School Committee meeting 11/09/21

001first director to be joining the central office team in january presentations from each school on last spring's impasse results uh updates from several subcommittees of the school play including the election subcommittee the policy subcommittee and the superintendent evaluation i want to thank sebastian for uh volunteering to live streams tonight thank you so much for being here and spending your night with us i don't think you have any members of the public is that right all right so just a reminder to speak up speak clearly since we're all masked it's just a little harder to hear so just shoot your voice across the room okay so let's start with the pleasure [Music] liberty and justice face up with me so we'll go to the consent agenda um this consent agenda has seven sets of meeting minutes

002and that shows how busy everybody's been two school committee meetings two new member training meetings two subcommittee meetings and one executive session may i have a motion to approve the consent agenda so lori had a second yes uh when i signed him in the office the other day i came across some animals um headed to the williamson police department it was mark's school committee mass enforcement enforcing the mass mandates i'm sorry i can't hear you sorry we needed a police officer to do that yes we did that evening that seems like a waste of budget particularly special about that because there may have been problems with mass clearance that we needed to address is that related to what we discussed at the last meeting calling parents domestic terrorists who don't agree with certain policies or

003is that just something else where i don't know why i'm throwing that in like i'm just curious why would wasted money paying for 30 minutes well there's no special judgment that was wasted money was not mine in this chair so i would like to receive this meeting mike i'm sorry i said that's your judgment it's not my judgment as a chair okay so i'd like to proceed with the meeting so we've made two adults from mass police okay here we go um we have a second for the consent agenda all in favor say aye opposed say no no uh discussion oh wait we didn't have discussion because there's not usually a discussion on consent agenda so uh i guess that passes we have the majority um communications we have two communications in the shared drive

004a joint letter from the berlin select board and berlin finance committee to the school committee and a public statement from the massachusetts association of school superintendents and the mass school administrators association uh plus as a verbal or update lori and i spoke with the boys and selectmen last night we have a nice exchange with them updating them on the school community's community engagement goal and the regional school committee's election and uh to solicit their suggestions on engaging posts and requests and residence and the election process and then finally i think some members of this committee attended the virtual sessions at the massachusetts school committee and massachusetts school superintendents joint conference last week personally i found some of the sessions very useful one in particular contract negotiations another on proactive communication to convey your district's message

005that is very needy uh and i just wanted to check to see if anybody else who attended sessions found any of those particularly useful comments have you found yourself able to remove those names because i was in um you know i'm not sure i know you can access their handouts but um i don't know if you can access the video anybody else want to comment on the sessions they went to was it useful some of it some of it yeah not even yeah so yeah so myself it was redundant i felt like i was like okay the first time i went to um i thought was interesting um yeah there was like literally like six in a two-day span yeah i'll get i'll get back to you if you have um handouts or um any

006notes from ones that are pertinent to the work we're doing on the committee you can um forward them on to me and i'll get them up into the communications folder to share or send them to some committees that are working on things uh i went to the bus when i listened to the bus one no bus the transportation issues yeah yeah that wasn't redundant it was just like okay we have a problem yeah i don't know they were probably they were trying to tell school committees to not allow schools to make any alterations to the bus routes at all so it just happened um so does anybody else have any other communications to report to the school committee i heard from some parents in regards to that weekend the conference they wanted to know what

007the deal was with the social media pictures of the attendees and learning masks including commissioner o'reilly has been following around on social media if you've paid attention to any of that so you guys notice any of that you're watching this session if yeah some people did yeah i was going to tell them so i mean this is communication they did have several parents come up to me the other day and they were asking about that why did their kids still have to wear them if the commissioner doesn't even wear that that as a compass no no because i just didn't i think they just they just took it out of iran if you if you double vaccinated then you didn't have to that was a that was a hotel room they weren't in a school

008building either so they were not separate facilities building determines the risk factor no before is that mandate applies so the first thing the most important thing here is i wanted to introduce you know patrick our selection for pupil personnel director she uh i won't go through her whole bio but as you know she's been with us for 12 years she's currently the middle middle high school special education coordinator and um we had 11 people applying for the job we interviewed five and we then we had two finalists i want to thank bob i asked bob if he would kind of have this whole thing and put it together and did a great job of going through the interview process and collecting the data we needed so so we selected janelle and janelle has been working

009with karen's been working with janelle as her mentor for a number of years now once janelle expressed interest in being becoming a special education director personnel director um the other thing i'm happy with is one of the things that we try to do since i've been here at least to build capacity in the district and um and select people who are qualified and who were already in the different or small districts so that's not always difficult it's not always it's not always possible to do that so um just a couple things because you're gonna have to vote on a contract and a salary we do benchmark the salaries and you know the salary we agreed to move the janelle is considerably below what karen's was it was still is she's still with us [Music] but

010we felt that you even though she's done all of the veteran work she's done a lot of the um special ed direct and people personnel and the task that karen has given her she's still new to the job and um so we sell them off with the atmosphere the contract is a standard contract it's the one karen has the one most of us in the central office has she's had to give up some things and gained a few things but um that's so that's basically where we are with janelle again i won't be able to tell but you want to say anything um you know i'm really honored for the recommendation i have been here for this is my 12th year in berlin boylston i've worked with students at every grade level in the district

011following preschool all the way through high school and some of those that stay with us beyond i've you know received a lot of direct mentoring from karen mulder and even the previous vps director judy valenport and you know i'm really looking forward to continuing on here for you know the foreseeable future does anybody have anything on the committee have any questions about the process what we did you mentioned whether they were both internal and external candidates we had one general candidate thank you so much all right so when we vote on this in the business portion of the meeting we're going to hire janelle accept her contract and salary and stimulate his contract just something else here this is really related to a couple things one is um you're going to take a vote on

012a policy that's related to the vocational school but also just as a way of giving some information on how things are done and how that's the process for selecting students they have the the vocational school has a lot of the system you have to do two things one you january 15th student recommendation that's also january 15th and also a required interview which is february last year around that time resident students accepted people and non-resident students they've been doing a lot of equity work and so one of the things they're going to do this year is they're going to hold for the lottery the lot of these on on april 8th and they're going to accept 300 students and the way the students are picked is based on the three-year average of the history of the

013acceptance of the community so let's say our three-year average has been 10 kids in in berlin they get 10 seats so when they pick the lottery everybody will get a seat so if what happens is and then the rest of those kids who from the resident district will go on a waiting list there'll be an additional waiting list for non-resident students so the kids from boston for example and so what would happen let's say you have let's say you have you had 50 seats and you know in your district and only 40 kids applied you get 10 extra seats they go into the general they'll go into a general lottery now and they'll go into a general lottery of resident districts of residence to school after the waiting list because he might have another district

014that has 10 seats and 12 advocates so 10 get in two go on the waiting list but in resident schools so they sit in this pool down here once they pick all 300 whatever's left over or to get close to that number once all those seats are filled for the residents they go they do a general they do a general lottery and all of those kids from all those resident districts that didn't get in they get picked out of that pool once that's done if that gets that gets exhausted they then go to the out of the out of district so and the reason they did that is because they wanted to make sure that each um each member district got the um got an equitable amount of seats and that all those kids got

015in so um so that's the process for acceptance and to have passive the other reason i bring it up is because you're going to vote tonight on policy that basically says from the standpoint of this committee that if you are a boylston resident then you must first apply to asp before you deploy anything else the chances now of a broader student actually getting in become pretty low considering that they're actually in the third lottery selection process at this point so but that shouldn't change that should have changed what you do at least we have a starting point for western students and if they don't get in then they can always apply someplace else but um that will be the system going forward and most of these uh policies that the asset committee has voted on

016um yeah they said they're doing their equity work too so they wanted to make it as fair as possible the result is that if you're in a non-member town your chances of getting in uh [Music] to get in i'm just concerned that they're done they're going to find i mean they can apply somewhere else first but if they get an acceptance those when they get accepted those are conditional acceptances so for example there's another they have another policy another they have a up to a 10 days suspension of expulsion that they they'll take that conditional acceptance and they'll be voting and so that's not usually an issue with us but there are some districts that uh they really have an issue with this and they've expressed that they've expressed that to the assad because they

017have kids who who had some issues and they don't think it's fair that they should get their their acceptance revoked so so potentially could a boylston student fly like if they're going to set on a location they want to go if they have applied to a whisper vocational school and after that if they don't get yeah right but but i would assume that because they're again not a member you know right they're example then the same thing that would happen all the other vocational schools are doing the same thing so it's going to be if you have a member district you will get in and that's what they want to make sure that you've got if you have 15 seats you have 12 kids they're all getting there um but what is that the non-mental

018issue put them in a little more scary situation so and as diane is saying that all the other safe equity work this policy is an asset policy so i'm not familiar with the other schools um but i'm sure they're doing very similar work i haven't heard anything anything no i think it really stems from just the the equity piece yeah um you know due to the vocational schools receiving you know public funding and um you know no longer being able to to pick and choose who they who they select as long as you're a member town everybody has equal you know access and rights yeah and so i mean and again i don't think it should influence how you vote i mean policy is in place but if you get accepted here that's where you

019it's a good school there's no reason not to go there unless you're interested in you know an agriculture program or some animal science something that they don't have but any of the standard programs they do a great job and there's no reason that they should be still there first so so i just want to give you guys an information piece just so you know how it's done what's going to be done going forward at least right now unless something changes and just so you can put that bolt into into some contrast thank you okay so just one additional point on that before the talent voice that we remember is not a member is responsible for transportation to any schools these students attend so if they go to more than one school it kind of works

020for bands or buses to all these other schools [Music] we're focusing on that now preparation for presenting in mid-december um budget templates have been sent out they do have um you know we did some early modeling i know you saw the email the memo from the town of berlin i've done some early modeling um and anticipate that it was going to be a significant challenge to get two and a half percent um we don't want to go into too much detail here we'll get to budget things change so but we do have some other district costs that were new this year that will be paying for the next year that are not from this year's budget we're seeing some significant increases in student needs whether in district or out of district so that's going to

021be a factor that we look at so i just wanted to mention that now see i'm surprised we will certainly work on this you know what you do in the prior years of the summers to start when we'll work on it throughout do our best to get for living to be um thank you any questions for bob all right are you going to carol daryl before we begin the presentation this evening i wanted to just bring tonight's presentation for the school committee give you a little bit of background on the mds today so you have to understand what the principles begin to present so it's reasonable to say that in past 18 months has been like no other we've ever experienced in the fields of education one of the fallouts in terms of annual data

022collection was the cancellation of the spring 2020 mcats the 2021 mcas tests are the first uh statewide assessment results we've had since the onset of the pandemic well it tends to provide us with information about how those challenges and disruptions affecting student learning and progress they can't do that in terms of comparing to the 2019 mcats because it was two cohorts ago and it was pre-pandemic the 2021 assessments were showed an administration of shorter tests to students in grades three through eight which creates a variety of varying individual student performance levels compared to previous years also there was some missing results that we don't have in some of the content areas which affected how we look at data and no principles we'll speak about that shortly jessie's intention in giving this mcas test this past

023year was really to use it as a diagnostic tool for this year only the staff in each of the schools are looking at this data however in ways that specifically meet the needs of their students our students and the instructional practices we have in each of the schools tonight's principles report will focus on three parts the assessment results by participating in grade levels and content areas our district results against the state and then our strengths and in particular next steps not necessarily through the same lenses we looked at mcas from the previous years but in how we're going to address deficits as they relate to the loss of direct instruction and the interruptions to learning created as a result of obtaining them so in a letter to the parents from the mass commissioner of education

024in october he said in our state like every other state in the country many of our of your children our children have not progressed as much as we can normally expect so that kind of frames what we'll be hearing about tonight what we do in terms of what we're doing in terms of the state is a big picture the state of federal pandemic relief money is going toward meeting students academic social emotional and mental health needs which is really critical and then there's a bit of release of tools and resources to support educators in the universities which we're utilizing to support what we need to do in each of the schools our students so tonight's presentation we're kind of going out of order from what you see in your your agendas i'm going to have

025ace thompson from both wells to present first followed by john campbell in berlin and then diane dusari and sally stupid um i'd like to piggyback a little bit on what was i'm speaking too about making really global generalizations about these stories and i think the other piece that we have to remember is that in our district in my school particularly transitioning through different offices throughout the year you have kids that were hydrating most of the year leading up to this you had kids that were four days a week leading up to this you have you guys that will pull in your mouth any adventures that migrated between all of those moms so you know i recommend everybody take a look extreme caution here and make generalizations the other piece to it i feel like i

026need to say is the state announced this was a test that was held it was coming at the same time that we were reintroducing all the students so whereas in the past years i focused our impact administration with providing the optimal opportunity for the adjusted at that time i was focusing on reintroducing kids to the normal daily routines and so we did not have everyone test first thing in the morning we did not move special schedules we did not do anything we tried to leave everything in place because it is worth just getting used to paying back now i say all that and you're like oh my gosh how about it it's not it's not bad so i started off with this one because you get a general overview you look at the blue that's

027the bes scores and the stage is in red what we're looking at is the percentage of students that met or exceeded the standard and so what you can do is you can compare bes against the state and you see that we continue to outperform the state as as we traditionally have it's not to say everything is all sunshine and rainbows but if i say globally we're doing okay um we'll talk a little bit about math because across the state math was really was a was a casualty of the pandemic when i looked specifically just at ela it's a hopefully a little clearer a little bit easier to see again we're breaking it down by grade level and we're we're out performing the state one of the things that mcas has always done is they break

028down these tests into three categories you see the same thing on the berlin report so you're talking about reading language and writing i wish third grade didn't come first because this is the only highlighted one um but when you look at this you can see reading is the area that you can earn the most points and we out based the state we outpaced the state and language where we really struggled in third grade is writing and when we talked with those third grade teachers we realized they spent so much time focusing on those other areas and in the hybrid model they didn't have as much opportunity to provide not just reading not just writing opportunities but some of the explicit feedback that they've traditionally done i want to go back for one second because i

029want to point out they still did really well overall it's because the writing portion is such a small component that being said this is a problem for us and it's a problem for the current fourth grade teachers so what they've done is they've added a great expression block into our rotational social studies and science so these kids are getting extra opportunities to practice writing receive explicit feedback from the classroom teacher about it and so that's where that's how we're addressing this area indeed moving through the rest of the areas where i wish i led was pretty much uh above well not pretty much startle above where we're expected today um we will talk a little bit and when i talk about next steps about how we're going to improve um in writing especially i think

030um i'm hopefully not stealing it down there i'm going to give you too many times [Music] you'll you'll find that we work really hard to work and you descend in you know one district already um mathematics you can see it was a really it was a tough year across the state um and it was a tough year for our students as well again we're still doing better but you look at that fourth grade and it's not as much better as we would like again everyone just want to say this is the percentage of students that meet or exceed the standards on the on the mcats they break it down into five categories you're looking at operations and algebraic thinking base ten fractions and one positive fractions because fractions have been something that we've spent a

031lot of time over the last couple of years talking about is traditionally an area of weakness for us so kudos to the teachers i think they found a lot of creative ways to do asynchronous fraction work at home and i think that might be be part of what we're what we're seeing there um measurement and data and then um into geometry i'm gonna kind of fast forward through the area that stuck out to us in and this was geometry and geometry is also an area that we've we've often struggled and tried to focus on what we find is that in the in the scope and sequence it traditionally comes towards the end of the year and in fifth grade especially because of the demands that they were finding in there it came after m so

032i don't want you to look at this and say oh man they didn't learn any geometry they they did um but just not before it was assessed and so it's something that the the math coach and the teachers are talking about right now i'll talk a little bit about the math coach towards the end so it's a it's an area of attention and growth for us uh and then science and technology fifth grade is the only grade that takes the science and technology again we outpace the state we don't get those nice little categories about um about where we where we outdid them but who's a solid science here this is what i feel like is actually the most important information we can take from these outcasts uh in the next three slides what you

033find is the standards that our students struggled on compared to this day you know there's a lot of standards at each trade level um so you'll you'll find that this the standards we did well on we did really well on these are the standards that we struggle on and this is the information that next year's this current year's teachers need so when they're teaching these students and they come across this this thread they can say hold on these kids struggled with identifying characters feelings we're going to spend a little bit more time and so you'll see um fourth grade especially they had a liars and focus um and i think that just speaks to in some ways the depth that they were able to cover on the one side as well but they've got some

034work to do in fifth grade um and then up at the hunter this is what they're what they're looking at i think overall given the set of set of circumstances and the environment in which the test was presented and taken um i think we have some positive ways from this but we also definitely have some some areas of growth am i mumbling or talking too quietly this mask is killing me okay so next step when we look at english and language x we've started incorporating hmh um in the in the upper grades it's a new pilot program for she has a written language component that we're looking really closely at and where we're incorporating into our daily work um and as i alluded to before in fourth grade they've created that extra blob for writing

035instructions and to catch the kids up i hate saying that job to focus some additional instruction um in math i finally did it i've been trying to buy joey florinoy away from berlin for years um and so i'm fortunate to have a little bit of florida magic in my building halftime now not only does he have a nice focus on mathematics but he also has um i had the perfect word before i stood up here a nice personality and a nice way to engage staff and teach and teachers on mathematics discussions um and so i'm really i'm really looking forward to the year working with him he's already jumped in with a couple of different grants we've been spending a lot of professional development time with those those guys looking at mcas results talking about

036math instruction in ways that we can tie our assessments into that instructions um and the other the other the other movement we've had is um we were able to extend jeff smith our title one math interventionist to full time this year so we're going to be able to to spend some extra time with those struggling mathematicians whereas her time is bit 0.6 is pretty tight in the past so i feel like i just ran through a marathon but you know i'm here if you have any questions or comments yes my question is specific okay that they were given this spring that the same test essentially they took in 2019 or was the test different the tests were different but they were shortened the questions were probably similar but they hardly chose which questions they were

037going usually it would be more of the same types of questions so they could have a fair kind of sense of whether the students truly mastered a particular standard and in so in your opinion is it unfair to try to compare the 2021 to 2019. given the difference in the test itself absolutely but in 22 we'll be administering a test that's more similar to 2019's version we're anticipating that we have not heard anything about the mcats for 2022 yet and what they i guess i would be interested as we move forward in understanding obviously we tend to outperform the state i'd be interested in knowing what is that delta in 2021 comparable is that delta in 2019 but we're still overforming the state are we out performing the state by more or less than we

038used to follow the state in terms of trying to compare the results yeah um just uh don't take this in any way as any sort of veteran but looking at these numbers um i don't know how they compare to 2019 i know we shouldn't be comparing them but on all accounts almost all the categories i know it's like at least the third sometimes well over half aren't even in expectations is that like how do those compare in general to two years password is that what are you looking for what will be a good standard for that so we're seeing less kids that are meeting or seeing years past not just at ours at our schools but across the state i think it speaks to i think we spoke about it last year a little bit

039when we were talking about our aims about data we were able to really work with kids in developing skills and keep those skills moving along the scanners were harder to get to and in as much i think that's why when i show those three slides of the standards where their kids didn't necessarily make that's where we're going to make up some of that ground and where we're going to be able to focus our work with the kids to get deeper into that because those are the areas that kept those yeah i mean it's totally understandable i completely get that i'm just curious how that compares in years past is it like one of the categories before one of the greatest people 64 didn't need expectations that's a pretty big number what is that usually is

040that specific to that grade is it just that class because profit was that number like 20 last time or you know it's lower than it typically is but i couldn't pull the number right off my somewhere [Music] yeah okay that that's that just trend sort of stuck out to me i know it was a bad year you know you can't do i mean there's always so much you do but to see that much not even meetings surprised any other questions i think it's great that you do the written expression vlog i think that's a really funny problem thank you okay john all right um and ace is right before i start you know we strive very hard to work together and to address common issues in a common fashion because we do want our kids

041to be talented which is obvious the other thing i want to say before we start is that i think our scores i'm going to probably assume for tons of they're not as good as they might look they're not as big as they might look because of the way the tests were done the style of testing that they've done this year so take what i'm about to say with a grain of salt um if i can make this work um [Music] i use very similar graphs these are the ela scores for berlin and grades three four and five last year and if you get my newsletter you wouldn't know that we were actually kind of excited about this each of these three scores are the highest scores of burlington in the last 10 years do not

042ask me about it because all i'll be able to say is fabulous teacher um but it was a very pleasant surprise to see the kids that you really love here's some morning theories one of them is that parents are super comfortable with reading with into their children yeah that's always a blessing in the school districts like ours we have parents who have the time and the energy and the commitment to work with their kids because when we were hybrid a lot of that felt people at home so for our students on this day these were our results and we were as i say you know extremely pleased that being said uh and i again this was in my report we break them out the same way um in third grade basis right we outperform the

043state in all areas in fourth grade similarly we outperform the state in all areas fifth grade's the same thing and again we were delighted to see that the one concern that i had that ace has that all of our teachers here was that whole idea of the essay and write it and again as you saw my report my big concern was conventions um conventions is the part of the writing school that addresses punctuation grammar and spelling the knucklehead stuff right i was in a first grade classroom the other day first grade six years old what's the teacher telling you or asking them what goes at the start of a sentence a capital letter what goes at the end of the sentence a punctuation marker yes still in my third fourth and fifth graders are struggling

044with conventions this is a pattern that we noted um actually back in 2019 and we thought we're going to get better we're going to collect those points and then filter so a lot of that momentum was lost but it remains a goal for us you can see we did okay here this is where we were two years ago or three years ago we couldn't beat the state we just barely beat the state third grade did pretty well fourth grade did pretty well fifth grade did pretty well but there's so much more that we can collect so it is a point of uh focus for us is to kind of just you know empower that mechanics of writing piece they're doing okay with the ideas uh they're that's improved this part it just makes me crazy

045so this is something that we're working on this is mathematics an entirely different story you can see third grade fabulous year in third grade thank you mrs julius thank you joey um but fourth and fifth grade both of the fourth grade um tied the statement fifth grade was just slightly above the stage and it concerned us um as you can see if you look at the state reverse everybody is now statewide in mathematics as i'm not sure to get in my report athletics is ruthlessly cumulative so when you're home reading with mom and dad but probably not getting the same support for mathematics we're going to see that drop a lot of talk about acceleration academies and how are we going to catch up the reality with mathematics is so what teachers have been working

046on as you've worked with is trying to identify underlying misconceptions or misunderstandings mathematically that we need to address before we can move on so it slows us down a little bit but it allows students to become stronger mathematically we noticed the same thing again third grade did fabulously in all these areas um significantly outperforming the state in fourth and fifth grade however it's the same story we were below the state level in geometry in fourth grade we were below the state in fifth grade it's not a ton of points but it's an entire subject area that they're going to need when they get to toronto they're not the hot already in geometry um so we have with mr florence help started to address kind of remediation around that part of uh what we're doing this

047year is building in some sometimes just to kind of do a cyclic review so the kids will do work unrelated to the scope and sequence a little extra warm-up math which will include things like geometry geometrical this is a challenge only because it can be for them a really complex concept they have to understand the vocabulary they've got to understand the mathematical ideas it's not the most interesting thing for most kids but it's a point of focus for us science and technology again as mr thompson mentioned um they didn't give us any kind of a breakdown just the overall meats or exceeds again that was one of the highest numbers we have right now we were very very pleased with fifth grade performance at science next steps for us we're gonna continue to seek out

048tier two interventions um looking for strategies to better support struggling readers the kids who read well in my school read well and they're highly functional and they're independent readers they seek out opportunities to read it's amazing to watch for some of the kids who struggle especially some of our older kids it's a challenge and so we continually look for ways to kind of support their efforts to become better readers and as i mentioned we're going to re-establish our focus i'm not going to mention some writing because that makes me crazy in mathematics we're going to look for ways to improve the performance and geometry which is historically kind of a weak point for us um and then the other thing that mr florida and i have been talking about and i should probably meant to

049mention this too jerry florida wants to establish kind of a parenting outreach effort to help parents better understand about what a lot of parents would call the new math which is what my parents called it back when i was thinking about um a lot of parents struggle mathematically with why can't we just do it the way i learned it when i was in school and the answer is we want kids to have a deeper mathematical understanding so that when they get to tahanta they can all take the cool part now and not the intelligence because we went from all they had the challenges that math can provide um they have them ready to do higher level math to haunt them they've got to be better grounded in mathematical concepts at the elementary level so we're

050going to try to help parents understand that so when kids come home and they want to do partial product on multiplication parents not only will know what that means but i think that's what parents we're looking at the fourth third fourth and fifth comparison to the state oh sure so they don't take them gas until third grade take it right so we don't know for example whether that grade four class would have been at 70 but for that fifth grade class that was in 41 they would have taken two years before in grade three do you know where they were they were not nearly that weak i was saying they were around 64. the problem is that you know it doesn't tell us it's just ruthlessly accumulative the third grade test is one of the

051easiest tests that you have mathematically because it's very straightforward as they move up into fourth fifth and sixth and seventh grade they're asked to be more conceptual on their answers explain why show how that doesn't happen in third grade third gets a lot more you know farmer brown has seven rows of corn each row has six corn stalks how many corn starch but the state across the board same score right so you certainly appear to be doing something right there together they will pay for the third grade test which as you say is easier i'll be very interested to see how that third grade class doesn't import what they maintain yeah carry that wave of excellence yeah great thank you sure so both both the schools with the math scores were several of them oh

052even the fantasy school district said that right but then in science they were almost off the charts like i think even though i think it was like what top four or five or something i always thought science and math were more linked than that because they're more linked like yeah jump in for the middle of high school where you're more light in terms of the subject here when it's more can you describe the difference between rotation and revolution can you describe the water supplement not a lot not a lot of computational stuff [Music] webinars for parents that joey foreign and i spoke to joey about the other idea about taking those and he is going to do that that's right somebody does the presentation if you can't get to that one you'll be able to

053see when i see a friend on facebook one of their child's homework assignments and their attempt to help them they were wrong and they myself to see that so it's going to be great to have that resource available to parents to themselves make sure they can try it out yeah absolutely it's like that grammarly commercial or that commercial girl my father that toronto um and the type of mmcas tests vary according to whether the students are in middle school or high school so the 2021 spring m class was administered to students in grade 6 7 8 on grade 9 biology only in grade 10 which is our quote unquote high stakes test required for graduation on in both ela and matt um as ace and john had said these tests um were altered to accommodate

054the fact that um there are different learning modalities we have to remember that across the commonwealth um schools varied and whether they were in person on from you know the mid-september all the way through june whether they were hybrid like we were um or whether they were full remote for a majority of the school um so in grades six through eight these tests these tests were changed on in not only length of time but also on the amount of questions that were given um and the fact that students on taking these exams were not given the same questions um as their their fellow classmates across the commonwealth um so as you're gonna see this evening administration department chairs and teachers took a look at this data and really a comparison between toronto and the state

055and then what they did is is really we took a look at what actionable steps needed to be take taken in order to improve in the areas of math english and biology across the grade levels so sally and i are going to go ahead and begin with our english results all right so for the grade six ela results um tahanto outscored the state in both the exceeding and the leading categories with 66 percent of our students in those categories in comparison to 47. in the state as for partially meeting or not meeting we had 34 which is compared to the state's 53. the areas that we scored higher in uh for sixth grade were sa language conventions which is john talked about how to do spelling and punctuation and grammar et cetera and also characterization

056and development of plot and the area that uh we spoke below the uh standing was for passage tone which is when writers talked about their the attitudes or feelings about their subjects for grade seven um we scored higher than the state oh sorry we outscored the statement exceeding and meeting with 70 of our students scoring in those categories in comparison to 43 for the state and 30 percent of our students scored partially medium or not meaning compared to these states 57. the areas that we scored higher than uh the state were areas of the use of greek and latin matrix of the groups and the use of context and the area that we scored lower in had to do with character identification in the poem and for grade 8 um we outscored the state and

057exceeding meeting with 54 of our students compared to 40 percent in the state and 46 of our students scored partially meeting or not meeting compared to the state's 59. the area that we scored higher in had to do with the use of context food and for lower it was irony analysis so um grade 10 for grade 10 um we scored higher um versus the state in the areas of use of literacy techniques claim evidence and reasoning and really this claim evidence and reasoning reasoning has to do with really a school wide focus um not only in the area of ela but also history as well as the sciences and that really is um about you know writing you know writing across across the curriculum um we outscored the state exceeding and meeting with 90 of

058our students scoring in these categories in comparison to 64 in the state uh 11 of our students scored partially meeting are not leading the pair to the states 36 percent um and we're very proud of the fact that we did not score below on the state in any category uh for a grade 10 ela and in fact our student growth percentile for this cohort in grade 10 was the second highest in the state so we're very proud of our of our current juniors so in terms of moving forward with ela both of our middle school and high school english and history departments um have worked together to determine actionable steps towards improvement across all the grade levels they're doing this for reading by recognizing important details and ideas and passages and also for reading looking

059at recognizing similarities and differences in multiple documents that address similar themes and utilizing similar literary and stylistic techniques for writing they're working towards supporting claims with evidence from multiple sources and providing reasoning for inclusion of specific evidence and they're doing this through teaching specific strategies and techniques for citing sources when providing textual evidence and also utilizing the state provided mcas writing uh rubric in ela and a very similar spy rubric in history and as was talking about to continue teaching the cer which is the claim evidence reason um as a basic writing strategy so that students consistently hear that same terminology from grade to grade and from the different topics um they're also working together to analyze mcas essays written by current juniors on last year's impasse exam because they are available on the pearson

060access webpage and they're examining the essays to determine how the state scored the essays and possible reasons for instance a score of a five compared to a score of three and for a deeper dive of analysis of this data there's a report there's a nice chart in the report that we changed now for mathematics right so for math as you know both john and ace are talking about um they're because math is a curriculum that builds upon itself um there definitely was a a decline scene with results for the whole entire state for toronto our sixth graders outscored the same in meeting and exceeding with 42 of our students compared to 34th in the state and 58 of our students uh sport leaders partially we were not meeting compared to 67 in the state and

061the areas that we scored higher than the stadium had to do with expressions and equations ratios of statistics and for lower it was integer inequality for seventh grade we outscored the satan exceeding our meeting with fifty percent of our students outscoring i mean scoring on these categories in comparison to thirty five percent in the state and forty nine percent of our students scored partially meeting or not meeting compared to the state 65. the 7th grade scored higher in the areas of expressions and equations and also number systems about the lower than the state with fractions in geometry and for grade eight we outscored the state in exceeding a meeting of 39 percent of our students scoring in these categories in comparison to 31 with the state and 61 percent of our students started partially meeting

062or not meeting to the state 67. the areas we scored higher in had to do with functions of geometry there and from lower with expressions and equations so the things that grades six through eight are doing to work on um improving math scores moving forward further is um that there are um interventions providing during a special block we have in the sixth grade called quest block uh they're also using flexible grouping of students and teach me teaching skills in small groups they're using data from if selene to have to identify and address the gaps that are needed to be looked at and they're creating video lessons to supplement what students are expected to know and then students with substantial deficiencies are either recommended or already in our math labs going back to the grade 10

063on mcast results in comparison to the state we outscored the state in the exceeding a meeting category with 77 of our students in those categories as compared to 52 in the state uh 23 of our students scored partially meeting or not meeting compared to the state's 48 um we scored higher in the state in the areas of algebra and modeling and modeling is about um you know using mathematics to help really solve everyday problems and apply on mathematics in our everyday life and we scored slightly lower than the state in the areas of um geometry which is interesting because grade eight we were higher so you know i i know yeah why um one thing i do want to say uh grade 10 with this cohort again um standard gross uh percentile we were um

064seventh in the state for growth on in mathematics this cohort um so again um congratulations to our to our 11th graders and so what is the high school um or mathematics department doing um so all of the teachers and in all of our different math classes in the high school through pre-assessment um to identify gaps as the students enter their new courses i'm providing additional practice problems regardless of what course students are involved in on basic mathematical computations and number sense on scaffolding with additional and relevant math materials and then designing assessments that address the standards and that are a minute and cast open response um questions and even in math there's there is writing that is involved in mathematics as well all right so next we are moving on to science technology and engineering

065so for the eighth grade test you can see that there's four um forming categories that are all represented equally earth and space science life science physical science and technology and engineering so for the eighth grade um test results we had 65 of our students within the exceeding remediate category versus the state's 41. and we have 34 with partially meeting or not meeting versus 51. um the areas that we uh scored higher on were um selected response questions which has to do with multiple choice questions in the area of technology and engineering physical science and open space science but they look scored below the state in areas of constructive response questions in writing some more of the essay type writing earth space science concepts and the science practices and also evidence of reasoning so uh working

066towards improving the middle school science results um the departments are um looking at release questions and reviewing them for their content and their question style um they're identifying issues and developing strategies to support the content and the ability for students you know their test taking skills in general also open response language and understanding what words mean in context will be a focus of their work and also to organize review session so that um the previous grade can review with students before they take the test thank you so high school biology exam this was probably i think the um the subject area and uh that had the biggest change as far as mcas was concerned for last year so typically on mcas high school science um to honda we do we test in the area of

067biology and um typically the student whether you're in 9th grade 10th grade or 11th grade if you transferred in from another school in a different state at the end of your biology course at the end of that year that is when you would take your ste high school mcas exam on because of the pandemic um in the interruption the state decided that um only students who are currently enrolled in the sciences as freshmen for full year courses would be required to take the high school science all other students sophomores juniors and any senior who had not met their um their requirement for the science or mcas for graduation purposes uh went through the competency determination um group for um a high school diploma and so only our ninth graders 45 of them that took a

068full year biology course took the exam so the exam was made up of um you know five different reporting categories um and again with biology they were supposed to all the standards are supposed to be the next the updated standards and the exam was supposed to be a next generation online exam about a month or two into school the department of education sort of put the brakes on that and said we're going to go back to the old standards and we're going back to paper and pencil that shifted a lot of a lot of the teaching for you know all of the um science teachers across the continental there were no release of questions or contents just standards for so there is basically when you go into edwin analytics and you try to get all

069the nice scraps that they have for math and english they're not available so um pretty much what i what i had um just stated um and so it was very it's it's very very big you can't we couldn't do much data analysis on this exam whatsoever um but what we do know on is that 91 of our students scored proficient in advance on actually i mean 71 of our students scored in advance that was fourth in um in the state we had no students on in the warning or failing category for um for biology addressing deficits even though we did perform so well there were standards that um you know we realized we're not as strong as um as others um and so the um biology teachers will be focusing on literacy on scientific literacy

070for on for our writing as well as modeling exercises to promote student construction and knowledge for application processes and moving forward with high school biology on you know the open response questions again yield in weakness um and so there'll be additional writing in the biology classes we do hold on review sessions prior to the mcas and the mcas in biology is always the last exam and that is the first week in june um which is great because you get the extra content time but not so great because the kids are like it's 80 degrees outside and i don't want to be sitting alive so um and again and we will continue to provide biology and class review sessions um after school as well for um for our students so that is our presentation um do

071you have any questions at all yes congratulations i think the numbers that you presented here tonight are fantastic i can tell you that my old family will be looking where we wanted to move coming into this area looked at the percentage of students that met or exceeded expectations in that 10th grade level historically i know the student has done extraordinarily well at the honda it looks like that's continued which is awesome the one question i had when we look at some of those groupings between those that are meeting or those that are partially meeting a lot of students in those two buckets and my question is do we know at all let's take the partially needed work are they closer to being needed or are they close to being monogamy we think about where they

072could go in the future is there another numerical value that tells us like how we are within that particular group it is not easily accessible to us um you know we would have to but you know what we do what's interestingly enough is that when we look at our for dental school when we look at those students on who we recommend for our labs lab classes in either math or ela typically they are you know those students that are on the cusp and it could be honestly a matter you know between one question and four questions that sort of you know brings them um you know over to the meeting side um and so with that and that varies um according to the number of um you know students of how they score for that

073particular exam you know with this year's scores honestly because as ace and john had stated you know we had students that that didn't take the exam um you know we had other students that um you know maybe show them for ela and not for math um some students and and we did not have any students but in the you know commonwealth some districts had students that took their outcasts at home online um and so there's so many variables that again i i would hesitate to to make you know a educated guess on that i would you know think that taking a look at this year's the 2022 for and you know compare it to you know like the 20 um or 2023 would give us a better understanding but i know historically um you know

074i would probably say it's about a you know a 65 35 split 65 being in that like four questions you know versus because i mean i think that you would see historically our middle school scores are fairly similar to that and then once they get up to the 10th grade um we we typically outperform the state pretty significant that's great i think i hate to see the state put science sometimes as what feels like a third priority after reading the map especially given what we've all gone through the last 18 months or two years right awesome results on the biology side of the science side from both the elementary and the high school level um but i hate that it sometimes gives it an afterthought after reading that it's not you guys that's well you

075know what next time i'm going to put science first any other questions i just like what i have said about science um science background biology specifically our kids are always talking about how important science is how much i love to do science volcanoes every day and all that um i know we're focusing on stem but one of the main themes i saw here for all schools was both geometry and then just writing in every subject right to me that's not just a covet issue with these mcas tests i deal with college grads coming into the accounting world finance world and we're constantly getting feedback from the directors these kids don't know how to write they can't write to a client they don't know what they're doing i can't have them send an email to a

076client because they don't know what they're doing so i just think you've already recognized it and you're doing something about it but it's such an important thing that kids these days if it's because of phones or texting or whatever it is even coming out of school working in a real job with clients you know working on million dollar accounts they can't write so whatever you can do to fix that do it don't worry yeah any final comments for danielle thank you very much and i know that those presentations in the handouts represent a lot of programs in part just analyzing the data but also taking the time to present it fairly to us and to the public we really appreciate the effort [Music] absolutely thanks susan um so election subcommittee i don't want to try

077to say this even but there are some documents that you've seen related to the timeline for the upcoming election um the timeline is really fit into three different phases we're currently in people referring to a community engagement phase that goes through march followed by a nomination phase where people will be able to even take out papers that were working you know present themselves to the community sometimes after they take out combination papers and is much more detailed um timeline of that i don't know if student or lori won't speak at all about your presentation this information to the selection or if that was clear on the agenda uh yeah no i think we just we didn't have any questions particularly about the timeline i think they were just uh commenting on these things in terms

078of engagement that we've asked them their opinions about um but the timeline was clear and i think they then the only other election related thing that you're also talking about later in business is we developed a set of frequently asked questions one group of those questions is very geared towards questions we expect a voter to ask the other questions related to questions we think a potential candidate would ask so you'll see as we talk about those later we've developed those they expect to continue adding more frequently asked questions as those questions become simple they asked and really will add them on the goal there is for us all of the committee to have a document we can point to when others ask this about the election we can answer the questions any questions about the

079documents that the election subcommittee is putting forward this is supposed to be locked it's a faq draft is that only for you to see or should we be able to see it so we can see did you all right as well all right if you have other questions that come up that you think should be added to this faq email um uh or suggestions of other kinds of tools like this that would be good to put out to a problem so this appropriate to also suggest that other members of the committee or administration ask new questions about the election that they can refer those questions yeah i mean i think um i wouldn't even say that informally we probably should vote on that with these strategies next in december or december the first read but

080when you put out the strategies for uh community engagement that would be otherwise included up there this is fantastic adam really like it it's just wonderful that you're thinking about what they might ask of you know a potential member and then what they i just really appreciate you very organized really thoughtful um together as well thank you because um the the we used some of the frequently asked questions in our presentation last night numbers three and four and uh we are going to the berlin selectmen next monday and we'll do similarly they they all have copies of the final timeline and we'll speak to them uh drawing from some of the frequently asked questions information policy subcommittee mike yeah we have a few policies here for first ladies and gents and the remaining policies for

081the employment policies that god gave us a lot of feedback on [Music] right oh that's yes the jeff spoke earlier the occasional policy any questions on policy or on the first read materials okay superintendent evaluation lauren so um everybody has their hope who has their binder um great work so if you open it up you'll notice on the left-hand side of the pocket are some sticky notes just pass it as you go through if possible to write in a sticky note and write them in there i'm gonna try to reuse as much of this there's some things will be updated next year but um it might just might help you also to put tabs in different places um and then if you want to just open up it's going to go to a couple places

082really quickly if you open up to the orange section you flip over to november we're very much on our timeline and i want to call your attention to january because that's when um jeff will be giving basically an update on where he feels he is how he feels it's going that's a really important presentation where i would suggest you take notes and things like that it'll help you when you write the evaluation but he's also going to give you an idea of where he feels he is and at that point it's i remember last year susan asked jeff that he felt that he didn't have time given that kobe took so much of our of our time um and there was a back and forth about that so it's really just that that was a

083really important meeting or an important item on that timeline and then if you just want to open up to the red section this is the red tab yes i apologize the red tab is the end of cycle it's the evaluation that you're actually going to follow and we're going to have a training on this so i'm not going to go through and go over everything but susan did a great job it was very hard to convert this into google and word and i tried two different times and then she took over into the fabulous job you'll notice if you if you flip to page um four of seven there's a chart there that has all of the standards and they're highlighted in different colors green and orange and pink and then as you go through

084she highlights where those would be that you would fill in later on this will make more sense when we have um our training but it's very it makes it so much easier movement proficient and exemplary that so these two tabs are really going to be your most helpful when it's time to do the evaluation so put these in a safe place because you will use them thank you questions for the for uh tools in here okay so it's safe from a contact lord i mean yeah if you have questions about things that you're seeing in here okay so let's see we're doing 755 great we have a few follow-up discussions to try to complete several tasks the first is each actually each of these tasks the first and third is these who need protocols dashboard

085are on the business section for votes tonight the school committee goals coordinator that outreach is a first breed so we're going to treat these just a little a little bit differently so the first one uh schoolmate protocols uh conversation first is does is decide whether we think this accurately reflects the whole community's perspective and can you each agree to every statement there because basically you're you're committing to those statements when you approve this and final protocols um and then the discussion should inform them when we get to votes if there are any amendments that are proposed they would they shouldn't be surprised that you should hear them in this discussion if there's anything that needs to be uh modified this is a chance to kind of talk about that uh before we get into the

086work section so let's just make protocols so susan can i ask for some clarification um just because i'm sure we knew what i want to write i went to our um the policy handbook through the mis yes and i'm wondering i'm just and again i could have missed it why we need this document when a lot of the things are addressing here are i feel like a lot of them fell under different um there's bda e which is norms and standards from school community and that's basically what is being rewritten there because that was written for a different committee okay that's not to say that that the committee could decide those are assets for us and we want to go with those rather than what's been on the table [Music] fit in so it's not

087actually the policy properties the policy that act um but it's currently in our in our files but not doesn't show in our policy manual and the one that we're looking at tonight is that e2sc is that what's up right now u2 so it's the one that you see oh i'm sorry i didn't you were okay so there's e1 sc and then e2 as these with e1 like well yes the final document the other one shows compared to the previous document okay and so that one shows where the chains were made question on the table right now does does the current version accurately reflect the committee's perspective uh for protocols operating during calls correct the one that's on the table tonight is revised too much complexity and duplication of documents when policies may already address some

088of these things and by putting in place of protocol and also we have policies somewhat related to to me the process seeking a lot i would prefer to rather revisit existing policies and adjust that and then you create a new protocol which then led to additional protocols down the line just a beast of keeping track of it adam i spent a lot of time working on this writing this and i don't agree with you [Music] i was kind of silently thinking that to myself why why because i don't think we need it i think like absolutely funny policies discovery and most of this is uh it also adds to complexity i agree with adam said it's just more sometimes less is better just in case anything contradicts in the slightest verbiage where there could be

089you know something we're kind of led into this path by how agreements for how you're going to work together that's the function of that um so it's gone well over the last 20 years so uh what i'm hearing you say adam is that we would want want the policy committee to go back and find the policies that cover this stuff and take a look at those i would say the policy committee is important to change um regardless of what we're talking about right so if that's something the policy really wants to take up i think that's actually but i'd rather see that come out of politics and i'd rather say one of the policies that we can try our policies of the faulty document okay um julie um i think she has a lot of

090wisdom and expertise in this area so agree with dorothy meaning what we need to do it to do it this way to bring this out to us right not necessarily just him policy but i don't know because i haven't had as much work as you must have with it actually this version was not done by uh adam um because we thought that that was going to happen when we left the meeting but um all right so does anybody want to comment further do you feel like you well there's we have some difference of opinion it sounds like in terms of whether to use and continue working on this or to go to existing policy and revisit that within the policy of bringing meaning forward that needs to be revised or discussed those seem to be

091the two places we are and i'm just wondering if anybody wants to make that piece um or their perspective again or to stand in the other side consider that i mean i i i agree with with adam and i think like we brought up a lot of great discussion i feel like this wasn't an exercise of futility even though i can't imagine with you on the time and after that went into it for my to write it um my goodness um i guess i just i i would i would use the same questions that adam used i just don't know i don't i don't feel looking at our other one that we you know especially where we made the statement about the um the school boards like i think the towns know how we feel

092about um you know their input and how they how they share with us and different things like that i guess i just don't see anything really new one here that i think needs to be put in there this is going to sound like a really dumb question but i feel like i need to ask it because yes i think that's a good question because currently um the existing normal protocols are not in the manual they're as an exhibit so they're they're a um as a living document of the committees not the policy per se so then so what if we all accept this these protocols in our vote what happens next are they added to the to the policy manual or it's just a set of protocols that we're agreeing on the body right that's

093right oh so it's not like this isn't getting added to the policy this is just not the not the way it's currently framed all right and they um and so there are just the straight policies in there um so you'll see that when you go to dba it's just a short policy right it doesn't explain all the norms um so it becomes a document that the school made uses themselves and can modify and you know often do get modified in use or from year to year as the community looks at them so um it's a more of an operational document yeah so i think it still makes sense to vote on and accept it then i don't it's not we're not saying that we're it's just an exhibit this is kind of almost like calling

094out susan to have possible committees like this like other well that's what you're seeing on the dashboard okay just last year yeah my point of fact we have a very well organized easy research easy easy to find information and policy and if we're going to add additional protocols i'd like to more clearly understand where they fit into the policy manual and that they don't conflict with other policies that are pre-existing in the policy manual section b of the policy manual has by my eyes close to 40 or 50 different specific policies that are inactive as part of the school committee they're they're in the policy being publicly available i don't see where the protocols are becoming being held or whatever whatever it is here and i'd rather us if we wanted to lose in place

095do it as a policy and put them in the same place and make sure that there's no conflict between this document and other pre-existing policies yeah i don't i don't think it's intended to be a policy nothing because it's it's not like long standing it's for the current committee to adopt and so it will technically change or even change just by depending on march that you want to change something protocols so it's meant to be more a living document than a policy long-standing policy document but that's not to say that it's not worthwhile to look at what's addressed in the current policies that overlaps in this i'm wondering if people um feel like they have thought about this enough that someone can make a motion when they get to this in the business items and

096more able to work work off of that okay any other perspective you want to put out all right so let's move on to the next item which is this a breakout today is the first redial inside coordinated outreach for the school committee goal first goal statement um that says by december we'll have a coordinated approach to engaging existing groups already so what i tried to do there was to define that a little bit let's find the outreach goal it is f2 um to define the group of the votes and they use the first roots f2 and so what this tries to do is to define the groups that we're talking about the pre-existing groups and then to define uh in some way the liaisons role and so this is just on the table too for

097feedback it's a first read it does this job with where you'd like to see this particular goal go or would you approach it have we accepted this goal or yeah yeah we're getting into the results oh the goal itself is itself what is this berlin pto slash [Music] across the district yeah is that commitment um they have i believe something like 95 members not all of them active members 95. and what's the problem ptosis is the taxes [Music] why is it they're the berlin education foundation for that oh i'm sorry they're supposed to be they're supposed to say oh thanks one two maybe they have one well i'm like there's two bes and one and that would be an easy thing sorry that's um so comments because would this be useful the way this is

098set up a reasonable approach to to because we don't accept the goal is this is worth discussing this if we don't accept the goal and the discussion is just out there i think this will help us i like decide i think it's good for the school committee to know what's going on in these little groups i'm on the boylston education foundation but i have no idea what's going on with pto or special education or stuff going on in the selectmen and the high school so i i just think it it would serve two purposes it would get us involved in the community it's also good for learning the problem i think might be time for some people because we're already going to so many meetings so it's like to add i mean i i know

099that i'm already on bef so i can easily take that because i have to go to those meetings anyway so there's killing two birds in one snow but i don't know that there's too many people in here that are part of some of these other groups so this might be another huge time commitment for people unless we're talking like one meeting or two meetings a year or something like that that's what it says actually um on the second to last full and attend at least two of the group's meetings or activities oh or activities yeah exactly so does any of this so this is all just outreach to these groups not necessarily the community only the community that's part of these groups uh the purpose of this goal is to promote two-way our community communications

100coordinating our members with each other to and communicate with established groups that's this particular goal there are other goals in the school both if you look at the f2 document i don't know why um for resources for a great goal how we choose to meet that goal and um as opposed to how much would you get tactics and things we're going to do yeah i don't know if they do in the same way like for instance the election subcommittee is that says to bring strategies to the school committee um somebody's don't involve that but number one says to um that there'll be a coordination so that has to be defined somehow right so this uh correct do we have a document similar to f2 goal one b one c two three a and two first

101goal is to be done one b also yeah but collaborations we have covered the data dashboard all right any other comments on the f2 document outreach goal okay all right so we're going to move on to the third item which is the code dashboard and so i think the discussion on the table right now is uh whether we think the dashboard would be beneficial that was one conversation that came up last time um and if so which information would be beneficial and then if the committee will assume responsibility for updating the dashboard on a weekly basis so again uh this is on the agenda tonight so um i just want to have a little more discussion about that before we come to a vote and just air some ideas about this so we need to

102talk about um how would you find this on the side of things um so if it was up to me i would say we should do any participant that entered test and stay during that week if but i think it should just be how many have entered into the program not how many are currently in how many started so we could just use the word started or began because it's too hard to track how long some kids are in and what if someone has positive end i mean it's just too we can't we want to keep it as simple you know what i mean so that way you can see how many kids during that week had to do tests and stay at least one day and you might get kids i mean i'm sure

103it's happening kindergarten first grade they get squabble one day and they lose it i'm telling you my son this is going to be my son and then mom and dad say hi forget it you're home from there uh i don't care you're missing a week in school so they're out of testing today it's just these numbers to these numbers and i think sometimes i think too much information is you know not a great thing yeah is there a certain information here that you feel like would it be beneficial um no i would i'm gonna say i don't think any of this right [Music] yes i mean i think we need to start tracking vaccination rates we we have no idea how many people i know a lot of people that are getting their kids vaccinated

104right now i mean to come january or february quarters vaccination rate the des i think that the vaccination rates are going to be important data for the community and that information has been collected from elementary too as the vaccinations build mode jeff you know [Music] did start they sent an email out and they requested that when your child in nurse anna sent is there anybody here that would like to argue that uh tracking the positive cases occurring in the schools is definitely beneficial i think it will become beneficial i think it's beneficial too because i've had multiple people ask me that staff or student we still only know oh there's a positive case i can see julie's point of you because there are definitely people that are gonna cause a ruckus but i think there's

105a lot of quiet parents out there that are trying to make decisions for their own family that might use this data to decide you know do i keep my child home do i send my child to school do i send a child to sports right which one do your best right is is most of the school vaccinated you know i okay but the vaccine is different than right now we're talking about the positive cases let's get jumped out that's what's my answer we keep getting positive cases [Music] but anyways that's mine i agree maybe that intestines stay stuck too convoluted but i like the positive cases and i think the vaccination rates become very important um jeff i just i do want to say just to speak to what you would say we did try

106a couple times last year to um publish the uh the number of positive cases it didn't work the reason it didn't work because people were always compared to the statements and because you can never really get a sequence with [Music] in practice that's what happens and so i would ask that if you do have something like this you put something on the bottom that says any questions please contact making videos [Music] last year and um does anyone else want to speak to the tracking their cases for their cases and putting them on eventually i'm sorry just because we've been we keep track of the test and stay every day you know we've been getting this up and going now and i think there's different kinds of data so you have to be really really clear

107when people say the number of i want to test the number of positive cases for testing said that is a small portion of the positive cases in our schools the positive cases often happen on the begins and parents give us a call and say my son positive he hasn't been there for two days because we weren't sure and so there are many more that happen that way so i think the number you're putting up to the community no matter how you put it out is deceiving it's not about how many kids are really positive i guess as you're thinking about doing this think about really what what you want to get from this if you want parents to know how many positive kids of a community there's not a good mechanism to do that accurately

108if there's something else that you want to get out and you can kind of dig down and see what would be the best way to get that information that's great thank you [Music] after that information about the parents as deposit cases and the whole thing right i think that beyond that today and i think a month ago i would have wanted to know a lot about how much to intestine say at this point because we were facing challenges in terms of staffing tests and stay as well those challenges seem to keep it there at this point so i'm less concerned about knowing how many students are intense and stay or how many teachers are positive i think john ace had been providing [Music] so like i could certainly see us taking a different approach to

109this dab than what we really thought when at the time you were here and all of a sudden there were 30 close contacts and there's 23 close contacts here and we didn't have a solution [Music] but as we start thinking about you know start with what was happening with this kind of data you know it was clear to us that it could cause an issue with people thinking that would um that would not align with the state because they checked that you know so i don't want to make more problems for us when you say not in line with the state what do you mean isn't that the point we're trying to get to are we worse off better off more vaccinated less vaccinated positive you're talking about what the state says we have for

110coping cases in harlem the impression those numbers that chrissie put out last year were the town numbers from the states was that the town would be the school so going for a girl and it will be the school so the numbers that came out an email every week last year on thursdays last year was the town that was just students tried to people had asked for any time we tried to do it it was a problem because it didn't line up with that it didn't line up with state data we recorded the state i'm sorry it wasn't mine enough and very difficult to get in line with their their reporting schedule so the numbers that you reported as student cases were not the same as with the state proportions these [Music] um [Music] which data

111is accurate which is the data that i should believe right so that's a big question so our statement would be saying believe our data is that can you link directly to the state's data for our community like directly one link and it goes to the state's data and says this is dvr right so if you can do that maybe the solution years just send that link out every week on the newsletter regardless if we have the link that we're even doing a comparison if parents are seeing positives they don't scrap so you're not saying do this you're saying scratch that and just my last comment you're correct yes originally i said that yes sorry [Music] so whether um are students or staff in the schools that were positive new positive cases okay and that's what

112one's the right thing before i do it as i get them so i want to switch over to whether there are equally challenging issues with the vaccination rates and the vaccination rates more reliable as numbers to put out to the community although we'd be consistent with the state will the state have the same vaccination database that they'll be of the same issues will be different so the state system only the nurses have access to so jeff and i can't look that up and share that information with you and so we're getting to the point where we have steady nurses in place and they'll have access to that um and at that point they can they can look up their numbers for their school i mean anna's been here for a while she knows what her

113numbers are in her school and those but across the district may take us until after thanksgiving to be able to do that till after thanksgiving and those come straight straight out of the state database they're from a state um website yeah after thanksgiving okay do we have enough information but the other [Music] but the districts that have reported their vaccinations for settings have never been approved by the state to revisit the masked question those districts are looking at that fund part of the state to determine do you not necessarily have to tabulate look up all 600 students and figure out what it okay sounds like is good work right and apparently it's not my discussions but it's not separated by schools they have to go through the database which and it's like a can by

114hand and every time you record it it's the same about work we actually are looking we were talking just today about looking at a new program that we can use with the nurses that will take us some time to get in but we'll do it a little more seamlessly of course and the nurses won't have to be swimming you know two new nurses actually have a good working knowledge of the immune system so and the state it it has the guideline that if you reach 80 percent you can change your mass well you're not i think the fish is a stable question once you achieve 80 fascination so um so there may be some interest in knowing the vaccination rates just for that preschool after thanksgiving we can start to pull it once we have

115the nurses [Music] go through the business items is for someone to make a motion regarding the uh what you want to see happen with this data dashboard so just to think about what the motion will be um and if you want i'm just going to give a minute so you can jot down some thoughts or suggest language for them we're going to move on to the business items [Music] we should be seeing motions and seconds and both pretty smoothly for quite a number of items and maybe some more uh discussion on some proposals so uh item a do we have a motion to approve mrs janelle fitzpatrick as the people personnel director contract effective upon mrs martin's retirement in january 2022. unanimous motion to extend we have a motion to extend the appointment of superintendent

116signing to the ancient valley collaborative board of directors until november of 2022. mike ii julie uh discussion so i just want to point out uh two things one that this is an item to help align the appointments and roles with the election to try to get all of these things on cycle for november 2022 and second is the assabet valley collaborative is not the same as aspen valley book tech school and i want to make sure that you are aware of that okay all right um any other discussion just a request um if we can try to not use in some of these agendas in the future that would be really helpful um [Music] any other comments okay all in favor of the permission say opposed okay that passes unanimously on the board until november

117to approve the regional school committee election timeline adam said mike seconded uh discussion questions all in favor say aye i opposed it passes unanimously that will be shared with the berlin selectmen on monday uh to be a motion to approve the observation d motion to extend the committee's roles and appointments this was a first read and prior meeting to extend our own rules and appointments made i'm going to say since september so that includes the district clerk appointment and other appointments um by two months to the november 2022 elections glory second seven julie any discussion questions on favor i opposed okay passes unanimously everybody's on in their spot still remember a motion to accept the school community protocols this is one where someone needs to put a motion [Music] on the floor here the other

118emotion had set scorpion further second discussion i was ready to write my prior comments around feeling like this is perhaps unnecessary but also included our policy manual um so in so just to clarify if people agreed with your perspective they would hold nay on this proposal [Music] those opposed [Music] just take that um prior conversation and take the battery policy something came out of chair was that vote one um one in eight or five against or was it two seconds uh f motion to accept the full set of school committee goals for 2021-22 this is this is um is that right yes yes in the provost's folder uh you can see the edits that were made so adam had suggested last time that the items and the goals being rewarded to flow in sort of

119sequential order from the most immediate to the longer term goals so that's they've been reordered the blue text was added because we weren't sure what was going to happen to difficult database and the bottom um goal i scratched based on the conversation that sort of suggested that maybe this was not a priority for them at this time after the committee at this time so there would be three three goals approved with the amendments shown i mean the language shown in building support we're referring building support within the community buildings for those titles those uh tags came from the masc self-assessment headings so they relate to specific items okay uh all in favor of accepting the school committee goals as presented here i suppose yeah that's unanimous that we now have official school community goals and

120that means that the conversation about the number one a will go forward or next in december g motion to accept the copic data dashboard proposal um and again um so this is to collaborate with the district to provide a data dashboard to be updated weekly by the speaking username and um so a motion to can i make a motion at the table until december 14th when hopefully we'll have some vaccination data so first we have to move the motion all right i mean we'll move this so is there a motion to accept the golden data dashboard proposal so glory second okay discussion so i'll i'll just comment and say that i think we need to add something there around the vaccination right i have some likely to suggest as part of the name of this

121motion um is that the district will publicly report that's initiated by december 10th 2021 in advance of this unfortunately i'd like you to read that again solely and then i'm going to ask christy to capture this place yeah to add the vaccination rate of the condo by december 10th 2020 in advance so that it's available in advance of the meeting of the 14th okay so we're going to vote on just the amendment that adam has proposed is there a let's see that's the motion give me a second oh if that's what i think it is i can hear you um discussion of the amendment so i would just ask and give the forward to jeff or karen make sure i was okay with you guys as a date out there i mean i said you

122know tentatively and kept tom said again we gotta get the nurses i think our priority is to get them up and running and make sure their offices are running so i don't want to hit them with something that i really don't know how much work this is going to take to pull this down i know it's not just there and easily accessible so i think it's a great tentative date it gives us a goal to shoot for as long as there's an understanding that we may have to come back and say we just couldn't get it to you this time we'll give you an [Music] and decided so the current language is to amend this so the district will push push the data out by december 10th do you want do you want to say

123for a tentative date of december 10th there's one habit of hard and fast december 10. [Music] has [Music] with the all right so right now we're just voting on that amendment language of the descending channel okay um so all in favor of that adding that amendment like with that language say i i opposed to that language um all right so um that that amendment passes and now we'll vote on the following uh statement to collaborate with the district a motion to accept the kobe data dashboard proposal to collaborate with the district provide a data dashboard i guess the right would be by december 10th i'm sorry so we have that motion open and uh seconded another discussion about that whole the whole um motion now i'm sorry restated with the amendment yep the motion is

124to accept the code data dashboard proposal with the additional um with the addition of the vaccination rates at sahaja by 1210 so it is available in advance of the 12 14 meeting i thought we would decide we did not want to test and stay stuff in there so as it is now it includes just gonna say so maybe we have to add so i think i thought what we kind of landed on and you do the governance language and i'll just say layman's terms i thought what we landed on was we're going to report vaccinations as of or we're [Music] a motion so you're you're saying to uh if i understand the right to delete the uh test and post contacts information yes that whole table and to leave the co-contestant and another event just

125show positive cases the intestines stay with the caveat that just said at the bottom at the bottom that said due to timing differences this one may not match the state website so we have an amendment to delete the close contacts table and add statement below the copic case table [Music] stating what this statement of positive cases may differ from amounts reported on state when numbers recorded on reporting um this amendment is to delete the close contacts table and every statement below the copic case table stating data may differ from the state website due to timing differences does that sound right to you yeah so there'll be two amendments to this because this is one amendment but it includes both and it will also include vaccinations we already have that all right so then this is

126the second one okay okay all right and we're making this and i heard you said a second to them all right okay discussion just to clarify the information we report the identity that is important [Music] what we're talking about earlier i'm not sure so we've got a table here that shows positive cases by school that remains in the motion right now to only remove the close contact does that get reported as a positive case high school no we get a call from parents sometimes a lot of the time normal report but you don't report that on this so that's where the data gets tricky because if parents are looking at this and saying you know okay wow bernal has 15 positive cases as well how many of those kids are in school or making it

127all happen during a halloween party these kids were never even in school but that's where data you know it's really tricky and we're not you know we're not data analysts we don't study how to collect this data and put it in there and you know that's right and i can tell you intestines day we have had five positive my concern is not that i don't want to be transparent because transparency is extremely important and people want to know my concern is is christie and jeffrey they're gonna get emails and phone calls because people are gonna say the numbers aren't lining up and then they're gonna have to go through and explain this even no matter how many you know aspects you put on there and explain i'm just worried that we're creating something um that

128might put more work on other people even though we want to do it ourselves we don't have access to that information the only time that would happen would be in the parents if the kid tested positive and it was reported through the state and that parents had their kids school and didn't call school or just call their weekend numbers on on there yes they are they have to break christie so some let's say somebody is at baseball this weekend and somebody tests positive and they call the school and they say hey my kid's not going to explode you're sending that to me that's in there yeah right that's fine but it's the fact that they bought it baseball not at school which i think is what julie is saying okay but they there still is

129a positive case in the school so i get it you're that's how you're interpreting that everyone's going to interpret it differently right but the data is being reported in isolation those are positive in case that students were not in school because they're in isolation because they had coping remember that absolutely just just positive cases i don't know where they all are right but they're just positive okay yeah okay so the of course if you could again read the motion on the table okay um the whole thing or just one amendment so we're going to delete the close contacts table and add a statement below the covet case table stating the data may differ from the state website due to timing okay um may not have been transferred in school i mean i now that i

130understand that i'm just concerned that people are going to look at like when you look at the number of cases that come on halloween party on the weekend um i think that's my concern is that is the still interpreted as spread right because oh my goodness we gotta lock everything down because the school's on fire everybody's catching but it might be something on the weekend yeah most of the cases that's what the most context numbers would but the point is that this this hasn't been put out there the reason why we're not seeing an uproar is because these numbers have not been put out there it's one it's when the data gets put out there that you have to just be it's how it's which was the point of this just to know how many

131kids are missing school when we started this was because test the state wasn't in place tesla's days in place i kind of agree you don't necessarily need the close contact information because if a kid's missing school now is their choice so it's their parents choice not to participate in that program do you want to see cases by school don't understand what level we have with code in schools which parents might want to say you know it's getting higher home anyway it's not high what the hell we're doing that was the point of knowing this information to give so uh i'm in favor of the motion to remove the table and amend as we put on the table but i i could also see supporting um a bigger thing so this is not report any others

132but instead to look for the administration when we start to look at that vaccination percentage and decide how we might want to change our mass policy based on that can present to us over the last two months what did that data look like and that's the kind of subject we're going to make decisions on more than the week two week whether there's one days for two cases of gps which seems to be around what we're seeing test and stay positive which may not necessarily mean that those five students caught it from the student who happened in school here but they didn't see five problem cases through test and stay in that case that can be information that would inform how i would consider making future decisions going to cultivate policy that's why i'm in favor

133of changing the disease [Music] so the amendment on the table is to delete the close contact table statement under the copy case table there are causing cases from [Music] that language to the motion you say i i have an opposed nay two and it moves in two two said nay so um [Music] i think i would say [Music] bye so that motion passes so amendment language is added to this so the fulmin the full motion [Music] i mean i can paraphrase it but i don't know okay so let's see the cougar data dashboard proposal adding the vaccination rated to haunted by 12 10 so it's available in advance of the 12-14 meeting and deleting the coast contacts table and adding a statement below the code case table stating the data may differ from state the

134state website due to timing so that's the motion on the table right now any further discussion okay all in favor of that motion of opposed [Music] thank you for hacking through that that's a tough one um let's move on um so we have more to do tonight so we're at the item age a motion to accept the proposal to create a volleyball club uh we have a motion so glory second ah julius second any discussion this one could be easier say aye aye opposed okay that's enough of a volleyball club that's fun uh motion to approve help do we have motion to approve policy lbv partnerships with other schools any discussion on that all in favor say aye aye opposed if that passes and uh this last item i just want to officially appoint a

135glory to the voice and master plan committee uh that sort of just took place accidentally behind the scenes when she goes to that so i want to officially point it to that and invite her to give us updates [Music] all right and the rest of the items are first reads does anybody have any questions or things they want to discuss on those first reads i think i already have an opportunity for them okay all right so um within motion to go into executive session to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining with the rural employees and education association the executive session is necessary to protect the committee's bargaining position we will be joined by legal counsel and april steward whilst in town administrator and municipal representative we will not reconvene an open session adam second

136julie okay so we're going to do a roll call vote on this please laurie hi mike julie i adam megan i and i or me uh so now we will reconvene in an executive session clear some of these people out yeah [Music] nice to meet you just making sure