1/25/22 Meeting

001two um tuesday january 25th uh we're gonna start pleased with the pledge of allegiance and if you would please just stay standing after this [Music] um i just wanted to make note that we learned uh recently that um ms stuples the assistant principal here at tohonto lost her son unexpectedly on sunday his name was doug hutchins and he was 27 years old the school committee would like to extend the most heartfelt condolences during a painful time distressing time for our family and before the schools so could we have just a moment of silence and memory of doug and in care and supporting support institutes thank you i just want to explain the uh structure of tonight's meeting a little bit for anyone who may be live streaming in in particular um in fact we're live

002streaming so uh the first thing is just a reminder that your voice or image may be scene tonight um maybe broadcast and uh but tonight's meeting agenda is a little bit unusual because it was originally planned as the second meeting in january a three-hour governance workshop with ms dardeel president from the massachusetts association of school claims um but we had some business to carry over from january 11 and so um we uh put that business um after the workshop and ask for our videos we would condense the workshop make it a little shorter the workshop will run for approximately two hours and 15 minutes and then around 8 45 i'm guessing we will take up the business that's brought over from the january 11th meeting um let's see so during the business portion of the

003meeting we have a couple of um refiners to vote on and then we'll hear an update from superintendent zioni regarding our current testing protocols how they're working in light of the recent uh omicron surge here as well as a new testing option announced by commissioner riley from the department of ed on january 18th and the committee will vote on a related proposal from the superintendent and then also based on our january 11 discussion the committee anticipates voting on a motion to request information from commissioner riley regarding your evidence base for the state's current mass and vaccine requirements um so that work will that part of meeting will take place starting around 8 45 so if if you're live streaming uh you want to check come back at 8 45 for the business portion you may

004want to do that or you're welcome to stay for the governance workshop for the next couple of hours this week with dorothy presser all right so uh we will start the meeting with our public comments section and then go into the governance workshop i don't um so um jessica well let me just each in turn go ahead introduce yourselves and you have a public comment and make sure so i'm jessica alberti i'm a family nurse practitioner i work at the edward kennedy community health center i also have a third grader at bes and i grew up in boston and we live here again so dear superintendent missing principals and school committee members of the boys environment school community district i first want to alert everyone to the fact that there was a protest by parents

005outside of destiny this morning the guidelines they set forth are not sufficient to keep our students and staff safe i'm glad the guidelines are being reviewed by the school committee at this meeting i hope the school nurses will be present unfortunately so they can also give feedback immediately to the discussion so caitlyn jennelina is an epidemiologist that works at texas medical school that started a newsletter for medical students and now has a worldwide following that's been on many national news shows she takes data and boils it down so very easily to understand and utilize to sum up her most one of her most recent articles that i forwarded last week to the school committee that rabbit antigens have a delayed sensitivity to become positive meaning a rapid antigen will not be piled up until 48

006hours after symptoms the pcr will catch the infection three days earlier but one has to wait for these results 24 to 48 72 hours if i have symptoms today my rapid antigen will be positive for two more days omicron is contagious until 10 days delta was 11. a new data came out showing that the five-day policy is not supported by evidence and at least more spread within the schools i've previously said that kids on days 6 to 10 according to need to eat separately from the rest of the children until their day 10 is complete in order to reduce spread i especially want to answer the question that was posted last school committee meeting why did destiny extend the masculine thing i've asked you to review the email that i sent you with this evidence

007and a really nice easy to understand uh that i asked out this evening um masks do work when worn over your nose there's a limitation however how long and how they are worn by children and adults the last chart i sent was from caitlin jenner that you're a local epidemiologist again and it showed that if someone was wearing an n95 and an infected person was wearing an n95 they would get 25 hours of protection in a perfect scenario if you look at the chart if one was wearing a surgical mask and someone was wearing a candy fine they'd have five hours perfection i sent my daughter into a fan and i hope that she can wear it the best she can throughout the day but at best she has five hours per fashion when the

008school day is six and this ignores lunch and snacks and water breaks and so this is why the entire class should be considered exposed and not the time-consuming tracing of three or six feet that cbc and jesse has laid out omicron is airborne it doesn't matter vaccinated and unvaccinated students need to be notified if there is a person in the same room as them i know that contact tracing has been eliminated in many districts but a known exposure should change your behavior and who you might expose contact tracing is indefinitely more difficult if you consult a seating chart and that is unnecessary and not supported by data i again remind you of the augmented reality from the new york times article that i showed in the spring and also dr zandi showed in the screen

009the virus is in the whole room by the end of the day i also heard that dustin's considered stopping the tests of state program and the pool testing program again sadly we don't participate in the pool testing and just have children test at home two times a week with home antigen tests i don't think this is sufficient even if all the parents truly did them at home i've had two close friends whose children had a negative rapid antigen in a hang and then a pile of pcr the next day who weren't notified for two more days one of their parents a co-worker of mine tested her son immediately with a rapid negative when he developed a fever the next day got a pcr and then waited 48 hours from his first symptoms tested again with

010an antigen flagged positive in a minute on that antigen test and then 24 hours later she had the phone call that he was indeed positive luckily they all stayed home suspecting it was such from school i again support the boylston merlin regional school district nurses in their plea for help and what they are requesting and the modifications to testing and quarantining policy please don't hesitate to ask me any questions especially in regards to policies made by destiny in regards to masks i think it would be embarrassment to the district if you wrote that letter to them i again asked you to review the email that i've sent emails previously sent to review the data so you understand where these policies come from thank you again for taking time to review the information before you make

011a decision thank you jessica okay i don't have quite the data that jessica does but my name is katrina and i have a child of bces third quarter and my approach is a little different than data including one doctor or another i'm going based on my child and how this has affected them and i didn't realize until today that there were hoops that we needed to jump through for this committee to ask jesse where is the evidence to keep our kids in mass desi is not made up of health officials and they're making health decisions for our children and for an entire population evidence should be provided well before we are allowed to mandate our kids to rename the masks that should be first not less there are multiple studies from doctors who say masks

012aren't very effective and we could go on and find them home and yes they're ones that say that we should wear kn and 95 nests everywhere well i don't think they should those aren't 100 effective unless they're properly fitted and are we just assuming that our children are walking contagious deadly viruses that can't be good for their mental health and i also asked where was everybody when flu was killing people i don't ever recall being notified of a positive flu case never mind extra precautions put in place to stop the spread of the flu spread the flu spreads up to six feet and through your nose and mouth and even on surfaces meanwhile classrooms were barely sanitized i couldn't be more frustrated that our kids are part of a i hope this works experiment while

013our states and schools while other states and schools are nascus and doing just fine my preschooler hasn't born a mask all year why is our class any different why is one state any different i think we all know it's politics with vaccine protection and our recent omicron surge a majority of our population in massachusetts is either vaccinated with natural immunity or just has natural immunity it seems foolish to continue with masks mass mandates they didn't seem to stop the recent surge some vaccinated and boosted and recently contracting coven wearing a mask after quarantine does not make sense to me it's only a sign of compliance and it gives false impression that we're protecting our community who is held liable for speech delays emotional physical issues is the superintendent going to be what about child suicide

014from all these restrictions and fears there are harmful effects i want evidence showing that there won't be harmful effects from covering my kid's face or i should have the right to not send my child in the mask tomorrow this is all being figured out at our child's expense and the finish line keeps getting moved up at a recent basketball game my rule following child unlike myself grabbed her chest looked pale and red at the same time and i thought for a minute i might have calm ambulance she couldn't breathe in the mess and she was too afraid to take it off at school she's told to eat in silence at snack break when it's indoors because of the recent omicrons book what evidence do you have to tell my child when her mask is off

015she needs to be silent and if not that she can't eat or any other child let's pretend for a second they're in a restaurant for their celebrity or a politician can they remove their mask then and it's okay how do i explain this to her other than tell her well those are the rules rules and mandates in history there were a lot of rules and mandates in history that were not right and they caused a lot of harm and some of them it was too late until we stopped them the updated data has shown that a majority of the coveted hospital cases and deaths had comorbidities i didn't i don't see mandating the way people live at home no cigarette bans no fast food bans no forced exercise and throughout all of this the data

016has remained the same that our kids have been fine yes some aren't some kids have risks but they always have for anything in their life we have come a long way with the virus in the beginning when things were unknown it made sense to protect everybody until we knew but now we know and it doesn't make sense as the data keeps changing why aren't we allowing people to make their own choices are you absolutely certain we aren't creating superbugs and suppressing our children's immune systems living this way are you absolutely certain we aren't creating anxieties and mental health issues for our children because if you're mandating an entire population and parents to force their children to do something you better be certain that it works and it's without harmful effects thank you [Music] we will

017take those thoughts into the business portion of the meeting later on closer to 8 45. um and don't continue to think about the issues we're going to take care of two items i don't want to ask for a motion to approve the consent agenda secondly all right thank you for allowing me thank you for not saying the word uh we have a motion in a second to accept okay the consent agenda all in favor [Music] um we have uh two parent emails in the communications folders from them as well uh and are there any other communications [Music] all right then i think we're ready to move on into the governance let's see workshop we can get done in the next couple of hours okay well bye everybody um it's nice to see everyone again and

018be back here um so what i want to work on tonight what the purpose of the workshop is to talk about community engagement so my plan is to have us first talk about what is community engagement i get sort of your ideas and spend a little bit of time talking about how you view community engagement and try and get a definition we can sort of all agree on or some of these good points that technology contains um and then i have a few i want to talk about how lucy the committee's role versus the administration's role of community engagement i have a couple of scenarios for you to kind of tease apart um and then talk a little bit about the open meeting law and how that interacts with your work and your community makes

019sense so and my goal is to back up like 8 30 morning and night as i know it's going to be a long night so unlike my postmates you can keep these when you're done but what i want you to think about i want you to take about five minutes and just jot down how you define community engagement for you know some of the key concepts that you think are really important in community engagement and we'll have a discussion and put some of those thoughts and definitions up on the chart paper and see where we can get some commonality in people's names i'm actually going to set a timer for you know go a long way that the five minutes so what [Music] okay um [Music] um hmm okay i've got a minute left and

020i see some people still writing oh so it's a two-way communication between the community and for us to school and then to have a proactive approach with the goal of making student achievement a priority that fall right under that team [Music] a a proactive approach with student achievement as a priority we might want to bring those charts up a little bit okay i don't know if anybody else is i think as we've thought about it and talked about the things we're trying to do i think a lot of it's about communication and information sharing and particularly a lot of kind of things on the engagement side kind of the few years i can put there using student achievement as a priority how can we how do we leverage the community to enhance the student experience

021so can you talk a little bit more about what and transparency and access to us to administration to coordinators so talk a little bit more about what you mean by transparency first and then asked a little bit more about leveraging the community just transparency into decision making and the information that's used to make those decisions and making sure it's a transparent process that anyone in the community can see and be a part of it so okay so transparency is not only seeing understanding how a decision is made being able to participate in the decision making or the kind of diversity of the community and resources in the community to help enhance the student experience we talked a little bit and i'll release a recent meeting on internships and job shadowing those kinds of opportunities where

022members of the community could help enhance the educational experience okay i pretty much echoed julie um [Music] where i said community members kind of coming to the meetings and then school committee members going out to the community and being part of different community groups so that we could you know share information but it definitely is a two-way and proactive i think those are really good words this is yeah and i i know it's hard for people but i wish more parents would come to the meetings it was great to have because it's like sometimes i have no idea what people are thinking besides the people in my circle so so part of that is understanding that the people that you know may not be represented of course [Music] i wrote saying what you mean and

023doing what you say with no hypocrisy as an individual word there's a lot of thoughts i like to write okay so i heard equity right be inclusive of promoting equity i also said integrity is that what you meant by integrity or is that something different uh no that's inclusive okay what i technically wrote was show integrity by saying what you need and i'm going to close that with uh without your progress [Music] so when you talk about being inclusive is just some of the the things that have said before encapsulate that or is very thinking differently than that um two-way communication will be inclusive transparency is certainly part of being inclusive communication access certainly so okay okay um i think i would say being visible and by visible i mean because i know a lot

024of us go to different things but i'm not sure people know who we are um and i don't know if that's something that maintains situations or if it's like a social media thing where your picture is there and they can associate a face with the name because sometimes i feel like people don't reach out because they don't realize oh that's who julie is i've talked to her and told her what i thought but i don't think so i think visibility people knowing who we are and that they can get to us anything else the advantage of my glasses everybody said what's on your list never follow students people have opportunity to speak with school team members and um the committee seeks out fraud the breadth of perspectives in the community not just those in our

025inner circles as many was saying but uses tools like surveys and forums and talks a variety of tools and places to try to hear from a breadth of the community people feel informed of and committed to improving student learning in the district that's the focus and that people in the community report that they've been heard by the committee now you all know why i will never be a classroom teacher that's good you read all your writing too um so yeah i'm going to check with you yes sorry no no not yet i'll ask you a little [Music] so talk a little bit more about how people see that as part of community being called what's happening well i mean i think one of the goals is to engage people in thinking about what's best for

026students and people may have different perspectives on that but the people bring those perspectives into conversation uh within the united commitment to support students in our life okay you say more yeah yeah it is it is it i just had just kind of one general umbrella topic that you just thought which is responsiveness to community needs and then you know so i had some other kind of sub topics um that those are a little bit cyclical and i found that um just like my experience that so for example like these committees other committees in the town you typically don't really wanna you don't really re interact with them [Music] it's that time of the year so you know so the time of the year was you know you know in time a lot talks to

027you after you when uh this time of the year when the planning board will want to talk to you and then you don't see them you know and then you know obviously you have to have a tribulation but if you have you go to that for something so planning for the chapel might want to talk to you if they're putting out the units you know housing you because it affects involvement they all know that stuff but then you need to go to the you know the building inspector when you need to know how many units are being built so you can do your request too but those things are cyclical so you probably don't you know it's not like you do that stuff all the time um and then i also think this has been

028this has been addressed here is that you have enough you have to find time to listen to people's concerns one of the things that mike was saying i don't know what people think and that's typically i think because when everything's going well you know people pay their taxes and they hire you to do the job and that's how they feel about it like just getting educated and there's no problem i got a job i come home i do what i have to do and i'm busy too and i think they're really in the field you know this is what we pay you to do and i always agree with them so you know you hit things when they're not right so um yeah you've got to find time to listen to those people who who

029have issues and that's how you know i mean i think that's how you have you get a gauge of what you're doing if everything's quiet in my experiences everything's going okay it depends on the community too i guess too so yeah you know i might have to give you something tonight so if things are quiet do you feel like there's enough less need at that moment for community engagement no i mean i think i think it depends on community and i think it depends on who the community is i worked at a community with a high um puerto rican population and i wondered why nobody said anything i have a friend who worked at top hall who was puerto rican you know it doesn't seem like everything's going well here but i don't hear anything

030and she said well it's cultural you know that's before they rebuild it then you're gonna they're not gonna question they see you as an authority person they're not gonna question them um that's definitely national communities they don't necessarily see you that way you know they'll step right up to you so um i think you have to be the community you know i mean i think in a lot of communities where um people may be a little more i want instead of something less engaged if everything's going well you know they're satisfied and so i think you know you do the other things with the communities in town i think there's always i'm going to reach out and i i'm still working more things parents told me the first hundred days i was here um when

031i was out you know meeting folks and yet another community and i still have a whole list of things that karen said to me that i'm still thinking about says expansion of the you know the internship the internship shadowing program came from a conversation i had four years ago um expanding uh ap courses came from a conversation and the guy called me up claire blue and said you know you're no superintendent so i talk to you about a few things that's what i think so that's an interesting question that you raise about when things are quiet does that mean we have to think about community engagement less what what how would you guys answer that question i feel like it's the same people that voice voices are heard there's like this is going to sound

032weird there's like a group of people and i think it's the majority of people that just kind of do their job do their thing they're busy and they kind of go along to get along we don't really know those people's opinions because it's like the same group of people and i don't want to use the word complain i feel like that participates or engages i don't know if you guys feel that okay all right i kind of see you saying i agree with you uh i think uh it is quiet that's the challenge nobody's coming to you you still need to figure out what's going on what's in their minds and then thought it's quiet a lot of people don't agree with one thing or another but they got to go to work they got

033to put their kids home they've done homework they've got to do this thing that thing whatever activities they don't have the time and so they're just like whatever something else is happening about it yes so and that's why that's a challenge when it's quiet right you have to go out there and get it yeah that's what community engagement is you figure right so and it may be well i'm a little bothered by it but not enough right it doesn't rise to the level of coming to a school but that assumes that when it's quiet there's no input coming in and that's not true you get a thousand kids engaging teachers every day there's anybody coming into the schools all the time every day with everybody so and and in a super science in school principals

034in the school so it's not like you know that's when you get paid for you make observations you ask questions you know um yeah if i know the difference in the administration has one set of challenges and one set of activities from a school community perspective not in that building every day that's a different channel oh yeah no that's that's that's fine yeah i don't think again community is the school right now [Music] you know i think school administrators and school teachers see engagement very differently in school because they don't see the only thing they get is for me for you know facebook so you know that's that's what there's a lot of women with that facebook yeah there's like i think we got a guilty clown communities engage with so it's a slightly different

035audience or subset of the same one or more of one audience the other in your ear okay you've got students you've got staff um you've got parents community members more so not that you not that you don't have students and staff not that you don't have cancer but the balance of who you hear from more is different for the administration but i feel like as school committee members we're only hearing from our people so like we're all kind of from different uh groups like our kids are different ages so that's our circle yeah i mean i would never have somebody like from tahasha they don't know who i am everyone you know like in all seriousness i think that's a huge challenge um it's like i'm literally only hearing from my people which may be

036similar to me so i'm not getting the full spectrum so that's like a huge challenge i think for me um how can i or we be better at hearing what everybody i mean i think susan said surveys [Music] um especially for me i'm kind of difficult for me to draw the line in the sand and say okay this is your parent opinion and now you're going to put your school company hat on and think like the school committee member just your natural instinct is obviously i'm sure all of us can agree to love on your babies and want whatever's best for their specific situation so i want to ask you a couple other continue this questions and then um here and then once we've talked about the different aspects we'll see if we can come

037up with something that is sentence or two that incorporates a lot of these thoughts is actually the definition of how you see community engagement and how you would like to be a little bit of a stretch for tonight but how you would like to think about it if you know how likely you've defined it then implementing it becomes a little bit easier so the first um we asked about the role of community engagement how do you well how do you see the role of the committee not the role of individual members that's the next question how do you see the role of the committee in community engagement i'm not going to have you write it down here if you have enough if you want to write down some thoughts but i just sort of want

038to do a little bit of around robin julie do you want to start sure maybe i would say i i think we're sort of doing that we started that so that each member on the committee is going to go to the various groups in the schools or the community i meet with them periodically throughout the year to engage with those groups the ptos the pbs foundation yeah um uh i was literally gonna say exactly what julie was sorry [Music] um i guess i would say go back to [Music] adam's concept of transparency because it's hard you can't really engage the community unless they're getting they can understand what you're doing um and so i guess that is something that we're always working on is how to explain what we're doing instead of just doing it

039become prepared we've read a bunch of materials we've already been thinking about topics when we sit down at the table but then how to really make our thinking put our thinking out for the community when we sit down here in this room so each of us can understand each other's thinking but also so the community can hear our thought processes as we talk together because it kind of ties back to later the topic of the meeting law too you know where where do we make that transparent this is where we should arena you know i like the first one i would maybe maybe uh be a little more specific i always like to think of them as liaisons between the schools between the school district and community so i think that a lot of times

040uh uh school okay so that the school committee is a liaison between the schools and the community not the individual people that are liaisons yeah so you see the school committee is going to schools oh you've been trying to get a school system so if you think about when we talk about roles and responsibilities that this fits right in right that we talk about the committee being representing the vision and value of the community but you're also making sure you're also you know at the community table you are making sure that the community is well informed about the schools right that's that's kind of yeah how they they live in the communities they they go to places and they get stopped by you know community members who may or may not may have like have

041an idea or something about something it's not true or is true so if you need to confirm it or say oh that's that's not that's not how we interpret what's going [Music] another that's another issue but if they have a unified voice in there i can have one i don't see that yeah i'd like to hear more about that i mean i'm not saying you can't be an individual but i'm uncertain that i mean i i don't to me it's no different than in leadership you know we both leadership meetings and they may disagree with me and they disagree with them but when we leave if we're saying something different then one principle is telling their staff something different than another principle it becomes a problem so um i think a school committee speaks with

042a unified voice like say they think about somebody might go along with that bubble yeah people that's you know they can't then go in the community and say well you know five of them did but i would have done that yeah and that happens so i'm going to i'm going to tease this out a little bit granularly 100 agree with that but if but i guess what i'm thinking about is is not when the committee has made a decision enacted but gathering information that may inform decisions or getting ideas from community members they may be acting more as individuals dan has a community of bringing that to the table so my example is two principles might come to a leadership meeting and one of them says you know my teachers are thinking this way and

043another principle is saying my teachers in my building are thinking this way and you get to a decision they're going to bring the decision forward but they came to it with different viewpoints based on the input they were receiving that am i making any sense yeah but you know what again you know might be a function of where the team is or where the community is you know i think if you've set up those sort of protocols before that and things are put in place so that when they get there and they're collecting information there there isn't that why the discrepancy between what they say when they come to the table there are things to hatch out but yeah you know like it's not going to be might come with any other kind of you

044know maybe it won't come it's a little bit closer but you have to do work we need to work on the leadership team to make sure that that that's not the case that we we've already set those parameters but you know you know maybe that's maybe that's the issue for the you know the development of the committee that haven't had time to formulate that you know to get that those things in place am i making that um i think in the big picture yes because you're thinking about processes develop over time or information comes in and then that's how you get to a decision that everybody connects together as more information comes in and you have the discussions and people have the input and consensus okay i'm going to take a week on you guys

045can fill me in if i want but you decided to regionalize right and you've had a lot of opinions out there about whether or not you should be regionalized but there's a lot and i know a lot of some of you were or weren't involved in that whole process because it was a different committee but at the beginning opinions might have been all over the place and then it was a big decision that over time got more information you got more information out and then you got to the point where your community and the committee made a decision that was moved forward yeah that's an interesting example because during that time also the the members of the committee uh uh some of you that were charged with that held a lot of community reforms and

046had a lot of listening going on at the same time they were sharing information out they were also collecting a lot of perspective about him yeah and they did that quite a bit [Music] but to honda was always a regional high school right so it was just that the district was not regionalized until how many years ago 2018. oh really and before that it was three districts oh today it's on district yep it was a union [Music] so let's keep things moving do you have anything more to add about the committee rule and yeah i was thinking um attending um like school events i'm thinking specifically of just parent bootcamp that he does with the incoming sixth graders i know the company that i work for we were here we had a table which was

047talking to us that would be a great opportunity to have a table and have the school committee members there so people you can introduce yourself with a and when kindergarten starts things like that as a committee just so that people can know who we are it's a really good idea i don't think we are doing whatever you do uh [Music] there's all different like open house things that the school committee should i mean we did a pto event the pumpkin fest there was like all different i mean not to be there the whole time but just so some of the parents can or anybody else is it just school events or what about the broader community well it's funny because i had a memorial day on there [Music] as well so i'm going to ask

048you to take it one step further well because we've had we've had people go to selectmen for our school committee issues which i think is wonderful i mean whoever's going to advocate for them they should go to but you know when there's a problem with the road i don't go to the select when i go to the dpw you know i don't know that if there's something going on in school where there's a problem a plus like hey i want to bring in this program they should know who we are we should be a friendly face because otherwise they're all reaching out to jeff and his his inbox is probably pretty cool um but it would be like just a nice liaison a connection i guess is really what i'm looking for because i feel

049like people know what they know our names but they don't know who we are um i remember just recently someone said all that stuff and so oh my gosh next time all the time that's so-and-so so it's the same with us they may interact with us all the time and not realize oh that's coming on the school committee i could be telling them about this or asking them you know when the next meeting is or something along those lines that's the liaison yeah that's the appointment so if if that's what they're all doing if they're all saying that that okay we're gonna take that and then we're gonna we're gonna send that stuff to jeopardy as opposed to i'm to take it and i'm going to deal with it that's different that's not everybody okay

050so that's so they all said okay when we get something like that we're going to we'll be out there we'll all do them that's all acting in the same direction yeah yeah so that's the kind of thing i've talked about they're all you know known yeah so yeah we'll get to that more of that when we get into it now we can save some time had another thought and regarding what you guys just said i think jeff's getting on the point where individuals are going out and talking to people trying to solve the problem individually that's a bad thing going out and getting the problem bringing it back and dumping it on jeff's desk is your problem you feel it that's also a bad thing but there's some middle ground somewhere where if you tell

051the person out there you mean individually yeah i can't do anything for you right now but we'll take it to the committee and we'll depending on what the issue is that's a good thing but i wonder if you've run the risk of do that enough times and not get people solid answer that you might start to get the community saying well is my feedback even welcome am i gonna be hurt am i gonna be taken seriously or they just gonna pass it on the job and then you go wait three weeks for the next meeting and then maybe go on the gym maybe you did it it's busy that night we'll push to the next one that was two three months come by and they're just like i just want to know why there was

052greetings at lunches then and this gets this gets to what i'm constantly saying to the community since we spend a lot of time talking to committees about what your role is or against that government the people that don't understand that role are the whole rest of the community so when someone has a problem about readings the answer isn't i'll bring it to jeff it's why don't you go you know the person to talk to is the food service director yeah i think we have a policy on that we just maybe went over it so the other day right yeah so and we have a policy of that so i think you're right um that's a that's a fine line yeah you got a balance what category does this fall into versus that one what do

053i do so that's a that's a challenge uh what i was gonna say originally i think uh i don't even know what i was gonna say it was uh oh the someone mentioned something about i think the liaison the school committee is between the community and the schools yeah i know some people sometimes struggle like obviously they don't come to the meeting we do record it so they can watch it afterwards if they want that is going to take four five six hours there's the minutes that they can go through but then you know it doesn't read the minutes sort of tell you what actually happened or what was discussed or what the different sides were before was taken or anything like that so it's tough for the community unless they attend a meeting it's

054tough enough to actually know what's going on so what can we do to sort of educate them as to what's happening i was gonna say i was thinking about the same minds earlier when i thought about the fact that we've relied heavily on if we want information to be shared to building up suggests that's been the vehicle we've used to get communication out there to parents in particular you know other communities that do or communicate out to the community differently than that and they use their own channel their own communication to share information not relying on the superintendent's books a weekly newsletter yeah it's it um it gets difficult because because you have to sort of decide what the communication is going to be together it slows it down a lot of times our take

055on it is is really not like a lot of the communities will say we think we should have a community facebook position there's really but who's going to run into the side of the content you have to do that by committing right so really there's nothing that you can do that's much more than the district can do anything so that's a lot of times why the administration becomes sort of the main channel of outgoing communication so i find that reading the newspaper articles about our meetings tend to be the best source of information remember the communities want to know what's going on in the school committee those articles we want control over the fact that you know reporting on what we're saying here those who tend to be in my opinion some of the best

056sources for a community member to suggest seeing kind of i just wanted to expand a little bit on what i said i spoke specifically about a problem but i can think of several times when a parent has reached out to me and i said okay that's an issue that you want to take to here to diane or to ace or a certain principle or oh you know what that's a great thing oh you want to talk about that curriculum we have a whole curriculum you know where do we go about approving a curriculum you're going to want to go and talk to carol so that's what i mean about knowing where to send people rather than just jeff who's you know trying to do with his day but the other thing is just having some

057sort of familiar face where they feel like if they have a good idea or if they say hey this is going great it's something that you can pass along too it's basically the good and the bad and so that's what i mean about being just present and that's why i said than the other visible being seen i know i remember the training we did fairly recently um there were school committee members that go live on the facebook i'm not a fan of baseball however um i think that it's a great tool to communicate with on the committee as long there was an example there was a woman that after the meeting she just popped online it was maybe five minutes long and people can't i mean reading the minutes i agree with you might just

058you know get the sense of anything really that's happened there um and then to have to go through and watch the python recording is difficult but if you can just you know put that thing up while you're doing work in here the person you know i think that's a great way to have um engagement and i know it comes down to who manages it but you can figure that out if it's going to bed if there's going to be a benefit the only thing going live 11 o'clock other social media gonna stop this platforms not because it's not a good conversation limited time yeah and what we're getting to is a lot of ideas of implementing community engagement i want to get us back to the definition of learning conversation i feel like we did

059sort of talk about an individual community members anybody have any more thoughts about what's the role of an individual community member in community engagement certain research being accessible and understanding where information goes or where questions go or where concerns go in a sort of a common understanding of how it works and a common understanding is the administration [Music] i see some of the two-way proactive inclusive student achievement um foreign a definition of community engagement approach that that's why community engagement is not and you can step in and get this what have you got so kids um is a two-way proactive approach that is focused on student achievement responsive to community needs uh you know we have to put anything in here with budget um i think one thing you could say as a third bullet

060is it informs the school committee's decision making because that includes budget that includes other things to policies and other areas i think usually legions or interests perhaps to give a quality connotation uh i would say maybe attentive to the diversity of the community i mean attentive or solicits um i guess attentive to different special perspectives or something i'm trying to [Music] i think it's an approach that is built on integrity there's a lot of integrity with loss built on integrity uh i like susan's inclusive of all uh stakeholders that that covers anybody i attempted to put that police [Music] in terms of the beginning of this and maybe say that we could have a sentence that has some bullets after it but we agreed to because of what i've written community engagement is a two-way

061approach to communication between the community and the communities we represent that is so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee in the communities we represent that is focused on study responsible community needs that is informing us that's good yeah so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee and the communities we represent that is corner semicolon [Music] more versus reactive right something happens let me respond kind of like what mike said that it takes forever to get there to have the solution you know what i mean to the problem so if we can kind of be thinking or listening to numbers right and proactively getting at the concerns of the community before is a balance of understanding community needs and being responsive to them but gathering that input

062like when jeff comes to you with goals he's gotten a lot of input about what those goals need to be based on data right based on data and feedback and you're proactively sort of addressing you might see these before they become huge problems right so when we talk about establishing goals it's because you want to be proactive instead of reactive in the work that you're doing you're looking at what's needed you're establishing the goals to address issues and you're setting instead of letting community members constantly come to you and say this is an issue this is an issue fix it it's effective you're the leaders saying this is where we sense based on feedback from the schools based on feedback from the community bringing together these are the goals [Music] of life yeah i think

063sometimes the issue there is that proactive can sometimes look like a knee-jerk response like you hear from some small portion of people and so you set something in motion in the interest of being proactive but you've actually not heard from the diverse constituents in your community before you take that move so sometimes i think proactive okay i would say i would say that if you're responding to a small number of constituents if that's more reactive that's what i would call an agent but also it gets to what we were discussing earlier about the silence right like no news is good news but we're being proactive it doesn't matter if there's silence or if there's a lot of activity going on we're being proactive where out there trying to do something whatever that something is will

064define it but instead of waiting for it to come by also remaining informed of what's going on districts both in the state and around the country to see that there are topics that are going to present themselves at some point in the future or highly likely to and be ready to address those or have already addressed them because we proactively talked about one of these issues that we all know are going to be you know from center over the course of the next year with a big election yeah we should have the five p's in there right preparation [Music] well just just to go up with julie's proactive i i like that because i find that you know facebook becomes an outlet it's almost like you know when when you think about two people that

065have just did they've been stuck down it down and then eventually something sets it off and it goes up that's what happens on facebook people have questions and concerns and and they may not have the right information like i've seen this information and if they simply went to someone who could say here i'll direct you here's the deputy guidelines we're here you know the principal would have this if that's proactive versus them feeling like the only person they can reach out to is a computer keyboard and then everybody else jumps on it and then it becomes something bigger than it really needs to be they might have gotten automatic oh here's the information so that's why i think the proactive approach is really good have we convinced you uh yeah no i wasn't saying that

066proactive is reactive i mean it is nature i'm saying that what i've seen sometimes is people in always surrendering the horizon um you know kind of reading the pulse what's coming down the line and reaching outside of your own community i thought that was a good example adam i'm thinking about you know what's happening in other communities what's happening in other states but how does that inform our people by you know looking ahead what's happening to their students with like what does that mean with your students yeah in terms of maybe student population changes or student changes or you know yeah i wish there was more data because i'm a data-driven person so i feel like um i'm sure it exists somewhere but it's hard um without you know if there wasn't like an analyst

067in the district or something that's analyzing all this but yeah like you're saying what happens with our students you know i'd love to send more surveys out um to the parents and jeff last year he did a ton of them i don't know if they were helpful or not um [Music] focused on student achievement responses to community needs and interests and forms that can be decision-making of all stakeholders proactive and somehow maybe in your introduction we want to build in the integrity i'm not sure that's [Music] community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the community in the communities we represent that it is like somewhere in the middle there you have built on or built with or integrity or founded with integrity or something yeah is now we're getting a little bit into

068more of the the nitty-gritty of the how maybe that way so i just i didn't want you peeking ahead [Music] so in the first the top piece in here is actually a a community engagement plan but i really i really wanted there was a bunch of charts in it that i thought were helpful um [Music] in in thinking about community engagement and the two-way part of it you know i think there's there's a lot of places where if you ask people about community engagement they're going to start talking about one way communications out to the community um but i think you know in this report on the on the second page there's a court who squared down that talk about steps to community engagement on the next page that we're about to history down at

069the bottom there's how to dialogue and foreign policy discussions and then on the next page there's the three arrows that talk about informing and firing and engaging so i just want to take just a couple minutes for you to just sort of look through that and get your to speak up your impressions does it resonate or do you see that might apply to anyone is [Music] whether it's the community or whether it's the district or whether it's the administration of this when i first a couple years ago when we first started really seriously thinking about community engagement there was a lot of there was a lot of articles i could find it's really important you should be doing this [Music] it's easy to find why you should do it and the importance of it it's

070really hard sometimes to think of how do we actually do this so trying to give you a couple resources we're not going to parse them a lot tonight unnecessarily but a couple of just resources to think about i'm going to really start to go about this as a committee by you know that outreach that you talked about and being out in the community isn't a piece of that as a committee thinking about what other pieces [Music] more decisions ah so foreign [Music] is there anything you see in there i also like what they have here on the second page our goal is to engage the community in something called forums and stakeholder dialogues and other activities to ensure district policy changes are informed by those who are impacted by them so i'm not so i'm

071not i i guess i'm not thinking you're going to change your definition but that these are things that as you're thinking about implementing these are things that you might want to keep in mind about love the quote that you put here a couple of definitions of effective community engagement um the purpose of community engagement is to ensure that school improvement is done with the community community not to the community but that was really just bullseye there is one there is one website there that i ate on their website it says please ask permission to reproduce our materials so i just gave you the website so you could go look at it and kind of go through the process of getting permission to reproduce something but there's some good stuff on there they talk about thinking

072about your purpose for engagement is it communication is it participation is it you know and and if you're doing if it's you know if it's supposed to inform or is it collaboration or participation and that your strategy will depend on your purpose okay so um so that they know some of the information do you have something yes yeah so i'm looking at uh this is the second page how to engage the community i've always been a huge fan of backward curriculum design teaching to me the most important part of this document is the [Music] activities because you know if you look at this little equation and i don't know um but i think you have to start with um you know so i'm playing with it right so you have you can't see this uh

073but it's almost like that's the middle piece that's not gonna stop that's the middle piece so to me it's you know the the whole objective of being a school community member it's not a job onto itself it's to improve student learning that's what we're all trying to do but they're not in schools right so they have a discrete set of functions right and and the schools do so if the outcomes the expected outcomes to improve student learning and maybe they define those and then here and then so if you work backwards from that that becomes the middle part so here you get all of these outcomes which have nothing to do with anything that they're connected to student learning maybe something that happens in schools that they never see on a regular basis and then

074you have all the stuff in the middle is okay we're gonna we're gonna engage the community to get to those it's the part that happens right before that is let's think of what our job is what do we do we oversee budget like mike said we oversee policy evaluation now you have three parts to an equation here's what our outcomes are here's what our job authority is and in the middle is how we're going to engage the community to achieve those actions to achieve those and so this is just like if you just look at this there's no place i can see to go with this in terms of if you think about this and if you was designing a curriculum just there there would be no place to go because you don't know what

075to expect you haven't even find your job if you haven't defined what your authority is you don't know your outcomes but now you have this thing in the middle the you're getting here as a community what are you even going to do all of this stuff in order to get it and what are you going to do all this together but then the boundaries of your job so it seems like you were defining this middle piece but if you just look at it and you take it on itself and it'll sell it doesn't make any sense if what what if what you're trying to do is improve student learning [Music] you know what i'm trying to say i do and this is and it makes 99 sense but what i hear is we know what

076our goals are and now we engage the community about how we get to those goals we haven't like say you have three of those so yeah here's the middle piece here's our goal and here's here's our authority in the district we oversee budget we oversee policy we oversee the superintendent you know some other stuff how did you decide what the goals are what did you get to decide what is the community that's what hasn't been decided how are you going to do that if you don't know what the goals are yeah when you say goals mean analytics awesome yeah but i guess i think so i'm thinking of goals in terms of like your overarching district strategy right outcome i'll come relative to no no no it all comes relative to we're talking about community

077engagement yeah so what are your outcomes what what what outcomes are you expecting so yeah so and i don't know that i mean that's what i'm thinking i think that's a good middle piece so you got that what so if you work that backwards i think i would think you have to stop like like you know if this was curriculum what am i expecting students to know i know you define that and then you work backwards yes right so like i mean yeah you know that means yeah and so i'm thinking of it the same way you get this middle piece but without knowing your goals and without knowing how you're good at it we have a lot of decisions to make on policy and other things by engaging in the community are we better

078able to make those decisions informed by that feedback engagement possibly i mean i think you have to go and define what the goals are i mean you know or your outcome once you define your outcomes our responsibilities how are we going to use this stuff to get to those outcomes so can you give an example [Music] um [Music] but maybe something around while we're in the middle of this colder thing so i'm going to get a little cold today they oversee policy so okay so they always see policy this is the middle community and stuff what would be the goal to check this out with policies [Music] what's the overall outcome for the year right no maybe it might be something i think you could use anything like yeah you could use curriculum backwards curriculum

079design to design a unit to design a lesson what kind of area would you and adam said together well you're saying what are the outcomes based on policy and uh your review which is annually what happens is uh we need to be informed on from the community on these things that's one of the month to month in our case right the between meetings you need that engagement because focusing around the agenda and the agenda is going to be topics to come up for a vote do you want to be informed by the community on voting one or another or do we not care what they think about the items because we think that they are something that's going to help us achieve one of these outcomes throughout the year by the end of the year

080to help us either impact the school improvement plan or impact the budget or impact the policy that needs to be written about something as little as coping it's a month to month in constant engagement on a regular basis uh continue to collecting that feedback to be informed we'll make those votes so that it's not just like i said earlier it's just not our own personal student it's being informed by other people who don't families want individual places so there's two ideas there and i understand what jeff's saying because you know and in leadership business no one just sit there talking around in circles but it works out and things like that you need to know what you're aiming at like you said you need to know how you're gonna get there you need to know

081what your authority is to get there right like a middle manager has no authority to get there a committee i think this could be used to develop a template for everyday decisions school can just you know monthly school community decisions or overarching high higher goals so you know we got we can do the exercise we we have an issue tonight what's the goal of the school committee to know put the stuff on is their goal is there an outcome you know relative to what i'm presenting that you you would think of yeah or we're making policy decisions tonight you're ready to go so i guess that my question would be there is the outcome of a particular decision or is the outcome decision it could be that you develop a template so you know so

082they're gonna they're gonna take a vote tonight right so you know so they have an authority to make a vote they've uh they've included stakeholders we just saw two people get up here yeah right and the outcome is to uh to to amend to amend the uh to amend the the the entry plan that could be something that simple just that's the bill enough to take a bow use that use that what they believe community engagement is they use it use one of them at least right you don't have to use every single one all the time but if you come up with an idea of what you think community engagement is and you're always going back to that to make that decision then you're following the template so in this case they used you

083know you had two speakers so you're using one of those to be inclusive of all stations they've been collecting data they've been selected data how do i know that they're going to run emails from them and some communities right so they've been locked in they've been collecting data so they've been doing at least one of those things and maybe they don't have to do all four because it's very one very specific thing they have to do tonight they have to amend if they want [Music] yes i do then the output my outcome that i'm expecting the committee is to follow me and he might be expecting what if we discuss a different outcome so that's why is the outcome a decision that you have an issue of something that needs an outcome and you use

084this as a tool to get to get to it's one of the tools you have to get to that outcome yeah so maybe so the outcome tonight is reach a decision on the new descent tested state protocols that's that's what the goal is to know that's the outcome whether they all whether she feels one way he feels another they have to come to a decision they got to take a vote that's where they stop so they're going to take a hold using these parameters in the middle to reach that yeah that's correct that was and then community community engagement informed that out so right so that's a that's a much bigger kind of decision so and that they're going to validate so maybe instead of four of those there's ten of them and they can

085use one to or all of them depending on what decision they have to make what outcome they have to come to in this case maybe they only needed to get information from all the stakeholders in order to make that decision maybe they don't have to have a focus group maybe they don't have to do any other stuff maybe just that one thing's enough but you've defined what it is well then plus the committee might then even say we're not ready to make this decision yet because we need to consult the community more we need to do more of these things correctly i think less about the outcome being the decision we made more about how we got to making that decision in the first place well that's the middle part right so that's what you

086decide but you've got to you've got to work it backwards and you'll put whatever we want to do in order to use this stuff without the authority of what what you're in the saying correct it's hard and when you approach it this way it does i think when you just without putting in the context of why why are we doing this the process isn't stated yes correct well not explicitly yeah it's not stated within the context of what their job is right so i so then my i would say that that bullet focused on student achievement [Music] regarding um community engagement that would be one of the big options it has an outcome you'll give you all of these community engagement beliefs right because that's your development and we're going to use policy and what

087other other tools you have at hand as community members to get there but now you have a defined set that everybody uses to get to them yeah that's the news i think so that's the first chart can be pulled right out of the msc charting course materials about the school committee's role you know biggie's role is to blow allah use policy budgets they use community engagement as a key strategy to advance their their key authorities toward achieving student so you're always going to have generals in budget right you're always going to have two constants you know what you your authority is that's a constant and then this is constitution that's the way you define that okay so you come up with all of these strategies and then the variable is the problem you know the

088outcome and so all the time you can say okay we want to have this outcome and then what you have to do is work properly well not all you have to do [Music] now you have to define now you have a direction you say okay well you know if it's community engagement we use these and then we have to think about those in terms of all the things we can and can't do i'm not sure that those things the things we're going to use i think we're going to probably come [Music] the goal is to inform our decision making and to do so by engaging the community my goal is to have is to for the community engagement to inform our decision yeah and i don't think jeff's saying anything different than that yeah what

089i'm saying is i think about what i would pull out it's like specific to the goal working back the goal to me would be to have our being formed by the king we represent well yeah yeah of course that's why you did it i mean that's that's why you're doing that no no i'm not saying anything yeah i'm just saying you you did to what your authority is yeah so so you could almost start that state statement with within our authority as a school committee and then dive into it [Music] thinking within our authority as school committee members our goal is now as a school committee as a school committee yeah uh our goal is for community engagement strategy our goal is to use community in our decision [Music] is [Music] i think so what

090i was thinking is within our authority of the school committee we will engage the community in an effort to inform our decisions [Music] also actually i'm going to change it a little and you can fix it [Music] uh everywhere she's a mom who's going to be tissues of [Music] facebook okay so this is what we have so far within our authority of the school committee we will engage our community to inform decision-making that is focused on student achievement i like it yes you have there's budget policy uh higher and evaluated yeah i'm really with our authority in those but within our [Music] what school committee what authority does the school committee have to engage the community can direct everyone's body i think the community gave you the authority to represent them yeah because they voted

091you yeah go back to them to um well i like that word responsibility see a good place to put it because i don't want to leave a place now you can tell it will and you could say we have the responsibility to engage the community you know what you can put authority and responsibility because you can make an argument with authority responsibility [Music] our authority and responsibility as a school community we will engage our community to inform decision making that is focused on due to achievement to inform the decisions we make to improve student outcomes what do you think the goals of the school is [Music] achievement student earlier within our authority and responsibility as a school committee to focus on student achievement i'd like to inform this evening you know what julie i don't

092like to inform decision making that's my struggle would you rather know that i'm struggling to find out what i would replace it with we feel like it should be more like a two-way street than just an inform yeah like help with working together conjunction but it's hard to articulate you know it goes back to this bullet point in here the quote that larry said to the community but engaging the community engaging is two-way um informing is a lovely word under this we're gonna bullet those things right so that the details i think as long as you can look at it and that's the committee to find what it is [Music] but seriously because if they're guiding our decision both on us but they didn't they don't elect the committee to then guide them into the

093decision they let the community make the decision we're kind of turning around saying [Music] yeah so where would you start i like that you said the word input you could say to add input yeah yeah if there was like a something right yeah but what mike is saying is that the way it's stated we're saying simply we're going to take what you know whatever this scoop is if that's going to then decide when there may be other parameters at play like and there may be qriket that we're designing on or something the teachers are doing with their you know [Music] oh okay so do we have enough here as an overarching statement and then this comes under that exactly um and i i think maybe i'm just wondering is there anything else we want to

094have on that list um because then we have we have um just a reminder to me that this is a long-term process this is not a thing tonight it's not a goal this year i think we should be really committing ourselves to a longer process of further refining what we need what our strategies are how we use this how what our goals are over time okay so everywhere [Music] so i'm curious [Music] we'll get the senior director of community engagement we won't do this situation what might be different what would be the most effective way to handle it i tried to do three different scenarios one that was really focused on um sort of a of one issue [Music] one that was apparent that initiative really kind of fell under policy for the school committee

095which would have a different path than you know a parent who might be me um and one that was something that school kids face all the time where there's a decision that has to be made by the administration and the community doesn't like it but you can't say so you know how how do you handle that and sort of the community engagement trying to some of that is having like the trust of being able to build the trust of the community you know when when people are coming to this i mean like i've had people come to the school meeting and say why did that teacher get let go i like that teacher you know i'm talking about things as these kinds of examples i think are really useful and others that brought them up

096when we did the training trainings before the meetings sometimes if megan would say well you know so you know how do we handle this scene right you've asked us that sometimes and we talked about those things and so i'm wondering if we might consider something like instead of a full meaning to to just talk about this session [Music] and shorter and get on to have a conversation about this sort of a continuation of their training whether it's something like that as people would want to do a time beneficial or not because otherwise these will [Music] so i just think we don't have time to go through them tonight and sort of finish up the other part of the discussion i'd like to have i'm just gonna um talk a lot about the importance of the

097opening line following law um a little bit of there's a quote in there which is directly from the open meeting world the purpose health and leading law is to ensure transparency and deliberations on which public policy is based because the democratic process depends on the public having knowledge about the considerations underlying governmental action the open meeting law requires with some exceptions that meetings help public bodies be open to the public it also seeks to balance the public's interest in witnessing the deliberation of public officials with the government's need to manage its operations efficiently so if you think about the open meeting law can you think of some ways where you feel like the open meeting law helps that public engagement or ways where you feel it might hinder is definitely social media there's something that's

098out there and we know we can respond to it or like usual whatever it happens to be but if so many of us happen to do that and all we're invitation right but it's only just to engage with the community and give the right information so and this is somewhere you see administration for a thinking about how we as a committee handle social media because it is giving information if if someone can get on and say you know the correct information is in this document there's a link to it or it's in the minutes of this meeting here's a link to it that doesn't violate one of you doing that it doesn't violate your remaining health because you're just giving your check you're not venturing that extent so something or you know i want to

099help jeff and saying this is out there can we is there a way we can get the right information but but you are absolutely right that sometimes been trying to do your work ensuring being done in public means that you're not on social media sites that are very with each other right either that would that would hinder the public's agency experience with do you ever feel like that might slow down your work have open to develop the agenda it's tough because you can't add something last minute yeah that's kind of frustrating yeah it's frustrating however if you remember the public you had an opinion about what you might want to add to your agenda and you didn't get a chance because you didn't see it you know and you just started talking about it then

100somebody slowed down your work but you served the public but i know that some things it's like you know like if a club from the high school just needs approval i mean is the public gonna care or you know then we're gonna wait a whole other month or a whole other two weeks or whatever so i think some certain things it's like you know you're gonna follow the process just slows it down but yeah absolutely something big like oh we're gonna have a covent boat or something yeah like people want to know they want to be informed and they want to be here or have their voice heard we have just a couple minutes to look through the social media social medias or school community members that's in there and see if you have any

101any questions anything that resonates with you particularly or anything you have so it is a tool that's out there and if you're careful about how you use the tool so that you're informing the public it's a really good tool for you to use um it's when it becomes back and forth into liberation or even sometimes back and forth into liberation with the public which would be better served having it in a more but it's just not consistent it's not managed by us i'm wondering into your point of sharing factual information nothing will direct any of us from posting a link to a reading agenda saying that the school companies yeah 26 times over but there are others yeah sometimes i think people don't know where to go to find things like they know people knew

102there was a code dashboard and somebody's like where's that thing again and it's like it's on the district website well what's that it's like okay yeah that's right you probably never just like go over this visitor website because jeff sends an email every week so people read that yeah they don't have to go to the website to get it well if it's on the web school district website [Music] usually if i'm looking for something i think i think we took a little bit longer to get to that definition but i think it was a good discussion [Music] part of the discussion but it's not it doesn't exist in a vacuum that it exists within the work that you do and so the next next step here um you'll you'll type something up here separate from

103these notes if i can do that oh [Music] yeah and then um we'll at least have that as a touchstone yet when we think about this going forward i'm not expecting that we'll be changing our goals a lot this year but this should be we should start to reference these um commitments and actions um as we're making decisions we should start to become part [Music] is there anything else people want to see happen from this work tonight uh in the short term i think maybe more surveys um probably any more work sorry yeah no i'll do a survey i just think that's the best way to get community yeah especially when we have big decisions and it's like you know some people again i only know what my people think but a lot of those

104people think like me so it's it would be helpful you know especially [Music] that's the other thing i was thinking like one time a year people do like a forum where like there's no official business it's just all parents open comments and we try to at least make commitments to what we're gonna do to address issues on the spot so they're not gonna you know all right we'll add that for our agenda in six months it's like all right we're gonna do this we're gonna do this i mean once a year that sounds difficult yeah dorothy do you know any school committees to do their own surveys i haven't seen them both schools no i know either they may work with the administration to say here's the information plus we also have access [Music] dorothy

105thank you very much for your time tonight um we will see if we can make use of it in the coming months and we will work at seeing this sort of on the page a little bit and with the assumption the person that we look at will want to revise it and sort of massage it but we hopefully get some poor ideas but yeah hopefully [Music] all right so we're going ready to move back into the business portion of our meeting everybody okay ready yes okay all right so we start with uh well actually the that would go to the discussion with the desi letter but i'm wondering if um with the group's approval if we could move back if we could hear from jeff first and then update here okay so um so one

106thing that doesn't mean that i did send you is we've got some um i gave my recommendations on them most of them did not none of them actually required a spooky action um in light of [Music] nurses were not able to get their work done so i did answer those and i sent those to you if you have any questions i'll answer them but what i really want to get to is the photo this [Music] so the background here is because preston state has identified very few positive cases both statewide and district data also parallels about the state data and because intestines say excuse me an associated contact tracer across the state beyond in our districts have overwhelmed uh but the nurses in keeping them from doing many of the other duties they have administering

107events and just treating other students who come down during the day the department recommended a different testing protocol than we used today and so what i talk about next has been endorsed by the emergency and in fact they wrote the procedure so the new protocol that's recommended by the department and by our nurses replaces test instead contact tracing replaces it with symptomatic testing and um at home testing we currently remember uh some of you weren't there but when we did the original reentry 2021 plan there were three options that the state has for testing so we could opt into a tested stay synthetic testing and tool testing we can opt into any one of those or all we opted for tested studying symptomatic testing now fast forward to today or now in order to be

108eligible for the new testament hall program you had to have either signed up for symptomatic testing or pool testing originally and if you did you can now go back and sign up for one of those we had to you have to be part of that so and so the idea is that you have to have a laid approach you can't just do the stakeholder testing you have to do pool testing symptomatic testing and staying long test so um the the protocol that is recommended that you're going to vote on is symptomatic testing along with the at home at home testing so if you look at that document just briefly the first part of the entire program is symptomatic now we already do symptomatic testing but in our district currently you voted the symptomatic testing but

109right now symptomatic testing triggers tested state growth laws so the only reason you're voting that is because this systematic test does not trigger tests instead and it also does not trigger contact tracing so that's why it requires that we refocus an amendment [Music] we had some some flexibility and visibility so in this program uh you know until the student comes down they have any one of these symptoms they could be vaccinated or [Music] the nurse will uh contact them child the child's parents um and then encourage the and then do some education with them just go through some protocol the nursing home covers to contact the child's primary care physician and um and then informable artists students out of school close contact informed christie christie uh the department the department of education still requires so

110christy does that um every week she does it on a monthly basis i don't know how she goes um deadline on that is wednesday on thursday and for the principal of the school and then enter the results of cic which we currently do now and that generates an automatic email that's all part of the probability that has to stay in place and then the nurse will be following protocol a which is assumed to test a positive form called it if the test is negative then the number would just treat the child just like they would treat any other child that comes down with a headache stomachache the second part of the program that's a symptomatic and it's just very straightforward [Music] just like any other kid who comes down with any other illnesses so many

111times they'll get sent back to the classroom uh depending on how sick they are yeah all the others nursing homes but that's what always happens there's no there's really no difference but remember you know on this step test and study um on the contact tracing test we've done we've done 16 1700 we've only had 14 15 that have been positive from from confessing i know kind of reported a higher number and i think that's an important thing to know there's only 14 cases for actual positives from testing today right we've had altogether those are symbolic positives and so roughly the transmission in school has been you know one-fifth twenty percent [Music] just simply every other week you'll kind of have to pop into this um you don't need to be set you need to knock

112into this because we're not actually doing anything every other week of parents who decide to opt in will get a kit some test kit will have two tests in it um and this there is one change here we've been working on this and had a leadership this morning many of the principles the optics have been talking to are recommending a waffle wednesday test and not a one-day test the reason wednesday test isn't being they are positive they're only out of school wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday so it's less less time for our school the state is our so the program's open to all staff and all students [Music] on friday same thing every other week [Music] are they even responsible is christian law of all of those things or is it just like you'll

113let us know if you're positive because it doesn't do anything except from log is positive all right so you take the question negative then from here and that's it well if you're positive you go through that protocol yeah the next part um so um the student test won't be sent out until later this month we'll hopefully get that program distributing to the students on the floor but again um we're still working out those difficult pieces i do have one thing that is not enjoyable we've just worked on it today i know you're gonna ask questions about it so you always want to know the logistical pieces so you know i just can't [Music] that's why is [Music] this is just basically it's probably public information right now this is a template that the conference has

114sent us it's an interactive template we just put all that in there so this is nothing we uh we made some edits to it just to introduce the program i'll tell you janelle is the first project and she's really knocked it out of the park um so janelle today we added a uh we thought parents would want to see at least a ten of the schedules this was sent to us from the department of ed these are all interactive links and so pan will go on they will be able to opt into the program this way into the home testing program and there's also a link i believe [Music] oh yeah right under the calendar you can see 12 and 19 uh testing programs at our school so in a lot of these lengths of

115repeats so if you miss it on one page you get it on another um and so you see there you get the iphone testing a google form they'll just go in and as soon as you log in this will be sent electronically tomorrow and then [Music] number three the symptomatic testing if you already opted into symptomatic testing you probably did you don't have to do anything if you did not um and you wanted to have and you want your child to be tested you want to give us permission to test them if they are sick or they have symptoms then you'll have to go in and you'll have to sign up with symptomatic testing what if a parent wants to remove the condition given previously um [Music] how do we know is there a way

116to check i guess you should be called [Music] it's just a google [Music] you may have thought okay i don't know if i sign up or not you will if your kid was tested but they did it you want to know if you're in the um and you go down and you watch it yeah if you sign up for one do you automatically get the other or you can sign up for both the show okay because there's a lot of money program so you can just sign up for the synthetic testing and then say i don't i don't want my i don't want to test at all don't sign up for it or you might say i want to test every week but i don't want you putting something in my kid's nose so it

117gives the path um flexibility so you should still get in the test you can't it's not like if you don't do this you can't do it yeah i appreciate that thank you you're hoping um the only days of dramatic testing then we will be participating in is the at-home testing correct and that would be once a week if you want to know yeah so you said those panel tests don't get reported to the school it's just hey you're wrong [Music] it's optional so if a kid a family doesn't choose to do it then what's the point they're not they keep going to school and if they're cinematic then they'll get noticed at some point otherwise it's just yeah and that's why it's voluntary i mean you know when your kid's sick you know again there's

118a responsibility you know you get sick you don't want to test them don't send them to school that's just irresponsible yeah i said one more question i was just thinking about the fact that if you test positive that you're asymptomatic it was one thing for vaccinated thanks for unvaccinated so if you're home and you do a test and you're asymptomatic what happened to them if you're positive then you have to follow the protocol you're going to record a positive test and then you you know you should get the more advancement yeah [Music] this test is a lot less sensitive than then i believe it's called the pci test but one of the things the physician said is that this is more likely to even though it's less sensitive it's more likely to pick up the

119involved once you have enough viruses that it will pick it up that's the thinking at least um i have two questions uh so the first one is in this letter that you guys wrote i think you said janelle wrote it it says um if your child has a potential contact in school they may continue to come to school do not have to quarantine does not address what happens if your child is in contact outside of school let's say a little sister has copic big brother doesn't have symptoms i think i think you wrote an email like that when you come to school there's no contact training so you come to school so even if you're well you stay home so there's no protocol if one kid has a coconut the other doesn't the one without

120hope the one in the household who still hasn't tested positive yet but they test positive can go to school it wasn't before there absolutely was if you were a close contact outside of school you automatically fell into protocol safe only you absolutely had to report it no you were in close contact outside of school no not if you noticed [Music] i believe that if you i thought it said in your brief entry plan i mean i won't go back and look but i thought if you were in close contact outside of school you fell into protocol we're not allowed to test and stay i'm not debating but you were supposed to quarantine you were not welcome in school now whether a parent did not report to the nurse but if you were close contact that

121was part of what the nurses had to do you were supposed to contact the nurse yeah i thought you were talking about the testing no you're definitely not welcome into testing state you are close contact outside school you not had cold and that was available out of school post process he could he was vaccinated but he couldn't if he was unvaccinated that would be this is that that is the current so now i'm asking what's the problem [Music] so that's how it was with the vaccinated before this like this wasn't this if you were vast native yeah and a sibling had called yeah yeah yes but if you're unvaccinated right which is this which i mean honda was this much of the population so like people like oh my god going to happen but if

122you think about it it's really been happening here we have close to 80 if you take out the preschoolers of vaccinated people and they've all been coming and going and we haven't seen our number soar or you know i mean it's been pretty it's been what it's been a long time but it's been it's just been that way for a while so i don't see a huge change because that's been the protocol unless you are unvaccinated in which case you know your health forever which berlin and but the two elementary schools i think the vaccine rate is still pretty low right yeah so i think in the elementary school that that was happening frequently which in high school quite honestly you're not really sharing germs with uh sibling versus like when you're you know five

123and seven whatever one kid gets the others gonna get it there was no policing of that there was no policing there was a lot of system absolutely yeah but it was the nurses were enforcing that they were saying you know and the same thing if one sibling in the school had let's say there's two kids at bes that other sibling wasn't coming to school that sibling wasn't even in testing state that simply was home so what's going to happen now there's two kids at bes one has symptoms and has clothed the other one has no symptoms are they welcome to come to school without being tested or anything they can just go to school yeah i mean you're a parent what would you do [Music] these are voluntary programs we've had very very low transmission

124rates in the school there's a point you know and we're trying to get i think you know the department of head um has said that the the rate of transmission inside school the actual positive cases inside the school versus in the community there's a there's an enormous difference between those two things so we're just saying the protocol is just saying that when you went to contact tracing if you're a child if you have a child that's it's positive and it's sick and you have another child that's in the house we don't have contact tracy you know as a parent you need to use your best judgment too you decide i want to send them to school but if there's no pause so what you said first i wanted to comment on that you're right we've

125had little transmission in school because of the protocols that the school has had in place the school i think because you don't think because of the protocols in school we've had low transmission well not necessarily i don't see what i don't see i mean we don't know we don't know we don't know either way we have no idea we don't have data i mean if we took away masks and all the protocols and went back to normal and that would travel i know i'm just saying we don't know i think because of some of the protocols in school that's why we have little school transmissions i don't have any data i'm just saying i mean like all right if one kid is sick the other kid stays home because the nurses have said in their

126letter the nurses said they think most cases are trans you know the transmission slows through the household if one kid gets it seems like the whole household gets it but what if they're asymptomatic and one kid has a therapy system and there's three kids they're gonna get sent to school anyway i mean there were many times before they wouldn't have a friend some people would have they just wouldn't have told correct but who was the same kid at the school the nurses would have known and it was a different situation yeah but i don't think we have no no what i'm saying is if one kid has it and they hate the matter and they don't get tested and there are two siblings but we need our kids [Music] and the sevens came to school

127[Music] so [Music] oh they did come to school because they're vaccinated well my point is if i had if we're all if we're all siblings here and i have and we all live in the same house but i'm asymptomatic you're all going to go to school because i have it i don't know i have it you might have it too [Music] we don't know that but then you spread it but then it's spread like you go to school siblings [Music] nurses can't help other kids that's the outcome we want is to improve the entire environment right so when we when we discuss this we eventually go out what we're trying to do we're trying to get back to some sense of normalcy to try to fix all the harm that's been done already so if

128a kid makes a fanatic and he's got food he's going to school his siblings is going to school the kid symptomatic he's going to school and his siblings are going to show science in class they don't have the nurse to get tested if they don't choose to opt in to get tested the nurse makes the decision which she's highly qualified to do as to whether or not in that class sometimes it's called fifth month we're simply voting on whether or not we believe the nurses protocol that they bring here is acceptable no that would happen before too if the kids agree symptomatic and many of these kids have an asymptomatic there's nothing before theory do you mean they wouldn't they would still even have to be on the protocol they're very symptomatic they would come

129to school and they they could have possibly spread right i didn't think that was the case but i don't know no it's talking about asymptomatics yeah oh yeah they're like julie like if your kids were at school you didn't know i don't know how how you found out but those are sports again we still had [Music] roughly spot over close to five days a week you lose roughly five hours of instruction i agree with that that's not happening that's a lot of time that you lose and it doesn't say to have a program in place that has that's been so inefficient i'm not against drop intestines day i agree with dropping tests day i don't necessarily think that it's um doing this i think it might be more harm than it's worth but i guess

130my concern is just um if we're not doing test and stay and people are gonna opt people have the freedom to opt out of symptomatic testing and they have the freedom to opt out of this at home testing um you know and now it's like okay if it's going through a household and then they're going to send the kids to school i guess my concern is you know well where are is the spread gonna increase well this double sim card there on the systematic piece even if they don't choose to test to synthetic doesn't if they're noticed gives the nurses more time to catch those we'll look at things or that teachers aren't having to do contact tracing gives them more time to pay attention to these things do you afford to go a parent

131who can't afford to stay home and have one kid that might have had other than three others that need to go to school very well there is no doubt and that's but that's not coping that's through the years i think you have to remember that this was written they wrote the message wrote that on the back of this document this protocol is what they wrote and and you know i trust their opinion and that they know how much time they spend during the week doing testing today they see the benefit of it but they also know that because they take so much time doing this what they can't all the other things they cannot do they also know how many how much time students are out of class because they're involved in the test and

132state protocol so you know this isn't saying making this up i don't go in there and do that so i trust with the nurses with the justices you know i'm telling you what they're putting forward how do we know if this new protocol is working are we relying on the state department to compile state level data to tell us that or do we have any local metrics to make decisions from i mean i don't even know who completely defined it except to say if the if the cases if the cases all of a sudden go through the move i mean that's certainly an indication so through the roof is very help defined right so how are you how how do you think about it i think we'll have to monitor i mean we're gonna have

133to have state data we'll see if where you know i think the data has to be collected so we're using to use state data to compare how we're doing to the state well yeah that's what we did now and that's how this happened we took we took state data and then we looked at our data we said okay this is we're not getting we're not getting many cases when you look at the percentage of tests we do versus how many positive effects we actually get up to the actionable and then we looked at the state data and said well we're roughly where the state is with this we have more public cases springing up than this data show well i guess we're gonna have this monitor and see if it's something that's you know you

134know with the reason among if it's if it's so high that we can't run the class classes anymore so i think it's a new protocol so we would need regular importance i think at upcoming school meetings right so we'll be able to see if the cases go up after this yeah but i think we also want some anecdotal information from the nurses as they are [Music] in many more sick children than we did we've had before or you know there could be a number of stories there um my understanding of this proposal is that there are three parts and i'm just going to reiterate these because i think i think we'll take one vote and encompasses these three parts one if we approve this proposal we will continue symphonic testing as described by the nurses

135here we will discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and three we will offer families the option to sign up for rapid antigen at home testing [Music] and receiving those kits at home [Music] pieces that come with this proposal okay are we ready to move on from here do you feel good i have one more question one more it's foreign i guess um i kind of feel that maybe this might need um maybe a little bit more community engagement i don't know how i don't know if just as you gauged how people feel about this i mean i'm sure some people are like yeah no big deal i think others are going to be like oh my god i'm not sending my kid to school this month there is going to be a group of

136people that feel that way so i guess i'm just wondering you know have you talked to anyone else i'll have the nurses talk to anybody do you have any viewers out on how people feel about this and what it makes sense to maybe gather some data we've planned on starting this program this week you don't want to vote on a real start program it's this this program is very highly subscribed to throughout the state by other school districts what we do plan to do is we're going to send an equity survey out and susan i had actually talked about this earlier we'll include some questions um and we can probably develop some more questions actually because um you know once we get a couple weeks of this going um we can you know maybe maybe

137you can help develop a couple more questions is not out here we're still developing it but maybe we can add a few more questions and just relative to this um and the equity piece that's really what it is i mean my child being treated treated unfairly because you've made this decision to build this program so it may be something very specific about switching from test and staying contact tracing to this i think that would be i think that would be a fair question i don't know how it would be it's actually quote uh what happened you don't you want to go back on it to go back i don't know it's a piece about community engagement you're saying this protocol has been written by the nurses there's protocols in there so yeah so the community

138over the weeks and months the years we've been doing this the community has been begging us to listen to our mobile health officials [Music] i would trust the nurses more than trust them i mean the community wants us to listen to global calculations and i would say i mean you know you know i i've been very upset about getting extra marriage [Music] at the time the nurses i don't think they can sustain the pace they're at right now i think these programs so i agree you know so we've got something in place that it seems to me does not a very effective effort that's slowing down of the goal of swarm down covered in our schools possibly you know in by nurses accounts so this freedom nurse has been back into school been endorsed by

139the united states has been endorsed by a department been endorsed by the massachusetts department of health so could it just blow up and you have to revisit and say okay this isn't working your vote isn't in strong i mean it's just it's a guiding it's a guiding vote to get the program going it's not like what are you going to you know the only district doing it i mean you made the decision we made the decision to opt into this already before the vote let me tell you that yes we did that so we could get in line because the department said if you don't then you then you're down here and what a smaller district so i'm always conscious of if we don't get in right away you know they're not gonna prioritize a

140thousand kid district over four thousand businesses so i always think okay we're gonna jump on this and then if somebody tells me not to do it later okay it's easy to pull it back but at least we're in the queue i want to just reiterate uh two things here one is the the question that i i'm hearing tim reagan's the answer to megan's question how do people feel about this do we know the answer is not really we know that they care about what the nurses recommend but we don't know how they feel about this um so i would i would i guess ask also where's the parent education piece on this because when i read this letter it doesn't share the information that's in your proposal which gives the rationale for why test and

141stay contact tracing [Music] if i were a parent in the district right now and i were not following this conversation with jessie's you know and i got this i'd be like wait what [Music] want us to put this on this susan has a fantastic point i think your first line needs to be based on the evidence we have from our current test and state program and state data in school spread is virtually non-visited i mean a message like that at the top i think somebody's perfectly right well this is just right here with the third education piece and definitely give the link to that bestie thing because i think a lot of people it means [Music] and contact tracy we put a lot of energy into this parents we're trying to figure out all the

142protocol a b c d and all of a sudden we're doing a mega shift here and i feel like you've got to bring people along with you you've got to show them why this is warranted and you know why you're making this change or else you're going to draw or run into the phone calls so i would uh i want to just ask again are we ready to move on to the other topic and then we'll take votes yes okay so the the remaining piece is about um sending a letter to jesse requesting evidence of mask and vaccine after the syria i don't know if you want to speak to this sure so i circulated a letter to everyone earlier today that essentially isn't on what we discussed at our last meeting where we will

143be coming out of today's meeting uh proposing this passage to sign the letter today requesting evidence related to items first being evidence that masking students prevents the transmission of cobia 19 in schools seven being achieving an 80 vaccination rate preventing the transmission of copenhagen schools this is all related to deci's continued continuance of the nascent requirement the end of this letter it does state that on march 8th the school committee will be reviewing its massive requirement as we go through the last meeting therefore we request to provide this evidence by february 25th so that our committee can interview and consider it in time for our meeting on march 8th questions comments just to see if you're clear what this is proposing and why [Music] um given that we know that the sandwich school committee kate

144has requested this information four times and not been successful getting any informative response from desi do you expect anything different from our letter not necessarily okay um [Music] um can you describe since you initiated this um can you describe what your motivation is behind the letter like what do you want to accomplish from this i think speaking to what we talked about earlier we've come to being proactive we know that destiny is going to make some kind of decision about extending fasting beyond february 28th in advance of february 28th and being prepared to handle that new dressing recommendation or requirement at that point would be good to see if we can get any information we need to appropriately discuss their next decision at that time so my goal was to get our hands on any

145information they might have demonstrating that either of these two mitigation strategies are actually effective at preventing the transmission of both eventually i agree to see india that educates that from interested um [Music] the i think that jeff has said to me once you know that really the desi's um information supporting that i think you called it a logic trail jeff follow their logic trailer the department of ed relies on the mass department of health cbc team of medical advisors they reference those groups often and they have links that take you to the cdc page in fact there is a destiny page that has featured links that take you out to um cbc and another page which you can't read because my printer and if you if you follow the links you can find reports and

146studies out there you have to do the work it's not like this is summarizing their two years of information and sources for us nicely but if you follow the links you can find i followed online today and took me to 22 studies that were cited in some other decisions um at the cdc page it takes you out in about um so are you looking for the department to give you something short and sweet uh here or are we are are you do you think the committee ought to be doing legwork to go follow their logic trailers their requirements footnote evidence that proves the point that either of these two strategies are affecting these two specific and so if they don't come back with that information which seems likely what would you think should happen then

147we are meeting on march 8th now we're going to discuss our mass department okay so we just have to decide what are we thinking about so whether we have the jessie's different or whether they respond or not we're still gonna discuss it i think you know i think you should be very careful about adding two variables to this equation you break out the equations we're talking about this program we don't know the effects of it i mean we know what the investors grow we know all of that when we talk about how we're going to monitor this we don't have you know we all have a definite way to do it really in terms of like you know what really knows is going to work or not so if and i think it's going to

148need some time to do that i definitely think it's worth trying he's done it now so i i think it's worth trying but if you now start to think about you know ultimately what you want to get what you're trying to get at is how we're going to get these massive operators right so and dusty already has you know there is an offering for that it's the 80 right now and maybe that comes down and so i don't know what your timeline is maybe you had to have something but given the amount of questions on this committee just on this program and i agree that it's a big show i would think anything now that introduces getting rid of the mask i won't think it's appropriate till we know where this is i mean if

149we're doing okay with this i would say okay then the next step is thinking about the mass because you know even if they do respond you know masking with mechanical devices i think you could argue that my kid wears it down down here it doesn't work but you know yeah okay but they can be made to work you know because they in the cabinet so they can be made to filter things out so correct yeah yeah so there's you know i mean you know i think the big question is maybe around why 80 percent versus herd immunity which is 60 percent why where they seems a lot more arbitrary than what the mass will work work this match works like maybe better than that mass so i think again i think we're we'll end up

150in a place where we had too many variables to this equation we don't know how this program is going to work i think it's worth trying i think the benefits may operate the risks but i don't know that and given the amount of questions that you guys have all legitimate questions five times between not getting this underway if if it goes okay then you know that's the next step how do we now move to them well the only challenge there is that the response will be so delayed so it's best i would say [Music] you know they're going to say okay we did this we did this pointing to the the the destiny website that has all of all of that including some of the things you just handed out so but i would just

151you know just caution that we don't want to have a lot of really a lot of balls of the year i would assume too that the department is thinking that same way they've just initiated this program and they're they're probably going to see how what's the trend now given this new program and that's going to inform their thinking about whether they're ready to tackle masks so probably they're pacing the same way i do hear a lot like you know rumblings from other districts and superintendents about the next piece so it's not like and i don't know what the school can do but i'm guessing it's probably reflected in what the school committees think but i would think that like the best course of action right now gives me concerns about this and it's not like

152i don't have anything i'm not concerned about the test and staying i mean i think as a committee there is some questions about it and certainly you know safety i have to think about that i want to make sure rewards it's not something we go into when it ends up being worse but i would say adding two variables is probably not prudent at this point because that's really your goal to get the mass off right six weeks in six weeks we have another attempt to discuss our math requirement six weeks from now yeah probably continue to come down i have every expectation that case scouts are going to continue to come down not only within our schools but also with our community yeah so six weeks from now we're going to be in a different

153place than we are today that we were six weeks ago and so i think six weeks for the new product i'll go into place and see how that falls given my appropriate time as we're probably going to do but reviewing the mass requirements of the march i will [Music] anyway you're gonna wait six weeks you can just have a discussion about it in six weeks without sending it together you know it down and i don't agree with that logic it looks like we're going in that direction which makes again complicated to know if this is actually working the cases are really going down um and you know if they're going down and we're doing good with this program i don't really care why it's better if they're coming down so man it's just my two

154cents i think it's reasonable it's it's a reasonable argument to make when it comes to but what you just said many people kind of discuss that when it goes on forward decided to do anything the idea of not sending the letter but still going to review our mass policy on march 8 it's a reasonable decision which we already voted on last meeting yeah so i mean i um i don't think there's harm in sending the water unless you unless jeff you're saying you think they'll take the letter and be like oh we're gonna deliver a home test or something but i don't know i don't think they're being malicious [Music] so there are we don't even need to wait until march 8th we know what the data is now we know we'll decide that i

155mean i'm almost emotionally removed right now and if we could if you want to until march 8th then wait for margie but um i'm not concerned i'm concerned about the other side of the equation is the learning we know the data around learning impacts especially young kids can you tell us anything about diabetes in terms of the learning yeah i mean how do you teach a kid to learn with facebook so we have [Music] i think last meeting and let me just interrupt for a second because our task isn't to talk about masks tonight no i'm referring to his letter but so that's incoming on march 8th no in regard to whether or not we sent a letter to get data that's my question okay it sounds like we're talking about the masks yeah so

156i think i think what he's saying is we want to do we want the letter out there to get the information rather than just jumping the shark and saying do we want to put the mask thing on the table we're trying to go through all of the avenues to get the information to give the time for this program to happen yeah what i want to know is we're asking for data on what the masks do as far as coping deals but what data do we have when i look at what the masks do to mental health to learning to the 17 of our kids in our districts who are economically disadvantaged and don't have the ability to get extra help the over the last few years i saw last meeting that the english learning students

157has grown 625 over the last few years how do you learn a foreign language with a mask covering your face covering the interface are you asking for more board items on this level uh if we need to yeah okay so you would need to maybe make that proposal or maybe there's general consensus do we have any information on that do we do this no just yeah i know you're going to be looking at that transition here it's all research getting on the research base yeah i mean i've seen there's plenty of articles out there plenty of research i mean and we know all that in terms of you know younger kids like women [Music] watching teachers model you know you need to certainly helps if you can see right now and also have socialization skills

158so there's all of that data um the assignment did you get any speech hang on that just put it aside for a second um i'm assuming adam that you did not include requesting that kind of information social emotional kinds of information um because you were looking for the information that they used to um to change this mass mandate to its current form and that doesn't include that kind of data is that correct looking for the information that you use to put the requirements that's a different set of data than uh maybe we would be requesting from the department that might be for instance you might request that information from the local board of health or from the from msc or some other sources that we can't identify probably tonight i think asking for the information

159behind this decision in the first place i mean it should include that i would imagine if i put this in place their response would be well there's no there's no impact otherwise why are they existing or they think the benefits of masking outweigh the costs and if they do that are you proposing anything here my first time i propose to remove the mask right now no no with no that's in the letter right so are you saying to modify this reference on the letter yes it says on march 8 the committee will be reviewing its mass requirement i'm suggesting we change out the federation i can't understand whether you're modifying this letter to something easy or whether you're proposing some different actions well there are no motions on the floor right this moment at all

160so but in a minute you'll have to decide what motion is pertinent to the motion on the floor which will be the desi letter first and i mean the protocol that jeff was describing to them jesse leonard and then if you want to propose like adam did it the last time to put something on an agenda [Music] all right i think we are ready for a vote um first with a couple of small business items here um the first is that i'm appointing adam wilbur to the negotiation subcommittee in the fall i appointed him as an alternate uh and right now he is being um it's turns out that that's really not the best way to do the negotiation community there's steady crew in there who might step in and step out [Music] okay do

161we want to solicit a third person take his place uh you should have to if you don't the cellar doesn't show anymore [Music] the union is asking who is coming to the table i mean i can say i can say there'll be three of us without naming people all right so you want to think about this february okay and we have uh we have a motion to approve the creation of the green team club by um [Music] okay now um do we have a motion to approve the super super men's and hayes recommendation um that includes these three pieces continue symptomatic testing as described in the proposal discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and offer desi's rapid antigen at home testing program option to families one amendment is changing monday to wednesday oh and

162the number two what was that and then the other amendment did the big thing long ago that's just a letter if that's not really that's just a communication on your part what do you mean monday to wednesday at home oh it would be blessed yeah um so is there a motion to accept a proposal of those three components as stated [Music] second adam and discussion okay all in favor of approving superintendent's recommendation to move to those three elements in the testing protocol [Music] and we will move to this protocol um as described here and jeff will manage the communications thank you for your thoughtful consideration of all the components and for i know that the parent input has been that you've heard that and also that's in your thinking as well so i appreciate your

163uh and so the last item then is to uh is there a motion to authorize the district to send an official letter to commissioner riley requesting evidence to be provided by february 25th 2022 to demonstrate asking students and are achieving an 80 vaccine threshold that's the transmission of 19. um [Music] um that's that's a point again so if you want to entertain a motion to change the march 8th session to february [Music] and then talk about as much suggested an earlier day trippy masking requirement or the same day with the mastering requirement i do think that the information we learned from the sandwich school commitment in particular and some others saying that they sent similar letters and received a lackluster response for lack of better terms could change the necessity for the rationale for sending

164this letter in the first place because i don't expect we're going to get an answer that is different from what those other schools okay so um so we will if we have a motion and a second we'll go ahead and vote on whether to send this letter correct all right the flutter as is as is okay i'm gonna go back all right so i understand that right okay so are we ready to vote this letter s is okay let's just go around make sure i've never been julian do not send as is yes adam now okay so the letter does not go out now um mike are you looking to make a proposal for um a meeting date first i would like to move our discussion agenda again on the discussion on the masks i'd

165also like to have any information you can have on how masks impact teaching and learning from america from heading onto that can we maybe we need to break those two things apart let's deal with the date first move discussion of masks from march 8 2022 to february 8. is that correct yes um is there a second for that motion [Music] any discussion ready to vote let me go around that picture here everybody julie i'm going to say um yes i'm going to move the discussion to february 8th i didn't yeah okay adam yes megan no mike yes glory yes and i am i know um motion carries um i do need to look at the agenda for march 8th because i know we have a lot of budget uh conversation and a few other items

166already on your agenda so i'm not exactly sure how the time goes if the meeting needs to go wrong because of the being such a central piece in february are we going to go long on that meeting you're saying odds yeah okay all right um so i just want to be clear here committee review um so the topic that you're saying is being moved to february 8th is and so um i guess i want to be clear on the agenda what we're actually doing what does it say margie well all we have is adam's language is review the mass candidate so do you want to keep that or are you going to change that to your group no i mean i can the language of head is not exactly clear what it is the committee

167will be doing well what's the task what's our task what and pulling out everything that says something about masks i mean you can write down what you like and simply saying review the mask requiring whether it's still needed in our district so we're not going to take a vote on february we're just going to discuss it i think it could become a little discussion i mean the vote would be two parts against [Music] the mask requirement policy and vote whether to keep or change it to make it awesome this sounds like a different motion and survey results in two weeks good luck the is uh i think the intent of that was to have both on whether to keep the requirement whether to keep jesse's requirement in place or whether to follow jesse's mandate sure

168because their mandate will still be in place on february 28th right yeah i mean i i guess my question is would the district have to propose this to us how are we just saying okay we're designing like wouldn't generalize yeah but usually jeff makes uh i mean reactions as well but our re-entry plans as jeff brought this new dusty thing and conversation at that point was full committee can change policy whenever however it likes bible so i think that's what we're talking about here so you're saying now that you what you want on february 8th what you're proposing here is a discussion to review to ask mass requirement to vote whether to keep it as is or change it sure i mean we heard parents speak tonight about how passionately they want this to be

169going i mean that's our engagement right there [Music] is to review the mass requirement on february 8th and to vote on whether to keep it or change it i think that's well understandable [Music] so um [Music] any further discussion so just just can i just ask a question so let's say we come to february 8 and things look horrible we can then decide at that point that we might want to move it up a little bit later like we're not committed we're not committing to it at all or nothing on february 8th or nothing we're committing to discussing the mass requirements and whether to keep them or not right but what i'm saying is during that you can also can you make sure you extend it it was to keep or change changes to the

170defined changes in the day to change the mass candidates as it says whether to keep it as it is the district on board with us or is this just it seems like the school committee right now is kind of operating in the bathroom again i'm just um [Music] you've given the school district the authority to follow the dds which which is what was yourself in effect here what you want to say is that [Music] all right that's what you're but i guess i'm asking can we even come out and say hey we want to review the mass policy or does the district have to say we want you to review as a discussion point here too we're going to hit a [Music] a meeting problem because we know that the budget is already going to

171take a major part part of february and uh [Music] so we're we're talking about a meeting that is probably really realistically not fatal in one one sit unless you want to cast a separate meeting can't we just can we just have a meeting just for the basketball finally mm-hmm uh i think that is going to be if you want in february would be the third really all right and it would have to be february first vacationist maybe next week yeah it would be next week or the last week in february oh uh that's march 1st i mean after listening to the parents who spoke tonight i think we all wanted them to do it well there's two parents who spoke tonight they both had a complete opposite opinion so one wanted it and one just

172stormed out of here against yeah i took most of hers around the nurses [Music] whether or not we would want to consider a pulling meeting on february 1st to discuss the same topic to just do masks on february 1st which is a week from now so okay all right you want to change that mic to february 1st is that better for everybody so we have a meeting february 8th and 15th 15th is the budget through the budget okay yes that's the public and then the 22nd is the school break and then the following week would be march 1st so that would mean we have meanings straight for the next three tuesdays so we essentially have three options either create a new one february first grade meeting on march 1st or particularly march 8th as the

173day can be discussed from the students and trying to propose a list for february 1st if that works for everybody i'm well some of the questions is february 15th i'm going into oh it's a budget meeting nevermind a public budget here i just was trying to find the agenda but then i saw their budget i um during let's see we have that's the motion adam are you seconding this motion to have this meeting on february first yes um discussions so my discussion point is i have no idea what the race is to this all of a sudden it feels sloppy to me it doesn't feel thoughtful it feels um chaotic and unplanned for such an important topic i i would not be able to support it i agree and i think we're talking about opening

174up ourselves to potential litigation and by going against jesse um [Music] no i just think it's rushed and if if we are gonna if the vote does pass i think jeff needs to make sure he makes note of it in this newsletter because i think you're gonna get a lot of people that are here is contagious and it's not going anywhere and it's not the virus is lying it's speedy right um [Music] um i've watched two kids this past weekend up as i have the best the time has come the landscape is different and we have to kind of start making decisions for the health of the health of these kids breathing like this oh you think that's the asthma attacker for the mask no i think it's dry hair cold air outside you add

175a mask on top of that um neighbor breathing so is this your argument for why triggering first is important i can see why it's rushed you know i think this is a very hot topic and i think community members will want to voice their opinion on this um such a fun journey of two meetings scheduled for february because this is such can we move any of that stuff all budget stuff has to be eight and fifty yeah that's the only thing on that budget is nothing well i don't believe so no it's a matter of fact the town has yeah i agree i think that i think that we should hear what people have to say i'd love to do a survey before we vote on this um [Music] as it is yeah i agree

176with susan i think it it's just um a little hard not yet [Music] this is a lot of years i feel like it might be much better overseas like in march like hopefully like to your point cases are down like we're going to say yeah we'll show up next week you know personally i don't think a week or three weeks or a month [Music] the motion is to uh review the mask requirement on the district's mass requirement on february 1st an added meeting to the school committee and to vote on whether to keep the mass environment place for the changes adam mike's amount motion seconded um can you go around julie i'm gonna vote yes yes second no right yes glory yes [Music] that's the only thing called a young age [Music] uh the role

177i mean uh the prestigious republic on it and i know when i came in to speak to school committee i was unaware so quick let me know if it's not a back and forth conversation yeah just uh okay i think that's well everything all right you gotta mention [Music] um so when i looked at it i thought i really want to address all that stuff issue to the life and i said to them i said to the principals and to the nurses um and to the nurses that i would just like professor will decide on some of those issues some of the spacing issues some of them have more cases than others some have watches where they can't move kids a little further apart but i wasn't specific enough so well also as you know

178in in a nurse's memo there were things on there about silent eating which i wasn't referring to so when i said that to the principals that was one of the things that one of them decided to um you know one of the teachers it wasn't conveyed to them that [Music] that what i was really talking about was anything in that nurse's memo that had to do with distance if they had space they want alienated kids then it would be fine so the piece about the eating in silence was in the middle i just forgot to tell them not that [Music] um thank [Music] over you