Berlin-Boylston Regional School Committee May 4, 2021

001all right you're good all right good evening i would like to call to order the berlin boylston regional school committee as you can see this is our first uh meeting live and in person some folks haven't even met each other up until this point right so uh it's been a little over a year march of 2020 was our last our last meeting in person and uh so it's good to be back and uh we'll continue to uh they changed what we need to do to make this experience obviously safe and you know and working for everybody right so uh as always this meeting is being recorded and your image into voice may be broadcast just a reminder we are all wearing the mask so um we're just speaking into one microphone so everybody to make

002sure that they take a moment to speak clearly uh speak up if anybody does need to speak without a mask obviously we can have you move somewhere else uh if you need to you need to do that to give some certain distancing that can happen as well we can take a moment please stand for the pledge allegiance foreign okay we did not have any uh or any public comments uh submitted via the email process for tonight's meeting just an update for those watching in public if you would like an opportunity in the future as we continue to work through the process to provide a public comment please email that to parent questions rsd.org uh those public comments will then get uh if you're not able to attend here all those comments will get read from

003the public comments section of the meeting you always have the option of attending in person any public comments uh from the audience hearing none all right we'll do our uh agenda uh approval payoff roll with warrants obviously we're not passing it around but we are really getting back on the horse okay good from that perspective okay uh one agenda item i was going to add uh for a gender perspective uh because i missed it after me dale uh angela will add the lab discussion at the end as i am number 11 on the marion hawkins fellowship under business uh consent agenda but i please have a motion to approve our consent agenda thank you both now that we're back in person i believe we can move back to the non-mean for the roll call vote

004and go back to just um that's all those in favor aye approved two communications uh from the chair this evening and then i'll open it up to the committee uh first set of communication i would like to make is i want to thank uh first dave mccarthy and joel delay uh from the school make sure we have everything set up and that the streaming capabilities are going to be available from the public and all that good stuff so i want to thank those those folks i want to thank jenny ryan for being here she said she's not going for shorts volunteers good for her but thank you very much jenny for being here um and as well as sean killpoint for uh for helping us out and setting up the stage you get everything ready

005for tonight's meeting so i want to thank all those folks as they could have uh my next communication is there's a tough one here as many of you know a couple months ago um angela submitted her resignation uh this will be her final meeting on the school committee uh i believe we're talking i know right this will be good uh i believe we're about roughly nine years right 2012 was that right okay um nine years so obviously first and foremost thank you for your service um you know just a couple of things that i can take away from my time on committee uh with you being a part of it obviously the role you played in all the berlin scholarships over the years the numerous negotiations and contracts and what you brought to those groups

006and just your professionalism and your empathy and your ability to just really put us in a great position and help build upon some of the relationships that we have with administration and then obviously most recently importantly uh the regionalization work that we did obviously at the time but um you know the work that i did during that time was amazing so thank you for all of that you are going to be very missed on the committee but also also the uh you're never onboarding the process [Music] in our discussions around what to do for you uh we do not think a fleece jacket is necessarily going to be appropriate for your trip to florida so there is a um [Applause] well i really enjoyed my time over the years [Music] thank you any other comments

007okay i think i guess angela wins the prize for the acceptance before the school committee photo of the um images of looking like she's having the most fun on the school committee great big smiling forward at the table like this is the greatest position ever so shows to you setting the model for us and now angela is going to add it to you i think one of the things i appreciate the most about your time here is we've always um ask good questions we've always asked thoughtful questions you've always challenged us um and you've always kept the good of the region um in mind in everything we did never made a decision without having good information and um i know i want you to know that it's very much appreciated so in an effort to

008keep tonight's agenda moving somewhere in the middle or so i will ask if anybody needs biographic or massive break i think uh item number seven on our agenda is election discussion and i don't want to spend too much time on this um obviously it's an important topic um you know we need we have parent uh communication this week uh requesting that we had an update on our election unfortunately i didn't have a great uh update to provide the parents and you know i kind of thought to myself though it isn't a large group of people looking to see when the election and kind of getting some information it does you know i think it's a topic that does deserve and obviously there are there is some interest in what we're going to do with that

009so i just wanted to kind of bring it back up and my goal is to hopefully for us to get ourselves in the direction we kind of put this topic to bed a little bit and just have an answer for people well is what we're doing this is the process this is when we hope to have our next uh election so um it was kind of suggested we talked about the idea floated around a potential survey i initially said parents but i was obviously makes sense to provide the survey to the entire communities i would need some help trying to figure out i know how to easily distribute it to the parents i'm not sure how to easily distribute it to outside of parenthood community perspective uh i know what the towns do um stuff

010like that so maybe ask for like maybe website uh town website links or that type stuff and i know like you know tom people's electric bills and stuff like that i don't know if that's an option we have with the time that we have or desire but obviously if we did do a survey it would go to the entire communities um and really kind of what i see as that from this perspective is we really have we have two options and i'll try to i'm gonna try to give all the information i have and then we can have an open discussion about it in my in my opinion we have two options which is we wait until our november our november 2022 next election which i agree that is a long time and it's not

011necessary from a democratic process that will be a long time before we've had with regionalization and all that having you know with regionalization i think that's what compounds it because we didn't have elections because of that whole process um so it's been a long time since we've had elections had some turnover but it's been an appointment process right um the other option obviously is a special election when the topic first came up i did go through the due diligence of finding out from both top clerks what the cost would look like for a special time it is roughly seven thousand dollars it's about thirty five hundred dollars each town uh costs for special election most of that is made up of ballots um postage and the securities that type then obviously the remainder is the

012folks who want volunteers and the workers um i when i'm in that draft survey that i put together i put eight to ten thousand dollars only because i'm a business guy and i always plan for the worse maybe you might run into some other challenges uh we could really the cost of postage fluctuates we obviously are going to have to provide in obviously male and valid options still at this point because that's what the mandate is so postage costs could go up and that could fluctuate that type of stuff so i was sort of just patting the stats a little bit to sort of give an estimate so that's kind of where i came up with that number uh and what in what i wrote i did the other question that came up uh from

013a couple of committee members was they did talk to russ and um he's not 100 sure on the requirement for the home rule petition he thinks we might still need but that could be a touch of subject and i can't see necessarily into that but we can we can surely ask them that and find that out so with that being said um russ has edited and redone our homework petition document i got that from him today and it's been provided back to the town managers uh for review for town legal council uh and essentially you know what would happen is we could uh submit that back for legislation uh to try to get it back into the queue for uh getting through legislation now with the pandemic it's still way behind our current home rule

014petition act isn't even anywhere near the top of the list to even be discussed so what that does is that puts us in obviously the timeline quandary which is we don't we really can't do anything until we get that approved and then on top of that what i'm what i have to ask tom clark's telling managers is what's the time frame process to put together a special question i don't know what that is obviously you have to allow time for pulling your papers and signatures and all that stuff time for campaigning i mean a typical campaign process starts i think it's about three months long it starts you pull papers and or at least i'll use boylston i think you pull papers in march campaign in april and elections in may it's a three-month process

015right so at some point we need to decide when that time comes to that point and we're getting closer to november anyways or next year anyways do we want to utilize the funds from school budget to pay for a special election when this first did pop up i did work with bob and confirm with them we did put the potential um so that's all the information i have so really the discussion tonight is do we want to make any decisions do we want to move forward with the whole new petition act and see where that gets us put us in a position to have a special election and then the discussion around i know we talked about this in the past there wasn't a great appetite at least on the committee to utilize school budget

016funds for a special election um the initial response from the towns was neither town was willing to consistent paying for it we took the back and asked again maybe we could split it but i think that's a step somewhere down the line once we know where we're getting to that thing are we making any decisions not you know we're not gonna there's no vote yet but i think we should uh one um you know we can easily as the school committee decides we don't want to move forward with the special election and we don't believe and we can just set our date as november uh and then obviously obviously i think that would be some pushback from the community so i don't know if the best picture for the communities to work with the talents

017to understand how we can go from that perspective i mean that's one way to take it the other way is we agree as a committee tonight uh to continue pushing forward with the holding the petition act see if we can get that approved uh and then once we get that approved then determine if we want to survey the community to see if the community is willing to you know take the money out of the school budget and if if the surgery results come back it's really not a huge push to do it and that really just would answer the questions before we worry too much more about it if there's a lot of interest then i don't see a reason why because if there's no interest then we know the answer um the other thing

018about it is uh i was reading that today i was reading here today i believe the way it's worded is the terms of those elected that would have been elected this past november they're written very specifically that in some new terms because they're like a first term under the new committee so that might need to be addressed a little bit change the languages i don't know or not that's maybe a legal function but it is written that i believe the first time 22 if we had an election november 2020 there were going to be folks who were going to be two-year terms they would be in november 2022 they would be up for election after that first one there were two year term numbers in in the agreement there are i think in boyle state

019it's two two term members the one four and girls not two years so you might need to review that language the problem any time you change any language in the regional agreement then it needs to be voted by both terms yeah which is the reason for the state legislature because we're asking to do something against our regional ruling so not as simple as just so it sounds like we're going to need to see what i mean with that many things to be decided [Music] some of us are going to be appointed quite a convenient numbers where if you're appointed you have more information anyways so i guess my question is the committee members that are here i mean are you comfortable staying on the committee until uh and really until november december 22 even if

020you didn't in november to make too is regarding the appointment whether we are fully realized or not when someone resigns it is an appointment process so even before recommendation we had several resignations the only difference was at that point it said the school committee members appointing the new a member we went to the board of selection so it's not like this is something new but it does feel a little good when the i just wonder if do we even do we just make a decision to i work the process of the process of moving towards a special election and do we need to survey the lease i suspect you know should we just start the process of moving towards a special election yeah i i would support that i think that we should have an

021election i would like to know if um if we speak to our legislators they can work with us to get this through a time and matter what they would have to say about the timing like this because but we have it so once it's just i don't know if legislative legislation has spent up at all right i don't think either i think that we don't know i also think that it's worthwhile to just reapproach the pounds and say can we share inside the cost rather than taking it away from students services yeah everybody should have in that conversation either i just i think it's probably we should wait i mean i think that's the second step is i think this is there are risks of not having a special election i think there's a lot

022more risks if we have a special election and if they have ever come forward whenever it happens i think you know we're doing what we can to avoid some risks but you know some of the votes we're having not legitimate so i think from a risk standpoint going to special election right we're doing the best we can with some risks of big problems happening and i also just said it from a cost perspective the talents gave us the so2 funds we could have put that towards their assessment i think i would say just take the money and my recommendation is to take the money off the table don't make the times it must be three to four thousand and some people without budget they provided twenty seven thousand didn't ask for any of that separate

023lender i think let's make that a non-issue and probably going to be enough work to do it anyways just try to remove some of the options to make it happen so i would bring uh all right so i will um i'll try it out i'll add that as an agenda right in each school committee meeting to provide an update or where we stand on those things obviously from a support perspective any support each one of us can do in our communities with our select boards and those folks that play a role in this is a great thing and then when the time comes i'll probably uh ask everybody to play a role they were calling me emailing our state representatives tom did that quite a bit for us his first go-round so we should probably

024try to do that as well good there great thank you okay moving through number eight with our resignation uh comes the filling of the answer is fee we went through a process of conducting interest and we had one community member interested in the opportunity uh you all have a chance to see her letter of interest and resume via email in our drive so i would like to introduce julie lee [Music] position great thank you mr chair um i'm trying to speak loud enough okay my name is julie lee i've been a resident of garland for 11 years can you hear me um we have my husband and i have four children we have a seventh grader a fifth grader fourth grader and third grader so for the past seven years i've been volunteering in different

025capacities in berlin through recreation through the pto through sports and now that my kids are aging they're at the upper and that level of the elementary school and moving to the middle and we are after next our oldest will be going to the high school i was thinking about ways to use my time to serve the community and school thing came and i thought it would be a good way to continue to serve garmin and um i'm going to tell a really quick story because i know you guys have a lock agenda so i had a job in roslindale and it was at the professional facility for gdk18 boys but what i took out of that job was quality education matters here were these boys who was 13 to 18 you know living on the

026streets essentially committing crimes and then they would come to our facility for one to four years depending on the primary committee right so i taught pre-algebra in algebra in mississippi and i would pre-test the boys before and they failed miserably but then i taught whatever it was that i was teaching and then when i gave the assessment they did they seemed really well but it wasn't that they weren't smart enough it's just that their quality of education wasn't good it wasn't good enough it wasn't when i left that job i i've always had in my head that quality education matters because you can take a kid any kid but keep them going on that path or it can also take those kids that maybe aren't on that path and can be really impactful so why

027i want to sit on school communities because i believe in quality public education and i believe in good people and i think that good thank you yes any um so julie as a member of the school committee sometimes you have to take your personal opinions and put them on the side and you have to go with the will of what the community wants they don't always match um what i was curious about is are you able to separate your personal views from the local community and how are you going to keep your finger on the pulse of what the community wants i think that's a great question um i think you know it's it's hard when you have passion right and the passion that you have doesn't meet maybe the majority or the needs of

028in this particular case the community right however when you make a commitment to serve you don't always you can't always go with what your passion is because we have to support the thoughts and the passion of the people that were served and i think that that's public interest and that's public service right and we sometimes have to put that but what we really want aside um well i would like to think that what the community i would align my thinking with what the community thinks i say that i think that i would do that um uh actually i don't have a question because florida gives us my question okay i was gonna say i believe i i was asked to sing speaking of the election uh we always hear a lot of feedback from the

029community about what the community should do shouldn't do i'm sure jeff hears it uh you know we hear it everywhere um so when i was asked that question of my lord back in december um i kind of had a similar feeling i was wondering how you would react how i would react to that feedback that we got from the community luckily more positive than negative feedback right but uh you are the one that decided to step in front of that firing squad tonight and nobody else i thank you for that and uh says lori took my question and you said i'm leaving at that i was excited to see your name come forward because when i was thinking about who in berlin would be a good person to replace me you actually came to my

030mind but i didn't i didn't like solicit anyone because i felt like someone who really wants to do it things that come forward at their point so i i just think you'd be a perfect person for the physician i've watched you in action over the years just very committed very different um very open-minded so i'm appreciative of that and i think um the question i have for you too is i'm hoping that our committee members in the future are after the pandemic list that we but they become a little more involved in the conferences go to the conferences in november going to the summer institute for massachusetts association the school community puts on there's a district four which encompasses our towns um like once or twice a year um how open are you to doing

031some of the sort of state level um community level things with your colleagues school members across the state things like that see your schedule allowing me to do some of that um yeah as long as i had you know if i knew ahead of time of course then definitely i think it's a great idea because then you're you know there will be so much learning right happening in that process it sounds perfectly brilliant absolutely i think all of us um has informed the perceptions so i think the reactions from the community had a um what i mean by that is you know for well let me practice it with this i think you did a most remarkable job with this past year with code and your role in keeping the staff and the students and

032families safe and getting them to keep the kids educated i mean it was just a hard role for leading researchers i think everyone involved in that process really did a great job um i think it's very easy for people to share their displeasure with how things from cooking will crumble um without uh we don't necessarily understand everything that happens in the bathtub right and there were times that i was i was really saddened by how the community responded to things that were happening with decisions that were being released because of that they were such hard decisions and it was all rooted in good you know for the good of the staff and little kids but i don't think it was always receiving well and that that bothered me these are two great communities but they

033were very painfully at times and i said i think you know that starting with me would be a great thing because you know i can have conversations too you know i have four children you know we know a lot of age groups right so when people are talking you know it's easy to calm the nonsense they're easier you know it's a common process when they're on the sidelines another question i have is just are there any particular ways um the ways that i prepared to be on the school community i would say specifically no i've worked on communities before i've worked with budgets i'm the chair of our recreation committee so i'm familiar with town budget and how long that works um as far as the school committee i i don't know i mean i

034know the mission statements i know the goals and responsibilities but i don't know as far as preparing though i don't know that um i love to learn that i'm interested in learning it all but it was fascinating so just over time no i think i just have to listen i wish i had you know sacked for five months with angela of course i couldn't learn but but it's okay i'll just you know as hard as i go and any information i gotta get the suggestion that you need you know going to conferences is that's so smart because that's how i'll be able to learn how to protect you yeah one of my famous statements slash questions um um i'm just piggybacking off all the questions and kind of some things that you said right um

035some of the folks you know susan talked about kind of the community and the response of the coping stuff and all that stuff right one of the things that you almost have to start to believe and understand is the removing of passion from these things right and particularly when you start looking at things like social media and that type of stuff i traditionally am a person who uh sees something that i disagree with on social media and i desire to respond to that right there right and provide my opinion right but that's not um you know i know we're school committed numbers when we're here but and we're not necessarily school committee members you know whether or not you're outside of here but you aren't always a school committee member every time you go you're

036at the sport fields i see you there all the time anytime you go there um you're going to be particularly nowadays with everything going on it is you're a school community uh and when you um when there's a string on facebook and social media about school committee or school and stuff when you respond to that if you respond to that you're a school community even though you could be a parent it's it's you're you always got to kind of have that and think about that and you know for some of us some of us have talked about this in the past uh you know the ability to take yourself yourself out of some of those groups and some of that stuff right or the ability to um use some of that as information just information

037gathering not necessarily the need to respond right and take time to respond so i really that's sort of my statement the question really is how do you feel about you know that type of stuff and you're just you know moving forward the ability to sort of kind of pull yourself out of some of that stuff from a passionate perspective and start looking at it maybe from the school community yeah i think that's a great question um i think that like you said you just need to have to remove yourself i think facebook is toxic at its core um so i think when those threads come up we've been participating in reading them i think is toxic also because it will just feed the passion right and then we're human so we will want to respond

038well if you said you can't because you are a school for the members you just don't want to get into that you know on the sidelines of soccer or you know the parent you know approaches me about something you know i think it's best to even say oh you know i'm just putting an email or you know that can be discussed with the board you know rather than but i think it is a fine one because you are a community member right we certainly can there's things that certainly cannot get discussed right but then you also are you know these are your friends these are your friends parents you know these are your colleagues so it is a fine line to walk um but i think the best way to do that is social media

039is a valuable tool it's just one of those things that i you know i try to remind people it's just you know you got to be mindful right you know even though you're not in school that time that has not gone those things you have to be mindful of what the future might be thank you so can i ask the question absolutely yeah do you find that community members are mindful that with you as community members if you're at a um [Music] i think it's hard because you want people to approach you with how they you just have to tell people especially something controversial going on like you know there's background information that i can't share with you but the school community has made the best decision with the information they have you know and

040and friends and family and um julie one of the things that i really like about you is you're very balanced you're passionate but you're logical you're not emotional and i see that really helping you on those sidelines and i do what he says a lot i've always encouraging people i don't care what their view is email all of us let us all know share what you're thinking that's how we know otherwise all we know is the flips and little pieces that we hear here and there but i think your personality is suited for that kind of interaction yeah answer your question uh you know i don't think enough people do that but that could just be my experience people my big thing and my concern always with social media stuff people are entitled to their

041opinion that allow that's a forum for that to happen informed to share information my concern is when when i get concerned about when i read that stuff or see it it's the continued sharing and building upon incorrect information right and where thoughts and opinions start to become facts which aren't active and that could be resolved very easily by those individuals reaching out directly to a school committee member to get the information the actual information right we as a music committee try to maintain a response uh policy we all have the right to respond and do things we try to keep something out of a decorum and respond to policy when it comes to citizens but i just encourage people to instead of continue to propagate on incorrect information you know take an opportunity to reach

042out and call anyone i tell people call me give my cell phone number give my direct email email yes ridiculous that i'm interviewing you while i'm looking at this resume so if i have questions i have one question everybody knows that i'm a big advocate for the arts right based on your resume i'm sure you asked this question are you having a kid for the arts yes okay that's awesome good question okay um all right so now it would be the typically the uncomfortable part of your is there any questions concerns discussion as it relates to julie and their potential appointment here or not okay do i have uh more questions concerns deliberation all those in favor opposed [Applause] so from a process standpoint um [Music] you will need to uh between now in our

043next meeting make an appointment with tom clark to be sworn in and then once you're sworn in you can you know just have to get your email address and stop processing onboarding process as part of andrew was building out that process we had mentors now i was going to assign a mentor but i had one step up and volunteer laurie wanted to step up and be your mentor um so i'm going to appoint laurie to be uh julie's mentor through the [Music] gonna want to start getting your email getting access to the drive being part of you know the emails that you're gonna give us agendas and stuff like that so i would i would recommend trying to do it sooner rather later um mandated conflict of interest training certification okay also which probably will

044be i actually don't have your time this evening [Music] design step one superintendent will engage consultant with expertise and subject and concepts of equity regarding these discussions book studies and exercises try to understand the meaning of equity and also aspects of education the superintendent superintendent has engaged in services of teacher 21 2020 school year we hired started naj o'reilly um we've had two meetings one on my second one on april 27th if future work in the area given a timeline of our work and equity to extend to the summit 2021 the superintendent will collaborate collaboratively planning the administrative part of the retreat um the administrative leadership team will participate in these key professional development activities that will strengthen the shared understanding of equity the superintendent and administrative leadership team have participated in these three professional

045development activities to strengthen their understanding of equity which includes administrative book study webinars on culturally responsive teaching and degree presented by zoretta cannon and keeping him keeping your equity impact whether or not presented by gary howard uh three collaborative workers 21 consultants and four participation and individual literacy uh science advising college hosted by the education development center the focus of the cost was to create a pathway for all students k-12 to be able to access computer science classes we talk to you about that we're implementing this grade 7 and crazy computer science program i'll skip to action 7 and 7 which was the superintendent award with the director of finance and operations and the director of curriculum uh combined to budget here two equity goal activities that would be done by the mid years uh

046let's see number six the will provide a final report of the work done by administrative leadership team and he gives equity that includes action steps related to staff and parent involvement or reception from the year so we might finally talk by the superintendent and administrative leadership team environment to define the meeting of equity that has applied to logistics and students who serve during the 2020 2021 school year to begin a work relations administrative book studies using a recently published book called publishers breakthrough leadership six principal guidance schools where inequity is not adoption written by alan blankenstein and marcus newsom the contents of the court caucus it's greeted primarily through permanently those educational leadership roles an opportunity to better understand the meaning of equity and visualize the pandemic as an opportunity for transformation in our schools

047references of pandemic so it was timely and that a lot of the uh focus points had to do with opportunities the administrative leadership team met for one hour book study sessions and four separate weeks between january 28th and march 4. during these sessions the team responded to questions related to chapters in the book played for acknowledging the culture of our school who we are and what we are about restructuring the organization's organizational system in place the process how we move students through school school systems to ensure that they're successful in session one we focused on the responsibility of leadership to move forward and create a technical environment for all students to learn during the session the team learned more about the difference between adaptive leadership and technical leadership one of the leadership team's most meaningful

048conversation and his deepest dive revolved around the definition of equity as it was defined in the book as compared to each individual individual's personal understanding and biases as a team we challenged and questioned one another and what it meant for students to be successful who determined that the student was successful how was that interpreted and understood the book discussion was followed by a webinar assignment in which the team was expected for the loretta cameron to present on culturally responsive teaching in the brain in preparation for the father's session the administrative team also focused on relational trust and team buildings in relation to capacity building within the school day during this session we sponsored we responded to the following essential questions how do we engage our staff in creating a trusting environment how do we value

049their work do we honor each individual we recognize that we do how we treat one another as adults reflect how we treat students you'll see this theme of building capacity in our district is we've focused on it for the last three years and it will become it's a big part of that equity course from here we've moved into the four pillars of the technical learning community as outlined in the book during these sessions a team examining the current mission and vision statements and goals that we have in play that we have had in place the last several years we're going to be visiting the mission and vision statements but we will wait till we do a goal for work on activity seven just writing it first and then doing what makes sense and subsequent subsequent

050sessions of the book study the administrative leadership team considered what are some ways that you have reached out to the families and community reasons what are some ideas that you would like to consider try what community passions as the school district currently have and what i was working on together to keep the team agreed on three three key understandings that principals would plan to take forward into their buildings next year in discussions with seth one mutual understanding based on empathy and recognition of shared interest two meaningful involvement in families and communities in a variety of school activities and free regular outreach and communication to families and community they also focus on breakout sessions and technical changes that can be made in each of the schools led by the principal and only seen by the super

051family school at the conclusion of the book of study sessions the administrative leadership team was able to take away a shared understanding that that in alignment with central offices was critical for an equitable environment for all students in which a quote from the book resonated with all times related to developing sustainable leadership capacity reporters we need to we need to develop sustainable leadership capacity that enables school cultures to thrive despite challenges including the trans transition of leadership that's especially our district which is very small has a small leadership team and we're all probably closer to retirement than uh we are in the end for them from here the plan is for them to seek systematic changes to our districts over the next three to five years including one expansion of kickball programming computer science two

052changes in teaching and learning practices that align directly to the grading needs of our student population community and three opportunities for a greater number of students particularly those who follow us in the most compromised category access to honors and advanced placement courses in the middle of high school these action steps directly connect to goal 2a of a different five-year improvement plan in which we have staged inclusive practices work with building principles on identified areas of equity and development action planning improvement as part of the equity goal the superintendent also hired fresh consultants dr nigel rightly and dr chris scales who from teachers21 to lead the administrative team for series of exercises and expanding the key principles of equity as outlined in the book into a more realistic understanding of the current condition of the burlin

053boylston school district at the first meeting the superintendent described the goal of the superintendent and the leadership team to be increasing educational equity and adjusting the superintendent and emphasized that not only was secretly the basis for success that had schools but they intended to create a long-lasting culture of equity that would be sustained in the schools in the central office moving forward again if you notice since you know the last four paragraphs often related to building capacities in schools to make sure that this this effort this equity effort is long-lasting and and sort of lives us as administrators in this district during the first session the team focused on adult social emotional competency breaking down the meaning of educational equity the consultants also led the team through the beginnings of the databasing process using the

054index of 2019 and closing the session a team defined equally in our school business providing opportunities and answers for all students being raising achievement narrow achievement gap by social economic level of gender disability and racial ethnicity and c getting to a place of non-predictability educated with non-teaching shareholding student outcomes based on the limitations received within these specific student identified groups due to the lateness of the stocks the sun start date of its goal and as a result of pandemic the superintendent and leadership team will continue to work teachers 21 through the summer of 2021 with the additional meetings and may june and foreign also speaks to the um these conferences carol and i invited along with with our consultants to participate in an activity and an equity panel nass conference this year and we probably

055have one school committee member on that we're not going to tell the person who it is yet but we probably don't have one we'll have to be a little more involved in our uh our work um and at first we thought well you know we just started this work what what do we have to offer and the answer is a lot of districts that have um who look like us demographically and social economically and haven't started this work because they don't necessarily see a need for it so really the workshop would be just to talk to districts like us who might not have started they might want to start don't know where to start and just for us to go through the process we you so again we're hoping that happens they have submitted their

056proposal for us to do that and also you know just just ironically about a month ago students from group students three students from high school seniors emailed us and wanted to have a meeting with myself and carol we have some two principals um from the high school and two teachers to talk about effort and some of the inactivities that they believe they've experienced in their time in school and uh it's unfortunately the seniors and so you know we talked about what their next step would be to not leave all those years on table to actually be able to do something um so they're going to meet with the two teachers who obviously live that they trusted them and um so they're going to work with those two teachers and talk through some of these issues

057but also there are other groups in the school who are doing sort of similar work who have similar interests and they're going to work with them to try to kind of have a unified message and hopefully next year we can get those groups involved which is what we intended to do i had no idea than you do which is good so when we move into next year we'll finish up on administrative stuff this summer next year try to move this goal into the school and involve students and student groups and the teachers you know we've at least got two teachers who run that fall who who want focus in this area probably having any chances so far so that's um that's goal number one we've got a lot of work done we think despite a

058late stop and so we're looking forward to the summer work we'll do a lot of it in a summer retreat let's go number one that is that what happened on april 30th i had a question of what you meant what was the issue in the district that was inequitable leading up to a great focus um you know there wasn't really there wasn't really anything stuck out except that you know we know you know we know just from going to school and um i guess i had anything enough observations in the school but the school is really not much different from others than that um you know there were little things having the kids sitting alone things like that you know so we always wanted a client you know why is the student sitting over here

059well we bought these kn 95 because they're really good but you can't read that so i should have won one with the hole here so it wasn't anything mike but except just observations that i made when i walked through the school that you know these are things i've always wanted about and you know then you're the superintendent you're like okay now i can do something hard or just maybe there's nothing to do anything about it but i suspect it is because we made up i made those observations kids sitting alone or just just those kind of things you would think as normal and then these students now i don't know i don't know what they had written now man i said go to go to the teacher first and talk to them but they did

060say things like you know just we don't know if i don't know what that means and i don't know but i don't take the bosses in so uh so when we started the goal it was just that to just see you know just see as we move forward i suspect as much we get kids involved with teachers involved that will hear what they one was [Music] was there actually something calling that students plumbing or from accessing the honors classes those are two things well there were always this equity like what specifically is school you know a grade from the previous course and then uh recommendations from the teacher now i know in the last since probably 2008 there was and then another one in 2012 2003 from 2013 i remember was funded by the state

061to get more students into into weight gain and they the it's always the same thing when they're going to fail well in these two big efforts they've been able to increase another significantly and they didn't fail and then it goes back to this issue of well what success what does it mean to succeed if you didn't get a grade that that you needed to get in that class and i say this as of duty teacher and i say well you know mike you got to see in college kevin i don't know about this you said i really want to take it and say okay so you get it and you don't do great on the test or you get enough to see that might be success for you because maybe getting a c and or

062even indeed in an ap class might be you might have might have worked harder to do that than it would so i'm not saying there is anything wrong but i think we all make some kind of predictions about students um and and you know point fingers at anybody but but it happens i think there are biases you know biases that aren't explicit that we all bring to the table and that's just what we want to explore and yeah at the point thank you just you know this is one of the things when you do the equity more this is one of the things you that we're going to be looking at and in my head i think involved okay i look at ap as from an ap teacher i did that i said you know

063i don't you know better way to uh i'll have a better answer for you just to build up that one you may have answered this so forgive me if you did but one of your pieces of evidence for the school one was to identify specific evidence-based targets from improving equity did you reach that point no we didn't reach that point except just individually we did but we didn't get that to that point talk about non-predictability okay and that each of us had stories in our own head we were sharing with each other okay i know when i was a teacher i did this so i saw this but we didn't apply it to anything that's going on here right now so yeah you know this is a big goal and i thought it was going

064to be and it's a lot more work than i thought it was going to be but yeah i think we all came in with our own idea about what equity is and learned a lot so hopefully next year but i can see this being you know maybe a two-year efficient goal you know five year project okay that's helpful and i'm happy to hear you say that because i think it is a big goal and it's complicated and there's a lot of very subtle factors that that impact equity and it sounds like you're you're planning to do a bit of a deep dive on that and give it the time it takes by may 18 2021 the superintendent was established in memphis no and 12th amendment advisory board representing members of each of these schools the

065purpose of the board would be to provide the superintendent with ongoing support in the form of information feedback ideas and perspectives on areas related to the school district improvement and changes within the community these areas specifically include the program 19 enrollment physical space available in schools growth in the community initiative and concerns related to related to students okay uh practice step one the superintendent will establish inviting you to include staff administrative community members student by november representatives 20. the superintendent established the advisory council by january 2021 to include four parents one community member one belgium administrator two central office administrators and one student represented extra step number two the superintendent said the schedule for the knees no less than three times between november and june the superintendent will maintain an agenda in minutes of the

066meetings um the meeting dates for as follows february 24 march 24th april 28th so we were able to we're going to start on it and we were able to able to meet um goal of getting those meetings done and uh the superintendent will indicate the school committee any act is taken as a result of the recommendations of the [Music] circumstances by january 2021 the superintendent had over one hand was in place except one that was added one additional member that was added in late march and ascended on one meeting what will be with us at the first meeting held on february 24th superintendent to find the purpose of the border serving as an informer and advising capacity to the superintendent of school without all matters related to conditions the contenders also identified two main focus

067areas for the 2021 2020.11 school year to be equity and we entered 2.0 as it relates to full entry of students into the school since the close of school 2019 and march 2012 at the march 24th meeting the superintendent updated the quarter offensive learning house that was mitigated uh in the fall of classic grand finals institute the superintendent also indicated that social emotional learning would be a high priority vote upon a student's in the spring and again in the fall of and working towards actual steps from the district contenders to move forward with computer science pathways in the first stage of the firing position of internships coordinated in our mobile phone in june and the april 28 2021 meeting superintendent gave an update on the perfectly laid the school closure that took place on april

06816 and also discussed public related issues such as contact tracing quarantining protocols revised quarantine guidance and potential coded testing for the fall which i'll also talk about in june uh it will be briefly focused on the importance of communication and respect on social media so um you know we get a lot of late start with that um with that group but they they do provide some really good insight three of those members are also on another blog [Music] every monday morning so i think mostly they help us with communication to parents and you know help us with timelines so i'm just giving up one more example we talked about some program tests and possibly some fall i'm not not full tested but i'm targeting testing and you and so to have some some kind of

069testing available for parents that um it's school-based will probably help will be a big help because especially for students who are possibly being foreign they've been a big problem in a short time let's go through nobody has any questions see what towns are account representatives is that right no oh um [Music] um so i guess my concern is that we're going to be fully represented in there as well well we've got 9 we look at the 12 so 12 or less so it's still open basically yeah i mean did you absolutely solicited these numbers didn't you yeah yeah and the way we did it well i would like to on the see council so i hope that you'll do that for the coming year representation um again i guess i would well no well not

070really because yeah there's a different focus on one day i guess i would really encourage you to diversify it on the advisory council and get some perspectives that are needed so that you grow the perspectives that are coming into your space few more people the unfortunate nature of volunteerism in itself such as traditionally just in nature like if he says recommendations came from principles i'm assuming john thompson made more than one recommendation but most likely those individuals right i don't know i think that it doesn't mean that often um and it doesn't have a lot of tasks between meetings so i think that this is very possible to get volunteers here yeah but we'll try and help people step forward it's not but i'm trying to keep going certainly trying certainly we set up quite

071a few we send out quite a few and then we send out and we send it out again it may be partly related to the demands is yeah it's tough to meet the goal if there is do we need a psa please um yeah well it won't be a goal next year but to commit to the advising council it's a good way for me to get information about what's going on i have just one other question about approximately you are sharing information with the community versus the percentage of time you're soliciting ideas and input from the committee to something you're thinking about i don't know so 50. extremely relaxed very open he especially questioned sydney fuller who was a student she gave a lot of great feedback she was extremely helpful and i found that

072a lot of the conversation just was very natural and it was it was a genuine back and forth and the way you run it everybody feels very i i mean i feel like myself but feels very comfortable if you wanted to bring something up that you would you're a very good listener and you're you engage so i don't feel comfortable saying that it's 50 50 that if someone wants to talk and you're always asking questions it's not just presenting it's you're asking questions and a lot of great discussions [Music] you know so do try to ask questions to try to try to get some response because they do have a lot of really a lot of great information sydney does too it doesn't hurt [Music] how fast that should get communications out things like that

073they're not like just there's a superintendent updating on there yeah again i think that they don't realize they have a lot to offer so a lot of times uh i mean i've had things like um it was it was a member of there was a member of the advisor we want to talk about how we're going to mitigate student loans but i don't think they're quite at the point where they they realized that you know they have a lot to offer so it's it's it's a series like 470 that's here's a topic and then asking questions to try to get them to respond and give their like a parent perspective i mean i know this school perspective but you get a parent uh so you're right there's a lot of that so hopefully you know

074that that will change at some point i also feel like our third meeting was our most successful i think there's a comfort level too like i think people don't realize that it's not you necessarily presenting in them it's getting half of being on zoom and seeing yourself and seeing everybody else versus if you are all just together in one room but i felt like they've become more and more of a big conversation as we've gone along so i see that moving forward um different perspectives right yeah and she got like you know right here that's right once you do she could i think that's the other thing is the zoo the whole zoom [Music] so if there's anything going on out there they'll say maybe you need to do this maybe you need to do

075that think about this this is what i'm saying or something like that um uh [Music] but this is uh this one this was not the best yeah um during the 2020 2021 2020 2021 super council continues to be with his method of strengthening his leadership skills and targeting the age as noted in the 2012-2020 evaluation specifically presentation communication and agenda setting ensuring that meeting discussions and topics addressed by the superintendent remain untasked focused and linked to the agenda okay uh superintendent is meant to be focused on the following years and the intention of demonstrating the growth and improvements of first grade engaging the method engaging measured issues related to overnight and regional school business three establishing monthly meetings scheduled by november 2020 uh my mentor is the executive director of mama so um a lot

076of a lot of information from about region of school districts that she's able to share with me especially with communication skills have included this year and whether these communication goals have been met with how they will continue hollywood continue into next year five series self reflections related to the school committee presentations provided by the superintendent to the mentor identifying strengths and areas in the improvement over time so i'm going to read myself inflections then the past year i've taken self reflecting on several aspects of my engagement specifically with the goal including my presentation and communication skills and strengthening the leading agenda more focused and relevant these self-reflections that take place over the six-month period beginning in november 2020 and concluding in april while electric time um engaging this activity has not been extensive enough to

077recognize strategic time i have been able to identify specific behaviors and situations long before tonight in order to determine the next steps i have provided myself reflections over the sequential monthly observation stages based upon participation and leadership in the growing world [Music] do i include too many topics in an effort to have information to be fought out on for the meeting do i get off topic in my presentation should i bring forward only those thoughts that require formal work by the community that is i cannot control there is no formal timeline of discussion individual comments and questions therefore members are given unlimited time to speak either during discussions [Music] mid-cycle self-reflections personal behaviors although i review my presentation prior to meeting i do get off track and tend to go longer than needed i find

078that in an effort to explain my thinking thinking i draw upon other learnings to support my statements in doing so i draw away from the topic at hand and move to sharing watching general information this will list us comments and questions from two community members that may or may not be not related to the actual topic at hand and they hinder them from gathering enough information to make an informed decision the discussion forum while lending itself to an open and transparent dialogue this is not necessarily solving issues of matters of concern and especially beneficial therefore it might be easy to consider reducing implementation of statistical communication to a few people with greater focus and to the information provided and anticipated in anticipation of answering specific questions and moving them all the way situational behaviors the

079current model used has extended meeting times and made the discussions less effective meanings it ranges from one and a half to two out of no synthetic perceptions the pacing of the mean is not set in mind before the opening period of life with the ability to zoom from home while time and gain engagement has occurred in the form of lovely statements read to the community and prefer the comments the results of extended participation and in the moment reactions have led to an increased controlling that that has occurred at times simultaneously that has become both the distraction and hindrance the purpose at hand which is essential which is essential for the school community to meet and discuss and vote upon marriage within their curb we need to resume interesting meetings as soon as possible within a

080safe producer feed that based on discussion with my mentor discussions with the mental health to focus my heaven by reinforcing reinforcing the idea that it is in the end spooky meaning and i only control certain parameters it may be the full attention committee that all topics and related questions are fully explored in public also in a pandemic here does not advise you to make any drastic changes from which benefits are short lived some summary of final reflections both me as it relates to communications very scripturally that has been challenging to me to share to begin as my communication builder quickly more than through general analysis of the school community meetings conducted during the during the period mandate several months i recognize that i get off time entirely too much during meeting presentations i've included i've

081concluded based upon my discussion with my mentor that i do so because i want to share statistics with the community but an informal format that allows a free-flowing conversation to take place i've learned that this is innocent within the structure of the meeting and often consumes valuable time it also feeds into a meeting format less itself or long and drawn out meeting time both for myself for myself and for my administrative leadership team more forward report topics will be brief targeted that's my goal number three and i want to thank all of you who have talked to me about the aspects of my salutations uh you can take a mass breakdown you it's approved i can talk in two minutes oh yeah okay just quickly um i just wanted to give a quick update i

082don't know as you know we closed some closed schools on april 16 the friday friday before vacation so i did get a few emails including things like thank you for making the decisions for us um and so the first question people had was why were there so many students and um the reason basically the reason was that uh we had we didn't have a lot of cases only a couple cases but those students were in school a couple days and um also with the guideline when we came back to school we came back at three feet and because the six foot guidelines were still in place not only did we he hit the economist person who uh has told him we had a three foot person he had a six-foot person home a week [Music]

083plus there was a weekend event so we had to count those students too so it was just a it was just an unfortunate turn of events um and so the other question is we didn't have any issues in berlin but because of the way we scheduled this year we planned on having the last day of school for the teachers to be a professional development day to reflect on the year and stop thinking about um next year and i think carol talked about that in the last meeting and so i just thought it was easier to just keep all of the schools together our schools typically have a high absentee rate ferocities on that day so when i put all that together you've got to just replay the whole day at the end of the day

084so that's why growing another question came up about giving the number of students which we don't do and that's simply it's not illegal but there is a privacy issue early on the family but the students who were involved in the incident um numbers and the other thing is numbers get posted online we haven't been talk to the state and this time we have a case sometimes those levels [Music] the guidance has changed so we don't anticipate that we don't anticipate this is before you get that one kind of i don't know um i'm sure these two did because i got two emails and said they had it on 10 meetings with guidance and they wanted to feel the week before they weren't able to do it because of all everything that's going on in the

085school so i'm just assuming that's really what i started thinking i should just extend this and give them a chance to meet with guys to do everything they have to do so um my guess is at least two dead i don't know i think that's one from full person uh i'm not sure i'm not sure i'd have to look at my emails again um i can't remember but i know they had meetings with the guy i just thought given everything that happened that week in the school there was a lot of stuff going on here for those cases that happened on tuesday tuesday for some time the first basically so i thought just extended the week it doesn't really let's see if i can find that i'm going to send it just to you [Music]

086um [Music] um [Music] it's going to be outside and because we just send them to they sent out apply for graduation stuff it is going to be outside says i'm not going to read it just a couple of quick highlights the usda extended the free meals program which normally is just we're not eligible for so next year we're going to continue our model of offering free meals to all students we get reimbursed pretty close to what we would get if we have students paying and families get a huge benefit of their females so maybe instead of getting 350 for a time we might get 3 41. it's kind of a no-brainer to participate um so i just wanted to communicate that families here about some good news and hopefully it helps us in the food

087service program as well second item is fyi there's no actually needed at this time but pandemics create some challenges for families and uh many are struggling financially jeff and i talked about we have some unpaid balances in the district we talked about this we both felt strongly and did not want to deny access to programs like preschool particularly for uh ish financial issues um non-payments and typically in a normal year we might need to do that um and i talked to a couple families and said that we're not going to do that and we'll look and try to come up with uh some um approach to that might include donations might include making recommendations to write offs and balances um so um i need to check the school committee policy i'm not sure that um

088[Music] i think we might be talking about a few thousand dollars in total and so that's where we are and again i just wanted to share that information and then the last item was just informational as well there was two conflicting figures for the eleven dollars apart for the capital assessment for berlin and lower members that was in the chat is correct i just wanted to put this in the record and they want to see a school community certainly it comes out to our budget so we voted as presented last time i just want to have clarification christian has been so refreshing to come to work every day now and talk about teaching and learning and and to have teachers back and that's our focus for the day and not covet i wanted to mention

089in my reports and in particular the elementary literacy review that's really a subcommittee of a larger group that we had um before holders began that was looking at the big picture of literacy pre-k through 12. um and during that time we had identified gaps and tonics in particular so we were able to bring in the foundation for the early grades um building up the third grade to have that program in place and it's been working very well for students um looking at the data from that but we feel confident that that would close at this very economics but the literacy of this particular group of elementary teachers has been thorough and thoughtful in their work and speaking about equity they're looking at the looking at biasing from the material they're looking at doing stereotypes six

090of them after school and the teachers said to me today can we meet the person that you could really feel this material again so i wanted to commend that group um that ties into two other pieces i wanted to mention the grants that we've received recently the first one is around literacy we we had to submit karen knights until 2020 um plans based on the senior opportunity act that was a law that's in place that asks districts to submit a three-year plan that's really specified by dsc in the state um so we'll be doing that in 2022 it focuses on areas that we need to improve on that we've identified we wanted to get one for every teacher put in for that grant and we were invited actually to apply for the competitive grant we

091were able to get sixty thousand dollars so that was the big news um the other one i want to mention we're talking about equity it's a digital literacy now brand it's a small amount of money but it's part of a bigger picture before about the work we're doing around computer science and each of these smaller brands are enabling us to bring teachers in for workshops for trainings painful subs while i do that in school and then enabling them to go out to trainings to to learn to teach computer science and for the echo of part of that this it's not just is some students earlier as far as all students would experience opportunities to take control of science we have that now in tenth grade but also those are really the two highlights congratulations thank

092you i just wanted to close the loop a little bit i had mentioned about the tiered focus monitoring review with the old cpr it's done by the state and the educational stability review which is our foster care homeless military family for you um the school we did a lot of work on policies to get us back up to date and i just we finally got the official findings that you find in both areas so i just wanted to kind of close the loop on all of that um the berlin pre-k i also wanted to mention i think some of the community members that have been on this for a while they remember that we tend to go um with one preschool being quite large and then we kind of switched to the other preschool it's

093never consistently one preschool that's bigger than the other we're seeing an increase in berlin in our special ed students especially uh so we didn't have a choice we needed to add another section for next year so that we have enough spaces for our special education students so we also have been advertising and putting up newsletters that we're looking for in more couple of years we have some of the triple slots still but we're still looking for more different peers so if you know people spread the word so they they can apply at the school um there's no continuation um and i just i wanted to share a little piece of the update on the five-year plan and thank everybody for your support with increasing our especially coordinator the elementary level back to a full-time position

094we had to cut it for budget reasons a few years back and it's been a struggle and each year we put it back in the budget and end up cutting it because of other issues so we're happy that it stayed in the budget this year and we've been interviewing this week and we had some fantastic candidates so we're very excited so that's it if anybody has any questions over the um we were able to install at each of the buildings outdoor access points so much of the ones that are in here in the auditorium but basically made for outdoor taking all the weather in new england um it went well um crew was in here for three days um got the uh ap's up in the real test and um i'm happy that they actually

095had a better rate than we thought again these are primarily we still have although most of our kids are back we still do have remote kids and so as the weather gets better and we're hoping teachers will be able to get their kids outdoors a little bit you'll still have to be able to connect to those kids at home so these outdoor access points will allow for that to happen great are we are you utilizing you know can you give enough have you gotten how are you doing so we will um again the reason we only put up to an each building um i would rather again for our reimbursement rates about 20 percent so and that would be reimbursable with putting up more access points so before we really figure out what part of

096um you know for all of our internet access um for the switches that we replaced recently and again all of what's hanging in here we redid the wireless because that's really great so it was all again like only 60 cents on the dollar a new um hardware layer like that um which we felt that trying to plan for that this year um wasn't going to be a good idea so going forward you know we'll have a we'll have a probably again another big project similar to what we did with uh okay superintendent evaluation uh just an update on a couple things um that self-assessment again has two functions the first is to help committee members reflect on the functioning of the school committee prior to assessing the superintendent to avoid completing our own performance with

097his performance and the second function is to inform our goal setting for call so lori and i will be writing the report to bring to the committee in september as we start to think about 2022 goals so we're going to let that land and work on the report you know any questions about the self-assessment okay and now we're entering the superintendent's evaluation phase these are due back may 14th so 10 days or before please contact lori or me if any questions come up about that forum which you know can be confusing or if you need any just help understanding what we're going to do um one thing i do want to point out is that the goal when jeff went over to his goals tonight the numbers that he had on his report are different

098they're in a different order than they are so don't just jump from number to number read what the goal is and make sure you're aligning his report lori and i will work on compiling the results and bringing you a report for what you make um angela do you expect to be completing that evaluation do you know this is your last name uh yes um awesome thank you so much for doing that that's hard to do on the way out all right i think that's it anybody any questions about the evaluation thank you again for all the hard work make it easy on us obviously with my goal doing officer reorganization next meeting we'll be appointing a new superintendent evaluation subcommittee along with those ideas um did send out an email um that would be something

099i think is a good idea obviously not this year possibly uh i feel like i'm talking to i'm looking to have the school community do um its own fundraising to do an event that all of us would participate in and still raise money and it's not just about raising money it's also putting our faces out there you know kind of normal people and that you know we don't just sit at these meetings bring all the communities together which i know a lot of these type of fundraisers do to begin with um pretty tonight what i think we should do is obviously the year is coming to an end yeah perspective or you know probably leading into the next year maybe wrapped around something around the beginning of the year is um because i think this

100can wrap around a goal that we may have next year based on just a people review of the self-assessment results i think this can tie in nicely with a split mini gold and just good idea no so actually i'm going to update so i was going to meet with mike and discuss the onboarding process ask for his feedback recommendations different things like that and i'm going to use that with julie as well because i you know with angela i was she really streamlined it and then i added into some different things and then mike's really helped me along the way to remember things it's really a word for progress angela all um it's just a standard person so um so i'm still working any other updates there okay item number eight uh okay so i

101have items in the um retirement um the first is a first read for the committee about that described last meeting about moving the awards committee into a community based model overseen by the administrator and the document that you can publish this describes that in more detail like the purpose of doing that so since it's a first read i just wanted to ask if there are questions [Music] is and i realized you did that she did not um but that's i think that the feeling from the schools is that the way that it presented that would be very just usually that cumbersome through guidance to administrative industries so i think it's gonna have to happen and i don't know exactly how they do it but with the initial conversation with diane that the process as it's

102laid out would become some preventative i guess we have to take that back i almost feel like do you think it's possible to do it the way you did this spring made sure that there was a self-community and then interpretation of i think in in that scenario it's just a legal implication really important that it still operates as a subcommittee of the school committee if it's a subcommittee of the school committee so it's just a matter of whether it solves the issue that we're trying to solve just to protect the privacy of more similar to what we do for marion which is really just a little label behind the scenes the teachers choose who gets that mover the teacher delivers yeah i'll look into it the second item is uh recommendations of our committee members

103for those of you awards and so first i want to thank carol young and rich mariani they're um committed members very thorough and fair and they once again volunteered and have indicated interesting continuing there the recommendations are in the report so that's a vote tonight to provided a demographic description of the applicants and their final recommendation is to award a total of 16 to 14 eligible applicants three awards for 525. thank you very much okay what questions there is often now um i did reach out to the accountant at um the term count for berlin she was told to find out several years you've been so i guess what i'm asking is either this meeting or your june a member to take care of it's usually given to a verbal student with someone that is

104a volunteer within that has uh and i please have a motion to approve the marion hoffman award to uh of this country so um okay uh any other questions comments okay uh item number one could i please have a motion to approve the moses retalia scholarship recipient awards as presented thank you very much question deliberations all those approved all right proposed like she said i'm sorry i'm too busy some reason we might have questions on i just want to make sure we get in the habit of doing the appropriate way um could i please have a motion to approve the early retirement uh incentive bill good mood thank you very much questions around this so this still hasn't been passed it's still in the committee so this is both if we approve it um it's

105really just that it should pass in the legislature then because i want to take advantage of pen okay correct let me give you some information that was given to me from you today just to kind of give you an idea i don't know who it was but asked tara great response uh meeting you only got 32 completed surveys uh which really isn't a great barometer the guess is it's probably because it's a question that may not be in the wheelhouse of the remainder of those people so but anyways uh 32 surveys um out of the 32 that answered 15 claimed they would be eligible to retire early under the bill if approved out of those 15 they said they would be interested five said they might be interested and two said they would not be

106and so i guess there's a an element in this bill that says forget what it's called the local district have to pay if they can't replace those positions correct jeff was that right and um you shouldn't worry about that more about them people saying they might retire yeah that's a bigger distribution is that they use this cut position so they're just so immediate food because that's really that's included by the fda to prevent districts from using it as a way to cut staff so i guess right this is done at the at the local level so if one and if it passes school committees will have to approve it educators in that district take advantage of it also might have been changed in the legislative process i don't know i just looked at it today

107online to kind of where it respect to that medium public service so like you know i don't think there is i mean it was presented to us the first read last month um my suggestion as chair would be that we we do vote on it tonight um if there is concerns about why we're voting right now we can always um there's always the option of not approving tonight and then being pre-brought back up from another game you know after it's after it's passed um i don't know if timing makes any difference if it gets we've already done it tonight and uh tomorrow also it's approved i don't know what time of the gap means um any financial anything you have from a financial perspective is there any risks rewards versus i would say if you

108financially like just said um you're not one of those districts like this huge number of classrooms and uh we're going to look to a position where we're leaning in a small district so financially no though if the bill changes um you might think about hoping that you know assuming there's yeah i don't know where it is in the legislative process but the way it's presented now it's not going to have any funding to impact to us at all other than a little bit of savings and the replacement costs of new teachers so it potentially is a savings yeah but it does you know have some positions to go [Music] from um [Music] accepted any okay item number three um please have a motion to approve the school committee meeting dates for the 2021 2022 school

109year hi crouchers thank you both uh questions discussion raise the question of whether the february [Music] um committee dates and meeting days and we know the topic we'll continue to talk about before we depart um we could amend it now and change the february date or we can leave as is and if there's conflicts as we as we move along always particular issue i would vote that we uh i would and i would make fortune that we vote on the agenda as it stated today tuesday nights is it always been tuesday nights uh no actually it used to be wednesday nights and when i joined i had a concept from wednesday so they changed the day so it's been tuesdays does anybody have any is there any inclination from anyone other than myself that it's

110a change i don't want to be able to change [Laughter] [Music] my children get older older and everything i have quite a few more contracts on tuesday nights now than i did that i did previously so i'm proposing the idea of monday nights most town meetings what i would do is try to position to look at the town's select board meetings so you know i don't want to have two major right yeah we'll be seeing uh we'll be seeing a conflict there we have two major meetings um you know fighting for public attendance yeah i think it's it seems like such a small thing to discuss but it's really not right because our goal of the committee is to encourage more volunteers and more people to do these things and you know a lot of

111them are parents and folks and you know when we come up to an election standpoint so it is something that we do need to be cognizant of because you know four years ago when i started this had i had the same amount of conflicts on the tuesday night someone like myself may not have volunteered i don't know if that's the case but um so so i need to just understand because this voted the meeting dates so are you we did not go along yet oh i thought we just did no i did stopped it before i started into it but i meant to bring this up before i did we have not i would propose that we move our meeting dates well let me ask jeff in the crystal yes administration too as well this

112doesn't just impact school committee members i'd like to get the feedback from the administration as well they see a major conflict impact of obviously there'll be a change in the beginning but we're talking about next year right so the schedule dates will stay or change into monday nights you know moving forward so i don't understand how you're thinking about the conflict with the select board meetings because that's the conflict every single monday night yeah um i don't know i'm gonna i mean is there enough is there enough interest in the community to potentially move the date off tuesday i'll eventually um make amendments to move this post to our to our dude meeting as well uh we'll add some more i can put into it and i'll do some more research on people's towns and

113meetings and that sort of stuff okay i'll make a motion for a second [Music] questions concerns all those in favor aye aye opposed please have a motion to approve the updated people personnel director job description look questions hearing i know let's prove all those in favor aye opposed okay and number six could i please have a motion to approve the elementary math coach coordinated job description okay questions hearing none all those in favor opposed that please have motion to approve the guidance secretary registrar job description of course good motion questions all those all those papers please have a motion to approve policy vda school committee organizational meeting review and revisions questions to approve the policy manual review plan good luck okay uh last thing the school committee uh and the reason why i was saying

114we're gonna get to this and talk about this um it's our june 8th meeting right we're scheduled to do uh reorganization of officers we have superintendent evaluation and stuff like that mr chochman is not able to make it to that meeting and i actually potentially have a conflict as well which kind of generated this discussion so um i am proposing that we potentially move that particular meeting because i think um it's important for i think it's for every you know committee member to be involved in those items superintendent evaluation as well as reorganization of officers um i know people i don't like this like monday nights but i was going to propose the following monday night the 14th maybe a little test to see how they're like monday nights yeah i know what he's saying

115no that's a busy thing is there anybody opposed to moving our journey meeting to the monday night i didn't want to push it back too far because jeff's evaluation june 14. [Music] would you prefer a different [Music] [Laughter] wow picture mean at this point nobody's still on that thing anymore all right please have a motion to close any other comments before we close them audrey said thank you oh okay um okay could i uh um laurie make sure julie knows that the meeting they changed yes um all right i please have a motion to adjourn no food all right second individual all in favor aye aye thank you very much [Music]