh we uh began this review at the beginning of the previous school year um we uh first of all um we solicited feedback from the english teachers uh you know listened to their concerns their input um in terms of what they felt was going well um what we needed to work on and so on i created a survey i and the curriculum review team created a survey um that we put out to the community that we asked parents to fill out the link to that was active for several weeks and went out via the uh the high school and middle school newsletters as well was also posted on the english department site and then we um held panel discussions with students as well we got all of this the

137students together um in groups uh six to eight nine and ten and eleven and twelve uh first asked i first asked them to share their thoughts um on a an anonymous survey um and so that they would you know sort of formulate their thinking before we then opened it up into a whole group discussion um so that we didn't just get a lot of um you know yes to what she said uh kind of thing so that they had their own ideas and opinions before we asked them to share um and then we opened it up to uh just open discussion to to uh for you know from the students asking them their thoughts on our curriculum offerings and the way we go about offering them and so then as a committee we then took

138all of the feedback that we had received from the other english teachers from the students from the parents um and we coded uh the responses um to uh for a theme which we will see on uh subsequent slides but um just generally uh our current status um the middle school just uh you know in terms of our structure um at sixth grade we have separate reading and writing classes uh still very beneficial um for the students to get that very focused instruction at sixth grade in the reading classes we are moving now more towards preparing the students for literary study and so we encourage them to recognize how texts are structured uh how plot is developed how characters are developed and so on in in our reading classes um and then in writing we're looking

139at the craft of writing um encouraging them to understand the different styles of writing you know that we that they might do formal and informal um you know creative narrative analytical and so on um at seventh and eighth grade we have integrated uh english language arts classes um so uh you know which include literature uh of course writing uh vocabulary uh study as well we are fortunate to have a seventh grade students also have a critical reading and thinking semester long class um that is uh again it the emphasis is on reading strategies how to approach a text including a textbook students are getting these complex textbooks you know in all of their subjects at this point um you know math and science and so on one of our units has the students navigate a

140textbook um you know look for summaries um you know where is um sort of inserted information um that is uh supplementary versus um integral to the actual understanding of the text and so on and another emphasis of that class is also on um thinking critically and evaluating sources um for validity uh as well and considering the source in terms of um impacting perspective uh classes at the middle school are unlevelled um we are fortunate to have really great teachers committed to um you know helping students and to collaborating with each other uh in order to um to make that happen um we've done a lot of work over the past few years to align our assessments as well as our curriculum with the 2017 massachusetts uh english language arts frameworks as well and so these

141are the strengths um that uh again we coded for themes these are um the sort of integrated um themes that came out of all of our um surveys of teachers students and parents so our strengths in terms of reading we have a great deal of text variety in terms of style uh different genre we encourage the students to read you know plays and short stories and novels and non-fiction and so on and time periods as well uh from shakespeare up to up to the present day we uh got a lot of gurudos from the students in terms of the extent to which we engaged them in discussion of uh texts and whole group small group and individual interpretation of text as well as far as possible we have our students meet with published authors and

142so with the help of the school librarian chris allen and hopefully our new librarian will be able to help with this also um we have had many author visits over the past few years our goal is to encourage the students to see writing and authorship as something that real people actually do um and we place a great deal of emphasis as well on independent reading as as far as we can encouraging the students to um you know not only read school assigned texts but also to read for pleasure and to keep that going you know as long as possible for writing our strengths frequent opportunities to write including low-risk opportunities we don't want every piece of writing to be you know a weighty endeavor um where um you know they feel that they every word

143they have uh that they write is going to be uh potentially um analyzed and um you know evaluated um so low risk as well as higher risk opportunities for students to write again encouraging them to see in their writing how different styles are appropriate for different audiences um as far as possible we do as much authentic assessment as possible of course i like to think all um academic pursuit is uh authentic but um it does help to have um audiences um you know beyond the classroom or purposes beyond the classroom so we do try to reach out as much as we can to members of the community um near and far um to have um students engage with and share their work with um we've done a lot of work with technology integration and um

144you know most of our writing is scored by the teachers um who are able to give students uh credit to where credit is due for um you know the progress that they have made and so on but also we have we also have two blind scored assessments um beginning of the year and and the end of the year where we measure students um performance against um against standards um without knowing who they are or um you know taking pro their progress uh into consideration just for the purposes of um establishing their performance against the standard twice a year so the next slide um so these for the needs and opportunities um do you want me to do the same thing that sarah did is the next two slides similar with next steps and needs and

145opportunities or did you have um sure yes you can yeah uh really yes we wanted to um you know for reading um you know the biggest finding um that came out uh really of all of our constituents was that we um yes we do include a variety of genres and time periods and styles but we really need greater diversity in terms of representation of voices of people of different backgrounds cultures ethnicities races and that um is you know is already a work in progress for us um we would like to uh see uh students um at the middle school to have great opportunities to uh read you know highly advanced texts um for for the more advanced students um and um in terms of writing um you know we had the teachers have felt we

146have felt generally that we've had you know fairly large class sizes as far as possible we liked to do uh conferencing with students and we felt that that has been limited um fairly recently and um we started to vertically and horizontally align our instruction in terms of grammar and writing in the previous um as a result of the previous uh review and that work there are still some gaps there and that work is ongoing um and so yes um danielle if you would like to in the interest of time skip to the next slide because the next steps there are yes we are trying to include more diverse voices we are researching texts already we've been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to purchase sample texts which i have distributed um you know to the

147teachers and the teachers have been working hard to identify text that would be appropriate and yes we would love to be able to keep class sizes low so that we can indeed provide as much individualized instruction as possible and find ways not only a differentiation within the classroom but perhaps differentiated course offerings to allow for more widely varying offerings in terms of our texts upper level to uh to lower level and then so the next slide um would take us to the high school um just an overview of you know where we are already grades 9 and 10 our general english language arts grade 11 american literature grade 12 students get to choose from a we have seven different electives and these are semester-long electives we also offer ap courses at grades 11 and 12.

148we have a couple of electives journalism and real world skills classes are leveled starting at ninth grade again we're lucky that we have the plc time for teachers to collaborate and again we have done a lot of work on the uh the frameworks uh for our assessments as well as our offerings and so strengths again this came up at the high school um we do also offer a great deal of variety in terms of style genre genre and time periods the students again were very vocal about how they appreciate you know our engaging them in discussion and analysis of the texts and we are able because we have the level classes we are able to um do in-depth analyses of um texts of the appropriate complexity for different levels for writing again frequent low-risk opportunities

149uh to write varied genres and styles authentic assessment as much as possible we um at the high school as well as the middle school we reach out to um the community for audience as well as for input um and we do the by biannual assessment blind scoring also and given that we have the level classes uh we are able to uh target instruction and then the next slide needs and opportunities again uh we need more diversity uh for in terms of um you know ethnicity culture um perhaps even geography and race in terms of not just um you know the stories not just the protagonists but also the writers so that we have students are exposed to a variety of voices we did find that students struggle with vocabulary and we this is something that

150we have talked about for a few years we recognize it we we we are trying to find ways um within these very crowded uh you know general ela classes um that cover a lot of content to include more vocabulary instruction and we do need ongoing work to continue to align writing and grammar instruction we've made come a long way since the last review but we still have gaps and beyond the classroom and remember this was prior to this year these are the findings prior to this year beyond the classroom we felt that we had limited opportunities to provide interventions for students in writing and then so the next slide we are in the process of reviewing diverse texts aligning uh writing and grammar instruction as far as possible we were fortunate this year to get

151writing labs which are held during the period five assisted study period and we have run i believe three or four labs um during that period five um assisted study period mostly for students in grades nine and twenty nine and ten um but where we've had room we've also been able to include students in grades and 12 as well we asked the teachers where um they see uh the students in need of some improvement and extra help and once we have that information the writing lab teachers are able to work one-on-one in smaller group settings to individualize that instruction for the students and yes we need to continue to find ways to develop students vocabulary because when students vocabulary is limited obviously that limits their ability to understand complex texts and so i believe that was

152our last slide so i am open to questions hey karen um so um for the diversity and inclusion d are you guys talking about like trying to find anthologies that that have a more diverse uh voice and stuff like that or are they individual stories individual texts these are individual texts that we are talking about for the most part we do have anthologies um not at each grade level uh though and actually um since that review i've heard from some of the middle school teachers that they would like us to start searching for an anthology that they can draw upon not that we would use exclusively but that would supplement our curriculum as it is um we have anthologies at for teachers to draw upon um at all of the grade levels at the high

153school um but again these are not the texts that we have been focusing on uh most recently the texts that i have purchased this year and distributed to the teachers for their review um have been individual novels plays works of non-fiction poetry and poetry collections and so on and then when you talked about leveling so if uh were you saying that like if if you're teaching a ninth grade class or maybe better example would be a 10th grade class and you find that some some of the kids are below level or above level are they using different texts uh than the other ones to so that they're more concerned with the level that they're at um so some of our texts are core um at each level um and some of them do differ so

154um for instance you know just as an example we do have um a 19th century novel um 19th century is one of the time periods that we're we're required to cover you know per the the common core we have a 19th century novel but for instance at ninth grade um the uh honors level students uh would do a a text let's say uh by thomas hardy or charles dickens um you know tale of two cities or far from the madding crowd or a work by jane austen let's say and the college prep students um still doing a work by uh dickens they do a christmas carol which is more of a novella they're still exposed to the complex language and um you know the the richness of the text and the text complexity um but

155it is um you know more manageable at that level all students would do romeo and juliet um you know regardless of level um all students will do um the same the same short story unit but then beyond those cortex teachers have different texts that they can draw upon and not every teacher does the same thing and it really that is something that they will use their judgment um [Music] for based upon the students that they see in front of them yeah i was i was curious about that part of it because you said that they were they appreciated being able to discuss their readings and so i was curious as to like how you manage that if you're having different texts in the same class depending on the level how do you sort of manage

156having the kids talk about the what i see stuff like that yes yeah i mean you know the cortex that we do at both levels you know obviously we would shape the discussion uh differently depending upon the students that we have in in front of us to meet their needs to make it accessible for them but um they are they still do have exposure to the same to that same content and then um again beyond those cortex um they might have a choice so for instance many of the college prep classes will do curious instant of of the dog in the nighttime um and in um reading that book we really focus on what is it to be an educated person what is it to be um intelligent are the many different kinds of in

157intelligence and so on and that is um really the focus of those discussions whereas at the honours level um they have been looking at really many of those same questions but through um a more complex text we do typically a sword in the stone by t.h white also deals with education but the text is of in terms of the actual text complexity is is more advanced but many of the same conversations happen nevertheless um so you know i think we have the uh you know a very good balance between um that core content that the teachers that all of the students um are exposed to um and that the teachers at the next grade level can assume that the students have but then plenty of variety of offerings that the teachers can draw upon really

158based upon you know knowing the students they have in front of them and is the other concerns about vocabulary sort of system-wide in your view or is it more isolated to kids that are you know struggling kids that are maybe on 504s or no i i would actually say um system-wide this is something that we've recognized uh you know level wide this is something that we have um you know we've recognized a lot i mean um you know there's plenty of research out there that shows that students are reading less and less independently as they have many other calls for their attention uh in in life generally and so um you know we feel that we have seen a decline in students vocabulary knowledge just generally all across the board and we we do a

159vocabulary units of study with with every literature unit that we teach but um we do see uh you know quite often that um students um you know fairly limited uh vocabulary um does sometimes limit their ability to comprehend texts i see that you know i teach a uh an ap class um ap literature i see that with the ap students quite often we're doing the multiple choice um you know the ap test is still um you know the essay writing and then the multiple choice questions um and some of them are vocabulary based and quite often those are the questions that the students will struggle with so it really is all across the board and it's just an ongoing challenge to um to try you know to try to figure out how to include even

160more than we already do without taking something else away right and so that that is our that is our our ongoing struggle is something that we keep on the the front burner um and we um you know we will continue to do so um because it's something that has a lot of impact in a lot of areas yeah great thank you for that yeah so i don't know if there are any other questions thank you guys thank you very much okay sorry to make the three curriculum supervisors go through so much work so quickly at a school committee meeting but um i'll make sure that we share out this presentation as well as the full review in our principal newsletters and make sure it's posted on the school website so if any parents that are

161listening have questions or suggestions that they have an opportunity to go through the work that we've done on this as we head into the next five-year cycle with our reading writing and um curriculum review work from this review so thank you all so much and sorry to make you consolidate so much work a very short presentation for our school committee in the community tonight and if i could just add one more thing i i love hearing from the community in terms of just input about um about our texts about how we are teaching them suggestions for um different texts you know ideas about um you know writing assignments i i welcome any and all uh input i i would love um to get your emails um with any of your suggestions at any time so

162our curriculum supervisors um emails and contact information is on the district website so if you wanted to reach out to any anyone you can email them right from there thank you thanks thank you all thank you yeah okay sorry so we're moving on to our next discussion item which is a financial update with three items under it just miss blake are you taking anywhere or is doctor ranch new jersey yeah katie's katie's kicking it off and then okay close all right thank you okay so i am just going to share my screen with you all okay so tonight i just wanted to be able to provide you with um a fiscal year 21 financial update uh the first part of the update is going to be our march 31st or quarter three update for our

163operating budget and then i also included some information about where we stand with our fiscal year 21 capital budget as well as some additional information on some of the federal funding that we've received into the district um so just to kick it off with the operating budget i just wanted to mention that i did provide a memo with some financial exhibits in the school committee folder i'm not including those exhibits in the presentation tonight but certainly if there's any questions related to specific cost centers or expenses i'm more than happy to answer those questions tonight or if it's something that i don't have the backup for i can certainly follow up after the meeting so for fiscal year 21 and again this is just a status as of march 31st 2021 which is our third

164quarter um our overall salary budget is tracking under expected and that's due to several several reasons and so these reasons are pretty much consistent with some of the reasons that i presented with the second quarter financial report and those reasons include that we've had a number of employees working on a modified schedule this school year we have had and continue to have some positions that may be unfilled for a short period of time or an extended period of time and that is having us realize some savings in our salary expenditures um and we're also continuing to see a reduction in our stipend payments um i did want to mention that some of the salary expenses that we had previously funded with some of our cares act relief funding we did have to reassign to the

165operating budget just because we had reached the maximum allocation for that cares act funding and just some examples of that is any custodial over time um maybe some the time that they're working on the weekends to prepare the buildings to bring the students back in and then certainly um some of the cost acidity associated with additional nurse support staff for hours just due to the pandemic for this year um i did also want to mention that going forward the transition to five days of in-person learning will result in an increase of expenditures for our hourly staff but overall for fiscal year 21 we do anticipate that the salary expenses are still going to track below budget in so for our general expenses similar to our salary expenses we are also tracking slightly under expected and

166it's due to again some the same reasons from the second quarter we did this year have a reduction in our contracted services so i had mentioned previously uh for our yellow buses that we run district-wide we reduce those we typically have 21 buses and in this year we're operating 14 buses and that was due to the modified schedule it was also due to a drop in enrollment for transportation and so when you have a reduction of seven buses and the buses are an overall average of um seventy five thousand dollars annually to operate it is resulting in a pretty significant savings we've also had some savings in our transportation and some of the contracted services providers that provide transportation to for our students that are going outside of district and that's of course due to

167modified schedules frequency usage um so we're seeing some savings there and we had mentioned this in previous meetings but it's still consistent now we did have a savings in our out of district tuition because of some of the vocational schools specifically south shore votech did not accept any new out of district students this year and so i just want to mention that we have received so we we received the letter of interest here that tells us that some of our rising high school students will be applying to social south shore votech for the upcoming school year um so we have seen a number of those applications come through and we're hopeful that you know that circumstances change that they will have the opportunity um to attend social bow tech next year and so for our

168general expenses um a portion of those expenses we've been able to allocate to some of our outside funding sources that we've received so we've mentioned the cares act funding that we received we received a state year mark we received 75 000 that we were able to allocate some technology expenses to we just recently received some coronavirus prevention funds from the state that we were given a fairly short window of time in which we had to use those resources in some additional smaller grant funding that was made available for our special education programs so that is certainly helping to offset some of the costs that we would generally see um in our operating budget under our general expenses um so i did mention and just um one expenditure or one set of expenditures that is um

169something that i'm going to keep an eye on carefully for the remaining of the remainder of the year is the cares act funding that we received that was um allocated directly to plymouth county is received to the town through a reimbursement process and so we had our overall expenditures were just over 1.2 million dollar 2 million dollars so it was a pretty significant number for this year the town has only received ninety thousand four hundred and nine dollars in disbursements as of april ninth and that is town wide so that does not that's not just the school expenditures that is all of the town departments um so there are a number of expenses that we're still waiting for reimbursement approval on and so um the process has been in the past that if any of

170the expenses are not approved as specific coveted related expenses um that those expenses are then funded from our operating budget so there is possibility that some of the expenditures that we've previously allocated to some outs to the outside funding or the cares act funding may need to get picked up in the operating budget in the fourth quarter and so those expenses were not encumbered because they've previously been paid but i just wanted to mention that because they may revert back to the operating general expense line in the next couple of months um the district received that additional funding which i've mentioned previously and we did have a number of expenses um tied to getting the students back into the building full time which the storage containers we've done some air quality testing we've purchased some

171additional germ barriers and those expenses have been uh allocated to our state prevention funds and of course for our cares act funding um but going forward we're always carefully monitoring our typical expenses as well as any covet related expenses that could potentially have an impact on our end-of-year balance so that all being said at this point in the fiscal year um having completed the third quarter both our salary and general expense expenses are tracking lower than projected and so we do have the ability because we do build in offsets from our grant and revolving funds to leave the that funding in those revolving funds and roll those forward into fiscal year 22 and so that will leave us um some available balances that if we do have applicable costs that in fiscal year 22 we

172could certainly assign those to our grant and revolving funds and so i included in here a very preliminary year-end operating budget balance is projected right now we are trending about three percent under expected for the total operating budget so we're coming in over a million dollars as a surplus so 1.1 and so we will definitely see some variations as i said there's still a few wild cards with um our reimbursements that we receive if there's any other expenditures that may come up in the next couple of months but we're expecting that there should be a pretty significant surplus more so than we've had in past fiscal years at the end of this fiscal year and so i just provided um the next few bullet points it's just kind of a summary of what happens to

173that money at the end of the fiscal year we always want to be able to if there are different initiatives or purchases that we can make that will help support the teachers and support our educators and our administrators we always try to do that within the fiscal year but we're constrained to our procurement and if it's an expense that may extend over a fiscal year where it may be something that it's a contracted service for a number of months we just have to be really careful about the fact that we're only spending money in fiscal year 21 for costs associated and assigned to fiscal year 21. um so with the surplus at the end of the operating or at the end of the fiscal year the leftover funds are turned back to the town and

174then once the town books are closed they submit their prior year balance sheet um to the department of local services and the director of accounts and that happens sometimes in some time in the fall i think it's typically october and then any of the unused unrestricted operating funds are then certified as free cash and that also happens at some point in the fall and then the town can then use their free cash cash balance to fund any capital product projects to fund reserve funds and to fund other initiatives and that would be for fiscal year 23 so through the next kind of as we're collecting our next round of capital requests that money could be used to fund those requests um so our current practice in this practice it's a discussion that we had and

175we have our special education reserve fund policy that we had discussed during the march 6 school committee meeting in 2020 is that our school surplus funds are deposited into our special education reserve fund so i just included the balance of that reserve fund and at this point in time we shouldn't we do not have a need to utilize any of those funds for this year um and so the numbers here are presented with the assumption that the funding is not going to be used i will say that it there may become a need where we may have to potentially dip into those accounts so um but i just these numbers are reflected of the fact that there will be no utilization so this fed reserve fund balance is at 4 and that's as of march

17631st 2021 and then the town meeting allocation which is proposed is 260 thousand dollars so that is um our surplus that we turned back to the town at the end of fiscal year 20. and so our starting balance right here for fiscal year 22 is listed and so for our special education reserve fund just as a reminder our target funding ceiling so that is the the most that we can possibly have in that account is two percent of our net school spending is the overall allocation of funds that we report to the state in our end of year report and so it would be based off of what we're reporting out for fiscal year 21. um but i just used the fiscal year 20 number here just so we could get a rough estimate so

177the two percent of that is shown here and so our funding ceiling would be at 864. so our target to ceiling the available balance that we would need to allocate some funds and that is of course if we do not have to dip into this reserve fund in the next couple of months is 181 107. so that is we should be able to with our end of year surplus certainly reach that funding target um and then the less leftover funds would be available to be allocated to fiscal year 23 capital funding in other allocations this misleading question the two percent the two percent ceiling is that set by regulation it is okay thank you of course so that's the overall summary for the operating budget um i also just wanted to briefly update you on

178the capital budget i think a lot of the time or um in the past we've uh submitted our requests and then um typically with these capital projects a lot of the work takes place during the summer just because it's the buildings are not um they're empty so we're able to go in and and work on some of these projects so unfortunately this year with the the timing of town meeting it was a little difficult with the scheduling but we certainly have been able to complete a number of projects um so i just wanted to to update you on those so some of the projects that we've completed so far this year and i just put what the initial picture of what the initial request was and then at the bottom there's a picture of the

179completed projects so we replaced a wood storage shed that's used by our softball team we also had a number of instrument replacements so i just included a picture of the tuba and i think i also may have included that in our fiscal year 22 presentations so you may have seen that before um we um just recently open over the april vacation there is a flooring update to the alden main office and also the alden curriculum office so the top picture is um just that was a picture of before the floor was updated and then the bottom is the the office as it currently looks and then we were also able to purchase a new kubota for our operations and maintenance team um and we had put forth that capital request for a number of years

180um but this year it was uh funded so that's just we were able to go ahead and make that purchase we do have um a number of projects that are are still ongoing so some of our district-wide projects so the this is just a picture of um we've done some fencing replacement throughout the district so the top picture is you can't even really see that there was a fence there but um in the bottom picture is just you know the area was cleaned up and um they installed that new fence so and then of course we still have um some district-wide furniture replacement purchases that we're going to make because of when we were um trying to be really mindful of at one point we were actually taking furniture out of the building um so

181we kind of put a pause on that project because we didn't want to purchase something new just to put it in storage so that's certainly something where and i will say with that capital funding we don't need to turn that back at the end of the year so we do still have some time to make those purchases which we certainly are going to continue to um in the upcoming months and then we just have one project that we haven't quite started yet and that's for the chandler library and that was just a matter of timing but we are i'm going to work on that project in the spring and so this last slide here is just a an overview of some of the relief funding that we've received and i've also included some information with

182the timing of when the funds will expire and so i um the important thing on this slide and this was presented to you in a past school committee meeting but we've also just recently received more information on the american relief package funding and that is reflected in that bottom section there under the federal sr-3 funds and so this number is a projection um we just received the information um not long ago and so at this point for our sr3 funds um the proposed allocation and it hasn't been confirmed yet but the proposed allocation for duxbury is going to be 465 270 um and then i also wanted to mention in addition to this funding so this funding is all coming directly to the school and it's allocated directly for the school and school expenses but

183there also is some federal aid that is direct federal aid to the town of tuxbury um and so those numbers um that we've been made aware of so far so the direct federal aid to the town is 1 million five hundred and seventy thousand six hundred and ninety five dollars and that's just a projected balance um and i believe the confirmation on those numbers will be forthcoming um next week and then there's also direct federal aid for knoxville to plymouth county um and that's three million eighty seven thousand seven hundred and eighty dollars and that's also a projected number um so as we receive some final numbers i will certainly update you hopefully i will be able to provide an update um at the next meeting in may so i know that was a lot

184and i went through it pretty quick but if there's any questions that i can answer i'm more than happy thank you i mean no questions for me other than that the two percent what sets the cap on that but um i just want to thank you because you make it so clear and and you lay it out so well um and i just really appreciate that so thank you sure of course which of these um uh coronavirus or federal related funds have we expended because you mentioned that you were using some parts of the operating budget to fill in sure yep so so far we have expanded the state coronavirus prevention funds um and that expires june 30th so we just really wanted to make sure that we spent all of that money we've also

185expended the cares act funding but as i had mentioned that's through that reimbursement process so we spent 1.2 million dollars but we're still in the process of being reimbursed and that goes through the town and the town accountant has been handling that um so we do still have available to us the sr funds and so at this point we have not expended any funds for sr 1 2 or 3 but we do have a number of expenses that we know we'd like to allocate to those funds moving forward so i just wanted to make sure because those funds don't expire for future fiscal years and that we were able to use the funding potentially in the operating budget now um and to be able to save that or almost earmarked that um that we could

186certainly take a look at using that starting july 1st great thank you sure any other questions okay wait thank you spike so i'm gonna shift here let me just share my screen sorry bear with me here we go i think i'm losing it it said share i've been sharing a google doc and i uh instead of hitting presents so i think i'm getting uh tired here after a long day i don't i don't imagine why i don't know yeah we all are so so tonight tonight i um i'm going to be asking the um [Music] committee to revoke uh the fy 22 operating budget um which i think we originally voted on back in i'm going to say january and there's been some changes since then um and so let me just run through this

187and so i'm going to run through some slides that will look familiar to you um but there's they're revised in preparation for annual town meeting which is next saturday um may 15th so so where we started if you recall in the fall all town departments obviously the schools as well we're giving a zero percent budget guideline and by zero percent i mean a zero dollar uh year-over-year increase fy fy21 fy22 um you know in the in the best of times a zero percent guideline is extremely difficult to swallow uh i think in this case it was made even more difficult by the fact that last year we had a very modest increase sort of in the middle of covid uh the heat in the heat of the pandemic we had a one and a half

188percent increase um and you know and not editorialized but in just generally speaking we've had a pretty dramatically underfunded budget in duxbury for at least a decade um probably more so zero percent was was a significant challenge and i'll explain why it was such a challenge but on november 4th when i uh needed to make my presentation to the school committee um i presented a recommended budget that had over one um over a million dollars in cuts and was going to lead to a staff reduction of of 18.6 uh fte and ft is full-time equivalency um so 18.6 people which was which is really a big hit and a significant impact on class size and and programs i i i just i always like to make this point um and i certainly made it back

189then but you know budget cuts are not abstract uh any decision that we make as an administration or a school committee during the budget process has a very direct impact on our classrooms and uh as i say here an impact on our ability to provide this sort of top-tier you know first-class education for duxbury students so when you're talking about reducing staff by you know almost 20 um and with over a million dollars in cuts that it was going to have a fairly draconian impact on on our on our school district so the just to pry some quick context for why a million dollars um the million dollars came um off what we call our level services budget um and our level of services budget by definition at least my definition is um basically what

190what amount of money do we do we need next year to provide the same level of service hence the term that we're providing this year now this is our first stop every year in our budget process uh you've always kind of seen at least my methodology over the last four years it's where we start um we do review every line item but generally speaking what drives the level of service budget every year is fairly consistent it includes salary increases for our employees mostly due to contractual obligations we look at savings due to retirements we looked at whether or not enrollment requires any any impact um to our staffing sometimes it's positive sometimes it's negative you know financially we needed to look at our contracts for um things like yellow bus transportation and special ed transportation

191we look at our projected tuition costs we look at things like our vocational enrollment um etc etc right so every year we build our level services budget and in my opinion the level of services budget is is the minimum standard um that we should expect right anything less means you're making programmatic uh or staffing cuts so we hope to get level of service which honestly has not always been the case um in in duxbury and certainly in recent years when we built our level of services budget for fy22 the increase fy21 to fy22 was this number here a million one million fifty thousand dollars nine hundred and fifteen that was a two point eight percent increase over fy21 so getting back to my original slide if you're moving back here right from our level services

192budget back down this time uh this number line here to a zero percent increase that's the cut i was talking about so we needed to take our level services budget and cut that 1 million 50 000 915 to get to the town's guideline so that was a significant significant exercise which again led to um you know this 18.6 fte staff reduction so it was it was quite quite a task and here's what the picture looked like at the time i say here this is the original this is the original budget as you see here on the left here is zero percent increase year over year and on the right here we just did a quick chart that showed uh where the staff cuts were coming from 11.9 teachers 4.7 support staff right on down the

193line so again it was not a it was not a pretty picture back back in early november thankfully um a few things happened one is that the budget picture in the town's revenue projections became much clearer when they asked us to present the zero percent budget guideline um in their defense they were taking an extremely conservative approach as they should have um because we were still in the middle of the pandemic and no one really understood what the impact was going to be the local revenue and in some cases state revenue right and so the time took a very very conservative approach thankfully i think probably due to some of the uh stimulus funding that that uh miss blake just talked about and partly because the impact uh to local revenue and state revenue ended

194up not being as significant as people predicted uh in the middle of the pandemic the budget picture is far far far better than we originally thought i'd also add that throughout the fall and winter and even to today um no one was pleased with what we were talking about as it relates to the amount of cuts that would be required to the school department with a zero percent budget increase and there was real consensus among town boards and i'm talking boris selectman town finance committee and certainly amongst our municipal officials top manager and town finance director there was consensus that no matter what happened that the school department had to be a top priority if not the top priority in the budget process meaning if more money became available um that the schools you know

195had to take priority and we're really grateful um we're really grateful for that and um and uh you know it's something to be i think to be celebrated um the end result is that when all the dust settled throughout the entire budget process and you know the finance committee works weekly from the fall right up until tom meeting on the budget um everybody's massaging numbers everybody's projecting a reprojecting revenue estimates and tightening the belt on the expense side at the the end result of that work is that the finance committee um voted to allocate a a round number of one million dollars um to the school department for fiscal year 22. that's only a difference of 50 915 from our original level services budget right that that that sort of number line i just showed

196you so that number um that million dollar increase in the resulting uh fy 22 budget number is the number that is going to be uh presented at town meeting all right now in theory um you could amend that uh number on town meeting floor i wouldn't necessarily recommend that um but this this number is sort of the consensus number that's going to be presented at the at the may 5th uh town meeting and honestly it's really good news um so what that what that budget looks like is this is the update right this is the revised budget is that our rfy22 proposed budget is exactly a million dollars over uh fy21 so would be 38 million four hundred ninety eight thousand three hundred fifty three that represents a two point six uh seven percent increase

197over fy 21. very importantly here as as as it says here on the right side of the slide this will not require any budget-related staff reductions right we're we're we're essentially whole with a couple like one small caveat um that being said uh because our original level service budget was a million fifty nine fifteen that million does require us to shave off that the delta there the 50 000 915 and thankfully we were able to make two very in my opinion minor adjustments to balance the budget in two areas one was in school bus transportation which i'll explain and one was in a revenue offset from our special education tuition account and i'll show you what i'm talking about i'm not going to go through this slide this is a slide that i hope looks

198familiar to the committee and in the community every year i present some version of this uh slide at the very beginning of my presentation and i call it how the level services budget was built and what this does is walk walk us all through where we started in fy 21 and what changes we made step by step to get to our again level services budget and again that's just the base right that's the minimum standard for our budget this doesn't take into account a growth budget um you know new programs new staff what have you but it's a level services budget so i'm not going to go through this tonight but i want to show you what changed from the original budget this is the identical um exhibit from november with two exceptions the first

199exception is this first box highlighted in red and that is our school bus transportation contract which is a significant contract but since the budget was presented in november we have gone out to bid through the state procurement process and we have now and if you remember we presented this at school committee and we ultimately approved a new contract um but that contract that new contract came in less uh less than budgeted uh the actual delta on that was twenty eight thousand nine fifty eight so we were able to capture savings of twenty eight thousand nine fifty eight because of that new school bus transportation contract right so that got us about halfway there i'm actually excuse me more than halfway there uh to needing to shave off that fifty thousand nine fifteen the other thing

200we're recommending we do is just um take twenty one thousand nine hundred fifty seven dollars which is a very specific number um from our special education tuition revolving account we feel very comfortable um that we can tap into that account um we haven't really relied on that account at all in recent years so we have a we have a balance that will sustain us for for several several years several years if need be um but certainly more than enough to cover you know just shy at twenty two thousand dollars so again the difference from november to tonight comes just in those two accounts um and the the difference is fifty thousand nine fifteen which gets us uh to that balanced uh budget that will be presented uh at town meeting next saturday a week from

201saturday so what i'm asking uh for the school committee to do tonight is revoke the the budget you on january 13th you originally voted to adopt the levels you voted to you actually voted if you remembered to adopt the level services budget by january we had a pretty good sense um that that zero percent budget wasn't going to come to fruition um so we chose um we chose to um just simply because we needed to take a vote um because the town's bylaws required us to we chose to vote the level services budget of 38 549. again there's a fifty thousand nine hundred fifteen um dollar difference in what uh we're gonna take to town meeting so i'm recommending tonight that you re you revoke the fy 22 operating budget and that new amount would

202be 38 million 498 353 so i don't know if you have any questions on what i just said it's really i would say it's really good news um you know it's not the most exciting budget in the world we're not it's not a growth budget we're not asking for new programs there's no new staff um you know but given where we are with our economy both locally statewide and nationally given that we're on the heels of uh hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic the fact that we're not talking about cutting staff and cutting programs to me is actually cause for celebration um and i you know i don't know if there's different thoughts on that i'll certainly uh entertain any any questions you may have and i think also the doctor internet it's a it's a testament

203to the hard work that you and miss blake and the rest of your staff have put into building the relationship with the town and the community in terms of the finances and the fact that they are so supportive um we're in a very different position now than we were you know three or four years ago so yeah yeah thank you for saying that yeah it's something we worked really hard on and uh it's kind of credit to both sides you know we have a very very collegial um i mean it's more than collaborative it's actually a collegial you know relationship with um with obviously i mean it's full partners but the but the finance committee the more selectmen so we're very we're really happy to be in that position where we can have um good

204dialogue and constructive dialogue about uh district priorities and um it's really it's really it's really a great position to be in yeah thank you yeah um kristin do you i know she went on off mute do you want to ask any questions oh no well i was getting ready for the vote oh okay all right any one final call any questions or should we go ahead and move into um oh wait let me check the agenda um yeah you should probably hold the vote until um you can well we have a public comment next and then yeah let's yeah let's let's do that yeah okay so i'll just read the the brief statement for public comment um with a note of the previous statement i made earlier um comments from the public section the media

205is an opportunity for members of the community to address issues of concern about policy budget administrative matters or share ideas about how we can work together to improve the textbook public schools we value your input and respect divergent views we only ask that you limit your remarks to two minutes and refrain from airing grievances as individual members of the school community thank you all right so we'll ask people who want to talk during public comment to raise their hand in zoom chat and i'm going to ask dr antonucci to assist me with bringing them over for comments i don't see any hands yet i know it's been a long meeting and i appreciate everyone sticking through with us um give it another minute okay yeah okay okay so no public comments then i guess we

206can move into to voting the three items that we have tonight um dr engineers would you mind sharing that slide again with the number so we can read that for the um the first item yeah do you want me just can i read it to you um but you want me to put the slide up oh whatever's easiest okay let me just read it to you if that's okay final number is uh 38 million 498 353. can i have a motion to approve that amount i move that we approve a fiscal year 22 budget of 38 million 498 300 353 dollars perfect second um any discussion before we vote okay julia all right matt hi krista hi and shannon hi okay the next item for action items is voting to accept the senior class gift

207because i didn't notice any information about that all right maybe i missed it in the folder do you have a small yeah there was a memo there was a memo uh there was a memo it's okay there was a memo in um in your packet from mr donovan and um the uh the scenic cloud skipped our short version is that it's uh uh picnic tables for the the front of the high school nice it's a wonderful idea uh they're they're really um they're made of recycled plastic and they're extremely durable and they don't require any any regular maintenance whatsoever and um i think the students mr dunham made the point that i think it um you know they had to eat outside so uh so much this year um and i think they realize that

208would be really nice to to have the opportunity to do that on a long term basis when you know when when allowed and nice to have some tables so the gift is in the amount of 2321. um green and black recycled plastic picnic tables and the donation is from the senior class of 2021 so we're extremely grateful that they uh thought about a really nice way to give a long-lasting gift back to uh to our community generous and very thoughtful thank you very nice i have a motion to approve the senior class gift or i move to approve that gift from the senior class second okay julia hi matt hi kristen hi hey shannon and i okay i'm sorry it's possible that um that uh you may not have had access to that that document

209i think it's in the folder but um if there's an access problem i apologize i'll make sure it gets reached no no no worries and then the next one is the frost and foundation scholarship yeah so there's a there's a typo on that and uh since since the agenda was printed i've gone back and um [Music] i've revised the memo it's actually it's actually uh it it's the frosting found scholarship um frosting found uh is a actually a local business a local florist um and they're very generously um wanting to provide a 500 scholarship to a duxbury high school senior and they're looking at a senior who's planning to attend a two or four year degree program at a university college conservatory of the arts or school of trade and there'll be an application process

210just like there are for all of our scholarships and so we very much thank um the frost and the proprietors of frosting found but um i would certainly recommend approval of the scholarship tonight that's extremely generous thank you for the community support um is it it will be will it be managed by the guidance department similar to the other scholarships yes yep yeah in the effect the request uh came directly from um uh lisa nabalski okay perfect okay any questions or should we move okay can we move to approve this scholarship i move to approve the frost and found scholarship second okay julia hi matt hi kristen hi shannon aye i think i think the one item um dr antonucci the athletic advisory committee do we need to appoint a school committee member of that

211tonight i don't think so i mean i think you could i mean you could certainly i think it probably chairman's prerogative you could appoint somebody if you'd like i don't think you would need to vote necessarily okay okay i'm happy to do it shannon if you need somebody okay but we can discuss i'm like if kell i know kelly's not here she might be interested too so okay all right since we don't need to do a vote on it and that's an appointment maybe we can just provide an update at the next meeting um i'm very sensitive to the fact that it is late and it's been a very long meeting and i thank everybody participants and folks watching for hanging in with us so i hope you all have a good night thank you

212i need a motion to enter sorry motion to adjourn second all right julia hi matt hi krista hi and shannon and i thank you everyone good night everybody thank you