001good evening everyone i'd like to um welcome you to the tuesday may 25th meeting of the dartmouth school committee equality and diversity subcommittee um per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law glc 30a section 20. the public will not the public will not be allowed to physically access the school committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at youtube.com dhs tv meeting participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable um per open meeting law great i'm getting that dreaded um internet connection is unstable so i apologize if i go in and out just wave at me or i don't know if i um if i lose you here um kathleen if you lose me um you will go ahead and
002be the boss i'm going to start off with a roll call per the uh online open meeting uh rules so ross tebow i see you're here yes uh rks here uh kelly bloom here billy chamberlain here diane masari here uh shelly scott here elizabeth murphy here kathleen amaral yeah and i will call my own name shannon jenkins i'm here um next we have our two new members jada walker here all right and julina pamphile is that how you say your last name today last year yes thank you all right so um because we have our two new student members here what i'd like to do is to just all maybe briefly introduce ourselves first and then we'll have jada and julina introduce themselves to us um since uh since we missed that part so i
003will start and then i'll call around i'm shannon jenkins i'm a chair of the dartmouth school committee um kathleen can you go next hi kathleen ameral i am a member of the school committee and a parent to a few kiddos who have gone through dartmouth schools to remain i should say i think you know mr tebow but we'll ask him to introduce himself anyways i'm mr tebow i am the principal of dartmouth high school and i had the pleasure of meeting with each of our two student representatives um you know i think they'll be excellent choices for the committee fabulous mr hayes hello i'm mark hayes assistant principal at the middle school thank you miss bloom hi i'm kelly bloom i'm a social worker at the quinn school and i'm a parent of a couple
004of students in the school system chamberlain hi i'm mrs chamberlain i teach spanish i've had the pleasure of teaching julina but i haven't had the pleasure of taking teaching data yet hopefully i will fabulous uh miss missari hi i'm diane masari seventh grade guidance counselor at dartmouth middle school thank you miss scott welcome jada angelina i am a parent of three kids one that's graduated from dartmouth high and two that are currently at the middle and elementary school and i've lived in dartmouth for about 15 years thank you miss murphy hi i'm elizabeth murphy i am a parent of two students in the middle school and high school right now all right so now jada and julina you know all of us so we'd like to ask you to maybe take a minute or two
005and just introduce yourselves to the rest of the committee um so jada can i have you go first please yeah so hi i'm jada i'm 17 i'm a junior at dartmouth high school and i'm excited to be here so thank you for having me welcome we're excited to have you julina [Music] hi i'm julina panfield i'm 17 as well and i'm a junior at dartmouth high school and i'm very grateful to be here awesome thank you so much so um i will at first i want to apologize to all of you i'm a little bit even though i've been on the school committee for a while i'm a little bit rookie at running subcommittees so i've forgotten some of the routines and such that come with i'm complying with open meeting law so we were
006supposed to meet last week but i forgot to ask for a meeting to be posted and we cannot meet unless the meeting has been posted so we're meeting tonight i apologize for that i also apologize that i forgot to put approval of the minutes from last meeting um on this agenda dr gifford did take excellent minutes but since that's not on the agenda we will not be approving those minutes i will send those around for you um and ms amarill has agreed to be my backup um to uh to see all those things that um that i have missed because i'm apparently missing a lot at this point in our um pandemic school year but i did remember we did manage with the help of ms genther to get the agenda um posted and one
007of the things we had talked about at our last meeting um was people wanted to know some of the things that the schools are already doing around diversity um and so i asked dr gifford um to to put something together and she has invited miss oliveira but i'm going to hand it over to dr gifford first um to introduce miss oliveira in the presentation and we can get started and then ask questions about that dr gary great thank you so um exactly miss oliveira is a director of teaching and learning and with that role because she you know comes a lot of responsibilities to see what our curriculum is using the textbooks or extra reading books how our libraries are um equipped with various books and and i have to say we've done uh i
008think and we'll we'll hear from the group as time goes on but a nice job of adding various um selections to our libraries our school libraries in the elementary school as well um bringing forth the ideas about different cultures etc but we do a lot more than that so miss oliveira did give a presentation to the school committee at a recent meeting so we thought we would be able to bring that forth tonight and um talk about some of the things that we feel the school district is doing to address some of the issues that we might be talking about as time goes forth so mr oliveira tracy we need you to unmute sorry she usually does that very well you know it's been a long year for everyone i know there she goes thank
009you miss alamera sorry about that it has been a long year so i am unmuted i believe now correct yes you are and i am sharing my screen you can see the presentation we can all right perfect so once again my name is tracy oliver and i'm the director of teaching and learning for the district and i am here to present uh i kind of framed it around being culturally responsive education so thinking about what are we doing uh in our classrooms and i just want to highlight by saying at first this is certainly not uh inclusive of everything that we are doing but i was trying to truly just highlight um the big stuff that we're doing and also um look at where we're trying to make some changes and where we're trying to
010do better and and increase what we're doing around diversity in our classrooms so this presentation is broken up into two pieces like i said one currently what we're doing and one increasing our work around uh diversity and trying to um bring more um more more opportunities for our students to experience in our classrooms so i titled this a culturally responsive education and if you think we had to stop and think what do culturally responsive schools and classrooms look like and we kind of wanted to establish that kind of shared vision around all of our schools so we want our schools and classroom environments not only to be equitable and bias free but also reflect students and their cultural identities in order to foster feelings of safety belonging engagement and motivation we want all of our
011students to feel safe at our schools and we're looking at that it's critical to recognize that the goal of educators is to have knowledge and capacity to serve all of our students well and in order to be highly effective educators we must develop authentic understanding of students and adults that are in our communities we must also ensure that students experiences in schools are affirming to who they are and what they bring to the school community and unpack our own cultural impacts and our world views and approaches so we're trying to strive to validate students experiences as well as their values include curricula that celebrates all community members and actively reflect on our curriculum to ensure that we're reinforcing ideas that celebrate members and also reinforcing those ideas that celebrate all all members of our community
012and empowering all students so once again i am the director of teaching and learning so curriculum is key to what we do and we want to make sure that all of our curriculum the whole package of our is encompasses all of our learning goals and standards so units and lessons that lay out what teachers teach each day and each week assignments and activities and projects that are giving to students and also includes the books materials vid videos readings everything that's used in class we want all of that curriculum to be a key component of a cultural responsive teaching and we want that to be filled with stories activities assignments and illustrations and illustrations that influence how young people understand the world and contribute to all of our cultural and cultures and values so one interesting
013thing that desi came up with a couple of years ago was actually 2018 time goes by quite quickly but was um the history and uh social studies frameworks and they really built them on three pillars and it was about the standards for history and social studies the literacy standards and content standards but what they certainly did home in on was civics choices and how students should assume responsibilities for strengthening equality and justice and liberty uh across the united states and so i it's really helped us especially here in dartmouth to kind of pull in a lot of a civics education from k to 12 because the standards where feature design helps students develop skills to participate and lead society and uh to be more culturally diverse and one great thing that they did was our
014eighth graders will be experiencing a civics project and it's a homegrown civics project so it's something that they feel they need to go out and do for our community and it's completely student run so it's it's kind of tough for teachers because they were always thinking you know they set this the stage and they kind of try to plan for things but it kind of can't be done because it's all the ownership is on the students to come up with what they want to change what they want to do and where they want to go with the project so when we look at our standards especially for social studies and health and our social emotional learning this is just a wordle um where it really talks about all of the words in there that help
015for our diversity and and civics uh learning it's filled throughout and we try not to look at these as being very separate issues that we need to kind of look at but kind of fill them in with what we do each and every day we want it to be centered around culturally responsive education but also feel like it's part of what we are doing social emotional learning is something that we have played a impact in and we've traded a big part about for the last couple of years so here's just some examples of some of the things that have been real highlights in dartmouth um some of our initiatives of you matter i matter and kindness matters which has taken over the last three years um of making everybody feel inclusive and part of our
016community our second steps program which is a k-5 program and we're looking to bring it into the middle school this year really talks about getting getting along and including everybody pbis buddy benches and of course our unified sports which is um just a great program in dartmouth that kind of highlights all of what we are doing whoops one thing i just want to highlight that we've talked about with staff members across the district is this idea of windows mirrors and sliding glass doors i'm just going to play for you this video here where it talks about kind of um where we get that from this comes from reading rockets and it just pulls in when we think about the books and our literacy standards of what we want to give to students each and every
017day this is something that helps frame our thinking of what we want our students to experience so i'm just gonna it's only about a minute and now we need diverse books because we need books in which children can find stem cells see reflections of themselves i wrote a piece maybe 1990 it was published which i called mirrors windows and sliding glass doors and and i think that's that's really why we [Music] children need to see themselves reflective but books can also be windows and and so you can you can look through and see other worlds and see how they match up or don't match up to your own but the sliding glass door allows you to enter that world as well and so that's the reason that the diversity needs to go both ways and
018it's not just children who have been underrepresented and marginalized who need these books it's also the children uh who always find their mirrors in the books and therefore get an exaggerated sense of their own self-worth and a false sense of what the world is like because it's it's becoming more and more colorful and diverse as as time goes on so i think that's why so as we stopped and we looked at our literacy standards and as you know when a big push that we do is getting authentic literature into students hands from our preschool classrooms right up into our high school classrooms we really tried this year uh even amongst the pandemic of truly getting books that include the windows the mirrors and the sliding glass doors so we want students to see themselves to
019see people who are different and then also to kind of have that sliding glass door feeling where they can go in and kind of have a chance to experience what it might look like so in elementary ela we use units of study from teachers college at columbia university to teach reading writing and phonics and an interesting thing is in 2019 columbia university began a re-examination of their curriculum to emphasize the importance of this cultural responsive classroom so their work to achieve equality inclusion is front forefront and what they do uh they've done a ton of supplemental read alouds and as you can see in front of you some of the books that they've included in the diverse text uh that it within our reading and writing workshop in all of our classrooms um if we
020go on to the to the middle school sorry we've tried to increase the diverse text many of the stories and novels here in the sixth grade deal with issues like bullying the treatment of others based on social and cultural and economic class they read the bridge home which focuses on a group of homeless children in the streets of cheyenne and a long walk to the wada by linda sue parks which tells a story of conflict in south sudan and the quest to bring water to a small african village in seventh grade the conflicts of class distinction self-worth and cultural bias go deeper with the exploration of stories like thank you ma'am by langston hughes and the scholarship jacket by martha simmons and on an eighth grade ela as a layer of complexity by challenging the
021trustworthiness of sources such as the telltale heart by edgar allan poe a novel studies featuring a wide range of authors and they explore arthur backgrounds on how these backgrounds affect the voice and style of their writing eighth graders finished their year with the in-depth study of argument analysising the speech what the slave is in the 4th of july by frederick douglass at our high school starting last year uh nights yeah last year they rearranged the literacy readings for all classes and dartmouth high school uh eliminated the structure of classes around american and british literature and they moved to a more thematic system which allows for the increase of more voices in reading and hopefully we're hoping to get more engaged readers as part of this uh shift each grade level a novel has a play
022added that has diversity in mind so in ninth grade they read dear martin by nick stone ninth and tenth grade have been exposed in the english classes to eva davari's 13th a great documentary about the black incarceration in america in greater now in grade 11 power authority by tony morrison and grade 12 they do identity less by andrew john greer so once again this year and we are always growing uh and always trying to add some diversity um to around what we are doing this was two years ago but it's worth noting that the def grant celebration of self de mello diversity so they esta de mello school established a diversity library thanks to the def grant which was used by both students and educators their goal was to create a portrait wall at the
023entrance of the building where family pitches uh where it's going to be um displayed i think the the pandemic put a little bit of a stop to some of this work but um they still hope to pick it up and move on uh next year when we're all in person the other thing that the pandemic kind of put a stop to but adolf brown was supposed to be our kick keynote speaker this year for a back to school pd day in september but since we couldn't meet in person we really felt like it wasn't worth uh seeing him virtually because the power of his presentation is really seeing him speak uh and letting those words of his presentation and his actions on stage uh kind of seep in so he will be coming this year
024in on october for our staff and he really talks about he calls it real talk and implicit bias and what do our actions really mean and the staff will really have a great pd centered around that we spent some time last year really increasing diversity text in our libraries so we gave all of our elementary school libraries that middle school library and our high school library library media specialists um some some monies and they went out and found lots of great text to do that windows uh sliding glass doors and mirrors to increase their um their collections the ap english course uh mr higgins switched it up a little bit so that all um 80 english language competition students read um the book t nah coats between uh by tina coates between the world and
025me uh and it was a it's a lengthy letter written by a black journalist to his son and this was the first time that that cl that class had uh kind of did a book study on that book and then at elementary schools if i go back to it here are just a few samples of books that we've kind of pulled in more in our social studies curriculum so talking about refugees migrations and even looking at holidays and why we have different holidays in our countries and what we celebrate the middle school once again added some more books around diversity and their book clubs reading uh refugee and ghost boys this year coming up and parents have already uh gotten this information uh elementary grade uh level teachers which we call our cia team our
026curriculum instruction and assessment team of teachers reviewed our summer reading choices and uh they really dove in to find books at each grade level but that include more diverse characters in the titles for this year so we were really happy that we uh got a chance to kind of take a peek at that and really look and providing opportunities for more uh diverse reading for our students and um that about closes it up i'm gonna turn it over to questions but i'm just gonna stop sharing my screen because i had to do that presentation without seeing anyone which i always find a little difficult while looking at body language thank you miss oliveira yeah it can be hard i i try not to share screens because then you only see a few faces um anybody
027have any questions or comments for miss oliveira or dr gifford about that presentation about other issues the the schools are working on right now jada go right ahead yeah go ahead jada sorry that's okay um so from my understanding a lot of the um diverse i'm gonna say diversity points um come from the library like investing in books and stuff but i think that's tricky i know at least as my experience as a teenager like going to the library and picking books is not something i choose to do on my own time like if that makes sense and i i can't assume many other teenagers see that too like on top of like schoolwork in general so like do you think there's like a way maybe to work around that because i feel like there's
028a lot of investment and diversity into the library but not a lot of students actually utilize that so that that's a great question and first of all we we should always take time to read i certainly understand students high school students don't have time to read um but what we've done in a lot of like what we did in iap comp in a lot of the classrooms is we adding the books into our curriculum so even though we've increased the titles within our libraries a lot of the books that you saw were books that were added into our curriculum so books that you would be i want to say required to read but part of the curriculum that everybody was reading and also a big um push that we're trying to do and i i
029think we've done a pretty really good job of is adding what we call voice and choice for students so they have a lot more voice in what books they want to read so instead of saying the whole class is going to read this book we say this is the what we're trying to learn so the skill we're trying to learn but also here are some books you can choose to read that will still get you practicing that skill and talking about that skill so those are a couple of things that we've done to increase um the reading and choices for students but you do make a great point i understand kids don't go not everyone goes to the library so we are that's why i'm saying trying to pull it into our standards and what
030we do in our in our documented curriculum yeah thank you i'd love to follow up on on that question i was on a um a seminar about higher education recently and i heard one of the speakers who was fabulous was was talking about um how this needs to be sort of a lens for our whole curriculum and he gave the example i can't remember his last name now but i remember his first name was jose um and he talked about how he went through his entire you know k-12 education and there was never like a word or a math or a science problem that used jose as an example of the story that was being told so in addition to thinking about right the integrating sort of diverse books into our english curriculum our history
031curriculum to what extent do we use diversity metrics to evaluate the other curriculum materials that we use i mean i'm looking at mr hayes because i knew he used to be a math um teacher right math uses a lot of word problems do we evaluate textbooks um with some diversity metrics looking at that um to what extent is that part of the district's plan when we purchase those materials so we do have a textbook adoption policy and it does it that the we have a rubric for it and it does have that but one thing we're looking at doing and hopefully we will get it rolled out for september is to train more teachers on looking at that because when we my major kind of thoughts in a way is is we give out curriculum
032and we have our basic textbooks and stuff but it's also all the supplemental material that comes in and that's plays a much bigger part in what students are exposed to and opportunities that students have which is why i was really happy with seeing the mirrors windows and sliding glass doors philosophy because i think it just helps people to wrap their head around it so after adolf brown comes and we kind of do a little bit more pd around that we're going to be rolling out a supplemental material um policy which will have a rubric which will hopefully get our teachers thinking more about you know the the name exactly what you're saying the jose's the names the places the the thoughts the what we're putting in kids hands uh in a true confession when we
033looked at our elementary summer reading books um i just happened to be looking at them and i was pretty shocked to be honest with you about how many were white male characters in our books and we immediately put it out and i said let's switch this up and i just left it out to the like i said that team and i said thinking back at our windows you know that kind of sliding glass doors again and um the books that we came back with was was much better we're richer we're um more inclusive we're more diverse and i have to be honest it you know has a reflection on me when i looked at it i was kind of like wow someone should have called this out in a way or looked at it again
034so i think we have a much better options now for our students which is going back to what jada said it's another opportunity for students to have those choices where it's built into the curriculum they don't have to go to the library and get it and it's a nice chance for parents to see it too because we put that flyer up for parents to look at all the grade level choices so i just want to say i i appreciate your comment about reflecting on how we haven't been doing well but we're trying to do better because i think one of the important things here too as we work together and try to create a better better at more welcoming atmospheres we have to be willing to acknowledge our shortcomings um and just do better right
035we can't change the past but we can't change the future um so i definitely appreciate you acknowledging that and that that sort of effort that we're making um other questions from people here miss scott uh thank you ms oliveira for that presentation i i haven't read all those books and so i hope you'll uh help me a little bit i wanted to ask if things like native peoples um differently abled folks and um glbtqi communities are represented in those materials as well i couldn't tell by the titles and i'm not familiar with all of them so i'm just wondering what the breadth of the diversity is i guess like the visible and invisible diversity so i'm going to go back to the slide with the flower and it says we're growing i think after the
036to be honest with the joy floyd incident we really went out with our library media specialist who really have a good handle on these books and they went and picked a lot of books and we said to them same thing we want to try to really increase our collections so um i was just looking at that a couple of days ago um i can't think of explicit titles to be honest with you but yes we are extremely mindful of making sure we include all the protected classes if we want to say and make sure that they have representation in our uh literature that we have available for students thank you i had one other question but i'll wait if someone else wants to raise their hand now why don't you go ahead and then we'll
037we'll open it up to someone else if they need to go ahead ms scott all right i was also wondering about um in addition to reading if there were uh activities and i know that's part of the curriculum that there are different things that are happening that teachers are approaching it in different ways but there are like one of the most basic examples i can think of as not a teacher um would be like a debate team or opportunity in social studies class to debate um so that as topics come up the students can sort of get a little bit passionate about something and at first it may not be diversity issues it may be you know what what doritos flavor is the best doritos flavor but eventually you know we can engage them in
038things that are more diverse than that so i was wondering are we doing anything or what you know are we doing enough in your opinion in that way or are there other ways that we can be improving as we move forward so i think we can always be improving as we move forward and i think sometimes if i go back to the summer reading choices it's things that were intentional in a way but we just have to be reflective and look at things differently we've done a lot and i i sometimes think that parents out there probably i don't want my name out there because there's probably a lot of pets that have been bought over the last few years in elementary schools because we do teach persuasive writing and we have kids come up
039with what do you want what do you want and what what do you want to be passionate about what do you want to do and so um we've had a lot of kids write great persuasive essays to get pets and then we get the parents writing i just had to go buy a dog because it was so good and uh or we had a group of students at the middle school this was going back a couple years but changed styrofoam trays because they felt it wasn't good for the landfill so we are we do teach that and we move up far we move up across the grade levels for our persuasive writing and i think the eighth grade civics project is another great example of that of giving students ownership and making a change and
040saying that they can really make a difference in this world and uh the other part i really like about it what jesse came up with it's a it's a um collaborative thing so kids have to work together to to make that change so we're teaching a lot of those skills in there thank you dr gifford you wanted to add something along that line yeah thank you i just wanted to say that you know and and i wanted the principles to sp um we have mr tebow as well as mr hayes but also our teachers are here um that certainly include various projects in their curriculum um but can speak to some of those things to enlighten everyone here what's going on i'm sure our students can speak about either things that we're doing or things
041that we might be able to do but i just wanted to mention a couple of things um maybe small but i think it it speaks volumes for what the district is trying to do about being inclusive and i think about our buddy benches that we um have at our schools our unified um athletic program is humongous if you will um the attention it gets the support it gets the peers that um cooperate and collaborate with our students with special edu special needs um the programs that we run i just think that it's it's our basic philosophy and our core belief and our true north if you will and i i would say that anyone here our teachers as well as our administrators would um be able to speak to our emphasis on that throughout the
042last few years about really um promoting the rights of everyone the inclusiveness of everyone and and you know lgbtq whatever it might be we are here to support all of those students and um again i have we have a social worker here we have folks and again we might be able to increase and enhance what we're doing but i would i would welcome any of their voices here on things that they're thinking about that our schools promote because and and i see mr tebow's hand up so yeah go ahead mr chibo thank you so i just wanted to say uh a few things actually so um to ms scott's point um about do they you know students get to debate and different things like that i will share that our advanced placement program this year
043um the research in particular the research course um there were a number of student presentations students who did you know um uh unique research into areas uh you know they get to choose their topics that they conducted the research and then put together a 15 to 20 minute presentation on in fact uh jelena um one of the reasons julina was recommended um for this committee was her ap presentation around um issues of equality and the use of um you know indigenous people as a school mascot you know so we have um and she was just that was one presentation there were others of our ap students who did presentations around that topic i'm thinking of another one was around looking at issues of um you know uh gender inequity in stem related fields so there's
044a lot of these presentations and a lot of these different projects that our students are very much engaged in which i think is um you know it's just so it's really it's inspiring because it shows the degree to which our students are passionate about making the world a better place which i think is great um so that's one thing uh i want to circle back to jada's point around reading and and certainly um you know i i understand her point about the library and um i think our advisory program is an area that we could certainly look to do more around the issue of diversity equity and inclusion one of the strands of our advisory program which is fledgling it's only in its second year so it's really we viewed the advisory program as a
045four year build and unfortunately the pandemic hit when it did so that's made advisory a little bit tricky this year but one of the overarching strands of our advisory program is community building and so what better way to build community than to interweave issues of diversity equity and inclusion into those into that program and have really meaningful discussions with our teenagers with our students at the high school level also our english department this year identified kind of different social justice topics that aligned with their curriculum at different points um so that they could interweave that discussion around the the texts that they were reading at the time um you know so whether that was food scarcity or whether it was you know issues of of race relations or you know it was a different topic
046you know um depending on what was what they were reading at the time um you know so there are a number of areas and certainly the other thing i would say to dr jenkins point and you know i i don't even think necessarily that it's a matter of bad or good with how we're doing but it's a matter of continuous improvement and looking to to continuously you know um improve how things are doing and to continuously build a community that is more equitable um you know and celebrates the diversity it includes all i think uh is our goal so thank you thank you dr tebow i also i would add to that you know i'm glad to see where we're doing some professional development in the fall around this issue because it's not just two
047about giving people tools it's about you know teaching people how to do this sort of properly um talking about issues of injustice race gender inequality you know sexual orientation gender identity can be difficult conversations and people need to know how to use those tools and so it's about sort of both of those things happening hand in hand um so that the conversations that we have are are meaningful right um and so i'm glad to see we we're both you know working on the curriculum and the professional development around that because i think both of those things are are are really important um other questions or comments um okay so julina first and then uh elizabeth second [Music] a lot of kids did go out their way to talk about racial um christian puzzle gender i
048know colin zoo he talked about uh during his research about the gender that is dealing with um courses because many females are most likely to do ap than male and he realized that he was less than many kids who were doing ap so that was an interesting topic to bring that as well about identity during those type of situations as well going back to the um i feel like i don't know if you guys ever considered it or ever done this before um maybe like maybe like having like this similar to like college fairs like having exchanged those books that they picked out and like intriguing the kids i remember when i was in middle school i used to have book fairs and wanted to like buy books and all those type of stuff so
049maybe this educating kids on the book instead of them reading it for themselves because many teenagers aren't really they're just picking it just because i have to pick [Music] me virtually [Music] you're breaking up a little bit and i don't know if that's me or did you hear any i got i got it but towards the end i think you were breaking up just a little bit but i think we got we got some of the stuff again presentations okay and then you're talking about maybe ways to introduce to students rather than waiting for them to come in is that correct yes okay yeah that's like book fair right are great great ideas all right uh miss miss oliveira did you want to respond to that i know miss murphy had a question or comment
050too was that well i think yes i think that's a great idea about when we have books that um we want kids to read i know a lot of teachers and maybe this is something we can put out there to do more about diversity they do what we call book buffets and they set up just actually a buffet table of books and kids can come in and look at them and talk about them and kind of then pick what they like and we can maybe maybe do um you know something centered around diversity and a diverse book buffet if you may i don't know if that makes sense but do something like that so that is something that you know a little tweak that we could probably easily do i our teachers are very creative
051about going about things like that so we can something we can work on probably pretty quickly uh ms murphy thanks um yeah to build on that quickly i would just say that having looked at the high school summer reading list that came out already last week that was to me was an example like there were so many choices i think there were over 60 books um but also it really looked like a pretty diverse mix without being explicitly saying these are our diverse selections they were just in the mix and the categories were actually you know non-fiction memoir fiction young adult etc but there were definitely i assume a conscious decision made in how those shaped because it did it did show a variety of perspectives which looks great the question i had kind of
052actually ties a little bit some of the other comments i'm wondering though i love hearing about when we talk about all the kindness and the buddy benches and the different things over the years particularly the younger levels i wonder how we're connecting from elementary through high school and ap in terms of i think we know that not not the majority of students that are taking those ap classes so if that's where a lot of this really deeper stuff is is going what's what's happening at the middle school level how are we particularly taking all this focus on kindness and inclusion and also tying that explicitly to diversity right and diversity of all shapes and sizes not just cultural um i i believe in the work that i do especially it comes out a lot you
053know kindness is wonderful and super important but we also have to learn how to be kind when we disagree with people and sometimes there is a tendency to focus our efforts on kindness on the things that it's easy for everyone to agree upon and we know what's what's right and what's wrong and i think sometimes we have to start to kind of push things a little bit further when it comes to teaching these younger or early adolescent kids what it looks like to disagree but still be kind and giving them ways of modeling that type of thing so i'm wondering how we're doing professional development and maybe looking towards things for the future where we're not just presenting this book and its perspective but also helping kids to see and learn to discuss different things
054and stuff like that in a an environment where they can have structure and guidance you know sort of like debate but also be learning that there is a way to think differently and also think critically and and learn from others perspectives instead of just be exposed know so to and anyone can chime in on that if you'd like but um i think you know as as a part of what we have going i do think um in general this is an area where we are growing at the middle school and where we need to continue to grow um the debate process is something you know as our age ranges it can be a little bit sensitive um you know a little bit fragile in our in our viewpoints we do it with eighth graders they
055work on debate uh in their social studies classes um as well as you know as we move to the the new civics standards and um the civics project you know the um alternating viewpoints you know will be a part of that um and i think you know just in general we're probably a little bit closer to the elementary school model of teaching kindness um and teaching empathy because you know we're a little bit closer to that age and kind of growing out of that as as our students progress through the middle school um and you know and it's really about developing an environment of inclusivity we have you know a number of a number of students who are really in a in a stage of trying to understand where they fit you know how to
056be um how to be included if they don't necessarily feel so and and so i think in this case you know and this is kind of some of you know hearing about you know having adolf brown who i'm a little bit familiar with come i think it's a a huge step in the right direction for for our you know building staff who you know will then lead our students to to be more inclusive i think you know the understanding's got to start at the top and work its way down to our students so i think um that's a big area for group of growth for us i think we have opportunities to do wonderful things and as we you know as we get trained more as our building staff gets trained more i think we
057can really help our students along in creating an inclusive environment for for themselves and for their peers now something that elizabeth said just sort of got me thinking about that transition from the message of kindness to sort of that deeper thinking right because you know being anti-racist and focusing on social justice sometimes i i don't mean we want to be unkind to people that we disagree with um but individual behavior and systems of oppression right don't change systems and so it's like moving that step beyond kindness right that that that that being truly committed to social justice to being anti-racist requires more action than that and i don't think they're necessarily quite ready for that at middle school but i think that's what you're getting right that if we're going to make an elizabeth i
058don't want to put words in your mouth but i was thinking that as you're saying this that kindness is a start but right as we develop we need more we need more than that right you need you need we need some behaviors to to disrupt the status quo and to challenge right sort of conventional ways of doing things because of sort of some inherent problems um built into those structures i don't think that's going to happen in the middle school to mr hayes's point right i'm not sure developmentally developmentally ready for that but i think it's also important right to help kids make that transition right um i don't know if that makes sense or if that was but it made me think of that when you were saying that um elizabeth right that it's
059we've got to get them to that next step as well other questions or comments i don't see i mean i think i see today i think we appreciate this presentation it's the start of the conversation and the start of sort of learning um what we're doing um you know i think as we go we might start to and i've already started jotting notes and developing lists we might start thinking about well what are the other things that we want to learn about um and what are the other things that we want we might want information um from the schools about i think we got a nice presentation about like curriculum today and i think that was good um you know one of the things a couple of the things that came to my mind that
060i sort of wrote down to think about and again i don't want to say we all need this by you know next week or whatever but as we keep continuing our work what are the policies right around official policies around that invoke diversity like how do we select texts right tracy you talked about you know we're developing about policies about supplemental materials um we need to think about this in other areas too our hiring right our professional development all of that sort of stuff so i think at some point we may want to look at some of the policies that we already have around this um you know one of the things that also struck me i think maybe ms chamberlain asked us at our last meeting i think you asked some a question maybe
061about what other languages are spoken in our school am i right about that lily yeah um and that sort of falls under the umbrella to me well what data are we collecting around diversity because i'm doing a summer reading on this campus it's about um using data to move from an equity talk to an equity walk um and the idea is if we're not measuring things we don't know that we need to improve them right um so what sort of data are we collecting around diversity one of the things that i know our faculty did on campus was we started looking at some of the rates of um police interaction and disciplinary procedures by race and there are huge disparities which may not be surprising but i also think it was surprising to a lot
062of people because we'd never looked at that data that way so you know we have some idea of curriculum now but i'm thinking you know some policies are things that we need to learn about and also what data do we collect um and where do we want to be collecting data are some things that we might want to know more about as a committee i guess i might ask you all as we sort of wrap up the presentation part are there and again this is not necessarily for next week or next meeting but long term this sort of list of things we might want to go to are there other things that you think you might want to learn more about from the administration the schools around these issues jada you have your hand up
063go right ahead so um i made some notes before um the meeting started and i think um my biggest point is like building allyship because at least my experience in the dartmouth public schools is everybody is predominantly white whether it be the staff and the student body and i know the student body is out of your hands but like especially the staff like if i had someone who was out like looked like me maybe in middle school like i would have worn my hair curly earlier and stuff like that i wouldn't have felt like ashamed of those things because i never really had a person who looked like me i think there was two other black girls in my grade growing up um just i think that just shows how white dartmouth is not only
064as like a school system but as a community and i think we need to focus on building allyship because we're building like a lot of programs that promote diversity where people can learn about other cultures but i don't think individuals are learning how to support them if that makes sense it does absolutely and i think um you know one of the things that we did talk about last meeting was perhaps maybe next fall one of the things that we're doing on our campus but might be good in the schools is doing a climate survey um both about how how people experience um being in our schools around issues of diversity um both for the people who work here and you know for the students we're sort of age-appropriate um because i think that helps us
065also think about where we're not doing well and where we can do better um i think allyship is is a big one but i think there's lots of probably we might find others in doing that that climate survey um other comments questions suggestions miss aloe vera so i'm just going to put out there that i felt as we were putting together the presentation on curriculum that i did sell a lot of things short so i i know the school adjustment council is the guidance counselors i don't want to speak for mrs missouri mr bloom but they do an awful lot of work around this um i did not even touch upon a second step program and what they bring in so i i i just i don't have a guilt or anything but i kind
066of sold that part of it a little bit short the great work that they do around this so yeah and i do want to say that was really a presentation about curriculum right and so that's like i'm saying like maybe in a meeting or two we might have a presentation about policies right and maybe in a couple of months we might have a presentation about data um so yeah i think that was i think that's a very valid point and i think it's important to emphasize um that it's not everything and that that also might might um you know be a good presentation to have from guidance both at you know the high school and the middle school to talk about the work that our guidance counselors and our social workers are doing around diversity
067because they interact so closely with our students so that might be something that we add to that list i feel like we're going to have a process of information gathering right and so these are we there's lots of people i think that we might want to hear from over our next set of meetings so we've got some things about policy maybe looking at data maybe looking at guidance and social work mr tebow you have your hand up go right ahead so i i don't wanna you know i'm hesitant to bring it up um but i do think it's the elephant in the room um you know the mascot was an issue that came up at our first meeting uh yes we're going to come back to that can i put you on hold on that
068one absolutely sure because okay so here's what i want to do we're getting into a little bit of then looking at our agenda we have the presentation um the second thing on our agenda was the review of the charge and then the last thing on our agenda is the continued discussion of what our priorities are so i think i'd like to come back to the mascot issue if it's okay with you mr tebow under item three would that work absolutely okay so if we're done sort of with if does anybody have any other questions for miss oliveira or dr gifford about that presentation all right so let's take a quick look um last time i circulated we had we had talked to the meeting about the charge i'm not really sure that there's anything any
069changes that we want to make to the chart at this moment but because of open meeting law right i had to show it to you last time and now is really when we can discuss it um and so this charge that i sent the email to you i have all sorts of notes here so i'm trying to find it myself um i sent the email to you all um i think you know we don't have to change it now we can always go back to the school committee if we want to change it um but i'm wondering if anyone saw anything here that they thought you know they would want to change anything they thought was missing anything they would add we can always keep it as it is for now and come back to
070it later but since we did bring it up at last meeting i wanted to give anyone a chance to provide any input on that that charge now so does anybody have any thoughts about that charge i think it's pretty broad i think it allows us to do a lot of different things but again we're going to make changes to it we need to do it in an open discussion in an open meeting with all of you so if everyone's okay with that for now now we can come back around to that issue um that mr tebow brought up and let me say a couple of things one um i see as we go along right we're all starting to get to know each other we're all learning um and so we may be collecting some
071data with a presentation from miss oliveira we might learn about policies like maybe every meeting we're having a little bit of a presentation for someone that teaches us and we learn some things about different aspects of what the school is doing um but at the same point in time right we are we were convened to do um some work and um one of the issues that the school committee right wanted our committee to look at was the mascot mr tebow now i will open it up and bring it back to you for any comments you wanted to make around that sorry to put you off no no worries at all thank you um i was going to say kind of a little bit of what you just said which is that i i just want
072to make sure that i mean because we could have people report to us all day every day i mean there's a lot of work around diversity equality um and inclusion and so i think it would be easy to get lost in just continuously having folks you know come to present to us and you know um being someone who often has to present i appreciate that tracy has had a full day already today and so is dr gifford and and everyone really on the committee but i guess my point is um i just wanted to make sure that we both have any kind of presentation but also realize that um you know i don't think any work this committee can do will move us forward if we don't honestly and authentically address the issue of the
073mascot um and so i just want to make sure that that doesn't get put to the to the back burner that was all yeah i appreciate that mr tebow and you know we had some conversations about a bunch of different things um last um our last meeting but i was gonna say you know sort of as a member not necessarily as a chair of this committee when we as a school committee talked about convening this committee um the mascot issue was central to the convening of this committee but we also wanted to make clear that wasn't the only thing this committee can do but i think it was central and for that reason i i would argue that i would like for us to to tackle that issue first um because i think it's a
074conversation that many people want to have right now um and there's other things right we can continue to do presentations and do climate surveys and work on other really important issues like jade abroad of allyship and how do we cultivate that that work will be ongoing but i do think we should um tackle um that mascot issue to that and i want to share with you i received a number of sort of different emails um in inputs um i'm sure some of you may have but i have as well so i want to just let you know a few things um first the chair of the dartmouth democratic town committee um jim griffith emailed me and said um that he recommended the dartmouth committee democratic talent committee recommended an open and public hearing on the
075matter and they volunteered to host that forum i have not yet responded to him because it's not my job it's our job as a committee to chair this um my inclination would be to say to mr griffin griffith um i agree with you we should have an open forum on this um but i believe that the committee should organize that forum um and it may be more than one forum i don't believe that we should have a a political party hosting that forum um but that's not my decision to make so i wanted to consult with you before i responded to him um to hear your thoughts about that um offer that was extended to us as a committee any thoughts uh miss chamberlain personally i feel like we're a ways off from being ready
076for a meeting like that yeah i think that we want to be very well prepared and have lots of information at hand before we would consider something like that but i agree with you that i think it's something we we should organize ourselves and you know publicize ourselves but that was nice of them to offer very nice i just want i agree i don't think we're ready to have that yet um but i he i haven't responded to him yet so i do want to say yes i think i think it seems everyone's naughty yes we do want to have some sort of forum but when we do it it's going to be us hosting it does that seem about right for everyone okay email number two um that i want to share with you
077i also received an email from kempton campbell who is an alumni of the dartmouth schools and who is now chair of the town's youth commission he has been doing a um directed reading or a study project um about native american mascots uh and while he's been at college this spring um and he offered to make a presentation to us and then email number three um i have an email from miss laurel davis delano who um participated in an naacp forum about the mascot who also offered to help for us to arrange to have some native american speakers come um speak to us about the issue so i'm i'm i'm raising that because i'm i'm wondering whether how well how we want to tackle this do we want to do our own research first do we
078want to have people come present us research um how would the committee prefer to tackle that because i think maybe miss chamberlain your my point maybe we need to learn some about the issue before we do an open forum on that issue would that be fair to say okay julina and then i think jada both had their hands up so so go ahead please share your thoughts can you hear me i can yes thank you um i agree with miss chamberlain for like us educating ourselves first before going into it without knowing and then being rampaged by information that we didn't know about um i feel like we should educate ourselves as well be educated by the native americans that would talk to us about it to have an understanding of their perspective so we
079can have our own background but their background as well so i feel like we should do both at the same time i don't feel like we should just go into listening [Music] we lost you jelena sorry selena we lost you there at the end so we didn't hear i we got the point that we think that we should do some education first um we might perhaps ask mr tebow has some great things to say about your ap project so perhaps you might be willing to share some of that information with us we could have um uh mr campbell share some information perhaps as well based on his research um and i do know miss delano also does her scholarly research is in this area as well so we might do that uh jada you wanted
080to add um something to uh your comments yeah i was gonna kind of say the same thing as julina i think we need to educate ourselves because i think it's wrong to set the indigenous peoples to educate us um but i think it's so important to have their representation here when talking about indigenous issues because i think it's kind of wrong for us to just speak over their voices because essentially if they are not represented i feel like we're just talking over them and yeah i really think we should have the indigenous people come in and talk so yeah i will follow up with that uh jaden miss walker by saying that miss delane davis delano suggested and what has been done in some other communities in hanover and pentucket and winchester was to invite
081a panel of of native american speakers to speak um and to not just have one or two to engage in tokenism um right um and also to not necessarily have shortened time limits that we might have in a in a more public forum so i'm wondering if perhaps maybe our first step might be to have an informational meeting um where we can have some presentations from perhaps julina if she's willing to share some of her ap research but also um mr kempton um and then maybe talk with miss davis delano too about um inviting some some native um speakers to speak with us would that be a good first step what is the committee's thoughts on that mr tebow so there was a um so julina's presentation she can speak up and correct me if
082i'm wrong was focused on racial bias in high school and i think that i think that certainly applies you know to our com our work as a whole but we also had we had another student who did one specifically about um the use of a native you know native as a mascot um and so i could certainly reach out to mr higgins and to that students and see if they'd be willing to i think you know what a great learning opportunity that is for the student and it really again you know in an authentic way kind of elevates the research that they had done um and the presentation they put together you know i'm 100 percent for um back to ms oliveira's comment about students sort of leading and driving on these issues so to
083the extent that we can get students and former students to give presentations i i think that's fabulous um so i guess we're thinking about this in terms of discussion of our plans um would it be okay with the committee if i go ahead and start making some try to figure out a date where we could have an informative meeting like this um we would record it we'll post this um i'm just thinking that if we're bringing speakers in we may have to be flexible about when they are available as opposed to saying this is when our meeting date is who can make it um so if it's okay with the committee i think maybe our next step might be to make arrangements um for that type of meeting informative meeting for us i'm featuring some
084people talking about research and and featuring some tribal leaders to talk a little bit about that as as a first step in this process related to that and i would work um if anybody wants to help me with that work um i would i would welcome that but maybe that's our first step miss chamberlain i see your hand up i'm feeling like maybe um we should do a little work on our own before we have any of um the native americans come in and speak with us i don't know if if you if it would be appropriate or if it's something we can do under open meeting law if we there would be a sorry my cat if there would be a way um for us to maybe share some resources with each other like
085maybe just nothing that's going to take a super long time for anybody to read not a whole book or anything like that maybe there are some videos or short articles or something that we could just educate ourselves a little bit and then maybe have some of those other like the students that you were talking about coming and speak just so that we raise our level of education more before we have any of the tribal leaders to come in does that sound yeah so that's a good point um i would say two things to that miss chamberlain one i have some resources that miss davis delano um shared with this and i can share that with you but i also feel like in terms of thinking about this an open meeting this should be something we
086want to share with the community as well right to make available um to the community so um let me think about that maybe i'm i'm looking at dr gifford i might talk to maybe mr galashaw about some way that we could set something up like i'm thinking something like a google doc or something like that but that committee members could add stuff to right um so we would be authors on that um other people outside of the committee would not necessarily be authors but they would be able to read and view the resources that we posted on there um so i think maybe creating that sort of resource page not just for us but for the entire community would be a good thing so i think if we did it in that way right it
087would one be sharing of information because we wouldn't be discussing that information and i don't think it would violate open meeting law particularly if we made it available to the entire community right so i'll i'll look into finding some solution that i can share with you that you all i will start adding some of the stuff i have but as you all sort of learn and find stuff let's start building that up does that sound good to everyone okay so i like that idea so her miss chamberlain's comment then maybe our first step of the process is gathering information both on our own and then maybe um mr tebow might get that student i might ask mr um campbell to to present to us so we do some presentation about sort of the research on
088that step two then might be having a panel of tribal leaders um talking to us about the issue and then perhaps step three that would be down the road then we may be ready to talk about having a more public slash comment about that does that seem about right to everyone okay i see lots of head nodding this is good all right we're doing good stuff so i think i know it's been a long day for everyone we've been here almost an hour i think we have a path here that sounds like everyone's moving forward um but i don't think we want to set our do we want to set our next meeting date um i'm thinking about this maybe we want to do this i it's the end of the school year so it's
089a little crazy so i'm hesitant to say let's meet two weeks from now because i think all of the administrators and teachers on here might like keel over and die if i said that um so i'm thinking maybe like three weeks from today we could have that meeting three weeks from today so bonnie's got a three up that seems to be three okay good so that seemed to be good that would be i'm trying to look at my calendar here i think that's like middle school graduation time it is all right so we'll do four weeks we can't go shorter tuesdays seem to work 6 22 does that work for everyone okay and so over the next week or so i will get us technologically set up we can add to this as we go
090and then hopefully on the 22nd um mr tebow can you um try to coordinate with the student who did that project i will talk to miss davis delano and mr kempton about giving us presentations i will give you all one bit of bad news though and maybe dr gifford might have more information on this though um as we all know governor baker is going to be suspending um pandemic related sort of provisions in the law and it's not entirely clear what things are going to stay around and by what things i mean zoom meetings um you know i understand why it's great that we have school committee meetings that are public and open you know and everyone can come but sometimes for things like this it's really nice to be able to meet via zoom
091i do not know if we will be able to do that i'm gonna cross my fingers if we can i think it might be nice to do our informational meeting continue to do it through zoom if we can i i can't promise that to you yet is that that's correct dr gifford right we don't know if we'll be able to continue to do this right we're still checking waiting for the uh the official word okay so fingers crossed that we can continue to meet presume i'm in my like leggings i'll tell you underneath right i'm like i've seen that commercial with leslie jones where she says oh it's only the second date the camera's up top love to be able to continue to meet with you all in my leggings but that may be the
092case um if it is i think we should continue to meet on zoom i think that works better for everyone if not we'll figure out where we're going to meet and how we're going to arrange that um so with that i will ask if anybody has any other questions comments concerns before we get started before we all go okay fabulous so dr jenkins i just want to thank the students for coming as usual they so represent the student body and they are always articulate i've never been disappointed i've always been impressed and enthused by the kiddos if we call them our our young people thank you very much we appreciate having you guys here i also say um thank you to miss oliveira for coming uh to do the presentation and also thank you to
093to to all of you for for coming um you know showing up to our meeting here on a night to mr tebow's point after a long day's work um we're all tired but this is important work and i'm i'm really thankful that you're all willing to show up and do that with us um that having been said i will entertain a motion to adjourn i make that motion at the end of motion mr tebow are you seconding that i will yes i will second it okay and so now i technically have to do a roll call the one downside of a zoom meeting so i'm gonna vote yeah shannon jenkins uh ms amaral yes uh mr tebow yes mr hayes yes if you're muted a thumbs up too is good we can also confirm that
094miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss missari yes uh ms scott yes ms murphy yes ms walker yes and miss panfield yes thank you so much everyone for coming um i will um be sending you some emails hopefully soon and we'll see you in a month all right thank you good night bye all right thank you good night everyone you