001good evening everyone welcome to the august 18th meeting of the dartmouth school committee equality and diversity subcommittee meeting per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of open meeting law glc 30a section 20 and the legislature's extension of that executive order the public will not be allowed to physically access this diversity and equality committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at www.youtube.com dhs tv media the school committee reserves the right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as is practicable um so i looked i have some notes about what open meeting law says this new remote um uh dr gifford we it says we should record in the notes that all members are um attending remotely um and we will start
002with a roll call to open the meeting so you can just say yes or present when i call your name uh mr hayes president mr tebow president miss bloom present ms chamberlain present miss missari present uh miss murphy [Music] present uh miss scott yes uh ms amaral here um i am also here i am present um miss pamphiel is not here and miss walker is not here all right so um we just have a few things on the agenda the first is a presentation in support of the mascot um i forged you all an email from mr ventura and mr pereira on august 1st after the school committee met to decide to not allow public access to meetings i sent them an email to invite them to present to our committee i did not hear
003back from them and so on august 9th i followed up to them with them to see if i could uh if i could get any information from them i went out of town on vacation so i asked ms genther to follow up with them but because we had to post the agenda um and i had not yet heard back from them i asked ms genther to put that on the agenda so that if they decided to come we would have publicly posted that on the 11th um after i left for vacation um they responded stating that they will not be able to attend due to short notice um they said they are open to presenting at future meetings um and they as you see from their email um they asked they referenced the email from
004miss andrews mathias who's the chair of the wampanoag tribe that the tribe be engaged and further discussions they recommended that they the tribe should consult with us first and that's sort of what the end of their email notes i also forwarded you all today you should have received i got an email from the it was the national congress of american indians also asking to provide testimony to the committee in opposition to the mascot i would also like to note for the record that the other federally recognized tribe in massachusetts the mash p wampanoag have submitted a letter to the state legislature and it is publicly posted in opposition to the use of native mascots all right so i want to sort of make be clear about the full range of sort of opinion here um
005i apologize for that the presentation you're not we're not able to do that tonight but i did want us to meet um and to have a discussion um about how to move forward um one of the things i think i want to highlight um while i suspect that the miss anders and i disagree on the mascot issues um i do agree with her on the issue that and maybe i think this is a way forward for the committee is for us to have a discussion about um how we engage with our native neighbors around education around educating the community not just historical but also contemporary and maybe that might be something that this committee can focus on i also know you probably all saw that the select board asked for also for public input again
006at the last school committee meeting given sort of the rate of transmission in the community um we did not open our um our meetings to the public so they're not open to the public yet um we could proceed with a uh virtual public comment um if someone would like to volunteer to put that together and moderate that that's one way forward alternatively we can sort of maybe move forward on some educational issues working with tribal partners um you know while we wait to we have the ability to have some sort of public comment or perhaps there are other options so what i wanted to do was to sort of open it up again this is really the only way we can have discussions about how to move forward sometimes it would be nicer to be
007able to do it via email so we wouldn't all have to give up you know sometime um in our in our summer but we have to comply with open meeting law so i just want to sort of turn it over to you all and hear um maybe what your thoughts and ideas are about how we might sort of move forward on the mascot issues working with tribal partners other things that we might be able to do uh miss amarillo um i i'm leaning toward what you're saying in terms of like supporting in the meantime partnering in meeting with and and our tribal partners i think that would be um certainly rich and meaningful and important um so that's my my thought miss murphy so i do have a couple of questions um i have some
008ideas too which i i'd like to talk about tonight with this extra time but i'm wondering if we can get some clarity or maybe talk about the lack of clarity around just this idea of the select word now weighing in excuse me um and like whose jurisdiction this whole decision this is completely and holy and unambiguously the jurisdiction of the school committee um i've had conversations with masc about this this is the massachusetts association of school committees and they have been unambiguous about this this is the school committee's purview so the select board can hold hearings they can they can do what they want they're the select board um but um the decision about this rests with the school committee okay thank you all right so did you have other things you wanted to share
009with us ms murphy um yeah i've actually i'm coming to the end of my vacation so i've been thinking about this more as i'm kind of easing back in into work and what's ahead and i will say this so after the last meeting um i think right at the start of the july meeting i actually received the the letters that were sent because i there was some confusion in those of us who aren't school employees didn't get them right away um so i i spent some time really going through particularly miss andrews maltese's letter from the wampanoag and i i have to say that i i really found that letter to have deep within it a lot of i think it was perceived in the media let's say as like the aquina tribal leaders want
010to keep the the mascot in dartmouth and well i guess that's maybe a quick read i found that there was a lot in there um about really talking about we are concerned about erasure as we've heard right we don't if if this is all we've got in dartmouth we don't want to get rid of it and i've been thinking so much about that over the course of the last month because that is really sad and and really true in in so many ways and i think that if we can focus and if we have to pivot here and say we're we're not we're going to put our public comment on hold while we figure out how to do it online perhaps what can we be doing in the meantime and i think that we can
011be thinking about those ideas and those potential collaborations now whether we're voting yay or nay on on keeping the current mascot or not and a couple of the thing of things that i've come up with again and i think we should invite people to the table i it was great to just see this letter come in from the ncai that they would like to speak to us again i would like to see us make sure that they understand that we can't just do that on the on the last day because of all this public meeting stuff i feel bad when that those kind of things happen but what can we be doing now right to move forward and say we're not sure where we're going um with the ultimate decision but how can we actually
012work to bring more of wampanoag culture and history into our community um i do have ideas on that i don't know if other people want to talk or you want me to go through my my list of things or how we want to do that well kevin if it's okay with the committee given that you've thinking been thinking about it maybe it would be good for you to share some of those ideas with us and then we can um we can discuss those ideas add some of our own and and think about how to how to move forward with that okay so again keeping in mind the the letter that we received and also the the letter that came from mr pereira and mr andrews and mr ventura i believe where they they were talking
013also about not wanting erasure and they kind of pushed back a little bit on some of the things that we heard from uh dr davis delano two months ago right and saying well we can't educate the public and and she said it's hard to educate the public and they said well of course we can and so because i am not a curriculum expert but i do know a little bit more about the challenges of educating the public and getting parents to show up at things that are not mandatory um i think that we have to think creatively about how to do that and i think that we can do it but i think that it is not let's host an information night and see who comes up who who shows up to learn about this
014but how can we really say we regardless of the decision that is made on the current mascot we as a school department and a community in dartmouth care about educating and informing our community about the the history of these these lands and the culture that was indigenous right so one of the things that i thought about was again of course how we bring people together as we've talked about and actually have some type of advisory committee or roundtable or something where we can get those those voices in the mix to actually start to think about doing the work um the first thing that i came up with is i i know myself personally i need a lot more education and i would think others share in this in terms of talking about land acknowledgements when
015we hear people do land acknowledgements and what that means um but if we think about how we get tribal indigenous leaders to explain to us and and help advise us let's let's tell them what we're thinking and let them you know give some feedback how do we appropriately acknowledge the the lands in which we we are now operating so that's one thing and i think that we could do that effectively when we have public events if the nationalism is being played maybe that's the the distinction of how we decide when we're going to do this maybe it's something that actually gets posted in the in the schools in a written form i don't know i do know that there are lots of people that know a lot more about this so that's one thing um
016the next thing is that again because that's getting people the information when they're already at something else right we know that people come to the band competitions they come to the sporting events they come to honor society they come to anything in this school so we have to meet them where they are another idea that i had is talking about um actual physical space for kind of dedicated wampanoag history and current day culture things and again thinking in terms of our space is limited obviously our funds are limited but i do think we can fundraise for these things but we have spaces where the public tends to come in each of our schools and we all know i think if we think about that it's around music the arts and sports and our elementary schools
017and our middle school get a lot of use in the evenings for dyaa d gal all that kind of stuff this is where people are in our lobbies they're they're a captive audience so to speak in terms of waiting for the next thing to happen right so if we were to say that one of the things that we wanted to do was let's put up some boards or take some boards or whatever that are there and say we're going to have a rotating sort of display of history current culture different types of things that are put together by students at different schools of different ages the high school diversity and equity club partnerships with plymouth and patuxent whatever the case may be but we're actually saying like we're going to do this and we're going
018to prioritize it and we're going to do it well and we're going to have them printed and they can be sort of like a rotating museum type display so what's at quinn for for two months might rotate to dimelo school the next two months and so we we build these materials and then we can use them effectively and get get the word out get the public seeing them when they come into schools and then the other idea i had of course is our stadium is our biggest venue um it is outside and it is where a lot of the largest you know traffic moves through um with sports and band etc so um we could think about putting together some type of more like the museum displays that you see outside that you kind of
019walk by that kind of give us i don't know what this would be a history of of the lands the settlement of dartmouth by white people after that the the changes in the the mascot and the representation over time i know there was some mention in some of the letters too about giving proper credit to mr andrews for his design of this logo and these types of things we would have to do this in in partnership with different voices but to say here's a physical representation of our commitment to wanting this information to be out in in the public so we're talking about it as land acknowledgements and we're also encouraging you then to to look at this this history when you visit the stadium once or another time or um whatever like that so
020so those are kind of the ways that i think we can start to think about if we want to have a conversation maybe with um tribal representatives and other community members what's the starting point like what are we even talking about trying to do and i do think public education is super important because yes the curriculum stuff is super important on a whole different level but that's there are a lot of moving pieces to that and we're still only getting the students we're not getting the rest of the community which i do think is important um so that that's kind of the the basics of what i had thought about so far so i think just to sort of highlight i think common elements through all this is that there's opportunities i think not just
021for student learning but also for community learning because i think some of the stuff that you're talking about we're already doing some of this stuff throughout our curriculum right and so part of it might be thinking about well as we're doing that in our curriculum how do we create assignments artifacts that could then be also used to um to educate the public um which i think is you know it sort of doubles the effect of that and as an educator i'm also always a fan of you know engaged learning where students can do something and then they can see that it has a real world impact right like if you're a kid and you make a poster board and people are standing around and talking about it that's really cool like you learned that you
022know words matter and the things that you say and do can have an impact um so it sounds like what you're suggesting and you have several examples of this is you know sort of working with the tribes and then figuring out ways to create these things maybe in our schools whatever they may be a stadium display land acknowledgement a public displays that we could then write educate the community with so building that connection in multiple ways thoughts i i hate to put this on mr tebo but i always hear stuff like this and i think wow these would be cool sort of some of these cool projects for something like i don't know if you could integrate it into an ap capstone or something like that or an internship project or something like that for
023some of the some of the high school kids or or maybe it's something a club takes on but that might be something that we could explore right some independent learning projects for high school students who are capable of doing this sort of work yeah so i think there's a lot of different ways it can be done at the high school certainly independent uh individual students can can make it part of their you know their research but we have a number of clubs and miss uh chamberlain um advises one of them the multicultural club but there's a number of clubs that can certainly you know there's no um shortage of bulletin boards at the high school um it's actually one of the things i i don't like because there's so many it's it's impossible to maintain
024them all and so an empty bulletin board looks lousy right um but we certainly have a number of clubs uh that are dedicated to this type of of work that could certainly um take on you know um a rotating display as as was kind of explained right um so you know i mr pirati just chimed in too that right this is something that his students could work on i know they do a lot of amazing video projects um podcasting blogging um and that you know you put that up on youtube and that could be accessible to a lot of people um so i i think there's a lot of ways that we can sort of integrate this into the our curriculum and our learning experience i guess so i like that idea um you know
025miss amaral you said you sort of like that idea of moving forward on some of these issues do do we think that's how what we want to start working on and then i guess the other question would be sort of how would we do this right so there's some complications there's some limitations right on all of us meeting because we have regular jobs and it's slow because we can't do it all the time and so the question is whether it would make more sense would it make sense for us to do this and to invite or would it make sense to you know i think this would have to go to the school committee probably um to ask the administration right to maybe create some sort of group and i mean i'm happy to sit
026on it with the actual implementation would have to be on this a little bit on the school side if we're involving students um dr gifford maybe i might ask you some of your thoughts about that well to be honest i'm overwhelmed at the moment i think we'd want to wait right like until school has started we're going a little bit we see how the year is going before we pick this up for sure um but once the train has started leaving the station maybe do you think that might be something yeah um we do follow the standards and we do have many grade levels that incorporate various studies on the native americans already so i think a starting point is more to analyze that a little bit and when you were speaking about some of
027these things my thinking was it's more than the school department once again it's a community effort like what about the public libraries if you're thinking of moving you know rotating museums and stuff um i really hesitate to really get hugely in depth with some of this starting the school year because to be frank i'm the last week i'm in that inundated with covid response protocols and meeting with jesse and it's really pretty overwhelming right now and you know i don't i don't want to shortchange the topic but i think it's it's better to analyze what the curriculum is including already um and how we might move forward with that before we and again maybe some of the community uh groups might want to take up some of that cause as well because it's a great
028class let's just put more on new people again becomes a little bit much to be honest the other question is i know we've had other groups that have offered to sort of um help with this effort um i know dr hall who heads the new bedford naacp um you know the dartmouth democratic town committee has reached out so another thing we could do is we could ask for volunteers to work with some of the tribes to help us to help create that sort of stuff at least as a short-term start um that's another way that we might do this um i do know right having i don't even get half the number of emails probably that you get dr gifford or mr tebow about the start of the school year but i'm getting a lot
029of emails just as a school committee member um so that that is a challenge but we could reach out to some partners about working with local tribes and helping to create some of the sort of things that that miss murphy has talked about to start if we want to make some progress in this early in the fall also if you you know if you want to expand beyond um native americans etc just as an aside i have had a conversation with um it must be dr lasalle i imagine um he we we're meeting in in september via zoom early september um i asked him you know through the naacp to be part of the group that gives us feedback on the sr3 grants as we needed to reach out to civic you know the organization
030civil rights organization so might be able to mention something about it at that point too about because again expanding beyond the native american group if we're thinking of diversity and um all of it just enough right so i think though right to start right the focus would be on sort of native native history right and and at the that aspect that ms murphy talked about educating the public that sort of dual role um i'm wondering if um i'm trying to think if anybody has other ideas or thoughts please feel free to jump in miss amarillo um nothing really new but i just wanted to say that um you know after after reading you know the news and reading what you know the media you know locally kind of reported on it and then hearing that
031i guess on monday we'll receive a letter as a school committee from the select board i felt a little bit like i was in a soap opera right i'm looking through a glass like that's not really what's happening that's not really but i had a wonderful conversation with jacob ventura today who had been trying to get in touch with me but life is crazy and uh it was quite reassuring because a lot of the stuff that you talk about elizabeth we talked about um and it was nice to hear that don't believe all you need and that there's some humanity in this and that there's a lot of common ground where we can come at it from a certain point and kind of i mean that's beautiful um so it was really reassuring to hear
032and i'm excited about your ideas and i just um you know i don't know where we're going with this and and i think it needs to go somewhere irregardless regardless of what you know happens um whether the state comes and tells us we need to change it before we get to it because clearly we've got a lot of covet stuff going on on the onset of getting into school um but i just wanted to share that because you know you you often kind of think a certain thing and then when you talk to the people and you hear there is a lot of common ground and we can work with that right that's a really great place to start so that's it i do think this is the area of common ground that we all
033agree that we want to sort of honor native history native culture right and our partnership and so working on sort of that education is the the way to do this so i think the really sort of there's a couple of complicating factors right now right um probably the last time we met we were all like it's going to be a normal fall it's great we can work on this and it's kind of gone like this right since our last meeting and so that does complicate what we're doing in part because i know on our campus in the schools we're all overwhelmed with the logistics of getting school open and schools open safely and that has to be our number one priority and i don't want to take away the focus from our administrators or our
034teachers our staff about you know to do this because that's what we've got to focus on first so that complicates this a little the other thing that's sort of really complicating is okay their bandwidth is all really taken up now we could do work in this group right but were sort of bound by open meeting law and that's not to say that i don't want people to be involved in the process or aware of it but it means that in normal situations you have back and forth conversations right you pick up the phone you talk to someone you bounce a few emails off of each other we can't do any of that we can only work together as a group so i guess the question is whether we ask someone else who might not be
035bound by open meeting law to do some of this work with our tribal partners to create some of the things that we might put in schools like ms murphy talked about and to present them to us or whether we take a pause for a month or so while at least at least a month while we get up and running and figure that out i think that's because i don't think we can do this work in this committee maybe we can i don't know i'm sort of thinking out loud as we go through this right miss amaral one thing that just came to mind that i'm wondering and it might be available but our uh the google drive where we were sort of uploading and we talked about making that um accessible to the public for
036viewing and to read through some of the things that we've compiled there is that something that we that is available for for folks is there a link um for folks it is on my list of things to do okay no no i have not gotten to that dude yes mr gallashaw um you did mention that to me it is something i was looking to obviously we could have a google drive for us this group excuse me but for the public as well um that's something i've gotta help with yeah and i've gotta i've gotta i haven't reached out to mr galashaw because i've gotta if we're gonna make it available to the public it's gotta be clean and they have to understand what stuff is and i just haven't had the time to get to
037that um it is on my list um i'm i'm wondering um from go ahead and berlin i'm on vacation i i can do that i'll do that i'll clean it up and you can look at it and we'll move that along fabulous mr chamberlain thank you miss murphy ms chamberlain um i mean i feel like we got this letter today from the national council and we also got the letter from um the woman on martha's vineyard i mean does anybody besides me wanna i feel like we need to be including some indigenous voices in our conversation here and that's been said to us on a number of occasions that we need to be including them and we still aren't so i get that you know making whatever presentations or whatever for school sounds a little
038bit overwhelming but if we could just try to schedule some people for our next meeting i don't think that would take a huge amount of time on our part so i i don't disagree and i think we have two people who are willing to present to us i'm going to say this not as chair but sort of personally outside of my role as this um there's a division in the native community about speaking out on these issues right so on the one hand um there are native members tribal members who believe it is offensive to ask them to come present to us as to whether a mascot that they feel is offensive should be removed right and so this creates some challenges in creating public input because those people who find it offensive are typically
039less willing to present because it's kind of degrading to come and say yes that thing is offensive to me and could you please do something about it so to miss delano's point right those tribal members are willing to be involved and speak when the decision is eminent right and so my concern is in how we find this balance that if we say we have input now it favors some positions over others and i'm not sure how to rectify that i don't really know but that's a concern i have personally mr tebow he's working on it sorry about that yeah i had shrunk on the screen there and i couldn't find the new button um so to your point about when a decision is imminent um that's when some some groups will be willing to speak
040um to us i i think maybe that's what this committee this subcommittee could do is to establish a timeline because i i we were expecting a presentation today and i understand and respect you know communication can can be a challenge and that's fine but if if we allow ourselves to continue to be delayed and not progress we'll never get to that point where a decision is imminent by this subcommittee and so uh can i interrupt real quick mr be clear that what miss delano has said and what members of her group have said massachusetts is when the school committee's too many sure go ahead sorry right sure so but i don't think the school committee will get to that point until the subcommittee has made some recommendations conundrum right right so i think if this
041subcommittee could just establish a timeline like this this is our timeline for making a recommendation to the school committee then maybe that would um you know at least keep us on track to kind of get to that point i think that that would be helpful because what i would not want to see you know um the the cleveland baseball team right just got around to changing their their mascot and um one of the resources that was shared by the the council that emailed us today um was a 1997 paper written about chief wahoo right so i'd hate to be around in the year 2047 and still talking about you know this and not have moved forward um so i i i would love for the subcommittee to just establish some kind of a timeline for
042when we are going to feel we're going to be reaching a point to make a recommendation right and and i think the other complicating factor that i wanted is as always in the last oh it's forever now is coven right the idea was is that originally this meeting was going to be our public comment and we agreed that we wanted to allow the public to speak and then the pandemic happened and that's the other thing like i don't know when we're going to be able to do public comment okay you can't pay me a million dollars to moderate an online discussion on this issue right if someone else wants to figure that out i would be happy to let you do that but my concern is is are we willing this is something we should
043discuss as a committee are we willing to move forward without public comment if it comes to that miss amoro miss murphy and then mr tebow my thoughts on that you know um certainly we can't you know i agree with you ross what you're saying you know we don't want like 20 you know 15 20 years down the line nothing you know to have happened either way but that's where the education piece i feel is really important because uh i just looked it up this morning just to see where it is and you know the bill that sits in the state legislature had been sitting there since march and on uh july 19th it was favorably reported out of the joint committee on education and it literally sits in the senate committee ways and means so
044we might not have to that deadline for the topic of whether or not the mascot stays may be decided for us before we get to it um which is where i feel like that education and honoring and that common ground piece is really critical meanwhile um on top of all the coveted get back to school stuff miss murphy i was just going to say that i agree with mr tebow i think that a timeline is really important on this at this point i understand the competing priorities i don't think that we should be putting something else on the plate of the administrators to try to tackle large project management at this time but i do think that this committee um needs to keep moving this forward and i do think that it is possible to
045do public comment online and given the state of the way that everything's going i think we should probably try to figure out how to do that um and i did look up today um actually on that google doc there's some information on the hanover public school system and their change and they actually on their website have really clear documentation of all of the steps that they took and how they um communicated that publicly and they did do public comment electronically last fall actually the timeline is quite similar um to what we're heading into right now so i haven't i didn't dive too deeply but they gave instructions on how you would make comment and how they were going to work it and everything like that it's available on their website so i'm guessing there's probably
046a couple other resources like that from the various towns that have made similar um actions and i think using the zoom webinar format like we can can figure some of that out i have big reservations about saying let's let's try to wait until we can do it in person because it does not seem to be trending like that's going to be possible anytime soon mr tebow so i was just going to ask you know where this is a subcommittee and we're making a recommendation to the school committee i was just gonna you know pose the question to other committee members how important public input is for this subcommittee i think public input is important i don't know that it needs to be to this subcommittee um you know to your point dr jenkins we're not
047making a decision that is binding in any means we're making a recommendation to the school committee so i respect the you know the authority and the responsibility the school committee will have to act on whatever recommendation we make and i certainly value the importance of public input in that venue but i i wonder if again i i wouldn't want to see that be the reason we um get stalled in terms of making any progress um in this subcommittee that's all so let me let me suggest we we've talked about back to ms chamberlain's point about bringing sort of native voices right mr ventura is a member of the uh the gay head wampanoag tribe right as is mr andrews um and and miss maltese andrews we could have them present the ncai is also right
048a tribal organization so in terms of doing a timeline those are tribal members that represent two different sides of the issues that could be step one in our timeline is hearing those presentations and hearing those voices to ms chamberlain's point um step two if someone would like to volunteer right to figure out how to run a webinar maybe work with mr galesha we could do we don't have to but we could do a public comment we don't have to mr tebow's point because when it gets on the agenda the school committee it will be subject to public comment but we can doing having two opportunities for public comment would be fine i just don't have the bandwidth at this time to figure out how to do that webinar so that might be step two and
049then step three is perhaps those are the two things that we need to do to when we're ready decision point would be after those two things miss chamberlain you had a your hand up you want to make a point i i mean i don't know if mr galasha or mr peratti would be willing to work with us to figure out a way to do an online forum but if if miss murphy and i and one of them could work on it i think i think we could figure it out especially if as she said she already saw some things that might be helpful to us that other communities haven't done so i'd be willing to volunteer for that i'm volunteering you also so if you just do that i think that would be great do
050we would then want to do to give you guys a little bit of time i will contact mr ventura and mr pereira and mr andrews and try to find a date i want to say like no earlier than mid-september because i know that seems like a long time but i know the teachers and the principals and the administrators need to focus for like the next month on getting the schools up and running so we can do i will work with them to find a date maybe in sort of mid-september for them to do those presentations and then maybe looking at end of september for public comment that gives us like another month to set that up and then we can do a meeting after that and decide to make a decision on that does that
051work for everyone in terms of timeline i'm seeing a lot of nods okay that's mr peratti or mr galisha which one should i contact about working on that i would start with strongly suggest mr peratti but because i opened my mouth you'd be contacting me no i'm just teasing well we'll work it out well technically we'll work it out thank you mr galasha okay so i think we have a step there i'm gonna rather than us setting a meeting date and inviting mr ventura mr pereira i'm going to ask them for dates that work for them and then we will set that up sometime in the the mid-september range hearing that and so that would then give us a timeline i will also see this i don't want to put down the things that miss
052murphy talked about um but if we do this in terms of this timeline i think this gives the administration teachers right time to open up the schools and get breathing and then our next step can be this what we're going to do on this um and so to that end i think we as a committee is part of our mission i think i'm asking for your affirmation that we are committed to doing this sort of work and inviting our tribal partners in to do these public education displays i think that's an important part of our mission that we can work on and maybe work with miss chamberlain and her uh i think what are you the multicultural club ms chamberlain and some other groups getting some student groups once they're back in school up and
053running to do some of this work because um you know again i think i think it would be really great to engage our students on this um and so we can we can sort of explore that does that seem seem right to everyone somebody have questions comments this is good but it's hard because you have to process everything like on the spot right i totally understand what open meeting lies but it's like i feel like my brain gets tired after these meetings because the gears are spinning all the time right ms murphy sorry i would just say one more thing that i think it is it is helpful for us to think i think a timeline for where we're going with this next is super important and we're we're on a good path for that
054right now i also think that by not losing sight of the educational piece as we work towards that goal can help us again going back to the comments in some of those letters so much of this debate becomes sort of like more of like a scarcity mindset right like i don't want anyone to tell me what i can't do or what you're going to change and we need to look at this more in terms of like the opposite would be like an abundance mindset i think right like what are all the different ways that we can bring this positively to the forefront um for our students and our families in our community and the more we can be thinking about this as a larger diversity equity inclusion issue than just a yes or no on
055a single vote is going to get us more in the direction on all these other types of issues i think that that we hope that this committee will ultimately go right yeah and i think that's really important to reiterate is that i think to go back to miss amaral's point about sometimes the reporting is can be very simple on this that that this committee is just this we're the mascot committee but i think we're all here because it's more than that right that we're committed um to say we make this decision and hand this off to the school committee in october or whatnot we're not going to go away right there's more work to do and more issues to work out and this is a continuing effort um and so both right or related to
056education and to um to just you know not just on this issue but other issues as well that we'll continue to work on this all right i have a child to pick up in a few minutes so i'm either going to hand this off to miss amber all i don't want to stifle discussion but um i do i do need to go in a couple minutes um are there other comments questions suggestions i think you know i think this is good i think we have a plan i will be back in touch with you once i have sort of a date from them that works um and whoever can make it can make it and we know that this is always recorded mr parotti puts it up on the website um and so i'll arrange
057for those presentations and miss chamberlain and miss murphy thank you for volunteering to work on the the the webinar um and then we'll we'll meet after those two events and make our sort of decide you know how we're gonna pass this along um if there's nothing else i would entertain emotion to adjourn i make a motion that we adjourn this amaral made this motion you have a second second oh thank you all right so i have a motion and a second is there any discussion about our motion to adjourn all right so i need to roll call this mr hayes you say yes or no yes you or you you don't want to stay here yes okay chivo yes miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss missari yes uh miss murphy yes uh miss scott
058yes miss amaral yes and i am also a yes thank you everyone it's always a pleasure you guys have lots of great ideas um and i super appreciate everyone taking time out of their summer um a busy time of the summer to to to meet with us tonight so have a good evening and i will be in touch soon yeah so sandy i went to work