School Committee Training Workshop MASC April 29, 2021

001[Music] no one's filtering in shannon so i think we could start okay all right let's um call someone into order and uh let's stand for the pledge of allegiance please pledge allegiance [Music] good evening everyone thank you again to everyone for joining two nights in a row really appreciate it um and i'm really looking forward to this session i'd like to introduce glen kucher our executive director of the massachusetts association of school committees um and he is going to lead us through a a workshop where we're going to kind of try to work through operating protocols for for the school committee [Music] glenn welcome oh yeah but everybody but um on the school committee but i i just want to introduce katie blake our director of finance uh and pat dillon our chief human resources

002officer thank you glenn good to see you again thank you thank you did i miss anything else that i should do okay and glenn i will hand it off to you thank you uh we are doing a surprising amount of meetings with our member school committees about norms and protocols and post covert and getting ready for what's happening we've seen some phenomenon this year that i think are very important to talk about before we start and before we do i just want to run a quick a quick powerpoint through with you to highlight some of the issues that are hovering about that affect how school committees work and what their roles and responsibilities can be so if you allow me to screen share which i think i can and i am going to uh pull

003something up here if you will bear with me everything in my life is now in front of you okay can you all see this oops no not yet okay hang on i'm screen sharing but i don't know if this is working so let me go back to uh [Music] do i have permission to screen share you you're glad you should okay let's see uh okay here we are let me go back let me go on a screen share let me pull up the powerpoint okay now we'll go back and we'll go here and now we'll go to screen share and now we will pick up this and we will share and we will try again yes that worked this okay so some things that we want to think about that indicate where you are in

004relationship to everybody else uh i don't know john if you remember peter finn but peter finn was a great mentor to a lot of school committee members and superintendents and he used to say there are three jobs that everybody can do manage the red sox be the town manager and run the school department and he's a long time multi-district superintendent who worked with school committees for years and years and years and he's right about that everyone can do your job for you the members john's job and the red sox management you have been kicked in the gut three times this year most superintendents and school districts don't get kicked in the gut ever but we're all dealing with covid your football team's been in the news i know the globe was uh was uh again

005going at it today and uh you know allegations that you've had to deal with and that school district is working out uh never good things in the community and you've had all three things happen to you uh despite the best intentions and doing the best work you can so that makes it difficult if covert weren't bad enough and the more complicated issue is everybody's angry with everybody else uh people have been stuck at home they're angry over the budget they're angry over being at home they're angry at having the kids here the town municipal relationships all over the state have been challenged it's been very tough then we've been dealing with a lot of school committee meetings dealing with challenges over how you run your meetings how you set your budget protocols how you share

006information with the community and you know last year we had a lot of new members join the school committee just in time to get hit in the face with covet it's not why people ran for the school committee and people have not had an opportunity to work with their colleagues to do the things that they wanted to do when they ran and now we have the second generation of people coming on who are new who maybe were running in response to covet but covets going away so they're going to be looking ahead to uh to what they can do in the future there may be some federal stimulus money to help a community like duxbury is not going to see as much as other communities but there'll be some and the money situation i think

007is going to be okay for next year but fiscal year 2023 and 24 will be very difficult in terms of planning in terms of getting your priorities straight keeping meetings collegial has been a big challenge when everybody's angry so i want you to understand some of the things that we tell all of our school committees when you need to think about how you work together as a group number one the chair is very important the chair is the servant of the assembly not the master that comes out of general robert's rule book which i think most of you use the chair is there to represent the people who are in the room and the people who aren't in the room and the chair represents the people who are watching the meeting and the people who

008are at home not watching the meeting and if you're having a school committee meeting and you're on television the chair is effectively your play-by-play announcer the superintendent is occasionally the caller man and the members of the school committee will be will be chiming in as well rule number two the agenda belongs to the school committee not the superintendent not the chair the agenda belongs to the school committee so if you want something on your agenda and the board wants it on you can put it on the agenda you can discuss whatever you like you want to talk about the war in afghanistan you can talk about the war in afghanistan you are an elected legislative body in massachusetts you can talk about things that aren't within your purview that said the public doesn't like that

009they want you focusing on education number one can i just ask the quick question on that yep stop me anytime by the way yes please i was just curious so if i wanted something on the agenda do i just email shannon about that do we need to get an approval for that to go on the agenda generally every school committee has a process for putting something on the agenda it usually involves contacting the chair or if the chair delegates the agenda to the superintendent contacting the superintendent and saying i would like to sign him on the agenda if they are unable to put it on the agenda or in some cases if the chair is unwilling to put something on the agenda any member can ask the body to add an item to the agenda

010because the agenda belongs to the members okay thank you number three majority rules and minority rights glenn just to clarify that so if the member asks the board is that then a vote to go on the agenda it would be a vote okay all right thank you now here's a uh this is sort of a rule that we want to make sure you understand parliamentary procedure requires that majorities rule but minorities have rights but what's very important is that you need your majority to be supporting you if you want to do something if you want to put something on your agenda and three people don't agree then you can't put it on the agenda and i get a lot of people you know contacting us so this is the rule of three if you can't

011get three don't call me i can't produce a majority for you sometimes people will say you know i've been out trying to get this program we wanted to do elementary foreign language instruction so does the majority want to do it no they don't want to do it but they're wrong what am i what should i do tell them they should do this no i don't tell you what to do it's majority rules minority rights but if you make a mistake or if you do something that you wish you hadn't done you can reconsider it you can rescind it or if the chair makes a ruling that you don't like you can overrule the chair by a majority vote but if you've adopted a policy and you think it's a mistake you didn't like it and

012you want to ask the board to reconsider or you want to ask the board to rescind it there's a process for introducing rescissions you can change what you've done if you'd like to change it using the appropriate procedures another heads up that we all had driven home this year uh constituents are not objective if it's i mean we've got i spoke to a person this morning very upset ran for the school committee in one of our communities because the arts program in the fourth grade of the district was eliminated so this person ran for the school committee to reinstate the arts program in the fourth grade where that member has a child ran for the school committee for that purpose to reinstate the child's fourth grade arts program so sometimes people just aren't objective and

013your constituents don't like the idea of losing services they don't like the idea of closing buildings they've seen extracurricular activities or evaporate around the state a lot of kids didn't have a chance to compete in intramural and scholastic athletics and everybody is going to blame you because you're the school committee they'll preface blaming you by calling you and telling you the biggest lie that you will hear which is i voted for you now that i voted for you i want you to fix this because they don't understand how school committee roles and responsibilities work and they think that you have the authority to fix something because you're on the school committee a lot of people are very concerned about the economy hoping to get back to work hoping to restart their businesses hoping to have

014a business not knowing what the future holds back to school policies and processes were the most divisive issue that we saw that we have seen since proposition two and a half in 1980 when we lost a third of our teachers everybody is angry and you want to kick the nearest shins and the nearest shins belong to the school committee and the superintendent and believe me i feel your pain and here's another issue that most people don't understand and most school committee members especially the new ones are a little shocked to find out by being elected to the school committee you are a public figure what does that mean well it means they can write a letter to the editor and call you whatever they like they can confront you in public and call you whatever

015they like they can write letters to the newspaper and say things about you that may not be true but because you're a public figure they generally have the right to be critical of their public figures and the state constitution gives your constituents the right to contact you and to instruct you about how to do your business so the constituents will call you even though you may not have the authority to fix their problems because they don't understand the education reform policies and procedures a lot of them don't understand what the role the school committee actually is a stunning number of people do not understand how public finance works and don't always make the link between generating the revenue and spending it and for those who thought they did over the last year i think the

016federal government has budgeted how many trillion dollars and fixed all of our financial problems because we'll pay it back later ask people to understand how that happens and how that works keynesian economics is is something i guess we all learned at one time or another and we all forgot so it's a challenge i just mentioned this public figures can can contact you they can attack you they can do it without taking responsibility social media has made it possible to uh not only uh criticize you but uh you know sometimes create the appearance of a movement now i happen to be one of those dinosaurs who got aol 25 years ago 25 years ago i still have it so i can have seven email addresses on aol and i'm a comcast subscriber so i can have

017six more addresses through comcast so i can have 13 different email addresses and start writing letters to newspapers and create the appearance of consensus and a movement and despite what your constituents may say nobody ever ran for school committee for the sheer joy of cutting programs for children so uh if this nightmare weren't bad enough you know what happens in recessions ruins relationships ruins marriages ruins businesses creates social and emotional distress uh increases the tensions that that come from understanding your roles and responsibilities my daughter the kindergarten teacher reminds me that the birth rate declined and all the kindergarten teachers are worried about their jobs two and three years from now when the next group of kids comes up and what's going to happen to them everybody's concerned and school committee members are are wrestling

018with their roles i have worked in both so i can tell you that other than a prison there's no place faster to start bad rumors than a school district and i was a volunteer in a prison i was not a constituent of the commonwealth but still rumors get going quickly and they you lose control of them perceptions become reality and the media coverage sometimes isn't helpful i don't know if you know you probably have a lot of experience this year dealing with issues that the media covered that which you are intimately involved a lot of us have over the years and you know there's always stuff that they just don't get and the public never knows the real story behind the story and sometimes the story behind the story can't be told because people have

019rights to privacy and there are students that at risk there are employees at risk there may be evidence at risk of an investigation of any kind that that we get a lot of stuff stolen from school districts there are people always looking for missing stuff that could be anything and all that's happening so for for new members when we train them and for veteran members when we talk to them we always talk about knowing how to be an effective member when i was in my second or third term in cambridge a newly elected member wrote a letter to the cambridge chronicle and said i'm the only member of the cambridge school committee who cares about children and that member immediately rendered oneself ineffective because who wants to collaborate with someone who's going to say that

020no but nobody else cares about children and uh i'm the only one that does so being collegial is very important but more important is knowing what you should do rather than what you may do you have an enormous amount of personal rights as an elected official you can say what you like you can talk to whomever you want you can do a lot of things you can call your colleague a fool at a school committee meeting believe me i've been in some some food fights in school committee meetings where people call each other anyway you can do that you can legally do that it's not the best way to do business so when we talk about protocols and and i hope maybe we can talk about one some of the best ways to do business

021that we might have we also will need to understand how to address the areas of ambiguities in the roles and responsibilities of the superintendent there is very little legal guidance to differentiate the roles of the school committee and the superintendent simply put the superintendent is the chief executive officer just as the governor is for the commonwealth the school committee is the legislature for schools in duxbury you make the rules you set the policies where do the lines blur where do blue and yellow become green as we say we're going to talk about that a little later and i hope that you'll be thinking about examples that you can raise so that we can clarify them a lot of what we talk about when we talk about norms and protocols is balancing your roles and responsibilities

022with what you may do and what you should do resolving disputes among the members issue disputes are common they're good for the body they're not necessarily a destructive element they can be they can be very important that's because dissent and disagreement are very important parts of being a school committee member we are very strong proponents of having the school committee be the place with the table so that you can argue disagree and try to work to some consensus it's a sad fact of life that very few people remember you who hubert humphrey was uh he was vice president of the united states under lyndon johnson and he tried to be president but he was defeated by richard nixon which is another person that a lot of you don't uh probably don't remember but uh another

023subject for another time uh principal dissent and principal disagreement are absolutely critical to having a good strong meaningful and engaged school committee i want to be very clear about what i mean by principal dissent and principle disagreement i was at a school committee meeting that was debating the language that they would use when they introduced an elementary foreign language program in the k-6 program it was a very strong debate about whether to have the program and then a very strong debate about what language to offer and the debate included a superintendent recommended that the second language should be spanish because it was the most frequently spoken second language in the commonwealth another member argued for portuguese which was the most frequently spoken language in the district and then a third member advocated for mandarin chinese

024which was picking up constituencies as an international language of growing importance and in advocating for chinese the member told the advocate for spanish well if you knew anything about this you'd know that chinese is where it's at but go ahead be stupid i don't care that was on cable television no one likes to be called stupid on cable television that was not principle to disagreement a principal disagreement would have been we'll see where the majority goes i think this is why we should pick chinese i respect your arguments but i think mine is stronger and whatever we do we will move forward and maybe a year from now we'll change your mind but how we argue back and forth is critical because everyone's watching the community is watching and you're sometimes shaped with your image

025in the community by by what they see now civil discourse is a good strategy but i have to say uh i'm sometimes offended by it when i've been going into a room and someone says okay we're now going to discuss the appropriate back to school strategy and at this meeting we're going to be civil and engage in civil discourse in other words i think i'll talk to the whole room as if you were all 12 years old and needed a monitor to make sure you behaved yourselves our former secretary of education in massachusetts always insisted before every meeting took place that i will demand on civil discourse and i always thought that the demand for civil discourse was a strategy used by the timid to control the passionate in other words don't raise your voice

026i want everybody to be as mellow as i am and uh that's where i step in and say it's okay to be passionate it's okay to raise your voice appropriately if you're doing it on behalf of an issue that you believe is correct but to force people to sacrifice their passion at the door simply because uh you don't want to hear it is not fair and i always warn sometimes we have outlier behaviors on school committees we've had a few school committees that were unable to have meetings because of the presence of individuals who would not relinquish the floor or interrupting everybody or who would be bombastically insulting and the school committee would consider accenture and they would call for advice and i would say just remember don't make a martyr out of a fool

027there are other strategies than shouting somebody down so when you look at norms and protocols we argue and advocate for people being civil and principled but we also advocate for people taking responsibility for their actions and the general rule of everything that i'm going to throw out to you i guarantee you that this rule is true those in the know don't really know i think about my friend mike widmer who used to run the mass taxpayers foundation who always talked his talk about his friend the economist at mit who predicted of the 11 of the last three recessions if those in the know really knew we'd all be wealthy in the stock market we'd all be very successful sports bettors we would all know exactly the right solutions to solve our problems but we don't

028we think we have good strategies we hope we do but we must always leave open the possibility that we could be wrong so i just want to throw that out so that people can can feel uh a little more comfortable now i'm going to unscreen share there's a lot of stuff on the screen i don't want anybody to see let's get this stuff okay thank you glenn that was a good kind of overview of the current environment um and some of the background issues that school committees have to deal with i did have a chance to talk with everybody and uh i have to say uh you are you're not a typical school committee and that uh people have a great breadth of experience and they're very knowledgeable about what they're doing and knowledgeable about

029the fields in which they work so you come to the table very prepared i also have to tell you that uh well the community supports you the community is supportive of the schools the schools are held in high respect it turns out that i knew more people in duxbury than i thought and people were very complimentary uh what i learned about duxbury is what i pretty much knew about my own town there are people who follow the school department and everything that goes into it and it's their lives and it's very important to them but the average resident of duxbury is comfortable with the schools and is comfortable with i mean they're not happy about being in the newspaper uh uh they're not happy about being divisive about not going back to school but you

030have a very supportive community that has very high expectations for education we don't see that everywhere and you're fortunate it does not appear that your municipal government is at war with the school department which about a third of our school districts are so that's good uh your community is very has very high expectations which is good uh the community is demanding of its elected officials better off worse your goals as a school committee are all student-centered or parent-centered and your focus is on building a constituency in the community that involves students and parents that's good we often see different kinds of priorities but there was unanimity around that and even the goals that everyone has for themselves and for the board are mutually compatible yes there's a there's a very strong sense among school committee

031members that they want to make sure that they uh communicate very effectively with the community there are some different theories about how best to do that and a lot of those theories uh have been informed by the covet experience and your experiences of the last few months so that's a very important consideration now other districts are dealing with the very same issues in the very same ways we're having a you know a lot of our elections are taking place now we're finding a lot of the election debate is built around uh what we will do post covid now that we appear to be able to see uh the end in sight so that's off an opportunity uh we saw a lot of consensus around using the evaluation process as a way for the school committee

032to give its feedback and set its priorities into its operating practices and uh there was a uh an emerging priority that i was picking up that you would like the school committee to be the place with the table in other words there are communities that do this arlington did this very well cambridge used to do it a lot of our communities would have academic presentations as part of the school committee meeting to enlighten the community as much as the school committee i've sat through presentations about when's the best time to introduce algebra what's the best way to target still showing emotional well-being of students what's the best way to teach elementary music those people are very they're all kinds of inten if you're in the music world it's as intense as as as anything i'd

033ever seen uh shall we eliminate uh football in favor of soccer uh because of the uh concussion issue uh how are we going to make opportunities for our female athletes equal what's the best way to uh to test our kids as we come out from covet how will we know if there's been learning loss or demand for mitigation so i would be encouraged that despite differences the school committee is very well placed to play a major role going forward and to recapture in the eyes of the community a leadership role as its elected officials for schools that was that was my sense of of doing that so i guess i would throw out to you this is an initial discussion what do you see needing to happen in fiscal year 2020 academy i think fiscal

034year you think academic years and that's only because part of my responsibility is counting money what do you see in academic year 2022 as your major goals and what do you see as getting in the way now i'm not a therapist my friends who are therapists tell me there's something called wait time we don't have to wait too long i'm happy to jump in throw a question out they say you should wait at least 60 seconds but julia thank you so um so i i think it's uh trying to understand what the impact of this this current academic year has been or is on our students and then using that information to help address learning loss help address any kind of mental health issues or emotional social emotional issues um that students might be bringing

035back to school um and to try and bring the district kind of into a more normal operating procedure mode there are also lessons i think that have been learned about remote learning and what works and what doesn't work and so maybe those are also kind of um the benefits what are the benefits that we might draw from the experience of hybrid learning and how can we incorporate that back into a normal school year thank you i want to do a little product placement here a week from tomorrow at noon time masc is holding its friday learning launch and the topic is going to be learning recovery and learning loss and that is open to anyone there is no charge uh jim carredonio will be uh speaking uh on that topic and we're hoping to get

036a get that discussion going as a continuous theme and you're all invited you can tell your colleagues you can tell your friends go to our website and sign on and you'll get the link who's next i'm prepared to wait until hell freezes over i think one of the biggest challenges for next year is going to be what is the new normal i mean everything julia said is spot on but you know i have a middle schooler and a high schooler and you know jake you can probably speak to it too it's just it's been bizarre this whole year and they've learned differently they haven't had a full curriculum um you know now they're back in as of april 5th middle school high school that caused some anxiety i don't know what my okay um you

037know so it's the social emotional piece in the teachers too i mean school is a lot different for the staff so how's that going to translate is next year going to be smooth sailing is it going to be no we liked doing xyz this way better um so just really all those pieces are kid's just gonna is it just gonna be we're gonna jump back in and everything's gonna be regular again with sports and academics and um the environment i don't want to put anybody on the spot but i'd really like to hear something from i'm happy to i'm happy to chime in um i think communication also is an important goal for next year how can we improve communication with our students with our parents amongst the administration so that we all really are

038on the same page and we understand where everyone's coming from concerns goals and just have a really good open communication and really make that a priority for next year because we're going to have to really work hard and i think danielle had a great presentation that's going to take two years to really catch the kids up academically so i think within that two years we really have to work on great communication within the major players to ensure that all the kids excel i mean i agree with i think with everything that people have said i think you know a slightly different turn on it but it is making sure that our um teachers and administration can focus on the student achievement so that we can do all these goals right like we have to and

039i think that's we didn't get to the um we haven't really addressed glenn the second part of your question of what gets in the way right but you know recovering from covid and then also these other two crises that we've had um you know how do we support the school committee how do we support the administration and the teachers so that they can focus on the job of teaching our kids shannon i think that's a great point and i'll just bring up an example um the assistant principals and i don't know who else but handling the um covet calls and i was always so i mean i've gotten multiple covet calls that my kids have been in quarantine and i was always so frustrated i was like i wish they had the opportunity to focus

040on the academics because the kids are so limited in academics that you know i think what you said is so important we need to support them so they can focus on education and take away some of that non-academic distractions from them so great point great point about how about what gets in the way well i think time gets in the way you know i think i think it's going to be difficult there are going to be a lot of assessments that need to be done and there's going to be a lot of segwaying back in and i think it's going to be an interesting jostling of what is the normal flow of a school day you know for both the teachers and the kids and the parents you know it's um i think next fall

041is going to be really interesting but you know the kids the teachers might want to do things differently and they might run out of time and you know some of them are trying to work more with the kids in the classroom so they're not loaded up on homework going home and then you know they're bringing these giant backpacks home and the parents are stressed out because they're trying to get back to work like you said so i think time is definitely going to be um could be problematic next year i think also um what could be a challenge is the changing guidelines the continuing changing guidelines that are coming down from the governing bodies for example you know what is the fall going to look like for the kids what type of quarantine protocols are

042going to be in place not be in place what are the expectations on the children going back are there going to be any specific requirements for them so i think you know as a school committee and the superintendent we're limited in what we can give parents based off of what information we're receiving so i think the timeline on that might be a challenge next year um as it was this year i think things were held up because of what you know was well beyond beyond our control and the other thing um means for our feedback um which comes back to my point of communication but how effective are our means of communication or not feedback from teachers and the people that are in direct contact with the students how can we get that most efficiently

043and effectively to the principals and the superintendent and then funneled what's necessary back to us to make sure that any issues are resolved so i feel like that could be because we don't want the teachers we want the teachers to feel supported so if by doing that they need to be able to communicate what their concerns are so what is that avenue because if they're not happy i just feel like then it affects the kids the happier we can make the teachers and the happier than the kids can be i think we could also chime in and say money is always uh possibly yeah and let me raise this uh money is always an issue it's never a simple one but this year it is more complicated because we're not quite sure exactly how much

044money there's going to be we're not sure how much federal money will actually be available and we're not quite sure how that money is going to be distributed we know that the title one formula will be used for some of the distribution but then there's a lot of money that won't be it's a lot of talk about using the stimulus period to fully fund the federal special education obligation the president threw out another 1.4 trillion yesterday beyond what we've already heard and the state seems to have done fairly well on its own despite covet so okay it's a very legitimate question how do you develop a master plan when you don't really know all your numbers and you don't really know what covert restrictions will be in place but everybody is still impatient to get

045to get back to normalcy that calls for large-scale group therapy just to help people figure that out and i have to say for those of you who are behavioralists that is a skill i do not possess so for those of you who have insight into uh therapeutic end of the world i'd appreciate your chiming in and contributing to this discussion nobody huh i'm in therapy so i can add some stuff i um i would say that you know some of the things that could possibly get in the way for next year would just be overall change management just because um so when people were bringing up things about sort of the goals for next year you know what are some of those goals addressing learning loss trying to get back to some sort of of

046normalcy i think all of those things are fair one of the things that could get in the way of helping to inform that is just how how do we deal with the changes that will need to be made to address those things because i mean it would seem to me that addressing learning loss is going to cr is going to require i would think some change in how we you know educate the kids how we do hybrid learning whether we do hybrid learning whether we have to add more hours or anything stuff like that um i also think that there's going to need to be some change management associated with how we feel we and this is my own opinion how we feel we should be communicating with the public because to me like if

047communication is a priority which i don't think it's in to anyone surprised that i think it is i would agree with kristen we you know communication is a i think is improving our the way we communicate should be a goal i think we need to sort of understand i think i need to understand that like if that if that's a goal we have to we have to consider whether there needs to be improvement to communication and i'm not so sure that we're all unified that we do so i think that that that's a potential barrier you know it's like just to put it bluntly how do you address a problem if you don't think that there's a problem so um i think that just kind of an overall change in thinking and managing [Music] potential

048change that's a little bit opaque right now could be a barrier to to realizing the goals that we that we have for next year well i think that matt goes to another you know is we have to we do have to reach alignment as to our goals right i mean i think we all think communication is important but to your point and this is the hard conversations we all need to have right we all have different views on on what it means and that's that i think that goes to the discourse you know point from glenn's you know introductory comments you know how do we have these difficult conversations about our differing opinions right and how we work together as a committee to kind of reach alignment right because and i think that also goes

049to the learning where you know everybody we're never at the end of the day we're never going to make every single person happy right that's just not possible um in terms of different so anyways i think that's that's that's one of the challenges specifically to our committee is working through differing opinions and and how you navigate that yeah i mean i i was energized by that part of what of glenn's opening because it it to me maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it seems pretty clear that um we have a sort of majority rule posture that we we need to take in the committee right majority you know majority rules so i'm comfortable with making my opinion known and hopefully it's in a respectful way if my you know if if something that happens to be

050my opinion is not shared by the committee and that comes to some sort of a vote then we just move on but the question was is like you know what what do we think our goals are i mean like to me that's a goal and there's some potential obstacles to to realizing it but i'm comfortable with whatever the committee decides yeah yeah i think glenn you know as a committee right it's been i don't say smooth sailing right but it's been very aligned for the last few years and um so kind of getting comfortable having these conversations is i think really important part and one of the reasons why we're you know the conversation around operating protocols and understanding the rules of you know engagement kind of thing so that's good well there needs to

051address or things that get in the way yeah i think real quick just coming from like a student's perspective i think it's be like next year i think one of the biggest issues that i think us as like a student body will most likely face is definitely that transition into a post um covered year and getting that full back in-person instruction again and maybe not necessarily being socially distant and having the mass requirements really just adjusting to this new learning process and i think that's going to be um something that's going to be difficult but it's also something that's also going to get in the way at the same time of completely just transforming our learning compared to what we were used to this year and i think that's something that a lot of us

052students are most likely worried about um in the like upcoming year jake what year of school are you in a sophomore okay how was the year uh how was how was the remote portion of the year versus the uh in person portion of the year um it was definitely a challenge but i think that goes for all of us i think it was a challenge for students and teachers because it was an enormous adjustment from you know this school norm that i've had for 10 years and now all of a sudden i'm at home and online and then in person it's been definitely an adjustment but i think as of now that's kind of settled how do you feel the students feel about next year i think we're definitely you know in general we're pretty

053i think excited but at the same time worried because you know still so much up in the air like there's no definite of what our plan is for next year and years after that and i think kind of what um the common consensus from what i've heard from all of you is that i think we're all aware of like the lasting effect that we will have as students because we definitely missed out on you know a lot of learning because last year we were at home and had virtually no real instruction and then now we've had this um hybrid learning so i think definitely the biggest part about next year is going to be like what we missed out on them from the learning aspect okay yeah i think there's a coming to terms with

054some of the stuff that's been lost and i don't say this just in the context of schools and students but you know there have been times and occasions and opportunities that have just been lost this past year and sometimes i almost it's it sounds you know reading in them in the media or or hearing people talk it's it's almost as if there's a competition for how difficult this past year has been um and or how much one set of people or another set of people have lost and uh or been set back and i think that it's almost like a spirit of competition is isn't is it in itself a barrier you know we've all lost something and and are going to be facing difficulties trying to recoup whatever it is we've lost and trying

055to particularly in the context in the context of schooling where budgets are set or limited or whatever um the the perceived competition between uh addressing the needs of one group versus another um that could be an obstacle we need to address make everybody feel as if uh it's fair when we get back and their needs are being met in a in a way that's equitable how are those people who say christians i cut you off no okay i'm sorry that you were about to speak i was going to speak but i can wait till you're done no go ahead i wrote my note down so i won't forget oh okay i was just going to say like another um potential barrier is and i think this goes along with julie was saying was just a

056lot of judgment and defensiveness and i think um just everybody we just need to kind of be open to feedback and instruction and areas of growth so i think you know everyone kind of like julie was saying like it's a competition on who had it worse and i think if we can just kind of let that go a little bit or it's definitely a barrier so if that defensiveness can come down and we really can be open and hear everybody i think i think that would be great so if that makes sense just to add in with what julia was saying given that when you developed your last strategic plan you had no idea that there would be anything like a cobin but that now you have to open school and get ready for twenty

057twenty one twenty two though does the school committee does the district have a a plan for building consensus about reopening school in september well i think our you know where we are with the strategic plan is uh definitely an area for discussion um because this is year two and a three-year plan um and uh and last year was uh affected this year has been affected and some of the goals both uh some of the goals were affected by budget considerations and so it's not only covet it's also the budget so i think there's uh and um and i think covet has maybe moved some of the goal posts in in certain areas so that's a a huge um i think a huge area for consideration for for us as a school committee um to work

058with the superintendent to to make sure that the new reality or the new normal is factored into that plan yeah i just want to follow up on julia said and i'm not sure if it's my place but i think the strategic plan i mean we made a three-year plan but i think that's good for four or five six i mean it's a very it's very alive plan so i'm not personally worried about about that we certainly are slowed down because of covid but i'm not sure this is the point of your question glenn but as far as planning for next year and is your consensus the reality is we're driven quite a bit by the state um in in in destiny i think maybe kristen mentioned it or something but um i don't want to

059say it is what it is but we're going to have to wait and see um what kind of guidance we get from desi and the governor about what next year's going to look like before there can be any consensus i mean we sort of i think we've become more is maybe more flexible than we've ever been in our career because we're sort of going week by week you know trying to figure out what they expect of us next so i i know it the the september's going to be here quickly um but i think we'll have to be pretty patient um to see to see what next year could look like despite our best just our our biggest desires right you know what i mean i actually um those who work inside understand that the

060department of elementary and secondary education exercises enormous control over what people would like to do uh i don't know that i could defend that or explain it to the average resident of duxbury say i know how impatient you are i know how anxious you are for your kids uh uh but we have to wait for those uh um people at the department to give us further guidance so we know how we can move forward uh is likely to be a very truthful answer but may not be an answer that people are going to tolerate i i you know by the way those of us who deal with the department have been struggling with this on every issue all the time what's chapter 70 going to look like well we don't know well the legislature passed

061it yeah but it's got to go to the state and they take a skim off and they give us what's left and they make us beg for whatever and it's unpredictable and then you never know what the bureaucrats in the cubicles are going to do to try to control your lives around special education and graduation requirements and you know the commissioner sent out rules on commencements he sent out rules on commencements to private universities i i wanted to you know call him and tell him you know i i'm gonna call the president of harvard and i'm gonna tell him that he's gonna go to you to get approval for the commencement this year you know i i don't think they're going to buy that uh but it is a fact of our lives and i'm

062just wondering if because so many of you mentioned the uh having given some input into the strategic plan or having the desire to give input to the evolution of the strategic plan as it goes forward that might be an opportunity to to engage more people in just having a voice in the process i just throw that out to you is something that i heard from several several of you in that regard i also heard from many of you that the roles and responsibilities of school committee members with regard to how you can influence various elements of public school activity are unclear for example why is it that any citizen of duxbury can call the superintendent's office and give him the discharge of the contents of their mind about how they think things should go and

063yet uh school committee members have their particular roles and responsibilities now i i raise this because i want the school committee members to understand uh we have understanding of where you're coming from in your desire to be involved if i may a while back some of you may have heard me talk about this i watch c-span on sundays watch the congressional hearings because you can do that and multitask at the same time sort of the way a lot of people zoom and multitask at the same time and i heard a member of congress question the assistant secretary of agriculture about the appropriate timing for putting dressing on the salads of school lunches okay do you think that member of congress do you think that assistant secretary of education of agriculture would think for one second

064about saying to that member of congress uh that's not your responsibility you're micromanaging me you're micromanaging me i'm not going to answer that question you think that would happen but let somebody say to the police chief i'm a selectman i want to talk to you about the traffic pattern and local officials are held to a higher standard you know don't micromanage the police chief stay in your uh stay in your stand your lane in terms of what your role as a school committee member might be and uh that is raised almost everywhere we go school committee members whose constituents come to them with problems about everything i'm sure you hear you should keep track of it it's an amusing what have you heard lately from your constituents they want you to solve problems over which

065you have no jurisdiction and how do you deal with that and how do you and the superintendent work out a uh a sort of a state of data where you can have conversations without violating the the procedures and protocols that go along with an education reform bill and i i suspect it could be an issue because it's an issue everywhere and just to uh to uh love in that conversation a bit i did give you as sent out to you as one of the uh one of the handouts what we call the blue and yellow become green handout because i'm from cambridge and i'm very politically correct and there are no green people to offend so we can say when blue and yellow become green and i'm just wondering if any of these kinds of

066situations can be instructive for you to talk about your roles as school committee members trying to influence how you would uh work with the superintendent and your colleagues in the school committee any of those issues arisen any of them of concern it's it's about four pages in it says when blue and yellow become green and we gave you a list of the 25 most frequently identified areas of ambiguity and roles and responsibilities because the protocols that most districts adopt are designed to help resolve these or help people reach mutual respect and understanding and the law gives you no guidance here if any of these issues come up that you might want to want to kick around as instructive or as the basis of having a discussion yeah i mean we we did touch on one

067of them last night michelle mcnulty was with us last night so we did touch for example on parent complaints that are brought to a school committee member but um i think we could probably go down does anybody else have one off this list it was one of the documents that i've sent earlier today is that because we use that as a very important uh discussion point in a lot of these kinds of sessions i can't imagine that you all have not heard from parents at one time or another with some concern of some kind uh and it could be anything if i'm wrong is anybody who hasn't heard from parents okay uh sometimes they bring concerns to you about how i think our children are worldly enough and we should have an elementary foreign language

068program well that that's good feedback from the constituent sometimes they may come to you and say my kids and i only use the fourth grade teacher and terry smith as the teacher because terry smith is name neutral and the fourth grade is right in the middle so my kids teacher terry smith is terrible doesn't know the curriculum doesn't show up on some days degrades the kids is unfocused just just a bad teacher i want this person gone and i voted for you so call the superintendent and get rid of this teacher uh now we know what the protocol is the protocol is you refer this parent you first of all you listen respectfully to your constituents and then you refer the parent to the superintendent uh if they haven't talked to the principal you might

069suggest they call the principal but you can always refer them to the superintendent and that superintendent know that you're referring the smith family to him or her to deal with the fourth grade teacher now the superintendent may not be able to tell you how he's resolving this because he might be able to say well he can't say yes that teaches a problem that teaches in corrective action we're moving the process along because that's confidential he can certainly say yes thank you i will speak to the parent and then the parent can get back to you and tell you whatever they like and the feedback from parents can be very helpful to you when you evaluate the superintendent at the end of the evaluation period in other words when parents come back to you and say

070thank you very much the superintendent took my call talked to me referred me to somebody we're working on the issue um and i think you know i think it will resolve and the parent is happy and if you hear 10 or 15 of those comments in a row well when you evaluate the superintendent on the basis of communications with constituents you have a basis of communication and you have an opportunity to give the appropriate praise and credit we're due but if those parents come back to you and say and this has happened by the way what did you refer me to that superintendent for that person actually told me i should do what i'm told because they're experts and i'm just a parent now when you hear that 8 or 10 times the evaluation of

071the superintendent is going to look very different so feedback from constituents is a very important component of the evaluation process and i'm wondering if you actually have that built into your evaluation if that's one of the uh artifacts of of uh a measure of evaluation and i'm not suggesting that that's the right way to do it i'm just saying that for an evaluation process you want to sit down with the superintendent pick out the right goals and objectives pick out the right standards and give your feedback to the aggregator at the end of the evaluation process and all of the evaluations that are submitted to the aggregator are public documents so if you wanted to do what uh you know we had somebody in stoughton uh ten years ago who just thought that satan brought

072the superintendent to stoughton and by the way a fabulous superintendent but just decided that this person was terrible and nothing good could be said about that superintendent um that's all part of the record you could read the comments now the majority out voted that minority member in weighing those responses so the superintendent was always well evaluated but still you get your shot at giving your feedback and it's on the record and nobody wants on the record this superintendent is not a good communicator or this superintendent is ineffective at managing the budget or can't supervise principles or doesn't follow the curriculum they want to see other more favorable comments and working on the evaluation system can be a very important tool for giving your feedback positive you know what they call cool feedback and warm feedback

073so we have we did a revision of our evaluation system in 2016 because it was uh shortly after the um desi framework was delivered which was what 41 different standards for superintendent performance and it was unwieldy and um not uh not district specific enough to be useful either to the superintendent for setting goals or to the school committee for working with the superintendent to set goals and then evaluating in an objective way so we have a process that involves goal setting at the beginning of the year and then with um a setup of evidence that we track and an interim and then a end of year evaluation against a performance document with these goals and so that has worked pretty effectively around um the the goals that are set uh it gives this my view

074gives the school committee a pretty accurate way to track superintendent performance goals and and how those are being met and what uh what pieces of evidence what benchmarks what actions are being taken at any point in the year uh and then that's coupled with desi framework of 41 standard things that we take you can't use all 41 standards pardon you don't use all 41 standards no but you have to have some way of picking which ones are relevant for the goals that you're setting for your district so it rather than starting with the 41 standards you want to start with the goals that you want to achieve for your district and then work backwards to identify which of those standards is applies in this particular case um for this particular year this these particular sets

075of goals so that um my feeling having used it since 2016 is that it it is it provides a good framework for a discussion around performance um that's tied into the goals for the district um and which are linked to the strategic plan so it's kind of it has its own integrity and but it's clearly always open for improvement um so well it looks like it looks like you've actually been faithful to the department's general outline we we would encourage people never to use more than eight or ten different uh criteria despite what the goals may be because otherwise it's going to be unreasonable and i guarantee you that the commissioner of education is not sitting around his office saying i wonder if those duxbury people have followed the ag or the matrix as we

076have instructed but you should you should certainly make sure that the members are happy with the tool as you update it every year or every other year depending upon how you do it and that would be an important opportunity for people who are particularly the newer members who come on to be able to have a an impact in in doing your job i just have a a quick question um last night it's kind of with what we're about we're evaluating but last night miss mcnulty had mentioned that we also oversee the business manager and the sped director um and i was just curious if you could clarify what our role is in those two your role is to um confirm and contract with the business manager and the special education director as well as the

077assistant superintendents once they are hired it is the superintendent's responsibility to supervise them but the contracts and the compensation parameters are determined by the school committee in other words the contract is signed by the school committee so so do we go ahead do we have any oversight like um would they talk to us about their evaluations or anything like are we involved in any part of that like i would assume the contract um i guess i'm just asking for clarification do we just sign whatever doctor in well obviously we would read it but do we sign what he gives us do we have um the opportunity to provide feedback anything like that i guess that's why i just want to understand my role well other than the contract like in the contract a school committee

078would set the compensation parameters and the policies surrounding the contracts that would be signed with the people that are confirmed by the school committee and the school committee would vote to confirm the appointment of the assistant superintendents by whatever title the special education director by whatever title and the chief business officer by whatever title once they're hired they are under the supervision of the superintendent the school committee may refuse to renew a contract and the school committee may by policy of the district determine what's in the contract so for example there are some school committees that have a policy that says there will be no vacation buyback or no sick leave buyback or no health insurance benefits greater than that which are provided to the teachers so that as a policy question you can set

079the parameters for contracting but the supervision goes to the superintendent now if you believe and this is hypothetical because i don't know any of these people if you believe that the business manager is ineffective uh if the special education director is incompetent uh the assistant superintendent is uh not doing a good job when you evaluate the superintendent on the superintendent's ability to manage administrators that's where you get an opportunity to provide feedback now see the the the law as it was changed in 1993 gave the superintendents a degree of autonomy that they did not have before but here's the thing it did give the school committee members exclusive authority over setting policy and budget and through policy you can get to pretty much anything you want um and there are hundreds and hundreds of model

080policies now uh so that's why i i like to probe into some of the uh the more ambiguous areas of responsibility because some cases are clear who appoints the principal the superintendent does the school committee have any role in the appointment of the principal only in so far as the school committee sets personnel policy so you may have a policy that says the superintendent shall seek uh to employ a diverse representation of administrators in the district or the superintendent shall consult with parents on the appointment of the principal that's why you sometimes see search committees but you can't tell the superintendent whom to hire and you can't tell the superintendent how to exercise professional judgment that authority was given specifically to the superintendent under the education reform law whereas prior to 1993 you could walk

081into a school and tell the superintendent you wanted teachers transferred from one classroom to another as a body that you'd be surprised how much time we wasted on petty personnel stuff and i will say to you and i will say this with with emphasis the reasons that massachusetts have risen to the top in terms of student performance is because the authority for appointment of personnel was given to the superintendents and that has effectively minimized the role of patronage in most of our school district appointments now if you feel that they're not being supervised well that's when you use your educator evaluation tool superintendent evaluation tool it's not an immediate resolution of your problem uh another another uh well another gray area came on the issue of of academic presentations you don't supervise the music department

082you have very little say other than the budget of the music department but you can say we would like to have an academic presentation on how the music program k to four improves student achievement are we getting value for our money because research that informs your policy is a legitimate function of a legislative body so you can ask you know arlington did the second meeting every month was a different academic program and they presented middle school math one month elementary music the other high school foreign languages the third and they had a good academic presentation once a month i don't know if they still do it but they did that and the superintendent warned the department heads i do not want to see a dog and pony show i do not want to see little

083third graders marched in here singing a sweet little round in harmony and aren't they cute and then they all go home and you applaud that's not it i want to know why the way we teach music makes them better at math or as i said when to introduce algebra middle school math is the question of the ages by the way i don't know if any of you i i'm not an educator so i don't know why but everyone always talks about we can never fix the middle school math situation and i don't know why i once one district did a session on why girls outperform boys in every grade at every level and by the way they have since 1908 at every grade in every subject at every level with a certain exception the females

084have outperformed the meals so they wanted to know why so they had an academic presentation the community watched the community said hey the school committee is uh helping to enlighten us this is a pretty enlightened group of people so can we you heard me breathe yeah um just sort of going back to we were talking about evaluating um when we do the superintendent's evaluation and um i think we were talking around communication and it's really interesting because you were talking about constituents might call and say xyz and how is it resolved i would say we all hear from very different people some people have elementary right and so we're all getting vastly different feedback which is going to play into the evaluation process as it should right but i'm wondering if we could do or

085if you think we need um some sort of workshop about evaluating the evaluation process when the evaluation process was first conceived we were at the table and we fought very hard for the rights of the superintendent the principals and the school committees to use their professional judgment in giving a ranking and a rating to the people they evaluated so for example if a principal feels that a teacher is proficient but others might argue that the data show that the kids aren't performing as well as they should but the superintendent's professional judgment is this person is proficient the superintendent has the right to let professional judgment guide what they do same for school committees so if you have a matrix for the superintendent's evaluation and you use a scoring matrix and the matrix tells you to

086lean this way as opposed to that way but your professional judgment as a board says we're going to lean this way the board has the authority to do that therefore the board needs really some instruction and some training around how to evaluate the superintendent effectively in order to be to be objective and that can be that can go in any direction and uh i'm not saying that because i believe you've been unobjective but uh as as members come and go it's always a good idea to do that kind of training every couple of years and and we do that uh as we detail through the evaluation process and when you have your evaluation session uh that's a good opportunity for people to engage without limit and thoughtfully and completely and giving their feedback and you

087know many school committees have good discussions about this although see the superintendent has no legal expectation of privacy and neither do you everybody else in the district has the expectation of privacy so you are evaluated by the voters and you're evaluated by your colleagues and everything you do is pretty much public and the superintendent is vulnerable in the same way is there any obligation to provide evidence for your judgment as a small committee member when the when the when the process begins you negotiate with the superintendent you develop with the superintendent the evidences you will use but the evidence as to using your personal professional judgment has not been subject to a matrix of standards that i have ever seen it's a gut issue as opposed to other kinds of measures that you'll have that

088are listed in the uh and we we have a uh like we call it the idiots guide because we we took 800 pages of stuff from the state and condensed it to 12 pages so people could use it simply and it's uh we jokingly call it the idiot's guide but we're very proud of it and it will help you get a sense but but it's it's also written under the principle that the heart has the gut has never uh lost out to the brain when it comes to making a professional decision usually works to the advantage of the superintendent by the way usually the the ability to use your gut or your professional judgment generally is a counterweight to pure use of data is there any requirement to use data at all uh you could

089mutually agree to use data you certainly can use student achievement in student performance data for the district uh subject to whatever is mutually agreeable you see the great the great compromise that was achieved was that the unions agreed that teachers could be evaluated on the basis of student performance data or other measurable data subject to collective bargaining wink wink wink subject to collective bargaining and that teachers could be compensated on the basis of performance subject to collective bargaining so that's how the agreement came to take place and then the commissioner and the education secretary ran right to washington they had a group hug with arne duncan the secretary of education and they said look at massachusetts we have paper performance and data based evaluations they didn't mention it was all subject to collective bargaining i

090don't know whether you ever bargained it but i don't know a district that has but with regard to superintendents it's the same standards there is an opportunity to use the evaluation system just like the strategic planning process as a way to engage the community the the board uh collaboratively in looking at things carefully and closely yeah the reason i'm asking these questions is that i don't i don't recall this there's uh on the document there's any obligation for evidence-based judgment which i find kind of curious um you know at every other level in education educator evaluations evidence the evidence basis is kind of set out as um being expected or the standard and it doesn't seem to be that obvious it's not that obvious but it's it's embedded but that's why you negotiate depending on

091what the contract says you work out with the superintendent mutually agreeable standards that are acceptable to both of you and for the district goals you might you know they're supposed to be smart goals smart specific measurable attainable relevant and timely uh so a smart goal would have data measures for assessment yeah those those do they just the specific goals i'm thinking more of that the kind of broader judgments that you're required to make i think in general if we had an an issue that we were going to put on an evaluation that i would definitely would hope that we have specific examples to support our judgment and i think as a committee that's something that we can agree upon um i would hope going you know going forward but um and i think that was

092a you know just objective measurements in general i think are the best way to go about things it shouldn't be based off of feelings and thoughts it really needs to be objective so that's my two cents and i haven't even seen the evaluation so um that's my feeling too it's just um it's kind of a curious system the way it's set up the the department of education side of it the district side of it i think is pretty coherent there were literally 800 pages plus of matrices guidances rules regulations uh don't get us started on that that's the whole thing that's uh but that there is a real long i mean school committees come together over these things even though they may disagree on what the ratings will be it's a great group process that

093is helpful to everyone so you come together do you mean coming together on planning the evaluation process or coming together on the results of the evaluation and having a principled discussion about where you're going to go with this what do you mean by that i'll go with yes end of the year you all give your feedback to the aggregator okay the aggregator comes back to you and says here's what i think is an aggregated evaluation individually or is it individually or is a group well it can come back as a group and who's included in that meeting everybody it's a live meeting it's a public meeting yeah yeah okay unfortunately well i said unfortunately it is a public meeting unless you're talking about character and reputation or alleging improprieties the superintendents superintendent's evaluation is a

094public process so so discussion around the evaluation after it's been aggregated by the chair subject under approval sorry subject to your approval the committee has to approve the aggregated report right yeah okay but that but okay and when when does that when does that when does that approval happen when do you aggregate the feedback from the super i think i think in the i think in the past what we've done is we've individually filled out the evaluations we've sent the written evaluations to the chairs aggravate aggravated um i don't know if the chair is aggravated the chair aggregates them and then we in open meeting we you know basically sort of present the evaluation publicly um but we don't at least to my knowledge we haven't sort of kind of discussed the evaluation as a

095group to come to some sort of sort of cohesive agreement on it which i think is what we're kind of talking about right now right you could yeah i mean yeah there's oh in the past not at least i remember that there's always been you know the chair presents it and then there's opportunity for comments and discussion you know and we've always yeah right and i think that's where if somebody disagrees with the aggregated data then you'd have a conversation around it yeah i just don't think it's been framed that way that's not a criticism it just hasn't been framed that way yeah no that's fair and the timing the timing right this we have currently we have three regular meetings scheduled and this you know we're gonna need to probably do this before the

096end of the year right so we gotta talk about that's gonna be the timing we need to talk about that and we'll have to talk about it at one meeting to kind of align on the process and then the next meeting to actually do the evaluation yeah yeah matt i i agree with you we've never like publicly said you know what i mean done the math at a meeting and done the aggravate aggregate and voted right the chair does it ahead of time but exactly does anybody sit down and check it while we're walking through it no you trust the chair has done it accurately based on the individual the five reports exactly that's how it's always been done because if not we'd have to have two meetings i guess i don't know but yeah

097right it's up to now it's almost been like a game show it's just like you you give your own evaluation you don't know what the other evaluations are and then when we publicly talk about it we just essentially just sort of we don't always do it this way but i know the last time we just sort of like we went around the room and sort of just gave like a high level sound bite of what we of what we individually presented but it wasn't framed as like okay this is our opportunity to you know talk through our evaluations and compare notes or come to some sort of agreement or disagreement and hash it out and again that's not a criticism i think that's just the way it's worked up to now and i think what

098i'm learning is that if we we can do that if we want to do that um it just is done publicly it's fine the the evaluations of all members of the school committee given to the aggregator are public documents okay great and matt we could we used to do that years ago even though they'd be in aggregate it would be well it was more when it was a paper document but we would go one at a time and read our comments and it was much more um it was longer it was much more thorough you would read your comments and what you rated the person the superintendent and then the aggregate would sort of come at that meeting too it was obvious but so the chair would have it ahead of time but every single

099person would have an opportunity to actually read what they had written if they so chose and most people did yeah that that predates me my first my first one was with the former superintendent i had only worked with them for a few months and right the the chair at the time read everyone's a value we sort of summarized everyone's evaluation and unfortunately for me gave color commentary on one of the things that i wrote oh matt must have had a bad week or something like that because he wrote this so that sort of to me like created like a almost like a cul a culture of like okay well you know it i guess you got to be seriously politically correct on your evaluations or otherwise there's going to be so um no this is

100how this is helpful to know and i think i mean the other aspect which is glenn touched on is that each of the documents from or each of the evaluations from the school committee members is a public document and the whole purpose of doing a performance evaluation is to it's a what a formative assessment you're using it to direct future action and so um uh the aggregation process to me isn't that meaningful you know to say oh on this aspect he's a four or he's a two or you know that just doesn't um doesn't necessarily lead to an informed response going forward it's more useful to use the commentary the opportunity for commentary within the evaluate evaluation process to um to uh describe the future that you're looking for um and that's uh to me

101that's the more um the more meaningful part of the process well you do have a real opportunity to uh talk about the evaluation process going forward and to make it a collaborative process and engage everyone in the school community in the school committee and participating in that [Music] there are so many other things that we could get to uh how much time that people have left but you've done a little bit of talking about communicating and communicating with the public as as an element of your protocols and norms one of the things that emerged from my discussions with people is and my discussions with people around the state the impact of social media and how that's changed our lives now it's had a big impact on us we have we we have a lot of

102social media going out of our organization but you know we took a survey of our membership and we actually tallied the percentage of our members who engage with us in social media anybody want to guess what that percentage is let's throw a number of 12 percent return i was going to say 10 julia i was right there with you if this was card sharks which you might watch on the game show channel at 10 o'clock every night on one of the cable stations do you guess some whatever the answer is four percent most of our members don't read social media and they don't go to twitter and i thought that was very interesting of course the people who do go to social media are the people who uh are really into the inside game so

103i hear from legislators all the time most of whom are not very happy with us but it is what it is uh but uh so you wanna you know social media is free speech and in some cases it's protected freedom of the press if you're a blogger and social media has created more problems than jin and and vodka have uh in the history of their existence but uh this is a a point that i would talk to you about social media may be important to have as a presence if you want your community to have access to you there are occasions when people will go to your website uh we'll look forward to hearing from the teachers texts and emails and it can have a very effective impact on certain things but it can also

104uh as i said earlier in the meeting it's a place to get a room started very quickly and not necessarily an accurate one so i would just think about when you're looking at your communication strategies i don't know whether you've talked about how you address social media how you engage social media but that might be worth having a uh a separate conversation and a more detailed way because that is how you may be communicating with a lot of your parents the feedback i got from talking to my duxbury friends is that they think things are great now they don't you know they may or may not have kids in school but uh uh you know they're not as they say they're not happy about some of the bad press but the district is held in

105high regard and the school committee as a body is held in high regard because not everybody follows the day-to-day operations of the school district so i think rather than having a bad reputation i mean you know so one of the challenges you're talking uh you've been talking about using social media for outgoing communication from school committee to parents but um or to the community but obviously there's communication coming kind of in the other direction or maybe just going past us in social media where um feedback around the schools uh is shared on social media and there's um because it's social media it's designed to grab your attention right that's the whole function of social media platforms so there's a sense that uh that opinions that are shared on social media might be pervasive across the

106community when in fact how do we know that and so what what are other school committees doing to kind of parse out what happens on social media what gets discussed on social media and then what actually is the um kind of spectrum of opinion on the ground that's not on social media they do what you do they try to figure it out some of them don't worry about it others panic incidentally and they move on public has a very short memory unless you have a a major a major major crisis well we've had two of those no yeah but but but no no i'm talking about um i'm talking about even bigger than that you you've had you know a bad media month because of a couple of things but you know people outside of

107duxbury know that there was something going on but they don't remember what district it was i mean it's quite i mean how many of you have been to a school committee meeting in another district how many of you can name any members of the marshfield school committee i mean i i lived in cambridge i can't name a single government official in somerville except maybe the mayor we live in our in our insulated world and things blow in and out very quickly especially on social media yeah whoever's giving you communications advice on dealing with the big picture has really been very effective at limiting the potential for collateral damage because when i'm outside in other parts of the state they haven't heard of what's happened in duxbury unless you're in duxbury or uh actually pay attention

108to everything that's in the globe or the herald uh i mean i'm not downplaying the seriousness of what you're dealing with but it's not something that's going to have a long-standing adverse implication uh might be you know it might be harder for the school committee members to get past it because it's getting personal and the constituents bring it to you but uh my god knows i've been through a ton of stuff it's amazing to me how quickly this stuff vanishes from the from the public scene i'm not trying to make light of it but i'm saying it you know it's serious you want to deal with it appropriately you want to send the right message to the kids and the parents but this too shall pass and school's going to open up in september and

109everyone will be back to school seeking to return to normalcy very quickly sort of like you're not old enough to remember the blizzard of 78 but by the summer everybody had forgotten when was it was it february was it like you know last winter's weather nobody remembers it but at the time and for the week afterwards a blizzard is catastrophic well i the only thing i would say to that is um i think that this has implications beyond just sort of like the immediate memory short long-term memory of people and so you know we um i think that there's there's a pretty i think that there's pretty shared perspective in the school committee in the administration that the um the district for example has been underfunded habitually over time and so you know this is

110just my opinion but my opinion is that we it's incumbent on us to make a case to the community for you know for example to see value in properly funding the school that requires buy-in um [Music] so at the same time we and again this is just my opinion i'm not speaking for the committee but at the same time to sort of land on well this too shall pass or whatever people are going to get to normal i i'm not sure so that i sort of agree with that because one i think there's a trust issue right now that needs to be addressed because of these two uh crises that are going on at the very least there's a there's a trust issue so trust has to be regained regardless of what people are putting

111on social media or not so um the my question is is what are some of the strategies that you've seen other school committees do to be able to get a better pulse on where the committee where this where the community's you know sort of attitude and pre and and and opinion is because i think we do a very good job of saying well it could just be like a few people but you know we don't know about the other people it's always like the same people one of the things i've been advocating for is like a listening session and so i'd like to know like what your advice would be or whether you've seen other school committees put together some sort of a forum where we don't say anything but we put together a structure

112where the community can come and talk about what their concerns are what their you know issues are what their challenges are what they think we need to be doing better what we're doing well at as a data point not the data point but as a data point um because right now i just get the feeling like we sort of have our it is very isolated i think that i'm guilty of it too i think i have a perception of how the community sort of perceives us that's probably wrong but i have to go with what i know so i go with who i hear from i go with who i call i go with who i see at the supermarket i go with what um so to me i think not only is it would

113be worthwhile to do some sort of like a listening session so we can understand where the community is at but also it extends i think the right olive branch to be like we care about what you think so have you seen that or can we do that would you recommend it when we we talk about being and i heard some of this when i when i talked to you guys um being the place with the table to come and let the community talk to you easiest thing to do we're going to have a listening session on on the public schools we're going to use it to uh i mean i i bet right now as we're about do you see it done yes can you give an example uh cambridge does it all the time

114just just public forums around schools okay uh you could go online and ask people in melissa but it's first of all it's very easy to set up and you'd need to do more than one but uh you know i bet right now your superintendent has started to think about fiscal year 2023 in addition to 2022 how do you form the basis of your goal setting for 2023 you start listening to people now i agree so you could be the place with the table yeah no i agree with that i i would hate to have the i would i would hate to be sort of viewed as we don't care about your opinion because you're not educators but we need you at town meeting to vote for more money because we need money so i that

115you know i that that's where i see a real disconnect in the back and forth communication what i would suggest is that the uh you know the leadership of the of the school committee talk about a series of community forums over a period of time and invite people to uh come in and talk excuse me come in and talk to you uh as i i would i would make it more enticing by making it part of a you know thinking about 2023 or a conversation about reopening school knees again i do want to i've been to lots of these forums some of them are helpful some of them are not but you won't know unless you try i guarantee you the rule of thirds will apply a third of the people will come for attention

116a third of the people will come for therapy and a third of the people will come to help you figure out what you're trying to figure out but it's you don't want to wait for a precipitous crisis to bring everybody out and to have an enraged mob uh giving you feedback you know we saw this we saw this in medford give you an idea of how this stuff works uh roy belson was the superintendent he announced his retirement for the following june a few months away and at some point in march allegedly a gun cartridge was found in the back of the high school auditorium now i say allegedly because other than one of the housekeepers who was cleaning and allegedly found it and put it in the principal's office from which it disappeared no

117one ever saw it but the fact that a gun cartridge was allegedly found and no one called the police created a situation where 600 people showed up at the high school auditorium screaming for the superintendent's head so they had a big meeting it was vicious it was bitter the superintendent ultimately agreed that he would uh retire earlier and depart in in a few weeks and suddenly um the whole problem went away and three weeks after that things had so calmed down that the school committee asked the superintendent to rescind his premature retirement and he stayed until the end of his uh tilliana's term and had the biggest testimonial dinner i think i've ever seen on the way out whereas only a few months earlier he was uh the evilest thing that ever set foot in

118men no one remembered the other incident when i say rule of thirds it was exactly what i mean it was five six hours of of hearing and uh so you want to make sure that you make it the most constructive opportunity under the best circumstances to have somebody to come in and and talk to you in a constructive way and you know the public is not intimidated by the presence of its own school committee so they'll be very happy to come and talk to you just i want to be cognizant of time it's 6 59 and i think maybe you have another obligation in 60 seconds yes yeah we don't want to take away from the game show channel so no um so i just i think um i'll say thank you on behalf of

119the committee and i think maybe we might need a follow-up um but let's be happy to speak with you about following up maybe helping you in whatever way you feel is appropriate yeah forward thank you yeah i know i mean there's a bunch of things that we didn't get to tonight so we'll have to kind of discuss as a committee how to navigate that going forward but i think this was a great um helpful discussion you want to say that i think you're in a very good place from which to move forward good for this in general that's hopeful thank you thanks glenn okay okay thank you thank you oh he's quick he's done on to the next one okay um so i don't know about you guys but i kind of like i'm at

120the point where i need to kind of stop kind of look back at the original agenda that he sent and then maybe we can kind of regroup next week at our regularly scheduled meeting if that if that works for next steps sounds good okay i do i do have one one quick question um and i hope this is appropriate to do um the remember i mentioned the like remarks for the um event this weekend the interfaith council event um i did just want to make sure that you guys were comfortable with i basically um looked at the proclamation pulled two sentences from that and then added a sentence about what we'll be doing so would you guys like me to read that to you to make sure that everyone's comfortable with that um i don't

121know if we need to vote on it it's just a very minor thing but i'll just i'll just read it i might as well um uh the duck spray school committee is committed to ensuring that our school district is a safe and welcoming community that embraces diversity equity and inclusion we unequivocally condemn discrimination in all forms as elected leaders we recognize our responsibility and we'll be and we will be reviewing our existing policies and and where necessary enact changes to build a stronger more equitable community as always we welcome and encourage feedback and questions from the community as we navigate a path forward together so that that basically it you know aligns with the town's proclamation and just kind of puts the school um to the front of that is is that is everybody comfortable

122with that sure yep okay yep kristen you're good yeah okay i saw i saw yes okay um okay i think that's it then unless anybody i mean is there any final or should we just regroup regroup for next week and um okay and i have all your input for the agenda so we'll finalize that tomorrow and get that out great so i move that we adjourn the meeting second all right julia hi kelly aye matt aye kristen hi and shannon i okay thanks everyone have a good night thank you bye