School Committee: May 20, 2026

001Good evening. Um I will call to order the uh Milton Public School Committee um for the purpose of a school choice open public hearing. We are here today to discuss uh the policy of school choice. The school committee votes annually on school choice procedure um for the Milton public schools. Currently Milton is not a school choice district. This is a state uh requirement that all school committees must do each year. Uh and I will defer to the superintendent here for a quick presentation on choice. >> Thank you very much. I would ask uh bless you uh Dr. Carol to bring up the PowerPoint that we have uh for the public to see on school choice dated May 20, 2026. Um each year every district, every public school district has to uh school committee has to

002vote on whether they want to um take part in school choice. Uh it has a um a very a unique history of uh something that districts do in the western part of the state where if school district school districts have not regionalized they're actually supporting each other by sharing students. It tends to be less pre in the eastern part of the state where some of our uh cities and towns are a little bit more populated. Uh people decide to just keep their district uh not a school choice district. So the background of this uh law is uh it is uh chapter 76 section 12B of the national laws details the conditions of inter school interd district school choice. The Milton school policy is JFBB regarding school choice if you want to look that up uh

003in our policy book. The interd district school choice program allows parent and guardian to enroll their child in a school district that is not in the child's home district. And again, this is not within the district like Cunningham district, Tucker district, uh, Collie Park, Glover. This is Weimoth, Brainree, Milton, Westwood, uh, etc. Um, the prior to declaring themselves as a school, school choice district, the uh, with the state, the school district would determine how many seats be available uh, to be offered and at what grades they would be available. Um on the next slide, uh each year the Milton School Committee must vote on whe or not to participate in school choice just like all other public school districts across the Commonwealth. This vote must be submitted by June 1 uh to the Department of

004Elementary Secondary Education along with the minutes to justify that we've actually had this conversation to public. If the Milton School Committee voted to participate in school choice, a student enrolled in public schools through this program would have the right to remain in the system until graduation. Historically, the Milton School Committee has voted not to participate in the interd district school choice program. So, just a little background now that we've gone through the slides. Um, I'm assuming that past votes of the Milton School Committee have been not to take part because our enrollment is a concern. Our class size is a concern. Uh we have just been invited into the uh Mass Building Authority uh project um process to build a new school in order to alleviate uh the enrollment concerns we have especially at our

005elementary school um as we're trying to create more space to serve our students. And I would uh recommend that we continue to vote to not accept school choice. Um this is something that some districts do in order to increase their enrollment and also increase funding. Uh there was a headline the other night that a school district did not take uh did not vote to take on school choice. And I think because they've had budget situations, they were hoping that the school community did want school choice because those students come with uh a percentage of their per pupil expenditure. It's not even the full per pupil expenditure. So an example would be per pupil expenditure from DESIE is about I'll use a round number of $18,000 per you really only get about $12,000 uh from Desi

006in the exchange of taking a student from another district or inviting other students. Um I think it's a wonderful program if you want to be able to open your district up and you have space in order to make sure that your classes are full and you can um invite other families in. Uh but that just seems to be not the case in Milton. And so uh the district gets to vote each year. We'll give the uh information after tonight's vote. Um my recommendation would not to be take part solely on space and overcrowding at our elementary level and at our high school. >> Great. Uh the committee will have time to discuss this kind of within the general agenda, but for the purpose of this hearing, this is a public hearing. So I would ask

007if anybody in the audience wishes to speak about um school choice they could raise their hand. There's nobody in the room with us here. So it's very online. >> No hands raised online. >> Okay. All right. Um well to be clear without a specific no vote uh the system becomes a choice district. Vote limits Milton's school population to those students who live in the town. Um however, Milton residents attend other choice districts even if we vote against choice. Um the vote does not limit or repeat any other agreements that exist in collective bargaining agreements. There are still no hands and I will uh I would take a motion to adjourn the school choice open public hearing. >> So moved. >> There second. >> Second. >> Great. All in favor? And hearing is closed. I will

008now call to order the regular um meeting of the Milton School Committee. Uh and we will start with the pledge of >> allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the stands nationy and justice for all. >> Good evening everyone. Uh our we'll move our second item of business which is to approve tonight's agenda. Everybody can take a look and let me know if there's anything on the agenda especially related to the subcommittees uh we need to remove hearing none. I will assume the agenda is approved and we'll move forward with item number three which is public comment. So, um, in accordance with school committee policy, we welcome members of the community to share their perspective with us during public comment. We've set aside 15 minutes for this part of the meeting,

009and individuals may speak for up to three minutes each. While the school committee does not respond directly to public comment, there may be opportunities for members to address issues that are raised over the course of the meeting when re relevant topics are on our agenda. We strive to engage in respectful discourse during our meetings and ask that public comment speakers keep that in mind. Speakers should introduce themselves with their address for the record. At this time, if anybody would like to speak of public comment, please raise your hand. There's still no one in the room with us. >> No hands online. and we will uh conclude public comment and move on to number four um the superintendent report part one. >> Thank you very much um chair I would like to welcome student rep uh

010Olivia Wilson. Olivia is a junior at Milton High School. Um last week I saw Olivia stroll up to the stage at Scholastic Honors Night several times collecting some welldeserved awards. So we welcome her as part of our student reps. Unfortunately, Spencer uh Futrell could not join us tonight uh as he is in the MHS concert that had to be rescheduled because of last night's power outage and the concert is taking place tonight. So, uh we wish Spencer and his colleagues well at the concert tonight and welcome Olivia. >> Good to see you all again. Um I'm just going to give some brief updates of the goings on at the high school. We'll start with sort of the less fun stuff which was that today and yesterday were the math MCCcast days for our sophomore students

011and tomorrow actually will conclude about three weeks of AP testing. So we will be done with that very soon. Um and then the biocast is going to be coming up uh June 2nd. So that's for our freshmen. Um when we were talking about what to say today, we had a whole section on the seniors because this is like their last harrah. So, their last day is May 29th, which is going to be next Friday. Um, then our prom is going to be the day after that on the 30th. And then we're gonna have they're going to have their own separate award night where they'll do all of their like t-shirt recognitions and then recognizing single students. And that's going to happen on June 2nd. And then they'll have their graduation on June 7th, uh, which

012is a Sunday. Um, so that'll be really nice. And then they have a senior lunch and we're going to be having a boosters banquet as well. And then there will also be the MHS varsity athletes banquet um to support all of our students that have sort of contributed to our school community in that way. Um and then oh yeah, also the seniors every year they walk through the elementary schools um that they've attended and get to kind of say hello to their old teachers and see the next generation of kids that are going to be coming through. So that's a nice fun thing that they'll have coming up as well. >> Yeah, that's kind of like that's basically June of our school. So yeah. So Olivia, how does it feel to be a junior slash

013senior when the seniors leave uh and getting ready for a summer of going into your senior year? >> Well, there's a lot more parking, so that's um it's, you know, now I'm the king of the schools when they leave, so that's fun. But this summer is, you know, for juniors, if you if you know a junior in your life, this summer is kind of crazy with all the college stuff, getting ready and visiting schools and writing essays and everything. But there's also like that that light at the end of the tunnel that has it's becoming more and more visible as the days go by. So like my last AP exam is tomorrow and then I can finally like kind of relax. So >> any other questions for you? Thank you guys. >> Thank you very

014much. Thank you for taking the time tonight. We appreciate it. >> Great. We will now to the chair's report. Uh the first item is an executive session. Um I will go ahead and make a motion. So the motion will be to go into executive session pursuant to MGL chapter 3A section 21A3 to discuss strategy with respect to litigation. if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares specifically an open meeting law complaint and to review the executive session minutes of April 29th 2026 which was held under section 21A6. We will be returning to open session at the conclusion of the executive session. Is there a second? Uh it's an executive session. Uh so we have to do a roll call

015vote. Nathan, >> yes. Stevie, >> yes. >> Now, >> Yes. We returned into executive session. And again, we will be returning to open session. >> Good evening. from executive session. Um, and I will now motion to release the uh approve and release the minutes from executive session meeting on April 29th, 2026. Is there a second? >> Second. >> Great. Again, this will be a roll call vote. Stevie, >> yes. >> Yep. >> Val, >> yes. >> Lizzie, >> yes. >> Hannah, >> yes. >> And I am a yes. So, those executive session minutes have been approved to be released. they will be posted and uh we will talk more about this item or the subject around that session which is lore here a little bit later but for now we will move forward with the

016school choice recommendation so this is our opportunity for members to ask any questions have any discussion and ultimately make a decision a vote about um Milton school status for next year are there any questions or comments Hearing none, I would take a motion. >> I'll make a motion to uh that I make a motion that Milton not be a school choice district for the FY27 school year. >> Is there a second? >> Second. >> Okay. Uh Ty goes the number. >> Yes. >> Uh all right. Uh this is does not have to be a roll call vote. So all in favor it's unanimous. So that is school committee choice recommendation and you'll pass that over to the state to let them know. So we will meet that obligation. Great. Uh next up the school committee

017subcommittee and advisory committees. U so that is attached. I sent that out. I'll just frame it again. tried to balance membership across um based upon interest and experience and kind of what people had done previously. I have not heard nobody's been banging down my door super Matt about committee assignment. So I assume it's all right but if there are any kind of lingering questions about committee assignments. All right. Uh well then what I would do is I will make a motion. I would accept a motion to kind of accept these committee assignments as they are listed in that Google doc. And I would just um name again also for the committee assignments one thing pulling up. I'm sorry. You scroll towards the bottom the devolved responsibility is the vendor warrants. We would be making um

018Nathan the assigner of the vendor warrant. We anticipate Nathan becoming the new finance chair. We'll make that official in our next meeting uh or first meeting of the finance committee. Again, that is a bulb responsibility that Nathan will now get to take on. So, just want to make sure I highlight that for everybody. And so, these committee assignments will go into effect now. Um, I mean, I know we've always had a little bit of like a transition time >> and the key subcommittees of finance and policy continue to be cross-osted. So, >> for example, for the policy forth like upcoming policy meeting, I could still come to it even if I'm not technically a voting member policy. >> Okay. >> Yes. So, do you mind if I just um does anybody have any questions about

019that? And Stevie, I know that you knew we we post all subcommittee meetings uh for all school members to attend just in case folks want to come. That way if if we didn't do it that way, school committee members would not be able to come to meeting if they had time to go to that meeting. It would be, you know, breaking of the uh open meeting law. So we just post everything that way. That way we don't have that worry um at any time. >> Yeah. And we're talking specifically for kind of the three primary subcommittees now will be four with the new superintendent search committee. Correct. Uh I did just want to take a moment to publicly talk about the superintendent search. So that is a new committee we we are forming uh for

020the purpose of finding the next superintendent for Milton public schools. Uh that search committee. Very excited to have uh Lizzie, Nathan, and Stevie on that. Again, all members will be involved in that search. Uh but we appreciate kind of the work that the three of you will be doing to kind of organize us as a committee bring back kind of plans and ideas on on how we we do this as effective as possible and engage the public and find the best possible person. So y'all for taking that on that will be a lot a lot of work uh doesn't go unnoticed that y'all are agreeing to do this and I think there was broad interest from all members even those that aren't on it to be a part of that because I think everybody recognizes

021how important that work will be in the upcoming year. So, thank you all for everybody kind of raising their hand and trying to participate in that process. Uh, if there are no other questions or comments, then again, I will I would take a motion to accept these uh subcommittee assignments for the 2026 2027 school committee session. >> So, moved. >> Is there a second? >> Second. Okay. >> All in favor? Unanimous. All right, we're getting a lot done tonight. Thank you all so much. Uh, >> would these be posted at any point somewhere so that if people needed to reach out to committee members? >> Yeah, I think we have a list on our uh website. Obviously, the town committees, they will the town manage that and they'll update that. So, I'll send this out

022over to the town administrator so we can update the website and I think we have our committee assignments also on the website. Um, >> I think so, >> which again we'll just update with the current membership. I'll challenge to do that tomorrow. >> Great. >> Uh town meeting updates. All of you were there. So mostly for the public uh that we had town meeting uh since our last school committee meeting. The really one article that was directly related to the school committee was the school budget and that vote was approved overwhelmingly. So we appreciate all the members of the town meeting their engagement and their their support as well as uh select board warrant committee everybody else who kind of made that happen. That town meeting was only three nights. So thank you moderator Dylan

023for making that as efficient as we can. Uh any other comments uh things people want to raise about town meeting? >> Mark and John I just thought you all did a great job in your presentation and responding to community input and questions. So just thank you for representing the work. It was it was excellent. Great. >> Yeah. >> Great. Next up is the summer meeting schedule. Um so everybody, most people have kind of um submitted their stuff in the meeting materials, right? We have the June, July, August calendars. I know there's a lot of conflict uh especially in August with several members and Val's taking an amazing trip which we're all really mad and jealous about. Um, so kind of two things coming out of that I think and we can get this with uh

024I'll talk about this in the upcoming meeting but based upon kind of our conflicts in later July and at the beginning of August I think our governance retreat which last year we did at the very beginning of August want to pull forward and do at our June 17th meeting. So we still had that kind of on the docket for as normal school committee meeting right now. Not seeming obviously that's like close to the last day of school. It's not seeming like there will be a lot of pressing items to actually need to have a full school committee meeting. So instead, the plan would be to pivot that to a a governance meeting, assuming everybody is available. Um, we think that's probably an easier time to make sure all members can participate in that the summer.

025Uh, I do think though again if you haven't filled in the calendar and I haven't just double checked that everybody put it in, please do just because we may need to have other meetings over the summer based upon the input from the superintendent search committee on if there's things that they want to update us, run by us, need our approval on as it relates to finding a a search firm and something like that. uh we want to have the the ability to kind of know when we can get members together and there there may just be times where unfortunately your amazing trip uh we might have to meet without you but we'll obviously let you know and if you want to zoom in from across the world we'd love to have >> keep posted >>

026we try my best >> the joys of a hybrid life you can't even get away from it >> have some contracts to vote too hopefully >> probably after 17 >> y so there'll be things that will pop up, but we might do most of that virtually. Um, okay. That is all I had for summer meeting schedule unless anybody had any comments or questions. So, we're meeting we have a the last sort of regular meeting is June 3rd. >> Yes, June 3rd is last regular meeting and then June 17th we will change to the governance meeting. I'll do that. I haven't talked to John and Anna about where we want to hold it, but we've in the past held it in the superintendent's conference. That's probably where we'll hold it. >> Same time. >> Yeah, >>

027likely. Okay, >> I think so. We can also talk about that if we want to pull it up to have a dinner together or something like that. >> Yeah. Would everybody be available to meet at 6:1 17th? >> Yeah. >> Sports are over by then. So freedom >> flexible. >> Okay. Well, if some changes you can't let me know, but otherwise we'll move forward with that assumption. >> Very much. Uh that is it for the chair's report. and we'll send it back over to super report part two. >> Thank you very much. Um very happy tonight for uh assistant superintendent for curriculum and professional development Kakosa to uh talk about what um uh good work happened across the district this year related to curriculum and professional development specifically. Um Kala had uh entered the district

028in August uh just in time for our leadership meeting with the full leadership team uh and started right off the bat assembling the full leadership team uh at the high school on a very hot day for about a seven-hour meeting connected to uh and looking at data that we uh wanted to review uh the strengths and weaknesses as seen through the data and through the lens of our leadership and curriculum folks. uh came up with a set of priorities that the leadership team wanted to uh advance and move through the district this year and then that work was continued throughout the school year by uh Kala. So I want to thank her for jumping right in and then executing uh significantly uh you know important and wellreceived um uh professional development by the staff and

029uh and also want to thank her and I think the entire um teaching community would say asking the teachers for what they need listening to what they say soliciting feedback and then publishing the feedback raw right back out to the staff. this is what everybody's saying, this is the strengths, here are some of the things we'd like to see differently and here's what we want next time in using that data to inform all of our profession. So, a lot of teacher voice, a lot of transparency and a lot of good work happens. So, I'll let K go into that in detail and K thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. So, thank you. really excited to be able to talk with you tonight about this year. Um it's been a great one in

030a lot of ways. Um so I'm just going to focus on professional development tonight just to give you a sense of what we did this year. So our agenda for tonight um I'm going to start with the context for the 2526 school year. Then for those uh who may be listening to our recording in the future today, what is professional development in educational setting? understanding what guides professional development in a school setting and then what we did, how we did and then what our plans are next year. Next slide. So the context so the context is the first and foremost uh superintendent Failen and I uh entered the year as interim one-year team and uh as we all know there were multiple prior years of change and leadership and so the roles that we were

031in and knowing that we our primary goal was to stabilize the district and provide uh and focus on the fundamentals with our teaching and educator staff develop the five priorities as superintendent failen mentioned with our full leadership leadership team in the beginning of the year um in an exercise that um we all talked about different priorities and where the the you know mass of priorities seem to be on our our discussions is what we focused on. Um, we created a through line to ensure that those five priorities are understood and could gain some traction. And we worked on building a sense of team for our leadership and our educators. And we did school walkthroughs on a regular basis and use some feedback from that to understand strengths and needs across the district. Next slide. In

032an educational setting, the focus for professional development is on educator needs for areas of learning and growth. That's the bottom line. and uh is important to align that with the district priorities so you can dig in and make some headway there. And we want to find ma ways to meet the needs of educators in different roles with of course the ultimate goal having some type of impact on positive impact on student outcomes. Next slide. So the picture you see here is from November 4th. It was this was the elementary team which I'm going to give you more information about that later. And this is uh superintendent failen and myself in front of this team uh doing some calibration on the priorities. Uh the recap on the priorities are here. The first priority was to provide

033all students with robust and intentional tier one instruction. Two was increase the use of data to inform instruction. Three, increase rigor through high expectations and high supports in the classroom. Four, take strategic action steps to ensure underperforming students achieve at grade level. and five, continue to cultivate classroom and school climate and culture to lower absenteeism. So those again were the priorities that the leadership team came up with and this session that you see in the photo is really about calibration and I'll explain that a little bit more. Next slide. So what I mean by throughine is to ensure that our priorities are real uh and lived and not just something on a p piece of paper somewhere and to build capacity. they were infused into multiple work streams. So the first work stream that we

034really wanted to ensure was done with fidelity was our evaluation process. And uh in a former district that I've worked in, we created plug-andplay goals. And I'll explain what that means in a minute. Um and those are really helpful for educators who have to create smart goals every year. And if you can create uh goals for them, write the goals in smart format um and they want to use it um they can. And it's a way to, you know, again, support the um the district priorities. And so many of our educators decided to use that option. And then through the observations of our evaluators and the feedback is a way to continually talk about those five priorities. At our elementary and secondary leadership meetings throughout the entire year, we continued to talk about the priorities

035and all of our work was geared in the direction of our priorities. the weekly staff newsletter. Um, every week I put a microlearning on uh some topic that relates to the five priorities that teachers can access. It's a bite-sized professional development. They can watch a video, they can read something short just to kind of keep their brain moving in in the priorities. A lot of I find Edutotopia is a great resource for just really byite-size learning. And so every week I put out there and I tie it to a priority and make sure it's explicit which priority it connects to. And then uh at the building level, principles when they put out newsletters will to the staff will often mention uh opportunities to think about the five priorities. And again in blue at the bottom

036um you see professional development. So that is another big bucket uh that use in our through line to help educators feel connected and informed and ready to work on the priorities together. Um, I wanted to shout out a special a special thanks to our PD planning team, a group of volunteers who meet bi-weekly to think about professional development and help think take that feedback and turn it into action. And that is Amy Tom, Brian Celig, Cat Young, Bill Fish, Noctt, Tran, Danielle Wetmore, Zena Hamada, and Holly Conan. Next slide. So, my philosophy uh is that what's good for kids is also good for adults in a lot of ways. And we've all sat in professional development and uh sometimes professional de development hits and sometimes it doesn't. Uh in order to have it hit, I

037believe that it needs to be personalized. It needs to be timely. It should be im immediately usable. It should be informed by the feedback of the people that you're giving the professional development to. It should be transparent. We should be able to sharing that feedback. Whatever you say, I'd like you to know what others are saying. and it should be consistent its approach so there's no surprises and people feel like there's a structure that makes sense. Next slide. So for this year I found the key success factors that uh that really helped uh have a positive experience for all of our educators was again that PD time was uh had an explicit focus. We shared our approach with the staff from the very beginning um and let them know we will have a clear focus.

038Your input will guide our work. We will share and respond to your feedback. Um, we assessed a baselineed understanding that was really important to kind of understand where people were coming from. What do they know? What do they not know? We gathered feedback with an exit ticket after each professional development day. We shared that feedback with staff and with follow-up action steps and we use the leadership team analysis of all that feedback to help inform the work as well. Next slide. So just kind of in terms of a consistency of approach, this is what the educators could expect um every time they would meet opening slides from central office. So if they were building based, the principal would they all had the same slide. Every educator would see the same thing um that provide context

039and alignment to our priorities. Every time there's a PD day, there would be an exit ticket. We would act on that input and suggestions wherever we could. The full day professional developments were were with colleagues across schools and the half-day PD time was segmented into 50-minute sessions with 50 minutes for principal time, 50 minutes for curriculum and department time and then 50 minutes for independent time. So that was the approach every time professional development by the numbers. So just to give folks a sense of what it looked like throughout the year, we have about 420 unit A staff members. We had two full days this past year and three half days. On the full days, we had districtwide development and on the half days it was building based. On November 4th, uh we had 62

040workshops offered by educators. 47 were academically focused, 15 were self-care and connection. March 3rd, we had 56 workshops, 42 acade, and 14 self-care and connection. And the average ticket response rate was 32% which in the world of response rate is pretty good, pretty solid. And I hope you had a chance to look at the cat some of the cataloges uh which I hyperl here and if you didn't um feel free at some point um you can also look at all of the data that was uh provided by educators in the newsletters. I think you all have or can get that weekly newsletter that goes to staff and all of that feedback is in there if you want to take a look. Um next slide PD by date. So here's how it went this year and

041I'll actually I'll start with that image on the top right. So I put the slide up with our educators in the beginning of the year because I believe it that sometimes the greatest PD are the teachers down the hall. We have a wealth of talent um and expertise in our district and um I find and have found over the years that educators really like to hear from their fellow educators and um it it is they're receptive in a lot of ways than someone coming from the outside to listen to their uh colleagues and so that was a foundational element and I I got a lot of feedback about that and appreciation around um so I think they they felt good about learning from each other. So October 8th was an early release date and on

042that day it was a building day. So MCCAST data analysis was happening and then the building based and or targeted PD happened on those days. And what I mean by that is job alike folks. So your special educators would meet together, your PT OT might meet together, your uh classroom teachers might meet together by grade. Um so everyone had something to be doing on those days. And that's what I mean by targeted. November 4th was a full day. The elementary folks were at Pierce and the secondary folks were at the high school. And as I mentioned earlier, we had 40 plus workshops all facilitated by our educators um with a host of different topics. And again, um take a look at that hyperlink to really get a sense of what was offered on those days.

043And um another aspect of professional development days that I have found helpful over the years is to really have that focus on the academic side of things, but also colleagues the opportunity to do something fun together to connect to build team. Um and sort of like a what I need block for students. We give that to educators and uh and if they didn't want to do something collectively, they could do something on their own. But it's really just uh respecting their time and giving them time to connect to each other. On November 17th and December 10, uh we had group work and uh we asked all of our educators to focus on priority four and to take a strategic action steps to ensure underperforming students achieve at grade level and to think about that together.

044And they had a response uh some thinking to do and and a response mechanism to give feedback on what are the gaps that currently exist in Milton public schools in terms of priority 4. So that was really informative to us to think about um what that feedback was. January 14th was an early release day and it was building based and targeted by role. And then March 3rd was a full day, same model as November 4th, but all of our staff was together at the high school which I thought was terrific. Next slide. So, uh, at our first meeting in November, um, if you haven't used menty media before, it's a live polling and we did live polling with, uh, our teachers. This is, this represents the elementary in the morning that John and I met

045with. And we wanted to know how they felt, what they thought about tier one instruction. And so, the question was, I feel confident that I understand robust tier one instruction should look like in my classroom or office. And that data was important to us. Um it was great to see 71 folks thought definitely but 88 mostly sort of and then no clue. So that was interesting information for us to be thinking about the next slide that I asked them for. Next slide there. Thank you Lizzie. U this question for us educators. I have a full toolbox of actions I can use to support underperforming students and as you can see there 150 folks said I use more. So that gave us immediate feedback to know where we should focus our time and energy. And again,

046that was live polling with the elementary folks on November 4th. Next slide. This was an interesting dialogue where we asked, "What does rigor look like in your classroom?" And um this was again with live with the elementary teachers on November 4th. And um this is just a snapshot of the feedback because we had 162 responses live while we were talking to them. And we had a great conversation. uh if you look at just that little part you see the word engage or engagement and then we had a conversation about just because you're engaged does that mean it's rigorous. So it was an interesting discussion. Next slide. This was again a very similar feedback loop where we asked list three data sources you use to inform your work. And so again doing this type of live

047polling not only gives us information it gives all of the educators information about what their their colleagues are thinking about. How do we define these things? And so this was critical early feedback to help the superintendent and I think about and and the leadership team think about what we might meet need to do with any gaps up there. Next slide. This uh you guys have seen this before um a kind of word wall emoji wall uh where we checked in. This was in the March uh third PD day when we had the entire staff together. And I find this is important feedback. How are people feeling in March? Um, tired was the biggest word, but as you look around, the emojis uh are generally happy and the words energized, uh, excited, relaxed, there's a little

048bit of meh there. Uh, but this is good information. How are we doing in March after, you know, several months together as a new team. Um, and that was good information for me. Next slide. So, what do we do with the feedback? We share all of it with the staff. um Google form feedback doc which I'll show you in a second and any summaries that I put together of the feedback I gave right back to them so they could really understand where they all were and uh you know what was working and what wasn't and just get a shared understanding of um how the professional development was going and some of the issues that educators brought up could kind of see oh I was thinking about that um or that's an issue I didn't even

049think of so I find that's really helpful and it builds trust with educators that there's nothing being in here your part process. Um, and so your feedback, it's necessary for you to hear it and see it. We then review and analyze all of that feedback with full leadership and the plan the PD planning committee. And then from there, we determine future action steps. So based on some of the feedback uh from the November 4th day, we amended the format of the second P day. We tried to create more tools and training for tier one. We want to review and involve some systems and I'll talk about this in a little while. The student support team model and we we got a lot of feedback around vertical and horizontal uh curriculum alignment which will be deferred

050to the next uh incoming central office team. Next slide. This is just a sample a little snapshot of u the feedback output that's shared with staff so they can see every comment every rating. Uh again we had a 32% response rate. We had a rating of one through five. One being this was terrible, five being this is great. Uh we I ask what is useful and what you learned today. What is not useful? That helps me understand. Um okay, we don't want to do that again. And then a comment bank, letting folks kind of just tell us what they're thinking. So again, um this all of this information, if you want to drill into this and have a sense of it, go back to those uh weekly staff newsletters that came to your email and

051Stevie, I can get those to you want them. If you can't go backwards in time, I can get those to you. But I think it's important to take a look because it will give you a real sense of the the temperature in the district and how people are feeling about things. Um, next slide. So, I pulled out some um some comments about what worked. Um, there are many comments generally speaking that were positive. Um, and I think people felt like when I see words like relevant, when I see refreshing, when I see I love this PD day, um, that really makes me feel like we're on the right track. Um, thanks for recognizing the value of educators simply being together to reflect, brainstorm, andate, and grow their practice. I want to hear that. And great

052tool to use in the classroom. Great thumbs up. We're getting somewhere and and people are getting what they need. So, we had a lot of great uh, feedback for that. And of course there are opportunities for improvement. So the next set of quotes tell us maybe we need to make change some things or maybe we need to focus on something differently. So uh looking for more specific strategies and supporting struggling learners. Okay, we need to devel develop that and provide that. Hoping we can continue some conversations from today and follow up and we did that. Um so these kinds of comments just help us think more thoroughly around okay they're asking for something. Let's see if we deliver. And then the next slide. So this is just a sampling of pictures of those days. And

053uh I will tell you uh I felt the energy in all of those rooms was positive. Um they were everyone was learning. There was um just a great energy in the buildings and I was I was thrilled with the opportunity to see all of this in action and teachers feeling like they were getting really positive and powerful and impactful to their learning. And then the next slide is the self-care and connection. So you see there we got a walking group, we have a snowshoeing group, flyables in town donated some um some great smoothies uh to the yoga group. Um so lots of fun activities. That's a maong very hot that was hard to get into. People wanted me to widen that up more. But um but that was a great um option for folks and

054they really enjoyed that connection time and the feedback on that was um was great too. So what are our next steps? We need to distill all the feedback from as the school year 2526 with 26 with our leadership team. Been doing that all along, but we want to make sure that we kind of think about that uh thoroughly and then when we meet for our leadership retreat in the fall, we'll use all of that to think through what our next steps are for um next year. We are currently working on a professional development road map that we would like to give to staff um before they leave for the year. They have a sense of what's coming. And um I f found as an educator for many years, I I just like to plan. I

055got my calendar. I like to know what's going to come my way. And so that's a goal of ours is to give that to all educators. It's important to note there are no half days next year. Um so a lot of the the kind of building based work that happened um in half days this year will need to happen on full days. So we'll have to think carefully around how we continue to move forward with the five priorities, but also kind of get things done that buildings need to get done. Um you all know that there's an elementary focus on literacy. So that'll be a big uh part of the professional development for the elementary folks and we bottom line is we want to execute a meaningful professional development roadmap that is attuned to educator

056needs. That's always the goal. Um and so we're excited to to think through that u my smaller team will be thinking about that and we'll deliver that uh road map um in draft form to them by the end of June. Um and that is the end of my presentation. What questions do you have? I just want to sorry >> I just want to start from commenting on how strate strategic that you you have been with the the group educators planning things ahead of time and getting the questions that they are curious to know more and and executing all those professional development sections and inviting colleagues of of the educators to to run those sessions. I think those are very great strategies that you have been doing um this year with with the MPS school. Um

057you mentioned one thing about um observation like class observations. Um do we document the our observation notes? >> We do. >> Okay. Do do we have a centralized location to store all notes for the educators to go with like each student have their own portfolio but each teacher should have their own portfolio as well? >> Yep. Awesome. They do. Awesome. So the state has its evaluation system um every school in in the state has the same system um and standards to follow for educators and um and I can give you a lot of information about that if that'd be helpful to you. But um yes, that was one of our our goals this year is to make sure that that evaluation system was used with fidelity. Um and so people are sick of me reminding

058them things, but I'm doing it anyway. Um and um that those observations uh go into the online portfolio for educators. they they talk about th those observations and eventually end of year evaluations. Um there needs to be a dialogue an ongoing dialogue around professional practice and so the kind of holds that information but the the real uh the metal mids the road is that the phrase the real good stuff happens in the conversation. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Awesome. This is very exciting thing that I'm seeing at MPS like in the past just one year. So that's amazing. questions. Um >> I wanted to so first um it's really um cool to see how engaged the educators are. Like one of the things that stood out to me is even in the slide

059that was about the feedback opportunities for improvement. Uh one of the pieces of feedback was we would like some uh you know headroom to be able to participate and present because we're feeling inspired. So that's that's really cool. It's like a, >> you know, an improvement that is actually also still um a uh a compliment, I guess, you know. >> Y absolutely. >> Um I suppose the the two questions I have and forgive me if uh you did touch on these in the presentation and I just missed it. Um you said no half days next year. I'm curious as to the why of that um and uh you know your feelings about if that's detrimental or or the impact of that. Uh and then also um what are the criteria for evaluating the success uh

060of this plan? You know, like um what are you going to be looking at in the future to determine if if this is is working besides the feedback loop I know is a a consistent thing, but >> in the end what you're looking for is uh to see that there's actually progress being made in those those five priorities. So um how is that going to be measured? >> Yes. Let's go to the first question first. The first question, why do we have we don't have half days. We have a one-year agreement. It's based around a calendar that we had to kind of make some shifts um just because of how the the year falls. Um so we have a one-year agreement uh with the KEA that um took away those half days just for one

061year. >> Um and yes, I do think and I do believe all feel like they need more time with half days, but in terms of how the calendar worked out, um we don't have them next year. Did you want to add? Yeah, that that was a that was a memorandum of agreement with the school committee and the MEA entered into to Ka's point because we had a calendar year that day was falling so deep into September that had to move a week earlier to start and we were trying to navigate some of those pieces of parent conferences early release time starting early and it was a compromise to make work for that agreement for next year. That's a one-year agreement. They will be back for the following years. >> Okay. Thank you. So, how do

062we measure success? Um, so ultimately we want to see kind of the traditional metrics rise. I don't expect there's going to be a spike in anything next year, but we'd like to see some type of movement. um some of the traditional metrics like you said anecdotally um as we continually gather feedback from educators where the do the gaps still exist working we also have our leadership team who are you know kind of in in constant contact with educators to either re reinforce what's happening understand what's still missing keep moving that's kind of the job of our leadership team um so you have your traditional metrics that you hope to see rise over time with consistency around kind of the way we approach profession development and you got and you have kind of the anecdotal like

063you mentioned earlier that feedback loop that helps us understand what's happening on the ground >> right because you hope to see that number for example of people who tier one education couple that see that shift >> yes absolutely >> and I'd like to also say that Ker and I do learning well we were doing learning walks once a week going to for about two hours or so we stopped doing them we started just meeting with principles to see what they needed by the end of the year but we bring with us a um uh an outline cardboard piece of paper with the five priorities and we're looking to see if if those pri five five priorities are happening in the classroom. And so we're evaluating and doing observations of our principles so they can see

064we're asking them what did you see today? How did that evaluation go? What did you think of that lesson? But we're also dipsticking for is is the sticking are people talking about rigor in that lesson? Are we seeing someone uh strengthening tier one instruction? Are we looking at anybody using data? And we're trying to get evidence of that so we can actually uh you know positively reinforce when we see that with teachers doing it that they're taking advantage of the priorities and focusing on them. K always has notes for every single observation after thank you for focusing on tier one instruction I saw today in your class when we visited. So our goal as as what I would call short timers is to increase the energy around focus back on the classroom, focus back on

065teaching and learning uh in students first and if our measurement may look pretty good with data at some point from student outcomes, but we're also gain uh Stevie looking at teacher response. Are people buying into this focus back on on students and are they asking good questions and do they feel like they have agency in this? And I think that they do and I think they should and saying that they enjoy that and they feel respected in that. So, you know, we're looking at kind of uh what's the response of our educators and then will that stop working and showing progress with our students moving forward. uh knowing that we have a two-year window to kind of focus on that and build that back up and build that culture back up of professional discussions, professional

066development, uh supervision and evaluation, being in classrooms with teachers, uh building up that good professional culture, I think is one of our goals for the two years that we're here. >> Questions, Carla? Um thanks for this. It's great. Two two things. First, next year I would like to attend teaching literary illusions through the music of Bob Dylan. Please put me down for that, >> right? >> Uhu. >> Um, and then the So, you said at the beginning that the primary goal for 2526 was stabilization and focus fundamentals. >> And John, you were kind of getting at this just a second ago in your in your comment. Um, as you think about the road map for 2627, are you sort of thinking, hey, we need round two of stabilization and fundamentals? Are you thinking we're in

067a good place? Let's go up a click. Like, we're how are you thinking about next year with that goal? >> So, I I think it's important to continue to focus on those fundamentals, continue with those five priorities. I think that's really important. One of the things we're going to kind of do with our leadership team before we exit for the summer is get some feedback for them. what's happening on the ground, where do you think we need to dig in? Um, and maybe help educators focus on each priority, choose something that they want to kind of a little more focused on next year. So, if we're focusing on tier one instruction, what's a strategy you're going to try next year? Um, so our leadership team has to kind of talk that through and think what

068that might look like. Um, but I think you have to spend time and continue with the same, you know, to switch anything up on them. I think they need to really continually focus on these five priorities because they are fundamental. Um, and if we do want to kind of move the needle and and we've talked about this before as a group, um, be consistent, continue talking about the same things, sug if if uh, educators want to do something really specific related to those priorities. Hope that makes sense. Can I shed light on that? Totally. >> So when you look at the five priorities that we have, we Ker and I have been talking about how can we deepen any one of those. What what's a sub bullet underneath rigger >> that a teacher team at

069the peers can create and say this is what rigor means to us and we're going to focus on rigor and identify a sub goal underneath rigger that they're going to focus on as a team or as a teacher or as a school building or as a you know English department. And so giving them permission to really like into that and and make some deeper, you know, you know, movement on any one of those five goals, keep the structure the same, keep the focus the same, but now that we're all in alignment of what rigor is, and we've done that work of a of really coming together and talking about it, uh, who wants to go deeper in that, and their goals might be able to be a little bit more specific. It might be something

070in their team or in their department that they really want to do together that can come under that and then everybody can identify it as such. So, a little bit of a deepening of it, but keeping with the structure and keeping the five things that we think are valuable for them to all stay focused on. >> Just ask one more real quick. Um, won't be that long until we're building the budget for the 2728 school year. Um, >> spoken like the true new director. >> Yeah. >> Potential chair of the finance committee. um are you know and I can't recall what resources are allocated to to fund this work um but is there anything that you think is important for us to talk about as we think about the re resource allocation financial resource allocation

071for professional development either next year or just in the future. I know it took a long time to lay the groundwork for the early literacy curriculum renewal. So, I'm not saying we need to we can or should change anything next year, but how are you how are you feeling about the financial resources available for this sort of work? Are we leaving big opportunities on the table that we should >> I think we're we're funded as you know for next year uh at at a level that I think is going to be is appropriate um for what we're going to try to do next year. Um I think there will be need to be some more thinking around the following year. So that's something we need to do early to terms of the budget cycle and

072think through once we're gone what does the leadership team need what's surfacing for them as a critical need. Um but for now I think we're in good teeth. >> Yeah. And I think when we think of the following fiscal year uh we're making uh two of the the pieces that we haven't talked about yet tonight is that we're engaging with the teachers lounge in order to give the leadership team professional development and we're paying that out of partly out of a grant and partly out of our PD budget. and and that's just warming the plate from the from the leadership team. It's going to have to go down to staff. So the next, you know, the following two budgets, maybe fiscal 28 and fiscal 29 may need an allocation for higher engagement of the teachers

073lounge or a third party to come and do that work or a train the trainer model where they come in and do more training with leadership and then leadership becomes the trainer with the district. But we might need to invest in that. So that might be a targeted PD budget item. And we're also uh we haven't spoken to you, but we are exploring foundational common um uh curriculum time at the elementary level by having block schedules for elementary so we can focus on literacy and math and having tier one instruction, meaning that everybody's in that block at the same time, getting the same instruction on the standard based work of that grade, whether it's third grade ELA or fourth grade science um >> across all the schools. across all the schools, >> not all of

074the so so this so >> so we're running into challenges right so we have a district that has a unique >> uh program French and uh the pathway uh STEM pathway uh we share teachers we have different uh you know uh breaks of how our grades work so what we're doing actively right now is planning each school is piloting what block they want to do for next year uh they're talking to the educators about it so it however it might be just the ELA block. It it might be the ELA block at two or three grades. So, we're wetting the appetite of everybody to kind of find out how it would work. Um, and then figuring out whether or not we are ready as a district to move into a full skill MTSS like uh

075model and going into training for that. That would also be um significantly supported by an outside thirdparty person either train the trainer or come in and do the work. So, that's another potential budget item that we might want to put on the plate. Um, and so when you when I think about big chunks, I think we've said this a couple of times this year, it is our diversity and it is our MTSS work that we think are the major pieces that we want to kind of put some focus on. And uh so we might be talking about what that would mean and we we need help to do that. So, we would need some funds to engage somebody to come in and support the district in some way. Uh, if we think we're ready for

076it and if this pilot goes well across the elementary schools, see how we can engage a third party to come in the following year. Uh, we are already engaged with the teachers lounge. They're coming in over the summer. They'll be here in June. They'll be here in July. We'll be working with them the year as a leadership. Uh, they're great partners. We're already throwing ideas around about what the work can be for the full staff. So, uh, but we'll have a better idea to how to budget for that when we have a clear idea to what what we think is the next best step forward. Um, that's all to say that we're trying to do things that we feel the next superintendent would want to continue. We think those are two very fundamental pieces of

077the work that every district should be doing with uh a high level of um, you know, professional development and support. So, we're we're making the assumption that those are things that would be continued when we left. The leadership team is really and we're all being thoughtful about we don't want to start something new that someone's gonna and stop and change because they've already experienced that five years in a row. So we're really being thoughtful about we know we have more priorities than just that. But what are the ones we can do that we know will have a staying power of that a universal approach what is just good for teachers and good for the district to have regardless of who the superintendent is at the time. >> One area that I I'm sorry go ahead.

078I was gonna say one more area that um I'm thinking about and trying to investigate is um a cohort opportunity through MACQ to have our incoming director of instructional technology and a team um I have to apply for it. I have to to get in um to uh or continue to develop our AI guidelines and our vision around AI. Um you know that's certainly something that we need support around. So that will be another chunk that I think that we're going to need not only next year but going forward. So that will be on the table as well. >> And and uh to add some humor to the night, the problem with John Failen and Colosser is that we don't prioritize well. We don't say no well. So the leadership team says, "Hey, can you

079think about working on that?" And all of a sudden we're we have the third, fifth, and eighth. Now we're going to 10 things that we're to do. So we are trying to be really thoughtful. uh obviously the the lack of a technology uh education director this year has been missed and we we fall behind. So we really want to accelerate that uh with the hiring of the new person. Uh and I'll get to the hiring process in my segment later on today about who's who's in line for that. >> That was a question I had was just sort of the vision for how that role can support the use of data to inform all of this work. Um, and I was just going to also say that I mean for the six of us like

080it's actually in our power to determine that these five priorities like our priorities we will continue as a district and thus we seek and hire a superintendent that's equipped to carry this work forward. I think that will be an interesting part of the upcoming transition is sort of the need to work together to bridge it. Um, and you know, we'll have a lot of opportunity to talk through all of that. Um, but I just wanted to um I guess say Carla, I'm not surprised that you got the feedback refreshing, you know, to the PD because that's this is also refreshing, you know, like you mentioned B like the opportunity to have this level of insight at the school committee into PD is, you know, very fresh and refreshing. Um, I really appreciate it. Um, and

081you know to be able to learn about like what's actually happening in those classroom observations that you had shared with us you were doing and you shared like bits and pieces but just to see how it all fits together um in this like coherent way is really um really helpful. Um, I also noticed the piece of feedback you got about positive feedback on the PD that provided background modeled strategies and then gave time for working on implementation and I feel like that's that is like researchbased that that's effective how to approach professional development and so um I just feel like that you know for that to be happening as like a baseline of the approach is um is just really great no matter what the content and to your point like that's important whether it's

082you know DEIB related about the culture and climate work tier one or what have you. Um so that sounds that's really good. Um you had noted about vertical curriculum alignment like that that really is a large undertaking for the next permanent superintendent and team to embark upon. Um, and I I do think though that you're helping us um lay the table, set the table for like a better cadence of curriculum review and you know some of those key ingredients um for that work. Um, and you know, even my question jumping in around the the alignment across all four elementary schools, even with the existing curriculum, I think >> that's something that I hear about in the community. Um, questions about and so I think just seeing that you have some focus on that um especially

083with the new ELA curriculum is I'm really glad to hear about that. Um, and I just wanted to finally like say, John, you quickly identified the need to like we wouldn't even be having this rich of a conversation about this if you hadn't decided that we needed a full-time assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. um which you introduced as an intervention like to realign our resources to get this work done, you know, and um I think it would with all the the things that have happened like we can lose sight of that. Members of the community may not have paid attention to that very strategic move that you took and then providing us with all this extra capacity from you Carla to like do this. So I like in terms of seeing the result like

084just even having this presentation with all this data to me it reinforces what that investment you know has >> provided. Um and so I think that in terms of the return on the investment like to even just see that you're collecting that feedback in order to share that feedback like um that I think really reinforces the value of the investment. So, thank you so much for everything you're doing. >> I really appreciate how you've kind of pinpointed what we really need to prioritize first and it and I love the variety of offerings that are offered in the workshops. You kind of touched on everything and it still ties back to the priorities. So, I really appreciate integrating tools like that's phenomenal, right? Yes. So, which is awesome because I think just kind of understanding we

085are and being present in the present kind of looking to the future and seeing um is so so important. So, I really appreciate the variety that's offered here, but how it still comes back and ties to the priorities because I think that's what we always have kind of struggled with. We've had so many >> yes, >> you know, priority areas and there's so much we've taken on. But I love that you, you know, here are five areas that we're focusing on and here are all the things that tie back to that. And uh, you know, I mean, being here, you know, almost as long as Lizzie has and having seen many versions of this, this has been, you know, pretty amazing. And, uh, I just love the detail that you've gone into for each one

086and just kind Oh, that's that's really cool. and even getting this like you know um the description of each of them and what they're actually doing and how it ties back which is phenomenal. So thank you. I give all the credit to the educators because they're the ones that stepped up and in their uh in the form where they could say I'd like to facilitate something, they had to tie what they're doing to priorities, identify which priorities it was going to connect to. But they did it all. They prepped it. They gave me the information. They they t the titles. It was it was uh all of them. They did all of the work. And uh the fruits of their labor were great. And I had a lot of folks saying, "Can we have a

087part two of that one?" Because it was so good. So people came back and did another session on that. So um I give all the credit to the educators who stepped up. >> That's great. So do they kind of like um go do the research and put all this together? Like are there resources available to them? >> Yeah. And then afterwards we have a folder with all the people because the first time around I learned a lot from the first time around where can you share those slides? Can you give that? So we created a a way to share all of the stuff that was shared in other um presentations. So, if I couldn't go to the AI one, but I wanted that information, I could click on that schedule that you're looking at had

088actually three more rows that had people and resources and things like that that um that the teachers could just access and still can access at any time. >> And how does for instance like facilitators that did the AI one like did they have other workshops that that they went to attended? Is there like cost associated with that? Is it covered? Like how does that >> So now this was just bring yourself into a classroom, open your laptop and or some people there were all kinds of different workshops. So um no cost. >> Okay. >> No cost like that's it was >> so even for them prep for the workshop like the facilitator >> it was volunteer >> right? So if you don't do it that's okay if you want to attend that's fine. But I

089was just really appreciative of educators saying I'll do it. I want to share something. took a little nudging and then the leadership team on the ground were like you should do that thing you're really good at that thing you should offer it and that that helped >> it built really nice momentum we were asking the principles of the leadership teams to go out and seek volunteers and then in our learning walks we could say well that third grade teacher at Cunningham's unbelievable at you know tier one instruction can someone go John can you go John Redden can you go ask her if what she want to present and then it just kind of built from there and there were from the AI perspective there was a couple educators who were involved with AJ Millansson's uh

090AI committee and the tech committee. So they were really anxious to get out. They wanted to get out there because they didn't really feel like they had a chance to share that information in previous years. So it was really helpful for some of them to you know to get out and finally present on the work that they had done. And uh to Ka's point that was all rooted in one of the five uh areas. And uh and I I really uh you know we we respect teachers very very much and and I think it uh was evident that that was part of the process and I think that they felt that way >> and so that's when you ask people to facilitate but I think also what other people feel who aren't facilitators the respect

091of choice. >> We're not going you're going to sit down and you're going to I'm going to tell you what you need to hear. >> No that's not working for me. Do you mean we're going to give you choice in what you're interested in and it's going to be around these five areas that we're all focused on together >> and you get to choose which one you want to take part in and then you have active more engaged folks. Uh so uh that that theme and that approach that Ka put in place was really I think well received and professionally wellreceived. They I think people felt very respected and valued in the process. >> That's great. >> Can I ask one more followup question? Um, in terms of the uh the live polling and some

092of the data that you showed us, um, I noted and I think you alluded to this a little bit that some of the respond that there's like 169 respondents out of 233, which is a good number, but I'm wondering if you have >> uh any sense of why uh folks didn't respond. Um, I Well, it's funny. I was thinking about that. Um, I think some people when you do a live poll, it's on your phone and I think some people are like, I can't figure this out. So, I be I was running around the auditorium making sure they could figure it out. So, it could be that. It could be I don't want to engage right now. Um, you know, and I really want to give educators choice. I I I just don't want them

093to feel pressured. I want them to, you know, kind of come to the table and I offer the opportunity. Um, and so I couldn't tell you exactly why, but those are my guesses. >> Okay. All right. I was just wondering sometimes when you have that number of people that are not saying anything right right says something and are they engaged are they disengaged? Are they the ones who are really not taking to the program? So I was just curious if you you know had and and if there was any strategy for trying to >> bring more of them to that table for the feedback. >> Yeah I think so multiple layers of feedback are important. So that's live poll with the whole group. >> Then we take good the Google form out >> and I

094don't know this for a fact because I I I keep it anonymous. I want them to tell me what they're thinking. So I don't you know if they have to give their name they might not tell me. So um so there's another opportunity there if you want don't want to do it in a live setting you have another opportunity through the Google form to to give more feedback. So try to do various ways of of getting that feedback. And then of course all of our directors who are meeting with folks and principles how do you think that went? What did you think? So kind of layers of of feedback um available. Um but it's not perfect. >> No, but that's great. Yeah. >> Like you could keep tracking that like into next year and that

095can be one of the things you're looking to see increasing. >> Exactly. >> Yep. >> Absolutely. >> That's great. >> Uh for the interest of time, I'll save a couple questions. Um, just a few comments here of like I appreciate the balance that y'all are clearly trying to make between choice for staff and also within the directed time the need to allow teachers to engage based on the things they're interested in and also from a administrative perspective through your classroom walkthroughs through your kind of team meetings whatever else through the data that you're seeing on the ongoing like what are the gaps we're seeing and the need to say we need to spend we just need to spend more time within this team on This I also think it's important to know that I think

096you're covering kind of the high level half dates, full day PD days, things like that. There's obviously >> like much more work with teachers like on like team meetings during the week, right? Within the school day, there's principal meetings after school there. Yep. >> Lots of other kind of places in which professional development, those conversations are happening. >> Absolutely. >> But I completely agree with your point that just time is needed. We've talked about that like there's can't ever have enough time. There are so many needs on PD like social emotional learning, behavior management, 504, >> EpiPen training, rather than just compliance, ethics train. There's just so many things pulling time >> and so I think that's a real challenge as I see within schools with PD >> and then how you I think to

097the point you're making like you want to say yes and like look at all these things because all those things are like good for kids but how do you also >> go in deep and really change practice by focusing on particular things in ways that that will move the needle and not just a one-off and I think those are are just balances and pain points within how >> how you do it so I appreciate all the thought appreciation appreciate the presentation. Also, just thank you again. You kind of came in August immediately had to put together this thing, put together a year-long plan. I think seeing you be really mindful of what I've seen, at least from my seat over the last three years, which is these historical pain points of teachers, of feeling um

098fatigue from all the different kind of jerks back and forth. >> And so, I think you can you could have quickly lost staff with coming in and putting a really like >> Yes. >> um rigorous. And so you listen to them and I think that that's great and I'm excited for what you do next year and glad you're we'll be here. So thank you. >> And the planning was done when Kala was three days a week. >> Yeah, I know. >> She was she officially three days a week and didn't shift over until mid year. So the work being done, the volume of work and the quality of work being done with half the year being our time is really >> uh incredible. So thank you very much. >> Great. Uh Ray. >> Yes. So

099um we have a presentation um we are putting forward tonight as a very high level overview of some of the options. I want to kind of um start with uh you know if if the audience watching this live or if you're watching this on tape uh wanted to go through the context a little bit of uh what what we're doing and why and what the goals are and some of the timelines. Um, and uh, I'll go into that in a moment, but uh, first of all, we are a district that has concerns related to space. We've talked a little about that earlier. We have been accepted into the mass building uh, authority um, process to build a 78 school uh, uh, by the Guile road campus. That is still happening. That group is still meeting.

100That work is still moving forward. And then uh Labber College decided to close and their facility will be up for sale, which I think is a great opportunity to pause and decide whether or not uh this uh purchase could in some way alleviate space within the district uh either in partnership with a new building uh off of Guy Road or in place of that work uh at Guy Road. So a lot of it is very very high level and when we had discussion about this at our previous meeting the request school committee generally was can you provide us with some options and so we decided to do that tonight uh and look at different options and try to pull them pull those options through a similar um process so we can kind of get some

101common data what's working and what's not. So I'm going to go through the slides I hope that works its way through that we can talk about it. This site by the way is beautiful. First of all, the slide before that is uh this for those who don't know where Labraet is. This is on Adam Street uh in Milton. Uh coming up from Lower Mills, it would be going over Adam Street on your right. Coming from East Milton, it would be going up the hill and on your left. Uh this is what they call building A, which they also call the mansion. It is a mansion. Uh I think one of the the president nicely said, "This is kind of like an old colonial." Uh this is not an old colonial. This is a mansion. Uh

102this is an amazing amazing residence uh that was turned into office space that the Labraet uh administrative team was in. Then behind that mansion in that beautiful building are two additions uh buildings uh B and C. Uh building B is a small addition that mainly is office space that can be chopped up in any way that we would like. Uh these are all connected from the inside so there's no having to leave the building uh to go to the next building. And then that third building in orange is the major school building. The classrooms are um Mark and I walked the space with uh Dick Milano and uh members of the building committee uh several weeks ago and our full leadership team, our full principal team walked it two weeks ago uh to get a

103sense of the space as well. Um the next slide shows basically uh the site potential. Uh we have building A which is quote the mansion. Uh that's where all the central office space could be. uh superintendent's office, special education, tech department, finance department, um the DEIB, residency and registration, and uh you know, if we had the funds moving forward, maybe a family center, maybe this is where we all go to register school. What a great way to introduce uh families to our district by uh coming in and and signing up for school there. Um, building C, uh, which is the major class building, technically has room for about 12 or so classrooms on the three floors. But as we talk further, uh, we're not just looking at these buildings as they're presently constructed. Building C

104and B would be uh, if we were to use them would require renovation. So, we're making that into thinking. So, we really had to principles think of the think of the potential of these spaces. Don't just think of how they're set up now because it is set up as a nursing school. uh not necessarily meant for any public school grades parts of our work. Uh building B again as I said it was small offices. We we're seeing that that room could be used for any one of our specialy services to whether it be OTPT, nurse, custodial space, etc. It does have kind of a full basement that facilities might be able to use for a workshop. It's currently a workshop for lab. I think it would need a little work uh to make it be

105more habitable, but uh there's a lot of good square footage here in this beautiful site uh on I think about 35 acres of land uh that backs right up to uh Quant Pond. Um just to give you the context of the library office uh option uh we trying to make this PowerPoint self-standing so when it goes on the website people can read it if they didn't view the the um >> the the night's committee meeting. So bear with me for the wordiness of it, but I wanted to have something that we can put on the web that people can read later on. Uh but just to give the background, the Milton public schools have been experiencing space challenges at the elementary level for several years. Uh the the town did take action several years ago,

106two years ago to increase classroom space at the Cunningham school by um creating classrooms where the former library was at the Cunningham and then putting the Cunningham library at the floor above that. The round of that construction happened in summer of 76. We have beautiful classrooms and office space in that uh what would have been the old library space at the Coney now that's being used every single day and next year uh the summer of 26 will be the um finishing of the library portion of that. So we'll have a brand new library on top. So that in itself was very one big important step for getting space at the elementary level. Um but the need for the space has been established by the work of the building committee. They've been talking about the need

107space for a long time. they've been talking about enrollment and and um really doing some very good work um to establish that we are running out of space and I don't think everybody in town really understands that that's the case and having been in the buildings uh very consistently over the last 12 months we need space there's no doubt about it we need more space for the service delivery to our students uh while the building committee was uh entering into the process with the MSBA um and has been accepted into that process and it is in stage two. Uh Laboreet uh announced that it was closing and it was going up for sale in August. So what we have is a very short window to figure out whether or not it's uh something that the

108town would like to pursue. And um the way that we were talking with at the building committee meeting that Nathan and I were mocker a few weeks ago, the way Sea put it was, you know, the school has to come up with does this work for the schools? How would it work? What would go there? uh and we need to have that work done. So that's what this is going to be talked about discussed tonight. Then the way Sean put it very very well is and then the town going to have to set up a way to figure out if it is useful and we do think something can fit that will have value and will meet the goal of um providing more space in the district. we've been chasing for more than a few

109years. Then the town has to figure out how to fund it and how to have that be talked about in the community and have money allocated for that whether it's through a vote of town meeting or a vote of the town. Uh so that's their job. And then the third job out there is for uh the school building committee to be available to help shepherd this work through if it does become something we think is important and we are able to uh purchase the space. Then the building committee would we would have to all decide how we would want that body to move into the operationalizing of uh the analysis further and deeper analysis the building uh renovation that would have to take place and then starting to uh take charge of that work on

110behalf of the school department of the town. So there's three jobs out there that have to be done. Our job right now is to say out loud here are some things that we think would fit and here's why. Um and then this group would want to you know have that discussion tonight. We may want to have a second discussion about this as well. And we do have a meeting set up with Nick and some other folks and select board members I think in the next week or so uh to talk about this at a select board school slash a larger meeting of different folks. So um this is exciting. It is a tight window. It is an opportunity. It may be something that would be good for the schools town and it may not but

111we have to really I think take it very seriously. >> Yes. Jump in real quick. >> Yeah. Um first of all besides 4.7 acres um the just on the point of the coordination with the school building committee as part of the school building update is just I think the conversation we're having tonight and obviously as John's saying like decision around what is our sense of what direction we want to go around programming is important to then share with school building so they can pro because they are we are contracting trying to contract with an architect who can provide some insight of like okay is that feasible like what would it what would it look like to do that on the site? Would we lose on site? What you know where could we put some things?

112Because then obviously that informs okay how how feasible is this idea? Maybe we have the these grand visions that can be seen. And so once you get that feasibility then that comes back to us to determine okay is this still the program that we want to move forward with and are we still interested in this being kind of a something we want the select board and the town administrator to pursue ask them to pursue at least. Um, so yeah, all that happening kind of within this tight timeline context is discussing >> in uh and in our conversation at the school building committee meeting a few weeks back, there was some remaining funds that they may have available to hire an architect to kind of give us that overview of what the potential looks like. It

113would be very helpful to Mark's point to have that architectural firm have a program in mind when they're thinking about the space could in what they could envision for the space looking like for that population to be served. Yeah. >> Um, so the goal and the timeline, we have a tight uh tight timeline here. The goal uh of this presentation is to review those potential educational program options. We want to be able to provide the school community and the community with a high level analysis on several academic educational program scenarios for consideration. uh by the end of June, we'd like to kind of decide on this big picture of who would what could actually fit there and would it work and do we feel okay about it and would we recommend that to be the

114scenario or the option that the architects kind of have in mind when they look at the building for potential renovation or uh thinking about how they could modify to serve that population. uh in July the town administrator's office would have to consult with the school building committee and the school committee to see what options would work to to sufficient to provide sufficient capacity to achieve that space and have that analysis supported by a contracted architectural firm and I think at the same time be thinking about how we want to pay for this because if we're going to make a bid when it goes for sale late August we this is not a municipal you know we can take our time let's go bid this we're going to be in the open market to buy this

115space so there's going have to be a process for the funding to take place that Nick Milano, our town administrator, is working on. And lastly, in August, the purchasing of this campus would have to have a positive impact in the Milton public school space challenges and the town would have to discuss the mechanisms for fighting it. So, you know, when I think about this from a big picture perspective, the first question I think about when we go to the next slide, we tried to make a quick rubric here. Um, does it address the needs that we've been talking about for years in Milton that we want to try to remedy which is the Cunningham and our elementary schools are overcrowded and we need to be able to alleviate that. The building of an 89 school

116would would result in our grade five going up to the middle school space because 89 would be vacated and that's how we would loosen up the space. And under that scenario, under this scenario, we're taking different grade levels and different populations in the schools through this rubric because the first thing it has to do is meet does it actually does it work towards the goal that we've had for the last few years. Does it create more space? Because if it doesn't, then we're not just going to buy it just to buy. We it just has to work and be part of the solution. Uh can the greater program fit in the library building with the additional renovation? Is the program or educational uh just a fit for that site? the age, uh, what's needed there?

117Um, and are there any different or additional operational costs that might be involved that will be above and beyond the normal operational cost of of separating any one group uh into another building? So, we're kind of using this as our framework. We're going to walk you through some scenarios at a very high level. Um, again, this this presentation is meant for anybody to to tap into it when it's on the website. So, first of all, if we built a brand new elementary school, a K to5 elementary school to have now five elementary schools, so we could spread out our students more and uh alleviate the space at every elementary school by reszoning the town and having the school be one of five instead of one of four. Uh so that means we take that population

118of students K to five, divide it by five instead of by four and create more space in each building. Uh would that provide relief? It would. Uh, can the grade and program fit into the library building? It be a threest strand school be about 350 students or so? Right now, Tucker is our smallest school at around 400. So, imagine a school that's probably a threestand school would take the the pressure off the other schools if we were able to uh build a new school. Uh, is the grade or educational fit uh does it fit the site? I think it would fit the site for elementary schools for sure. Uh, it would need a playground and it would need some things like a probably an addition that had some sort of a gymnasium, cafetum kind of

119space that we could put on it as well. That's probably likely for all all of the options that we're looking at. And what are the costs associated with that? Uh we believe that this scenario is really creating a whole new school where we're going to have to create even though teachers will be you know uh spread out across the different classrooms. This will probably be the more uh cost impactful options because we're going to have to create a whole new administration uh specialist language uh OTP speech all those different things that go in every school would have to be replicated at this school as well. So, this could be one of the more costly operational um models that we're presenting, but it it could it fit and would it be work? Would it work? It

120could work. >> John, sorry, just clarifying question. What's a three strand school? >> Meaning three classes of grade one, three classes of grade two, and three classes of grade three. >> Tucker is four, right? >> Tucker is three. >> Of course, three one year. Every once in a while, they have a four. >> Yeah, of course. Sorry. >> And Tucker also hosts uh two two prek classes as well. So this wouldn't be okay. >> That's correct. >> Um then we started to think about like at the high school would bring any one grade at the high school. So we just kind of worked our way down the uh high school, middle, and elementary. Um you know, just generally speaking, no one liked this idea at all because the the four years of high school are

121the four years of high school. We have a comprehensive high school. It's working. Uh between the band, the sports, the athletics, and everything that makes up a high school. Um we would like to make sure that we kept those four years together. So, could it fit? Sure, we can fit 350 students there. Do we think it's a good academic and educational fit? Probably not. You know, it's not something that we would recommend. Um, because we actually feel like our high school is actually working well. It's the flagship and it and it's actually performing initional four-year high school. But, you know, we could walk it through this process if we wanted to go into more detail getting into the middle school. You know, one of these discussions we've had lately, and this is something that I've

122been kind of a little bit, you know, overfocused on is, you know, do we do we put our eighth grade somewhere different? Do we create an eighth grade academy where we, you know, we leave that middle school model for that age group and focus on something a little different and hyperfocus on our eighth grade students in an academic way and pull them out of that school and do something different? You know, could it fit? It could. Do we do we think it's a good idea when we think about all the transitions that students are making and do we want to have a traditional elementary kind of a traditional middle school and all a sudden pull our eighth grade out and then have them go to high school? Maybe not. But uh you know there is

123some value to thinking about isolating that one group and really preparing them in an isolated way for high school in a very thoughtful way. Um, I I kind of in my back of my head I like that idea, but I also don't feel as educationally comfortable with the transitions that that would mean for students to go out of their traditional middle school, go out for a year, and then go back to a traditional high school. But, um, it it would probably have some financial cost into that as well because at the middle school, you have to you have all your languages, you have all your specialists, you have PE, art, all those are right now between three grades that would have to isolate them and we might have some traveling folks. um similar to the

124elementary uh into the middle and high. Do we take one grade out out of the middle out of the elementary level and just take fifth grade out? Again, we could. Um it doesn't feel as impactful as the eighth grade doing that with them. And it also feels consistently disrupting the educational flow of that child as they go through prek through high school. Pulling them out just for fifth grade if you don't have to would be that I would recommend. I do know that uh folks point to needm as an example that has a sixth grade school that that sixth grade school wasn't by design because that was an educational wellthoughtout model. It was because they had certain space, they had certain amount of buildings. They had enrollment growth and so they had to kind of

125organize themselves around the buildings had uh it's working for them. NE was a great district but I don't think it would be by design. I don't think I'd go that way by design. Um then we get into uh our model of kindergarten and preschool. Um this is the one that our leadership team feels most strongly about. Uh we feel like we are a preschool director. We already have a preschool that has their own team chair, BCBA, OTPT, speech. Um uh we they're a unit in and of themselves that is almost like modular. We could actually pull preschool out and put it in any one of our schools and it would work. Um, if we did this in in conjunction with adding kindergarten there, it would just be a larger space where the the prek and

126the K students could interact. Uh, we have been talking as a group all year about the 8 to9 transition, the fifth grade to sixth grade transition, but also the prek to K transition is very, very important. We go from a preschool that we are servicing three, four, and 5y olds who are on IEPs based on their pediatrician's recommendations. by law, we have to service them, and we're glad to do it because we get them ready to enter into kindergarten. Um, and we also have uh uh peer students that go as well to be part of that program. Then that's a big jump to kindergarten and we lose them at all four different schools. And what what we're hearing from especially our elementary principles is that wouldn't it be great to soak that that whole group

127of preschool and kindergarten in one school with literacy uh and and let let the least restrictive environment of kindergarten be least restrictive but in a setting that we still have a lot of control over. We're not losing them to that bigger elementary site that we can really do a better job of finding out uh our preschool students who are going into kindergarten. we could be more thoughtful about not pro, you know, really letting them be least restrictive in kindergarten. And if they're in need of pulling that back to be more restrictive, all those services are right in the building and the and with the teach with with the teachers who do them in preschool. So this is the idea that's really taken a lot of good roots with the leadership team. Um we could this

128could be a a literatur uh you know vocabulary rich uh support driven environment. Um, and so this is the one version of the options that I think the leadership team feels most strongly about. Uh, and the modification to the building, the cafeterium, the bathrooms, and modifying the building in a way that would be young people uh, friendly, uh, is something that I think is construction doable. And, uh, it it it even though it is another transition, it it feels like more of a logical transition to preKK. And then um unique to Milton is that we also won't have students going into kindergarten in a building and then potentially having to make a choice between program and potentially have to having to leave that school. You know, it alleviates that whole French English lottery. I don't

129want to leave because I want French, but I don't want to go there and my sibling doesn't take it. They're over here. It would really allow us to have everybody stay in one place and then when they make a program choice, they do that uh in their neighborhood school without without having to think that they have to change just one year later. That kind of transition change is hard for our families. We're in the middle of that process right now. We just had a lottery. Um we had several parents tour the Glover who were thinking about leaving either Tucker or Polycott to go for French and uh spoken to some folks in person or over the phone. it's hard, you know, and and so choice is hard. Some people don't want the choice. Just tell

130me where to go. Uh and when you have choice, it's hard. So, this might a little bit of that and it might uh shave the edges down on it a bit. So, we really think that that's uh one of the strongest options we have and we go into a little bit more detail later. Then, we just think about playing kindergarten, just put the K there. It feels like that would work, but I think partnering it with preK is actually more comprehensive and would make more sense for our preschool students to be part of that early literacy or early childhood center. Uh but of course, if kindergarten or preschool would fit, kindergarten would fit be fine. Um and then there's a preschool only model that I think is very interesting as well. and uh Bernardet Butler,

131our preschool director, you know, if we were able to just, you know, not agree on preschool and K. Uh there's a high demand out there for preschool. At some point in time, we were leaning towards uh in education to have uh universal prek for every child. We would be building in capacity for that. So if we just had preschool there, we could actually be ahead of the curve by offering preschool either for a fee that we could either, you know, generate some revenue or have it be self- sustaining a little bit. Uh we offer it to staff if we wanted to have that component of employment. We're trying to retain staff. We have over, you know, 40 people out on maternity leave and paternity leave. Uh it could serve the community well. We have the

132universal prek class at the Tucker that's open that's not associated with our our traditional preschool that's full every year wait list to get into that. So uh that has legs but that wouldn't really remedy to the full extent our space issue that we're really looking to do. So it's a nice idea might not fit the first one which is doesn't really alleviate that space issue but it's thoughtful and it's a it's creative and we're obviously detaining it. Um the next slide, why do we think preschool and or kindergarten is the fit? Uh you know, we are creating a space for our youngest learners to be together where we can focus on a solid deepening of their start to public school, which we think is really effective. We'll have three, four, and 5-year-olds all in the

133same space being taken care of by preschool professionals and early childhood professionals. Uh early literacy and foundational learning can be provided consistently and deeply in that site where like that's the true focus. um the service delivery students who need it. We're all together in one spot with all people just talking about early childhood development. Um um students will experience the diversity of the town and their peers before they go away to an elementary school and then come back together again in the middle. That was something that one of our principles thought was a really unique um aspect of this as well. Uh the site can be be retrofitted to unique academic and social emotional needs. Motor rooms, uh the playground, cafeterium, those things can work and we can do bathrooms. Um, we could also maybe

134partner this with a family center because when you're signing up for preschool, uh, we're working with a lot of agencies when students are coming in and turning three and then, you know, handing your child off for the first time as a kindergartener. Uh, especially if you only have one or as your first one, at least, you know, you're going to this really nice small safe space uh, for that. Uh, and we just think it eliminates the uh, also eliminates that need to go to a school and then have make a decision about grade one. that kind of kind of reduces that that stress level. So, uh we let our leadership team know that we will be presenting tonight. Uh this still seems to be the model that they think would be the best fit uh

135least impactful for transitions really creating an early literacy early childhood center for kids. Um really reducing that prek tok jump that's made right now and um and solidifying. So every, you know, you really feel good about every case student will leave ready for first grade and ready to go to their their elementary school. Uh and um and I can't think of a better way to introduce a family to the Mil public schools and inviting them to, you know, a beautiful site uh on Adam Street, welcoming them to the district and having this really enriching environment for their three, four, and 5year-olds and preparing to move into the public school. So uh it's a unique opportunity. Uh I think from a larger scale from a not a programmatic uh viewpoint this is also eco-friendly like this

136is we're not tearing anything down. >> We're actually using existing structures and we're renovating them in a way that's um all of this will be brought up to code whether it's windows or anything else. We'll get a price on that. But you know right now uh in the world of construction you know uh rehabbing is better than building new. I think it's it makes more sense. uh it would if it were able to take place and alleviate the issue of to build a new seventh and eighth grade school, we're leaving open space in in the town. We want to build on that open space by Gro and uh and I think the town likes to see government working by buying existing assets and taking advantage of them and utilizing them in a way that just

137makes sense. Um and I'd really be interested to find out that between the purchase price and the potential renovation price where that would be a cost savings perspective from um from just a purely financial decision you know I think we're talking right now it's somewhere around 170 million uh for the 78 school that will continue to go out wait um and um you know wondering after you take out the MSBA reimbursement there going to be a number that will have to pay and you wonder what the what the net cost would be um so there's there's a lot of good advantages if it works. Um, and if we're able to, you know, come up with a good plan, um, and we want to go after it, then we're positioned to do that. And if, uh,

138we feel like it's not a fit or we can transition to, uh, purchase enough time. Uh, I just still think it's worth exploring. And, uh, it's a unique opportunity. The the leadership is excited about this opportunity. There's a lot of eyes wide open when they walk into the space. and they they just kept thinking and thinking and thinking and it was a good afternoon we had there. So that's a very high level. It's not the detailed version that we we might you know have normally done if we had more time on ramp to this conversation. Uh we have a meeting on June 3rd. Uh here as a school committee we have time with the school building uh committee and the select board coming up where they're going to want us to kind of weigh in

139on what we think would work. And and this is all hypothetical. we think we'd like to do this. Can you go price it out? This is what we might work for the school department. So, there is a time element to this that we just have to acknowledge um moving forward. That's the presentation. >> This is great. Um I I really appreciate all the considerations for you just pulling out the grades and seeing what makes most sense. I would say um just by what's shared here. um the prek and just from a number standpoint, the amount of kids that you can put in that building, you know, versus 350 for the others, but here looking about 100 kids more. So, which is awesome to be able to alleviate that space at the other elementary schools. Um,

140so that's fantastic. I also appreciate the thought process of bringing both of these grade levels together and then also introducing students districtwide early on at such a young age and forming those bonds and relationships because I do think it because when they see each other in middle school, it's a it's a different feeling and sometimes when they're seeing kids new, they tend to kind of >> just stay steer themselves or, you know, go with kids that they know. And I think that's where you do definitely see that segregation a lot at the middle school. So I think this could really help with that. Um so I really appreciate um what we uh what is shared here. I'm glad that we looked at this. I think you know pulling out a fifth grade or an eighth

141grade. you know, as our um student rep said, it's great to be that the older student, you know, at that grade level because you've been there for three years or you've been there for five years and you're like, great, I am, you know, like the big guy on campus, you know, like that feeling and and it's great. The eighth graders feel that right now. They're all in DC >> uh right now. They're just feeling really special with all the end of the year stuff that's coming. The same thing happens in fifth grade. So to like kind of remove that um I don't think it's fair and I know like even with sports a lot of sports teams are set up seven eight five six you know like so it's nice to kind of keep them

142together um so um but and thing with the transitions going in from you know pulling out ninth for instance so I'm glad that we looked at all of those but I do agree that the prek and K is strongest. So, thank you. >> Questions, comments? >> Yeah. Um, I have a few comments and then a couple of questions and agree with Anna. Great presentation and really helpful to see the options here just in the just in terms of comments. I feel like the rubric if it's a if it's a no on either consideration number one or number two, I just feel like it should be automatically ruled out. helps the other two there's, you know, there could be debate within both of those. But if it's not relieving space and you can't actually fit anybody

143in there, then that's an easy one to me. Um, similarly on item two, can the greater program be fit into the buildings with additional renovation? Like there's another version of a question which is are we maximizing our use of the space of that building? like Anna made the point that you know with preK and K we're putting I don't know actually what the building can hold so I assume all these options can fit in um but preK and K will take uh 450 versus the other options are 100 less so if we're able to maximize the space in that building more I think that's a that's a real plus um what else have a couple comments here um I I think if If we do seriously consider any of the single grade options like 589,

144which it sounds like are lower on the list, I think I would want to learn more just about like what what what is the evidence on what it means to segregate an entire grade level into another building? Like what does that mean for child development or learning or whatever? There might be pros and cons. Um, the the fifth I if if it were bad, I I don't I don't mind. I I think I'm I'm in the I like the the early childhood idea the best here. The fifth grade one is kind of interesting. And I think one of the big social challenges for students in Milton is that I mean they stay with their elementary school pod for a long time like often all the way through middle school. In fifth grade integration could be

145a way to break that down a little bit a little bit earlier unless I I I think the prekk idea is is a good one. I think the idea that a year of integration will some somehow do something. I'm I'm just find that I'm less convinced by that. Sorry. No, I'm just I just have I just took a lot of notes during your presentation. Um I really John, I like the point around the lottery and the way that this could um help avoid some of the some of the big headaches both for central for administration of the lottery and for families. Um I sorry I had one one more thing here. um on the Okay, two two two questions for you. No, and don't feel if you don't know the answers, that's totally fine, but

146just um transportation wasn't listed here and pro probably any new school we have, it's going to have transportation implications. I'm wondering if there's especially with the early childhood model um if there's anything unique to consider there around >> uh transportation. This is not particularly walkable neighborhood. >> Correct. >> Um so and these are all young children. They're all going to have to be driven to the building. >> Um and so I'm curious to know how how we're thinking about that there. Um, and then if we do move prek and K, and I'm not an expert on our preschool program. And so we have preschool at Tucker and Cunningham, and I assume that that's a district-wide program, right? But it's going to so it's going to differentially free up space at two schools. And I'm wondering

147if we will need to if that will have implications for the catchment zones of those two schools in particular. um and whether we might have to think about how students sh potentially shift between schools to balance out >> the population and whether we might have to change the the catchment zones to get an even distribution at each of the schools based on what their new is. So, uh, first question, the cost of transportation will go up. To answer that question, I think that, uh, and there is a there is a potential that your start times might need to be looked at, reviewed. Again, some people might think that that's great because people always want to try high schools later. >> There's a lot of science around u adolescence and sleep that that we could always

148uh use from that. Um, in terms of the the uh zones of red houses connected schools, we already have some um I think what I forget what we call them in Milton, but they're buffer neighborhoods where you can you can be Glover or Tucker on like parts of Thatcher Street. You can be Cunningham or Collie Carter in parts of the neighborhood off of Pleasant uh >> depending on your >> depending on just the enrollment. And so we we utilize those well this year. >> And and what we ran into this year uh and what we also need to be thoughtful about related to >> um where what what what res what addresses go to each school is we have a lot of housing being built in the town right now and the majority of it

149is on the Cunningham Collod side. >> So we have DPW um uh uh units. We have the units right on the highway that may not produce that many families and students seem to be more high-end, but then you have the the units that are behind Abbeby Park and um and they're going to be children coming from there. So, we're already trying to predict how we want to slightly move our lines a little bit, but I think either whichever you whichever group of students go in there, we're probably going to have to move move those lines around a little. In the preschool K, it's a it's it's a little easier, right? They come from everywhere. They're all going there. But given the space that's freed up in each school, to your point, Nathan, we might need

150to make adjustments. You know, the Tucker could become a four straight school for grades one through five, right? >> Because we're freeing up enough space there. Um and uh you know, we know community schools needs more space. So, oh, you're creating more space than you need. You're never going to have more space than you need in terms of the elementary schools. Uh, you know, I would have dreams of science centers, community schools, you know, give Martha Sanderball more space and let her do her thing. More kids could be happy, more parents could be served. So, um, but in terms of the lines, going to I think the town's going to have to look at the lines of where we how we organize our uh houses to schools probably in the next three years. Um, and

151I'll gladly pass that on to the new point. Thank you, John. Appreciate that feedback. >> So, I I have um a couple things that I was wondering. I think this is great. I'm um it'sing um one thing that occurred to me hearing you talk about the opportunities of the prekk building is a question that again we might not know the answer to tonight but it's something I'm wondering if we could think about is like currently how many do do we know how many families in Milton live in Milton but do private kinder kindergarten and enter the district for first grade. And what we wouldn't want is to get like create this amazing center that now people are like, "Oh, I am going to kindergarten in Milton public schools now." And somehow it's like not big

152enough to hold additional kids. Not just kids, families moving into town, which is happening, but >> do you know what I'm talking about? families that have opted out of kindergarten for whatever reasons, but that this new setup might for the attractive things bring them in. So that that would just be something I'd want to research to make sure that not creating something that is too close to being at capacity that then we have to like reorganize it soon. Um, and I'm just thinking about, so when you're discussing the opportunity if it were the preKK to have central office relocated there, then that alleviates space in the high school uh, current central office space becomes usable for the high school. So that helps the high school and your other department centers, >> but that leaves Pierce

153>> the place that doesn't correct >> directly receive like a benefit through this. And so I have a whereas the seventh eighth grade building was sort of an in um an interesting idea because it helped at all at all of the levels. >> Yeah. So >> I don't know and I don't know the seventh day grade plan well enough. Uh so the high school would keep central office at the 89 school was built. So then the high school would >> 78 school built. So the high school >> no central office was going to move to that site >> and where was it? Yeah >> as well and so >> to the >> so that would free up high school building space similarly by having a central office move out. It wasn't I believe it was

154going to move like all this special ed department and other additional places. Um and then you know the fifth grade have been able to move to the Pierce. the issue is just >> I just I'm I'm sure that that's the kind of thing that just gets vetted in the next level of um determining the um like cost benefits of the model. But I that was just something that I was wondering about. And honestly, I just think that there are a lot of interesting new benefits that this opportunity presents that the you know, upper middle school doesn't actually address. But >> just just on the the space piece, I have some questions that too. But generally, I think this site is smaller than a middle school, right? It's 4.7 acres because we're looking at minimum six

155acres which G Road is. It's over 600 kids, right? Because it's 330 kids per seven, eight eighth grade. So, it's almost 700 kids. This is >> accommodate something that big, right? >> Yeah. Again, we'll have the architect look at it. It's very unlikely we'll be able to accommodate something of that scale. So, anything we do at Labberet will by just that math be smaller than anything we would do at Guile. And so, therefore, the space the positive space impacts we would see across the other schools would be lessened by doing this. Question is how much like to what degrees? >> But it looks like you would be put be able to put more of the district personnel there than based on the seven and eight model or would it just be central office that would

156move there? I I'm not aware of this what the plan was for central office at the at the middle school under the MSBA options that they're moving through. So I speak to it because I don't know it in detail. >> Um and um we we understand that the Pierce is not impacted >> with the elaborate site negatively or positively, >> right? >> Um Bill understands that. He's the only one that doesn't get any kind of flexibility there. Uh and that's part of the decision, right? we go. If it costs less and it does 80% of what we want it to do, great. And if there's some educational benefit because we like what it does with the prekk, then great. So, we're going to have this little off list where, you know, something's going to be

157missing somewhere. Um, the nice part about it that could be more timely. There's there's going to be a pros and cons big picture list, right? financial to operational to educational to space that we'll just have to walk our way through and say that the the balances work in the favor of moving forward with it or or not you know for sure >> um is there any uh universe under which we consider doing a K through because thinking about the Pierce and you know anecdotally knowing that um when my kid was there not more than a couple years ago uh there were space issues and they were using library classroom space and that sort of thing. Uh is there any university in which we considered a K through six option um which was the thing of

158alleviating some space at the elementary level and also alleviate space at at Pierce. >> So we thought of it as if we go with prek library and the space opens enough if the the impact of space opening up in a very unique way at every elementary then you can bring six back down to elementary and you could have a one six. I see. >> If if if every school loses their K, then you're going to replace them with fives, but you're going to lose the preschool. >> So, is that net does that net impact of that provide us a good enough flexibility at elementary and that then naturally would provide you space at the at the high school? I mean, at the middle school, it could only then be that's where you could go 78

159in central office and then everybody could possibly win. So, that's we did discuss that point. You just move all the pieces around. >> Sure. >> Um >> so the difference there and just in thinking about what the architect would need to >> explore >> would be um what you're talking about there is central office does not relocate to Labber. >> Yeah. Well, it could anyways because the the the main the the the mansion or the building A >> Yeah. is uniquely cut up that would never be able to be >> so it would be there probably either way. >> Either way. Yeah. Okay. >> The high school would gain space that way. >> The analysis that you're talk the analysis needs to happen about um whether bringing the prek out of Cunningham. Yeah. Whe that

160creates the opportunity to bring sixth grade down. >> PreK and K. Yeah. I think it's preK. >> Yeah. So that's a prek 1-6 78 school 9 through 12 no central office at the high school central office being at the prekk and now all of a sudden we do have space at the middle school that's one grade less >> and that's where the extra space would be available for whatever the next whatever >> configuration you'd want to be thoughtful about. >> Obviously Glover doesn't get any space in that scenario if you assume the sixth grade that they're gaining is the same size as the kinder they're losing. Yeah, >> they don't have a prek collie kind of >> that. I wonder if that is part of the conversation about the redrawing of the lines. >> Maybe

161the catchment zone for Glover becomes like a little bit smaller. >> It could if Tucker becomes a four strand school, then you can start to slowly fine-tune the it really comes down to how many what how many section will each school be? It will be a three strand, right? So yeah, if you have a four strand school >> at Tucker, a four strand school, could you have all four schools four strand schools and make that work that way? >> And we're averaging about we I think the I think it's 330 and 340 that FBA said we're going to the average kind of seventh and eighth grade. I think they they settled at a cohort of about 330 >> per grade. >> Yeah. So if that's being projected as the seventh and eighth grade one, that's

162a little smaller because they that takes into account the attrition that we're losing some students of middle school. I'd say that we should plan 350 elementary grade class size. Do you mean? >> Uh that's more than the 320s that we're seeing lately in the middle of what you've seen. You've seen some 370s, >> right? >> Too. So, um, but to your point, uh, Lizzie, you need to pay really close attention to not building something that doesn't have the full capacity in just four years. And there is a build it and they will come factor to any new construction that you'll have. >> The nice part about the 78 school is that we want people to come to 78 because that's that's kind of the valid that's where the enrollment pauses a little bit before it

163goes back to the high school. So, um, but all definitely good things to think about uh because we're trying to build capacity. That's the whole point to the to purchase. >> Um I I had a question just on the numbers. So again, I think you were using 350 for most of the scenarios given that's kind of about the cohort size per grade. And so and most of these are like one grade scenarios. >> We would need to see with the architect if we think 450 kids could fit on the site >> with the prek case scenario which had like the biggest enrollment impact. if we assume 450 kids could fit on the site. I had a very similar thought to you of like a K6 model like have we have we thought about that? Could

164we think about a K6 model which again would then turn all of the schools into K6s? Um obviously like issues with that is you're keeping kids. It does the opposite of your your fifth grade idea of like you're keeping kids apart one year longer which I know is a concern within um the school but you're not adding an extra transition because in any of the other scenarios you're adding a fourth transit third transition for kids. Um issue is you would have to redistrict as you would with K5. Um, and again, I think an issue you brought up that I had too with any of these like elementary ones is that it's just not a walkable >> area. The idea that with the all of our other schools, you just see so many families just walking

165their kids and flooding the streets to get to school and that's so wonderful. >> Yeah. >> And it's just not >> that like I don't see how that could be. in the Ksix model um to the Glover point that that requires us to make sure that we're using say Tucker as a four strand school to alleviate grade space because you can't a sixth graders to Glover because they don't have the space. >> Right. Right. >> And you would you would add kids to Glover because you'd be reducing Glover. >> Yeah. In the other grades, the only way that would work is you'd be pulling kids >> 5K6. That's what we're talking about. >> 5K6. Oh, are you talking about having it be a K5 school? Oh, okay. I'm sorry. >> Well, no. I'm saying it's

166the K5 model, but instead of making a K5, you make all of them K6es because you're pulling kids out of the other schools. >> I'm sorry, I didn't. >> And again, could you pull enough kids out of the other schools? >> So, five K6 schools. >> I also add one one point is that prek right now is not required by law. Um, we we do have special for Yes. And but we do have a half day prek program. So, so the 120 prek students is 60. Yeah. >> So, the capacity is really 410. >> Yeah. >> They that's half day program for most students. They take them half. Correct. >> But we do have one class that is full day. >> Correct. >> That's a one or two. >> I I think it's one >>

167one >> 18 spots. But then if you're doing a full elementary school, you would have to provide all the staffing needs there. >> I think it's the biggest cost driver. >> I had a question because all of your scenarios, you're a principal, you have elective staff, you have front office staff, I think other than the prekk because you would convert the >> bidette to that and so like that saves you >> that one position. you still potentially I mean I guess the question is like how many elective teachers do you need for half day prek and then a kindergarten model and maybe that's a little bit less than the other scenarios but like otherwise the front office staff you still need the custodians you still need like none of that's changing >> correct >> so

168like it's you know >> it's more about specials in uh in any languages that have to travel >> um >> added added adjustment I it's all going to be there's going to be fine degrees of what is too much and what's not enough uh And then you have to compare that also to is this the seventh and eighth grade school? What does that what does that look like? Because I think people are gonna want to know that answer as well. I think traditionally people say, "Oh, it's all the same. Everybody just moves over." >> Ker and I just went through this in the previous district. >> Does cost you. There are more staff that you need to hire custodians. There are these auxiliary positions that you need to provide. It's not overwhelming and it's not

169it doesn't make it not worthwhile, but there are more positions that you would need to add to make whatever we do work work. >> Yeah. I'm just think it's the the question of again exactly what is that what is that delta point to of adjustment counselor stats you have more kids they're getting older maybe you're just adding more people within that space >> you need some more of those positions any I guess a question I'd have is like next step would be any honing down of what we think like that >> delta could be between a K5 K6 model versus like the the prek to to understand that because it does seem like there's a lot of overlap between the positions that would be needed not 100%. Um >> there is a factor which you

170know becomes about um the town having a sense of like buy in to the opportunity. Obviously it's it's about benefiting all the kids in the town by alleviating overcrowding. I think it is also a little bit it's a different proposition to introduce like one beautiful new elementary school while the rest of our in that case four elementary schools continue to age in place >> while we have this >> beautiful new one. So a fifth of our students are you know attending. So, I'm just I'm not saying that's a reason not to do it if everything else points towards that, but that just becomes something that you have to like help the community sort of think about, which is just different from introducing a facility that serves the entire >> I I would agree with that

171>> which is the case for the early childhood or the middle school and which like all families who have children of that age >> could universally >> you know benefit from it feels more like a benefit to the whole So, I'm just that would be something that would would need to be like I think addressed head on um to avoid some feelings about that. And I think just looking at the labor college site and seeing the mansion, you know, shows like it's like for it appearance-wise too, even though our the classrooms are in the other building behind in the back, like it's just that perception of like, oh wow, like this is where this new elementary school is going to be. So I do appreciate the thought process behind, you know, the K and pre

172that. The whole the lack of walkability to it is a very interesting point that you brought up Nathan, you know, I don't know whether how many people could access that on foot, Jimmy and what does that three strand school look like and what neighborhood does it serve and right >> how would that balance everything out? It'll it's interesting. I do like the university universally everybody being able to benefit by this new space by going to either prek or g there. It has that feels better to me whether that's emotional or intellectual or data driven or not. It just feels better to me to have everybody access the space for a really unique experience before they go on to their elementary school. >> I I do think one of the challenges with the site is going

173to be the mansion in that to the point you made like I don't think there's any way in which you can salvage the mansion and have it be a student correct >> usable space just walking through like it is. And so that's a large chunk of the the site, the facility, and kind of need to figure out how you create access for people to come visit the administrative offices or whatever else that is that then, >> you know, would make a larger building like a Ksix challenging >> u because the site is obviously, you know, Tucker is two acres. Um it's obviously a very tiny site. This is 4.7 acres. So Tucker is 450 kids. Um, so like the idea that we can fit 450 kids, 480 kids on this site is doable probably, but

174again start losing parking. There's not really good other alternatives to parking. Um, although people at Tuck are probably say similar they can benefit from parking. Uh, and um, >> yeah. Anyways, so things things like that are things that just come to mind. So again, I I do think the preKK is a strong proposal. My just concern is the additional transition, which again we have with the upper middle school thing. So it is an issue, but I think there are a lot of >> is there within the 4.7 acres if we wanted to potentially, you know, if enrollment increases to like add on, you know, since these buildings are kind of they all look very different, but they're all connected, you know. So, is there a potential like is there room or is it conservation like

175is there like anything like that that >> So, they said there's no conservation land on the acreage. Uh there is conservation land that abuts the acreage that's swung by bond pond from what I understand from that conversation. The wetlands. Yeah. >> Uh and uh yeah, it's funny. We're talking about expanding capacity, but we're worried about expanding capacity to the right level. Right. You know, so but it's accurate. like we really have to make sure that if we do this and we organize ourselves is the kind of work of the cohorts that we decide to put in there and uh uh so I I I'm I'm interested to to see if the 450 410 would work on the prekk and and my head is spinning with so what does what does each of the elementary schools

176look like their K >> and how do we want to think about that and and maybe there's some um uh for lack of a better term mining of good ideas, how could we utilize good space at elementary schools differently uh now that the space is potentially freed up a little bit. Um and the first thing I come to is after school care for our community which is really something that people need and and if we have the funds to operationalize any kind of you know science centers and things like that or tech centers with each elementary school. We had a lot of conversations in our district about when we uh moved to the 7 through 12 model and then we had a four, five, six intermediate school that would have extra space in it and

177then we only had K to3 schools that would be the four elementaryaries and um and we knew we would have some extra space for for after school care but also we were really thinking about unique programming that if we could generate the funding for you know what better to have a science center, what better to have some sort of a tech center or lit literacy center or whatever that would be that every student could access in that building and that that the educator could pop around building to building and be the specialist to do. Um so um if we're lucky to have more space than we need to a certain degree not to the point where we don't need it to say that's not a good use of money but to do have other educational

178programming that would benefit kids uh that would be a good thing. Another thing in this conversation about the school in general that would like is the the opportunity for space to house programs um that could allow more students who are currently out of district to remain in district. >> Absolutely. >> And that would be like beneficial across for the education but inclusion and also the financial savings of not needing for them to go out of district. So those kinds of um calculations feel like really helpful to be able to make. >> Yeah, this is all it's all exciting. Uh I guess I my in my brain the next steps are hearing from Sean and Nick about the architect and what we what's a deliverable that we need to give to the committee and to that

179group >> in order to make this more real and substantial for them to actually have direction. Um it might be like you need to tell us what which you want guys let's go. I don't know. I really want to hear from them about what the deliverable is. I'm assuming they're going to want to know at least one or two options that that they to kind of uh sketch out and see uh what that would look like and if it's doable. And I think in construction these days, anything's doable. Um I also want to make sure that we're good neighbors to that community. Uh so I I you know, I'd like to think that they would appreciate a school going in after a school. Uh and who doesn't want prek kindergarteners and the noise of that

180good noise in the playground? Um, he's a good friend. >> I live next to the high school. Every time I hear the crack of a softball bat or the chair at a lacrosse game, I just think it's awesome and the lights go right into my living room. I have no problem with it at all. I think it's fantastic. So, >> you're raising a good point, which is at what point in this process going forward would it become important to offer like a >> community session for for neighbors, etc. Like that would be good to do sooner rather than later if it's moving forward. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I in my brain and please jump in the order of operations is let's find out what they the other two parties of this triangle look

181like. What do they need from us? What decisions do we need to make? I just don't want to hold it up. >> Yes. >> Uh whatever we need to get done while our leadership team is here and we're in school and we're all in session to give them time in July to kind of work out whatever they need to work out, assess, draw up, cost out, timeline out, and then come back in Octo and come back in August and really have harder conversations if this is viable or not. I think is where we ultimately be. >> Yeah. I I think we need to move towards limiting the options. The more options you ask the architect to do, the more expensive it is, the more time it takes. We don't have time. And so I think

182ideally uh it would like us to come up with one design option to say let's move forward and cost us out. And so if that's something that feels like we can get to >> then that's great because they can put more time and investment in there. I don't know if we we need to get there today. I do think if there's particularly like if we feel like we can throw out option like get rid of certain options that John and and the team have looked at. If we feel like we can get rid of all of them except for one, then that's great. We I don't have to make that today. But if we feel like there a couple still on the table that we'd like some more information about for John and the team

183to like think about and come back and further the conversation on that's what I'm looking for members to say. Um sounds like I haven't heard anybody kind of raised the flag for the grade nine program. I'm just saying what I've heard and so correct me or the grade eight program or even the preschool only program or the only program because it seems like those have some challenges. So I think there's some value in keeping those slides in there and some of those other discussions that we had kind of populating some of those like you know if if we put in a a new K through five or K through six school there and it's brand new and it's >> like kind of the same like how does that feel and just kind of put it

184in there so that if we do have a community forum we have explored every single option you know possible and If there are other ones, great that come up, you know, we're happy to look at that. But based on all these discussions and to talking to, you know, the other, you know, Nick and Sean and kind of find, you know, kind of fine-tuning it, but to put information in there saying that we've looked explored all of these. >> Yeah. I'm not saying for the community form. I'm saying for us on the third. Oh, yeah. Right. I think I think we want to narrow down because I think they put together some good very quick information. But how do we what is the more what are the scenarios here we want them to look into more

185>> right >> again it seems like prek prek through kinder that I feel like there's your alignment that like that needs to stay on the table we need to keep talking about that is there something else beyond that >> that we no I do I like the eighth grade um that you know we briefly talked about but I think when we're talking about the vertical alignment and the eighth to 9th transition we're addressing that so I think it's it's needed. It's interesting because I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done at that grade level, but um since we're addressing it through through all the other work that we're doing, >> um I don't think it needs to be on the table. I I I liked Nathan's point earlier about uh the

186two most important things being does it alleviate space because that's yeah the main purposes and then you know can you fit the number of students in uh and that anything that has a no in either of those >> really kind of falls out of consideration for me I I I agree with that and I think grade nine meets that criteria because it doesn't alleviate space >> uh that we need space at Milton High School um you But I don't think we've talked about that being a place that we're constrained. >> Yeah. Can can I ask a clarifying question? PreK through K when we talk about five K to6 schools. >> Um where does prek go? >> So you're talking about the option, not the prek K option, but >> yeah, a fifth K through six

187school. That was one of the things that we put on the table. Um, and knowing that >> um that if we >> I'm trying to I'm just I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around it. >> That's that's a challenge that >> idea. >> I mean, you could you could do the addition with some additional space for prek to pull prek out of Tucker, right? If that's a place that's going to The issue is with the K6 model is it only works if you're pulling a strand per grade level out of the other schools, right? To get that stuff. Uh and that means Tucker becomes a two school strand which is very small. >> Yeah. >> Uh and like yeah could you actually could you actually mathematically do it? I don't know if the answer

188is right. I was like trying to do some rough math and I'm not sure I I got to the numbers like how big would it need to be? Again, theoretically, if Tucker is a might, I keep pointing this direction. Tucker is a um 450 person school and um uh if the new school can be about that size, could it service kind of a similar number of students and trans as as the Tucker School minus prek? Or again, could we make it a little bit bigger and make it serve 500 kids with prek? something like that because the site is two and a half times bigger than this other site. So I this is like very rough math and so I I think you'd have to you maybe could immediately disregard this idea because you just

189can't fit the kids >> addition would need to be way too big given >> conraint of the mansion. I also think something to name is the K5 program as you said you'd have to add a gym in addition to adding a playground in addition to adding a cafeteria >> versus a preKK scenario. You are really just adding a cafeteria and a playground. You don't need the gym. >> No languages. No >> walkability factor >> that someone mentioned I think is important. >> That's important. >> I don't think they offer languages in prek and K anymore. >> No, >> we don't. We don't. So that Yeah. I if this is going to get further considered I think I just yeah the idea of a two strand school >> I don't think that that's educationally healthy. I

190think I think I think teachers need at least three classes to >> to work >> especially if it's K6 and those kids are together for seven years with two strands like >> you could also do something funky with the language programs to >> Yeah. You couldn't have >> you could end up with two classes or no classes. There could there could be some weird stuff going on there, too. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Maybe it's not a good idea for all those reasons. >> Two things. One, it's important to say it out loud because if you can wrap your head around it quickly and we can all understand it, then it's, you know, then it's why we need to just dig into deeper. But as you start to in my head, I'm just operationalizing everything

191and I'm just walking through every building at the same time. Um and uh wanted to make sure that whatever the deliverable is for the third I can present it in a way that could be consumable thought be thought about so we can get this done for the end of June. I think the other thing I do want to stress a little bit is what you talked about in like giving giving teachers voice, right? And and they, you know, if everyone is kind of unanimously saying that prek and K work in this space from because we're in the buildings every day and we kind of understand the landscape and you know our space needs and the challenges and all of those things. I think that's huge consideration, right? Like we could talk all day long about

192different options, but they're the ones in the building. And I >> I think, you know, it's funny. I won't say which principal said, but they I'm gonna cry if my kindergarten is leave. >> This is going to be hard no matter how we >> no matter how we divide this, you know, these uh these, you know, these are components that we're trying to move around and uh the only one that seems to be movable without disrupting a school culture is kind of a preschool because they their own kind of group for a little while. As soon as we delve into uh a grade, I think everybody's gonna I I I love my fifth graders. Why do they have to leave? You know, I love my kids. We're gonna see we're going to definitely see a

193lot of that. And uh and understandably, you know, >> can I add another layer to this that you just made me think of? >> One of the challenges our elementary teachers have because they're on two different schedules is getting together and collaborating. You add another school to the mix, >> make it makes it even harder. start time and end time. >> So that's kind of the the uh the differences that you've talked about in terms of elementary schools. You add one more now you have another layer. So teachers want to talk to each other >> and they need to talk to each other and they need to learn about each other's practice. So if you separate them again >> it's five places I need to try to figure out how to go to. So yeah,

194>> this just something that occurred to me when you said that and I was like oh yeah and that's another thing we've heard in the feedback. I want to meet my great peers. Very hard to do. >> Whereas, as you were saying, John, the prek brings all the kindergarten teachers together in one space and provides a foundation to all >> of the students. That's common. >> Yeah. that it's really early childhood centered versus traditional elementary school separated by subject areaing grade as much as it's going to be a real early childhood center which would have its own kind of little curriculum uh leadership group in that that have to be something that would be leading that but it would definitely be from an early childhood viewpoint versus having to make sure that treating K's like

195your grade five curriculums it's just not the same kindergarten is very different environment from a learning perspective than a fifth grade is Jimmy and um yeah that's that's the educational piece thinking of it through a teacher's lens an age appropriate developmental lens you know >> are are you in the I know the leadership team was part of the visit and the conversation um if this is becoming some like have the prek and kindergarten teachers been consulted in this yet? >> Not at all. We we we've just laid this out with everybody being potentially impacted. They're aware that we're all talking about it, but it's very very uh early in all these things. Wouldn't want to have conversations with folks that if it's off the table, it's off the table. But if we are narrowing it

196down to two or one, then we would want to meet with folks and have a voluntary meeting and and just >> the idea through the principles that's sort of our way of >> of if the principles are supporting the idea that's our way of hopefully understanding that like the teachers are not opposed to the idea. >> Yeah. >> I I I wouldn't say that, right? because we haven't asked them yet. Jimmy and I believe that speak for themselves. Yeah. So I understand what you're saying as far as like it might not move forward for myriad different reasons and if it's a good idea that we want to pursue it might not be possible but I guess that would be something I would want to personally know before like supporting to move it forward that at

197least there had been a layer of consultation with the teachers that would be directly impacted by the shift even as a hypothetical shift to make sure that they have the opportunity to say like I absolutely would not want to do that as a kindergarten teacher and you know so yeah cuz that would be tough if we were like moving forward an idea that >> did we have that conversation with the eighth grade teachers we said that we were going to have a seventh to eighth grade school >> yeah I think they did a lot of they did listening sessions right >> well >> didn't they honestly can't remember that but I I think the difference is that they're already together like the seventh and eighth grade staff are already Yeah, they're not they're not being

198told it would be about taking them out of their >> I just thought of it when you were saying the principles um would be sad to lose the kindergarteners like >> there may be reasons the kindergarten teacher to be part of >> Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. I think that they do. I think that I think it would be hard for our kindergarten staff to be disconnected from their historically K5 schools. And and I think that I don't want to diminish the fact that as a parent uh being a parent at one school for K through five is the longest stretch you get. >> Yeah. >> And it becomes your school and your your social community. Uh not just your school community. It's really important. It's the only stretch you really get that's that

199long. >> And I think there's a lot of value in that. That's why some people like K to8s because it actually extends that that way. >> Uh I I know a lot of districts do one, two, three, four, you know, they do all these choppy, >> but that I think it that reduces community. So, um there's definitely going to be differences of opinion with teachers, probably families about how that would impact them. of a parent of five children, you know, having all of your children a glover and walking to one place with two in a carriage and three at school and, you know, and then being that person who has two at Glover, two at Pierce and one, you know, then all of a sudden you're like this. Um but there's value to the community

200of school especially at the elementary level when it's available to folks you know but teachers will want to teachers have been working together for a long time you know and they have friends and colleagues in different grades that they would probably sorely miss no matter how we're going to >> organize this in any way but they should have >> want to put it out to any group of teachers until this body has decided this is where we're going to go because I don't want to disrupt and worry lot a lot teachers if we're you know the model needs to be decided first I think >> and then we can get some >> yeah because the other part of this is that if this is if this meets the the space issue the financial issue free

201submarine and the operating bud you know all all these things just might be decisions that might have to be made period >> but I would like to find out what they would prefer what they how they feel about it and what would make it easier if that was a transition that they had to make. Uh we did a lot of work after the decision was made to reconfigure our previous district in a way we did to then go and meet grade by grade by all right we're going to you're going to move and you guys are going to stay in >> and we just did listening tours where we just listened and and you could really see people who were just like yeah this sounds great and then I I've been you know I've been

202here so long and I would miss that grade. It was just it was all genuine you mean it was really impactful. I just want to be mindful of time. Um, I think had a very nice discussion. Um, do you feel like you have we're going to continue I assume the discussion next meeting. >> Yeah. >> On we will have the conversation with the town administrator on kind of that information. We really won't have much more from school building committee other than having to sign something with an architect. Um, but is there other like questions you have on analysis? >> No, really good conversation. Thank you for the ideas. I just need to digest it a little bit and get a sense and maybe when you and I and Anna meet about the next meeting, we

203can kind of fine-tune what what we think is needed to be reviewed again or discussed in a way that might be more helpful. Or is is it just putting these things over here for now and focusing on two or three and do we want to add one? Um, I have to say that this is the busiest time of the year other than the first three weeks of school >> that uh, you know, we have a leadership meeting on Tuesday that we were thinking of letting principles stay in their buildings because >> that's where they need to be. You know, there's field days, there's things going on. >> Um, and uh, MCCAST is still in place at school. So, uh, it's really hard to, you know, dedicate a big chunk of time over the next two

204weeks just to this. But so fine-tuning it in my brain for us, talking it out and then finding out how we can operationalize it would be would be great. >> I just ask if members have um follow questions as you're also processing it, please just email those in advance. That helps inform the discussion we can because again time is sensitive and right it's very busy time. Uh hiring update. >> Yeah. So uh very quickly um I actually forgot my attendance update but I'm going to skip that. Um sorry I wanted to first of all uh let you know about the administrative hires. We have the director of business and finance, the human resources director, the director of technology, instructional technology and data analysis and the assistant director of student services. All those uh search teams

205have been at work. Um the uh search team for the director of business and finance was Kakosa Marin Kennedy our payroll administrator Ma Sandival our community schools director and PS principal Bill Fish. They uh did a screening and then they interviewed candidates came up with three finalists. I have met all three finalists and I will make an initial offer to somebody tomorrow. Uh and we hope to tie that job up by the end of next week. We have three very qualified folks. It's going to be a hard choice. So Kyler and I have met uh to go through the notes of what the screening team thought of those three candidates. And then Danielle Wetmore and I two finalist candidates that uh we met with the three finalist candidates over the last three days. Um the

206screening team for the director of instructional technology and data analytics was Kala Holly Connan Bob Patterson uh Jessica Jabo technology teacher at the high school English department head Hardy and librarian Alpert. uh they had a really thick pool. We were really surprised at the quality of people we had applying for this job that we were a little worried about when we add data analytics to it. Uh I interviewed the two finalists today. Uh you wouldn't be able to go wrong with either one of those folks. We're really really fortunate. Uh coming from great districts with really good experience. Um so we feel confident so jobs will be offered to those one of those folks in the next day or two and then be brought in for uh a finalist interview and signing of a contract

207if they take the job. Um screening committee for the director of human resources is led by Karen Cah uh Dr. FA Shavers MEA president Brendan Bond and Cunningham assistant principal Andy Young. Uh we had Brendan on this because our union is working very uh very connected in some of the uh HR functions. We wanted to make sure we had support from them. Uh they're in the beginning stages of making they've had one interview but they interview several candidates over the next two days and they're interviewing seven folks and they hope to yield three that will go to the final stage and then I will interview are experienced qualified uh school HR folks in that pool which is really exciting. Milton has never had its own HR person and this is really exciting for them for

208that to happen. Uh the director of um special education the assistant director uh Danielle uh Wetmore has been running that with uh Dr. Fish Bernardet Butler uh preschool director Molly Mason special education teacher at Kycott Tom Failen uh high school special educator Glover team chair Mora Lamry and speech and language pathologist Shelley Wolf. So, as you can see, all these teams have multi-grade, multi-ubject um folks on it. Uh they are interviewing, I believe, seven folks uh for that role. They have some qualified folks in there as well. So, um we're really excited about the pool. Uh these these roles were all advertised at the Boston Plan for Excellence, the teachers lounge, Indeed, school spring. Um and we're actively working with the teachers lounge to to to reach out to folks at network part. So we

209think that we're diversifying our pool uh considerably uh in doing so. Um two of the three finalists as an example for our finance job are people of color. Um then we also have roles like out of district coordinator, team chair. We have our building based jobs that are open. Um some of these are due to resignation. Some of them are due to realignment. Uh I'm sure this list will get bigger over time because people make decisions over the summer. Uh but each interview team at each building. Uh we'll be doing that in a building based way and then bringing their finalists up to central office. Uh I think we've said this before, but just to say again, the entire leadership team was trained uh and went through a training session with FA Shavers. Dr. Shaveis

210presented uh for at least 45 minutes on bias through the interview process work with Kala uh on how we can use the job description to identify what we consider to be the qualities in a person versus you know someone who went to the same school as me or who looks like me. So we're trying to really base everything on qualifications in the job description to try to take that bias out. There's a lot of strategies that FA gave us that those slides are now being presented at the building based teams. So everybody's getting the same uh message about this is how we really want to be thoughtful about how we're uh interrupting our bias when we're walking through this process. Uh so between diversifying the pool uh going through training at every level of the

211district making us all aware of what we're uh trying to do in terms of diversifying staff uh these are the strategies that we're taking to hopefully diversify our staff. We met with CDM and Mark on uh Monday morning and uh went through this whole process with them as well. uh I think that they were very thankful that this was very concrete and happening uh along with our work with the teachers lounge um to support from an outside party. So I think it it's been a very very uh different process this year than it was in years past and uh really what we need to do is can see what happens in October I mean in in August when we actually make the hires. So uh we're we're happy to be where we are. Uh I

212want to thank FA for her work in Kala. Uh in the absence of a current HR director, we've been all acting as HR director and uh the work that we've been trying to do with teachers lounge and be possible for excellence and uh in the training as well. So um we think we're in a good spot. So you could have a business person by next week, uh a tech person by next week, a human resources person by the following week, and assistant director sped by the following week. So by June 1st, you could have those four major positions hired. That's correct. >> That's correct. >> John, are you the decider on all of the towers that are director and assistant director level? And then um when when are you thinking about having do you have

213targeted start dates for I'm thinking about the HR director, the finance director. Is it sort of like they can start when they're available or is this like a >> July one or after? Okay. and for for the director of finance position, Katie and I have already met. Uh we're balancing Katie's time in the district with her um her her task that she's taking very seriously and professionally to get everything set. So 26 is close outable. Even though you don't really close it out until July, it should be a very clear road map. and working on the budget for FY27 to be very clean and orderly so that person can just jump in and know exactly where all the money is and what it's in targeted for. And we're identifying two days in June, I think

214June 23 and 24 where uh Katie will dedicate those two days to whoever is being brought on. We'll ask them to take some two days off and be in the district two days to just sit and go through all that work with her so we can really and then you know we're we're working and talking about are there any is there any need to have Katie on uh some sort of a retainer so we can call her at a certain time over the course of July and August and September. She's open to help any way she she we would like her to do. She's very professional like that, but we also want to formalize it. And I'm also respectful of the fact that once you leave a district, >> you think you're going to want

215to come back and help and then all of a sudden you look at what you're getting in and you're like, "Oh my god, I I need the help and you're asking me for help over here." So, uh, we're trying to balance that. Uh, Katie will do whatever it takes to make the transition work and we appreciate her profession on that. >> There questions on the hiring update. >> Uh, we will keep it moving. Up next is the date for the superintendent's report, right? >> You know what? Um, I'm going to defer. I had some really nice stories about what's going on in STEM. I had some really nice stories about the high school uh um scholastic night last week. Uh, freshman through seniors on stage. Um, amazing night. Uh, really not rooted in. Uh, everybody

216there is the highest grade point average person. Uh, Wildcat of the Week, Wildcat of the Month, uh, Book Awards, um, National Honor Society, uh, a just a great night for Milton High to be celebrating kids that are achieving and and motivated and good school. Uh, you know, students that represent just all that's good about Milton High. Uh, and it's not all the highest grade point average stuff. It was just a wonderful night. Uh, Karen did a great job. Um and uh we had a great trip. The Washington DC trip called in today. They Phil had a picture of all these students sitting with two Vietnam veterans outside the memorial just talking just really really amazing, heartfelt. Um we had a group of STEM students who just went to Fenway Park two weeks ago for the

217egg drop out at the MWR at the deer at the plant out in island this week. uh trying to really make sure that we're engaging students in that work and uh the end of the year grade 12 work that our student presented tonight of all the dates that are coming up that are really exciting for our for our seniors. So that's just my without reading it all and boring you at 10 o'clock at night. There's a lot of good and we have uh at the elementary schools we have all of our field days. Uh we have our case screenings happening right now. Uh the middle school has uh just finished the quick trip and now has a DC trip. Uh step up day number one was today at the middle school. Step up day number

218two is tomorrow. Um great transition work there. And we just got some funding for the buses that'll have the eighth graders coming up to the high school later in June when the seniors leave. So a lot of good transition pieces, a lot of good things happening. Very busy district. Uh and your principles are amazing. So when you see a principal, say thank you. They're just great folks. They really worked hard along with the >> teachers. Uh we're going to move it along. Finance subcommittee. We haven't met but have some vendor warrants just to let you know. Vendor warrant 44 dated 5726 amount of $280,828.87 was signed and vendor warrant 45 dated 51426. The amount of $460,586.96 was signed. We have vendor warrant 46 right here. I'm gonna leave that to the new finance u uh

219committee chairs. Um that is it for the finance update. Is there anything else we really want to do? We're going to keep going. Know you'll really wish Miss Amanda right now because she us out of here at 9. Uh negotiation update. >> Yeah, just really quickly. Um I think negotiations continue to go well. Um, since the last update, we have participated in several negotiation sessions, most recently this past Monday, the 18th. Um, we have continued through these meetings just moving closer towards agreements on um priorities for each team. Um, both language in the contract as well as uh the economic package which is currently being discussed. Um, we have meetings next two negotiation sessions are scheduled for next week, May 26th, and the following week, June 1st. So, I do think I haven't run this

220by you, but I think it would make sense probably to have an executive session at the June 3rd meeting. Yeah. where we can um share with you in more detail. What by then, you know, hopefully uh we will be very close um to some agreements to be able to share and discuss. So, >> I would only say that across the state, we're seeing a lot of um districts and unions have uh friction in their work together to try to come to consensus. Uh this has been one of the most um productive and uh professional negotiations that I think I've ever encountered uh in my time in previous time in Milton and my time in Belmont. Just want to thank MEA for their uh ability to listen and respond and uh partner and meet in the

221middle in places uh and uh also the school community that we have to do the same. It's been really I think it's been very productive and we did start late because they needed some time uh and to be able to be finished in June of that year with all the time that we had to to miss >> uh for for very good reasons. Um I think it's it's remarkable in this day and age where some people are doing it for two years and we'll be doing it for about six months and I think it's really uh it speaks to the good culture that's being uh played out in our schools right now. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. Uh school building committee update very short uh still working on two paths. We have a

222committee established to try and go through uh for the OPM selection kind of talked about that before. So they're doing the posting and then going to the mission. So that through the MSBA process is still moving forward. And then we did talk about lab at the school building committee and um made a motion to ask Shawn to move forward with trying to secure an architect to look at the site. So uh he is working on finding one. So I think we thinks he has a kind of beat on one and so um those kind of both are both the scopes of work we're working on for school building. Uh questions on that we'll jump to approval of minutes. See if we can get out of here by 10. Uh, any edits, comments on minutes, or

223is there a motion? >> I'll make a motion to approve the April 29th uh, school committee meeting minutes. >> Is there a second? >> Second. >> Great. I give it to Hannah just keep losing his time. Uh, all right. All in favor? It's unanimous. >> Uh next meeting agenda items. Uh what are we covering the next meeting? So we got >> So we will have a um a preview of our uh year 2 goals that we have with the um initial goals for next year with the leadership team that will be represented by Ker and I's work with them. Um we will also go over a round two of Labareet. Uh we we may we will have an executive session to give you an update on the negotiations. Uh we will have a policy meeting

224between now and then. We'll have a facilities meeting between now and then. Um I think that might be it. >> Finance it's okay by that >> right. If anything else comes up, please email at the agenda setting meeting here in about a week. Um, any other final things? >> No. Thank you everybody. It's a late time we had to be together this late, but thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> Uh, then I will I will take a motion to adjurnn. >> So move. >> Great. Is there a second? >> Second. All in favor? 959. Thank you.