001Hi, I'm Lori Tosti, chair of the Ashlin School Committee here at Wacka TV to give you an update on our most recent meeting and also to fill you in on how we're going to be starting these reports to let you know what's going on at school committee and to encourage you to tune in mostly because at most of our meetings, we have students coming in from all the buildings giving us reports at most of our meetings on what's going on in their buildings. They might do a performance for us, read a poem, tell us about something in leadership that they're doing, and it ends up being our favorite part of every single meeting. At um not our last meeting, but the meeting before that, we had some middle school students coming in to tell us
002about a leadership project that they were doing in their building talking about um how to teach each other how to have difficult conversations and it was really impactful. So, we try to include something like that in every meeting and hopefully you'll tune in and join us. But I did want to let you know on what happened at the last meeting, June 11th, 2025. Um, in that meeting, we started by honoring some of our retirees. Our uh at the end of the school year at our last meeting, we usually are having to say goodbye to some of our long-standing staff members, and that's when we usually have our retirey recognition. And this last meeting was the last meeting of the academic school year. We can hardly believe whenever it is that we get to this point,
003but here we are just after class day and graduation which were amazing events. School committee was there. The room was full. Kids were giving performances. It's always so amazing to see the kids graduate and how excited they are for their future and their next step. So we started our meeting with recognition of retirees and those retirees were Mary Lou Dfano. She had worked for Ashlin for 12 years. Barbara Gerardi also 12 years. Jane Murphy 13 years. Keith Trudale 13 years. Jean Ernest 15 years. Jonathan Parker 18 years. Mark Styles 20 years. Peter Allen 22 years. Donna Lel 25 years. Jean Bruno 27 years. And Amy Angelo 27 years. And altogether that accounts for I don't know more than a couple of hundred hours worth a couple of hundred years worth of service to Ashland. So,
004um it's our chance to really say thank you and appreciate them and wish them luck on their next journey. After that, um also something that happens at the end of each school year is all of the uh the leadership from each building comes in to talk to us about something they've been working on all year with committees in their buildings called their school improvement plans. So, at this last meeting, we had the Ashlin Middle School coming in to talk about their school improvement plan, as well as the Ashlin High School coming in to talk about their school improvement plan as well as handbook changes. Then we get on to some regular business, warrant approvals. One of the things that the school committee is responsible for is the budget. So, at just about every me, we
005are voting on expenditures that we have made um in that period of time. Then we have the superintendence report where the superintendent fills us in on everything that's going on around school this time of year. The report was all about class day, graduation, um the upcoming plans for the summer and the assistant superintendence report will talk about curriculum and things that are happening in that department. nutrition services came in this time to talk about a prop proposed meal cost increase just a slight increase to some of the meals not all of the meals. Um we talked again end of the year stuff superintendence evaluation that's the second job that the school committee has talked about the first one that's the budget the other one is superintendent we evaluate him and that was happening at this
006meeting Mr. Adams got flying colors as he usually does. He's a fantastic superintendent. He was rated very highly. And then we talk finally the boring stuff, but it is again the third major thing that we do as a school committee members as we um create and amend and vote on policy. So, we had a number of different policies to talk about this year. We're just going through the manual and making sure everything's updated. So there weren't any major changes that I need to report right now, but there's big long list of things that we needed to go through and make some minor updates to. We get gifts and donations pretty much regularly. So that's a section of our meeting that we vote on the gifts and donations and then um we adjourn and this time
007we were adjourning for the academic year. So I probably won't see you until September. Um, but I'm excited to be coming back then and filling you in on all of our meetings and what's going on at the school levels. And you can feel free to reach out to us at any time. Thank you. [Music]