001All right. Good evening everyone. Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026 and this is a meeting of the North School Committee. We have no one for invitation to speak. So we'll pass over that and go to announcements, correspondence and distribution. Anybody have anything for for that? I have a quick announcement um around I Ready testing. So, our kindergarten and grade 5 students are currently engaging in the winter I Ready testing this week for math. They'll engage in reading I Ready during the week of February 2nd. And then our kindergarten and dual language students will be assessed in the I Ready Spanish literacy during the week of February 9th. Families can expect a letter to be sent home prior to the reading diagnostic at the end of January explaining the relationship um of this diagnostic with our
002early literacy screening. Um for the middle school students, they will begin their testing in February for both reading and math and parent letters will be sent home with the results um after February vacation. So if anybody has any questions, people can reach out to their child's teachers um about the I Ready testing periods. I just want to thank our uh the Milford Highway Department, our building custodians, and our maintenance team for keeping us moving on time um the last couple days. Um they they were up early. Um the Milford Highway Department, I know, is working through the night last night in and um pre-saltting, pre-treating all of our our roadways today. Um it's I think uh I think I was a I was able to walk around all the different properties um and just making
003sure that the all the areas were safe and um I'm proud to say that all of the at least internal grounds of our schools were all cleared and safe and and um ready for school both yesterday and today. Um, tomorrow morning looks a little uh looks like everything's going to freeze again. So, they're going to be up and at it again in the morning. So, um, I just wanted to make sure uh I said thank you to them on on camera because I appreciate all the work that they do um keeping us moving and keeping on time. So, thank you. >> Excellent. All right, that'll bring us to the general chairperson update. I have one update um courtesy of Mr. Wilson. Thank you for the uh MSBA project update. So, uh, next Tuesday, the MSBA
004will be holding their meeting to review the architectural services proposals. Um, Mr. Walsh, Craig, and, uh, and Chris will be representing Milfred. There's five proposals that were received and reviewed. The group anticipates narrowing it down to two to three proposals with potential interviews on the selected companies to follow after that. And that is the entire update, right? >> Greg, anything else from that? >> Correct. Y >> fantastic. All right. So, we'll move forward now with updates from the EL program director and the assistant director of multilingual learners and dual language programming. >> Hello. Good evening. Um, thank you for having us again this year. Uh, we believe that the slides have been shared with you. So, we'll just reference the slides. Um, so you'll have them up. Uh, on slide two, you'll see that there's
005a few definitions and you can just access those as you see fit throughout the presentation. Tonight, we're going to go over um some of our demographics for 2526. We'll look at um access state assessment and data. We're right in the um beginning of administering our state assessment. We'll then talk about our English learner sustainable improvement plan impact dates and then I'm going to have Julia cover uh talk to you tonight about our dual language programming. So the first thing I wanted to point out is on slide four you'll see our demographics across multiple years. I want to apologize that in the addition that you got it the the the years got cut off on the bottom, but I'll pay I want to pay close attention to the to you'll see 1588. That was our SIMS
006data in 2024. We do not have SIMS data yet um in school profiles on the DESI website. Uh so that's missing there, but next year clearly that will be there. And then um moving forward, as of Tuesday um on the 6th, our current English learner designation number is 1,317. So um that number there is due to reclassifications, things that are happening politically across our country. Um and we are seeing some students coming in in the family resource center. This week alone coming back from winter break, we have five students who are designated English learners. So, this number is growing, decreasing, growing, and dec decreasing. But we're keeping a an eye on our student um population districtwide, but also concentrating on looking at our subopuls of our students with disabilities and our English learners. But that's
007our current number as of Tuesday. On slide five, you'll see that um these are our um our percentages per school. And you'll see that at Memorial and Brookside Elementary School, we're staying very consistent as we have in the past in different of new students coming in or students transferring out of district. Our numbers are staying relatively the same as they have in the past uh uh two year two years. where we are seeing a larger decrease is at our middle school and our high school where students are usually coming um immigrating later on in life and that's where we're not seeing our students coming and we're also seeing a decrease of students at that at that grade level. In slide six you'll see that um by grade level and one thing I want to point
008out is actually this year we have more kindergarten kindergarteners than we have in several years. So, it's really interesting to look at the data to think about what's happening demographically across our country and then looking really micro at each grade level. So, we're predicting or I could predict that we might have more or if not the same amount of incoming kindergarteners, which will keep our numbers pretty consistent to the 1300 as we reclassify students and then new kindergarteners coming in. we might be looking around the same numbers next year that we are currently seated at in November. Um, but also things may change. Um, on slide seven, that gives you where the students at in their proficiency levels. You can see that 444 students are at English language proficiency level one and then two, three,
009four. You can see the numbers there. But if you look at that on the bottom of the of the graph, you'll see that the majority of our students who are at an English language proficiency level one are at Memorial and Brookside because that's where they're beginning their education. And so as students are moving up through the grades, first of all, they're not in order. They're in alphabetical order. I couldn't get that to shift in my graph. So just pay attention that it's like by um school and not um by grade level cons. So you'll see that our proficiency, our students are gaining in proficiency across the grade levels, which brings us to reclassification criteria being a 4.2. In slide nine, you'll see that last year we had um over the past four years, we've had
010the highest number of students that we've reclassified. That's a little bit because we are getting back postcoid of getting the our students um being immersed in English, getting access to education and meeting reclassification criteria. We hope to be reclassifying around the same amount of students this year. We will know those results in April. Um our first language um and in um slide 10, you'll see our e and fell student um by home language. This is has been consistent. We do have more Brazilian Portuguese speakers in our designated as English learners and fells than we do our Spanish or other languages. In slide 11, you'll you'll see that um our district is staying consistent with first language, not English. We are staying consistent at 55% of our students have a home language other than English designated
011in our um X2 which is filled out by their registration paperwork at the family resource center which means one of every two of our families utilizes interpretation and just highlighting the importance of our family resource center and our interpretation and translation staff. And slide 12 is where I'm really really excited to talk to you. And that's where I really like when we can highlight what we're doing well in Milford public schools. In our 2025 access um comparison data, we have um the highest percentage of L's making progress. 53% of our students on access across the 11 similar school districts. The state average is a is 44%. Even more so, if you look on slide 13, you can look at specifically our district at grade spans and how they're performing across similar school districts. And Milford,
012it had the highest SGPA out of our similar 10 districts in grades one to two span. For the past three years in a row, Woodland has had the top SGP on access. At Stacy, last year, we had the highest SGPA out of our 10 comparison districts. And at the high school, we were around seventh and eighth out of our 10 districts. And I want to um address that because we were given some corrective action. Um, in our last tiered focus monitoring, I spoke to you about Desi coming in and doing our tier focus monitoring last year. We were given some action items and those are being putting being being put into place here at the high school. We're really focusing on our curriculum development. You'll see that in the next slide. And also in our
013partnerships of co-eing in the math and science classrooms. On slide 15, you'll you'll have you have a link to our English learner department sustainable improvement plan. We create one of these every year and focus on alignment to the improvements um that we need to make in the English language department. Um also in conjunction with our district strategic objectives. So we have um our goal one, we have new WEDA language charts and curriculum and assessment alignment happening. Um in goals two through four, you'll see that um TFM uh action items around English language development curriculum um for grades 4 through 12. Our goal number five is around the alternate access for our students in sub our English learner students with disabilities in subsparate programming. There's a new assessment last year and because we got new scores
014and new results, we've had to make some shifts in on in our instruction to meet those test assessments and we're working around um preparation units and progress monitoring. And our sixth goal is around our dual language programming um assessment. In slide 16, I just want to give you an update of the dates that we are um our EMPAC, our multilingual parent advisory council is meeting. Our first date of this year was on October 28th and it was an evening with um superintendent um Dr. Conigley where he led a discussion group um on his new platform as superintendent. Um on January 13th, which is just next Tuesday, uh our curriculum supervisor of literacy, Carol Severki, will be um leading a discussion on literacy initiatives and I Ready assessments and um and so our families will be
015able to meet with her next week. Our March date is still TBD and in May we'll be uh working with families around English language development programming and WETA access because we'll have our our student results at that time and then I'm going to pass it over to Julia for dual language programming which starts on slide 17. Thank you. Yeah, starting off on slide 17 you're going to see a couple of charts um showing the student populations in our two current kindergarten classrooms as well as the three weight lists that we have. So, we had almost a third of our incoming kindergarten students who registered last year um join our lottery. So, we do have um these weight lists. Um we do see some movement in the classrooms and movement off of our weight lists. This
016has been entirely due to families changing residences. There have been no families who have withdrawn from the program by choice. Um, moving on to slide 18, you're just going to see some highlights, a little bit of student work and a link to the newsletter from our first trimester. As expected, all of our students are participating in um equal programming as other students. They're using expeditionary learning for their English literacy, HMAL elector for Spanish literacy, which is also a green lit program, and they participate in IM for math. We've been able to provide some of our special programming in Spanish. um from time to time for students. So when Miss Marcella comes to do an SEAL lesson with students, she's able to do that in Spanish. They also participate in library in Spanish every other week.
017We've been able to work that out, which is good. Okay, moving on to the next slide. You're going to see some upcoming events for spring 2026. These are our enrollment and lottery events. This list is based on the um activities we did last year. It's a little bit curated and a little bit tighter. We expect um that these are going to be our annual activities each year um through kindergarten registration and leading up to the dual language lottery. These are led by me as the assistant director, other dual language staff and also F FRC staff. On the next slide 20, you're going to see a little bit about grade one. So, while we have kindergarten um in implementation right now and while we are preparing for next year's kindergarteners to come in, we also have
018a third plate spinning in the air and that's getting ready to roll up to grade one. So, we have already identified our grade one teachers and they're working in partnership right now in a switch model pilot so we can work out any scheduling issues that might come up unexpectedly before we bring on Spanish instruction as another complicating factor. Um, I meet regularly with our grade 1 teachers during TCTS to talk about how the pilot is going and to prepare for next year, thinking about what schedule's going to work best and how they're going to be doing their instruction. Um, also later this spring, you're going to see our grade 1 budget initiatives for FY27. Right. Moving on to the next slide, um, 21, we also have a six-year implementation and rollout plan for K through
019five. So that sheet is organized with a different school year in each tab and it's listing annual activities that we'll need to accomplish during implementation as we're you know preparing for the next year and implementing a certain grade level. And you're also going to see some major milestones such as implementing the dual language design team at Woodland in the next year when the students actually arrive at Woodland doing Woodland building signage things like this. Right on the next slide, handinhand with our implementation plan, I've also included a projected budget for K through five. So this is what we foresee as being budget initiatives um each year going forward. This is based on our current spending and our current plans. It doesn't include, of course, things that might be subject to change like programmatic transitions. Um,
020things like things like that. We also often get um a lot of deals from our person at HMH, Shelley. She's the best. She'll uh throw in a little digital license with us to save us a bunch of money on handbooks if we need it. Um, she's great. So, none of that is included in there because I can't I can't put that on Shelly right now. Um, but that's what I've got for you and uh I think we have some time for questions. >> Yeah. >> For uh either of us. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, we talked fast. >> Anybody have any? >> No, I don't think >> questions. >> Um, first amazing like this data looks awesome. I'm so happy to see the progress. So, congratulations to you and the whole team. I think it's
021speaks volumes about what you've been able to do um over the course of several years. Um, one question for you, Julia. Uh so I see the wait list. >> Do you foresee in a year or two if that weight list continues for cohorts, you know, enter new entering cohorts, do you foresee asking for more teachers to support a second group of uh the immersion program? >> That's a big question. So when we started these two classrooms, we didn't add any classrooms to Memorial, right? We converted two classrooms. If we're seeing interest in the community, I think it would be a big project to bring on um another classroom and it would really depend on um movement of our teachers who are maybe deciding to leave Milford or retire who we have already on staff. For
022example, you know, if in kindergarten in a few years we had a staff who was fully bilingual in English and Spanish, they could teach um one um what do you call it? >> Like a self-contained >> self-contained. Thank you. They could teach one self-contained class and still do a 50-50 model. There just wouldn't be a switch, right? So, we could do that, but we would have to think about what's going to happen to those students in grade one. Do we have someone on our grade one team? So, I see it almost as if we were going to expand, it would be like starting a whole second program. >> Yeah. >> Right. Um, but yeah, I think something to think about for the next five years at least. And do you have like a threshold in
023mind of like if the weight list is always 40 kids every year, like would you say, "Hey, we should probably explore that." >> I might consider looking at um what uh school the students are zoned to originally and if it was pretty much equal between Memorial and Brookside, it might be a better idea to start a program at Brookside. >> Awesome. >> Might be here. So, I've been around long enough that I remember when this was like a lofty idea and so it's just so amazing to actually see it in action. So, Craig, I hope we can get back on the school tour route at some point because I'd love to just get into this classroom and just like see it first, one of these classrooms to see firsthand. It's amazing. So, thanks for all
024the work. >> John, I was curious kind of what the um impact involvement has been this year, just given kind of some of the broader context. I know we went to one meeting, the room was literally standing room only. Just curious kind of how that's working. >> Yeah. So um based on this year so far like when we had um our October meeting, it was also when ICE was very present in Milford and Massachusetts. Um and so we had about 28 families that that day. Um >> and just as many student, you know, children in the in the child care. Um we did offer just the other night an access overview for our um families and nine nine families showed up. So there's still a lot of fear in the community even though ICE isn't
025as >> active. Thank you. Um so I can't it's very hard to predict at this time. Um, but I will say like I tonight was like one of the lottery nights for our um SP um our English class adult classes here at the high school uh in partnership with Framingham Public Schools and the parking lot is packed. So you >> Excellent. Okay. >> Yep. Excellent. And then any sort of thoughts or impact in terms of as we evolve the graduation requirements on our EL high school EL students that are still making progress, right? That are Can you clarify your question? >> So, we're Yep. We're kind of evolving, right? We're adjusting. We're no longer using MCCAST. So, now we're sort of expanding kind of the graduation requirements. I was just curious kind of any interaction
026with some of our EL learners. >> Yeah. So, I guess what this is a good question because the state hasn't shifted any impact on access. Okay. >> So, students are still required to take access. It's still a high stakes assessment. They're still required to hit the 4.2. So although there has been shifts on MCCAST, there has been no shift on access. >> Okay. Thanks. >> Thank you. Um this is something that since I've been on school committee, I've been been wanting. So this is great. Um to kind of continue with Brendan's um questions as far as expanding the program, we are in budget season. >> Um and you know, obviously this is going to be a longterm term project. are you getting what you need as far as resources from the district? This is a
027good time to to bring up if you're not if you need something or or even think of expanding, you know, every budget cycle, we want to know initiatives to to make decisions. So, >> yeah, >> at this time, we haven't had to make any tough decisions about funding. So, just with the two classrooms, we've been able to use allocated funding to purchase what we need. Um going forward, as you can see in the projection, there are certain costs that are going to be like one-time costs or every five years, right? So, for example, next year, we're looking to teach um social studies in Spanish. So, we're going to order, we hope to order these um Spanish language social studies magazines. Now, they're not really magazines like the Scholastic readers that we get. They're magazines that
028will probably last three to five years, right? So, we'll see that cost coming up three to five years as we have to replace those. There are certain um online platforms and assessment programs and trainings that are going to um be purchased each year and that will increase until we're in full implementation through grade five, right? Um those are things that you know we're going to need every year. in terms of things that we maybe don't have that would be really good. Um I think an uh additional special special education staff would be really helpful. So we essentially added a third inclusion classroom to the kindergarten um classes at Memorial, right, without adding another teacher. We were able to add a TA and she's fabulous and she works in the classroom. She also works in other
029classrooms, right? We do have students with IEPs in our program and that's normal and expected and fine and it's going to continue that way. So basically each year the way we um do special education at Memorial and and other schools, we're adding another inclusion classroom. That doesn't necessarily mean we need a new teacher every year, but it does mean we have to rethink how we do scheduling, especially across grade levels that are on like different timets. >> Has that been requested in the budget process? Um I believe Lisa Burns included that last year and this year. >> All right. Thank you. >> I also think just another point about budget that is uh that's good for you to for you to know as you're looking at the budget um links that Julia provided in the
030slides is there are different costs as it rotates. So our I Ready our students are able to take their diagnostic in English and Spanish at no additional cost because we already purchased that product. Um um our illustrative mathematics program is available in English and and Spanish. So when every year when we order the the new booklets for the students, we order them just in in Spanish, right? So sometimes there's not an additional cost. When our um our instruction of science and social studies that year because they flop each year, right, is in Spanish. that's when we're required to buy some more materials because those don't already exist and they don't we don't have a purchase program for those contents yet and so that's where you'll see like a a flip-flop of price increase. >> Thank
031you. >> Um real quick on the budget link. Thanks for that by the way. That's excellent to have. Some cells are highlighted yellow. What's the difference between yellow and blue? >> Yep. Um, yellow indicates that those um are materials that were purchased with local funds that weren't in a budget request. Right? So, this is the first year I actually sat down with Lisa Burns and looked at the budget together. You're going to see that there's now a dual language budget line um where everything is so that we can keep track of everything instead of splitting it between different places. We can see exactly how much the program is costing. So, whatever is in yellow are things that that weren't um put in as a budget initiative that you all would have approved. >> Okay. Thank
032you. >> No questions. Just thank you very much for presenting. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Chris. >> All right. >> Thank you very much for coming. >> Thank you. >> So, we'll move on to Thanks, John. >> Report of the superintendent of schools. Okay. Uh, just want to update you on our um where we're at on our our on call OPM um services that we had recently had an RFS for. Uh, we received 17 I think it was 18. I think we got 18 um packages back from uh different organizations. Um what was the number? >> 14. Did we Did we get 14 or 15 though? >> We one of them we didn't accept. Right. >> Right. So it was 15 and we went through the Sorry. The number was uh for we had 15. One
033of them didn't meet the criteria. So we we went with 14. Um we spent a number of hours going through all the different packages. Uh it was me uh myself, Wen, and Carlos. Um we shortlisted a group of six different uh OPMs. Um yesterday we spent um three hours interviewing the six different groups uh and we were able to agree upon four different organizations um to move forward with for our our I guess our on call portfolio. So, basically where we go next is um we're going to meet with the facilities group um uh subcommittee and we're going to choose one of the the OPMs to run our uh HVAC pro um HVAC upgrade over at Stacy. Um so, we're in the process of letting the OPM the different OPMs know whether they were in,
034out, or or what their status is. Um once we do that, we'll bring together the group and then we'll we'll hear from each of the four four um OPMs and we'll choose one to um move forward and we'll get working on that so that we can be sure that by the summer we're ready to go. Um and we'll be able to upgrade all the we'll be able to utilize the money that the this the town gave us um in the last in the fall for the summer project. So, that's where we're at right now. >> Excellent. Any questions on that? >> All right. So, we'll go forward now to the report of the school business administrator. Um, I'm just going to take this one. As you can see, there's a personnel update that when provided,
035there's any thoughts or questions on that before it goes along. Okay. So, we'll go to the consent agenda next. There are three items for it. Does anybody have any comments on the minutes before I read this up? Okay. So, the consent agenda tonight is going to include the following. The approval of 13 warrants in the amount of 1,467,87.74. The approval of minutes from the December 18th, 2025 meeting and professional development in the amount of $8,220. A motion to approve. Motion by Megan. Second by Michael. All in favor. Unanimous. Thank you. Uh future agenda items. Oh, those tough forgot. >> Card keys. H >> the card key thing. >> No, I forget. >> All right. What was it? I don't know. I forgot. Um, >> shoot. >> Half a memory between two people. >> I'm sorry,
036Mike. Okay. >> All right. Anybody else? >> All right, we'll skip it for now then. >> So, that does bring us to adjournment. We do have an executive session set up tonight to discuss the collective bargaining strategy of the upcoming MTA contract negotiations, and we will not be returning to open session. This does require a roll call vote. Yes. Yes. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. >> I'm also a yes. Thank you very much. Good night.