001good evening everyone i'd like to welcome everyone to the first meeting of the equality and diversity committee of the dartmouth school committee to start i will note that per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law glc 30a section 20. the public will not be allowed to physically access this diversity subcommittee meeting the meeting will be conducted remotely 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 meeting participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable good evening everyone and thanks for attending the our first meeting i'd like to thank you all for volunteering to serve on this committee um i think we're all committed to hearing what everyone has
002to say about what our schools are doing well and what our schools can be doing better with respect to diversity equity and inclusion um and so i appreciate your service to the schools and to the town i thought the first way that we should probably start out would be to to introduce ourselves since we all don't probably know each other um i know everyone shows up differently on different zoom screens so i'm going to call out your name and ask you to just sort of briefly introduce yourself so i'll start my name is shannon jenkins i'm currently chair of the dartmouth school committee i'm the mother of two boys who are currently at dartmouth high school and i work at umass dartmouth i'm currently the associate dean of the college of arts and sciences um
003i'm gonna oh see and this is i'm already forgetting we actually have to technically take a roll call i believe to open the meeting i'm gonna sometimes look to dr gifford on this um so before we're gonna do the roll call and then we'll do introductions and i will go ahead and call roll so just indicate if you're here please kathleen amero here ross tebow here uh mark hayes here kelly bloom here lily chamberlain here uh diane massari uh i thought i saw diane um she may we may have oh there you are diane okay here okay great thank you i thought i was losing it for a second all right elizabeth murphy here and shelley scott here great thank you all right now we now that we're officially roll called in um i will
004um ask us to introduce ourselves um miss amaral can i have you go next excuse me um kathleen emerald i am a member of the dartmouth school committee i am parent to three um my oldest is finishing up cosmetology school really exciting um and i have a 17 year old who's out of district he's got some significant disabilities and i have a fifth grader who's near me doing her homework i work for i do a little bit of work for the arc of massachusetts community relations i i train family uh families uh i train uh families of uh individuals with disabilities it's not leadership skills i'm currently a lend fellow out of the umass medical driver um center and for those unfamiliar it's a it's an interdisciplinary um fellowship all related to uh disability and
005disability leadership so glad to be part of this thank you mr tebow i'm ross thibault i'm the principal of dartmouth high school i'm in my fourth year as principal at dartmouth high school um i don't know if i need to share all about my family like everyone has done but i'm the father of two uh school-aged children not in in dartmouth uh because i don't live in dartmouth but um i'm happy to be part of this work as a representative of the high school and you know both the students as well as the faculty thank you mr tebow mr hayes hello i'm mark hayes assistant principal at the middle school it's my uh my first year as an assistant principal at the middle school and before that i was an eighth grade math teacher there
006for uh for ten years hey my son's eighth grade math teacher too he loved you all right next let's see miss bloom hi i'm kelly bloom i'm a school social worker at the quinn elementary school in dartmouth and i also have two children that attend the dartmouth schools they're currently 9th graders at the high school awesome thank you miss chamberlain hi i'm lily chamberlain i teach spanish at dartmouth high school and i'm the advisor to the multicultural club and my two kids graduated from dartmouth high my son is now out of college and working as an engineer and my daughter is currently in college miss massari we got you have to unmute sorry sorry i should really know this by now because i i was just telling a parent today that i've been so you
007know savvy with my zoom and google meet so i apologize that's okay i think you guys use google meets more than zoom so yeah sorry for zoom's not quite as familiar to you all go ahead so um i am the seventh grade guidance counselor at dartmouth middle school awesome thank you um miss murphy hi i'm elizabeth murphy i live in dartmouth i am a parent of two students 10th grade and 8th grade and i was an independent college counselor in dartmouth for a number of years and i have transitioned now i'm actually in school full-time and i work for the unitarian church in fairhaven doing immigration justice work and last but not least miss scott hi everyone um let's see i work here at umass dartmouth as the director of new student and family programs
008i've had the pleasure of living in dartmouth for about 14 years our oldest is 31 she graduated from dartmouth high school she spent her last year and a little bit here in dartmouth and we have have an 8th grader and a 5th grader in the dartmouth school system i'm very happy to be here and i hope i can help thank you everyone i appreciate that very much as you can see i think hopefully from our introductions the school committee and trying to put together um this committee um very much wanted to try to get representation from the different schools right and different perspectives within the schools and different perspectives within the community i do know which we'll discuss later there there will at some future date be a high school student representative um we'll get
009to that discussion in a little bit um one of the things that as we talk about our charge this evening the school committee has tasked us with thinking about is whether the representation we have on this committee is adequate um and whether or not there are perspectives that are missing from our committee we do not have the ability to change the composition of the committee but we can report back to the school committee and ask them for additional members if we think there are viewpoints that we're not hearing from because obviously our goal is to be open and inclusive to all sorts of different viewpoints um i thought we'd start tonight by talking a little bit about sort of the the role of the committee how the committee was organized what what we need to
010do with respect to organization i will also say don't panic even though the zoom is scheduled to nine i don't intend to i hope we're not here um until nine i think we're just going through some preliminary stuff um tonight and figuring out where we want to go um when the school committee created this committee um we created it with uh we ended up i think with 10 members one two eleven we added one because we ended up with three um staff members for different perspectives so 11 members um at some point we would like to get to have people having two year appointments but for the initial appointment we decided what we're going to do is one year appointments and then once we're done with that one year we may renew or not but
011we'd like to get to staggered appointments because if you the whole committee turns over every year or every two years you lose some of that continuity so your initial appointment is for one year with potential for renewal um if anybody has a question at any time to just sort of raise your hand per sort of i guess it's massachusetts general law we are a subcommittee created by the school committee as such we are subject to open meeting law um kathleen and i i know and and maybe some of you all are familiar with some of the requirements of open meeting law um some of you may not be i really want to highlight just a couple things here about open meeting law that are important one under openly meeting law we may not deliberate via
012email all right because when you're communicating via email that deliberation or discussion is by definition only available to the people on the email chain therefore you're violating open meeting law so it's okay you know to share maybe a piece of information um for instance i am going to share uh something that i found a website and i may send that to you but we then cannot engage in the discussion about oh i like this or i would change this or i would do that that's a violation of open meeting law the second really important thing about open meeting law i know all of you some of you may know each other um open meeting law requires that we do not have discussions or deliberations in private um so you may talk to one other person
013right about that um but you may not have what are known as serial one-on-one conversations so i couldn't call you know mr tebow and say hey let's talk about x and that's one on one so we're not violating open meeting law and then call mr hayes and say hey mr hayes let's talk about x because those are serial one-on-one conversations all right so those are also violations of open meeting law and again the goal is to prevent um the committee to pre-discuss an issue not while that deliberation is open to the public and therefore them not having access to it okay um i will see if i can find you guys some more resources about open meeting law i don't want you to get freaked out about this um but i do really want to
014sort of inform you of our duties as a subcommittee of the dartmouth school committee i'm going to probably from time to time look at dr gifford because she's also very familiar with these things dr gifford i should ask you i also to introduce yourself you're not an official member of the committee i think everyone knows you but maybe you want to ask you to introduce yourself and then also um let me know if you think i've missed anything with respect to open meeting law so far so good obviously i'm superintendent i'm just finishing up my sixth year and since everybody else mentioned their kids i'll mention mine i have two much older students um i'm not students anymore sons but i wanted to mention i think it was diane i'm saying about the google me
015and the you know messing up this today i had my mask around my neck as we all do walking around with them in my office and then proceeded to ask kate where it put it it was i couldn't find it on my desk i couldn't find it anywhere and it's like it's just the crazy stuff that's happened through pandemic right but anyway um we're just happy that you all wanted to be uh part of this part of this group so thank you for stepping up so um per um i think uh rules uh i went and i did some reading this evening about um and i looked at the minutes and we had a conversation about this because we are a subcommittee of the school committee we do need to elect a chair and a
016vice chair of this subcommittee as well as designate someone a scribe um we're going to have to do nominations we can open this open this up for discussion i am willing to serve as chair of this committee in part because i'm familiar with open meeting law and procedure but if anyone else is dying to do this i would also be happy to hand it over to any one of you um so why don't we have first order business then we'll be to open nominations for chair of this committee i would like to nominate shannon jenkins for chair of this committee okay do we have a second i'll second it okay are there any other nominations for chair don't step forward at once i know it's a really enticing job all right so i will close
017the nominations at this point now we can have a discussion of the nominations if anybody has any comments concerns questions okay so hearing none this is normally the point if we're all in a room we would all say i or nay but we are in um a zoom open meeting therefore under those provisions that governor baker put forward we need to do a roll call um so miss amaral yes okay uh mr tebow yes mr hayes yes miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss massari yes uh miss murphy yes and miss scott yes and i suppose i will vote for myself too so that passes um unanimously um now we need to elect a vice chair so i will open nominations for that as well my hope is that we do sort of our work
018collaboratively and these are more just for sort of procedural titles um because we have to have them and as such i i was thinking it might make sense to have kathleen be the vice chair um unless any of you wants to step in and run an open meeting under open meeting law um if i am unable to so um i'm chair i can't make that nomination um if someone else would like to nominate kathleen or someone else ms scott go ahead i would like to nominate kathleen admiral for vice chair excellent do i have a second on that i'll second it okay mr tebow we get that are there any other nominations all right hearing none it will close the nomination are there any discussion about the um nomination questions concerns issues all right if
019not i'm going to go backwards this time on our roll call uh miss scott yes uh miss murphy yes miss massari yes miss chamberlain yes uh miss bloom yes uh mr hayes yes mr tebow yes uh ms amaral yes and i am also a yes okay great thank you very much for that um the last thing we need to do is to um nominate someone to be we need someone to take minutes um i'm taking minutes right now um do we want to rotate the taking of minutes do you think that works um alternatively dr gifford would you be willing to track motion i mean i think we mostly have to do broad contours would you be willing to do that for us yeah i'm actually taking some minutes for you right now so i
020don't perfect thank you so if that's okay with everyone we'll have dr gifford sort of keep the minutes for us and then we can approve them when we move forward do we need to dr gifford do we need to officially appoint you do we need to do a roll call and motion all that uh no let's just no i'll just volunteer okay great all right so um so that's great see like we already have checked off two things on our agenda all right so the first thing i think to start with really sort of substantively is to review the charge that the school committee has given to us that they approved um i am going to say let me see if i can find i think i can share my screen hold on i need
021to figure out what i need to share with you guys okay um is that um we approve this charge as a as a school committee can you all see that now so we approved that on the 7th of december as you can see there but again one of the things that the school committee wanted us to report back on is whether we thought this charge was appropriate um i will email this all to you in case you haven't seen it but let's just go through it really quickly and and i believe miss waite and i worked on developing this we found this from some charges from some other um diversity equity and inclusion committees in other school districts so the first is to examine the cultural aspects of our community including language cultures student performance
022and program participation and discipline data to inform our policy and or procedural recommendations two is to solicit input from diverse members of the dartmouth school community around issues of diversity equity inclusion inclusion including but not limited to current policies procedures curriculum facilities communications and messaging from the dartmouth public schools three review and recommend diversity equity diversity inclusion related policies for the district four review district and school plans through an equity and inclusion lens and research best practices and innovative methods for cultivating a safe equitable and inclusive environment with an intent to recommend best practices to the school committee make recommendations to the school committee on equity diversity and inclusion throughout the district with regard to allocation of resources ongoing activities and strategic investments to shape future direction recommend practices and policies involving ongoing professional development
023for staff and training for students and families in issues of diversity and equity and inform the community on equity diversity and inclusion issues and then finally establish appropriate timelines to complete tasks and make recommendations to the school committee so it's a pretty broad charge i don't necessarily think that we need to like fully process it right now i think all of you probably want to read and look at this some more but i will open it up to see does anybody have any questions comments or concerns um on a first sort of pass at that charge of the committee if you do if you if you do want to raise your hand you want to say something just um let me think uh maybe i'm going to stop share so i can see you all
024um does anybody have any comments or questions or concerns about that it's pretty broad i think um it allows us some flexibility to do um a lot of different things um at the same point in time i don't think we want to try to tackle all of those things right to start um because there's a lot there um and that sort of gets i think to really what our last item is on the agenda and our on our biggest and i think most important thing is to talk about what it is we want to do and how we want to start and how we want to proceed given that charge given what we're interested in so um i would be interested to maybe start off that conversation to hear some of your ideas of issues
025you'd like to tackle things that you would like for the committee to investigate proceed with i'm open to any sort of thoughts right now can i start go ahead lily thank you for breaking the ice it's like a first nightmare right when you ask a question but i've learned in my years of teaching that if you outweigh people if you wait them out right they get more uncomfortable with the silence than you do so appreciate you breaking that silence lily go ahead that's a good one i didn't wait very long so i think i need to study that technique um so we did receive a letter from the naacp of new bedford correct correct yes and i can share with the committee if anybody is like that might be something that we should address since
026it was addressed to the school committee and to the school department okay and the letter from the naacp was around the issue of the mascot i'm i'm trying to remember it's been a while i think it was is that the letter that you're referring to lily yeah yeah okay and i will also say that i think kathleen correct me if i'm wrong that that was an issue very much that was at the heart of this formation of this committee but it's not sort of the only issue we decided we're gonna look at um so that's i think one thing that we can start looking at one item on our agenda what else other thoughts do we want to start with that issue thoughts on that yes yes you do so elizabeth you're interested i'm in
027agreement on that yeah i do think that was a big part of the founding of this subcommittee so i think it's a logical starting point okay miss scott i saw you raise your hand i definitely think it's an important issue that we should discuss um as we're a new working group i'm wondering if there are other issues um or other ways that we can start to get to know each other as a group and be able to express ourselves and get a sense i think that the mascot issue is a really big and important one um so i definitely respect elizabeth your point of view on starting with that and i could get with that but i wonder if we should consider if there are other issues i was also going to suggest i don't
028know this so maybe there's some reading i should do but um what our policies are i did read the handbook for quinn elementary i promise you um but it was a while ago i would love to know more about um [Music] dress codes and how we're doing that especially for students who identify as male female whether they are transgender or cisgender that would be i think an interesting thing to look at for this group excellent other thoughts or ideas i will go ahead and take the program of the chair and add sort of one of my thoughts i'm definitely i agree with miss chamberlain and miss murphy that i think tackling the mascot issue is important it was one of the main impetuses behind the creation of this committee by the school committee i would
029be in favor of tackling that first and then one of the things i think for me particularly as a social scientist is i want to find out what i don't know and i don't wonder like at our institution shelly you may know we're doing a sort of a climate survey or an inquiry into sort of what is the our campus climate around issues of diversity equity and inclusion um and so to me as a committee charged with receiving input from various actors um one of the things i think might be worthwhile for us to tackle is what do people think what are our strengths what are we doing well um and what are some of our weaknesses where we can improve and so some sort of way of tackling what not just the public but
030also members of our school community teachers staff students think about what are important issues again what we're good and what we need to work on i think might also help us give some direction so for me in addition to i really do want to start with a mask up but also starting with the issue of what what do we know about about this would be important to me other ideas i'm seeing this is sort of a brainstorming session so we can get some ideas out on the table and then we can sort of talk about how we want to move forward so other ideas dr jenkins i agree with that idea about some kind of survey or assessing the climate that was something i thought would be important too i'd like to get a sense
031from students but also maybe staff and parents and community members about you know how do they feel included or validated or accepted at school and feel like their voice is recognized and and their experiences reflected in the curriculum or in the language that we use and i'd like to hear what their concerns are you know what they see as struggles in our community in areas where we can improve so i think that would be a real good issue to kind of tackle early on so we that could help guide us a little bit and what we should be addressing i also am kind of thought about students who are transgender and you know i know that's something that kids are coming out with more and more and what is their sense of acceptance inclusion and
032policies that have kind of been changed particularly at the high school level but i imagine the middle school level a little bit regarding that i'd like to kind of look at kind of our diversity statistics as far as you know different ethnic groups or racial backgrounds for students that we have in our our schools as well as our staff and you know i think it's always great to make sure that kids feel like their faces are reflected their voices are reflected in our kind of our curriculum as well as our staff you know and i think that's probably an area where we can improve in you know having kids see themselves reflected more so i'd like to see that issue kind of brought up too i think certainly the issue of race is very much
033in our culture right now and race relations so i hope that will be something that we can look at too possibly through the survey about how kids feel regarding that in our community and the the openness or the acceptance or again their voices and experiences being reflected yeah i think i think that's uh i i i think it's important to get some idea of climate and also some information about policies and just being really careful on how we think about this so i'm just going to give a small example we do school reports every year right every school has to put together this massive report um and i never noticed it till this year but dusty requires us to report the number of male students and the number of female students right and um i'm
034gonna get everyone going back and looking but i noticed this year that one person reported non-binary students and they're one school and there was none right but just the act of putting that line in the report to me meant so much right and so it's those very i think little things that that we're gonna i think start hopefully noticing and looking at um in ways that that create that sort of community that we're talking about miss loom i like the idea of maybe um i might you know i hate to ask um our staff to do more work but maybe some sort of short presentation at our next meeting about some of the statistics and data that you talked about um is something maybe we might put together and i can work with dr gifford
035on that um that we can help sort of inform sort of where we are just in terms of just basic data right about the district so maybe that's something we might want to put um on our um our agenda start early to get us all up to speed other thoughts ideas comments i would just add on to that that i do think when we start to look at the issues of gender and things like that we want to think also maybe through the lens of professional development i know sometimes from doing this work that the the language is really new for a lot of people and it's it's really helpful and we can actually make gains pretty quickly on a lot of this stuff when people have the same same understanding of terminology that is
036used and how it's developed and why things are talked about in different ways that sometimes if we just jump right to the the data and things like that people don't always understand what they're looking at so focusing on the professional development side would be a priority yeah i also think too um one of the issues um we'll talk about too in just a minute here is is we're all a little bit old folk right i mean we all have kids kids in the school maybe not all of us right but um i say that in the in the context of you know elizabeth your point is for us um a lot of this terminology may be new um but i know for our kids um it's less so and so i do think it's important
037for us to think about right how do we involve students um it is also professional development but also students because um you know even though i'm not a boomer and there's nothing wrong with it that is my what my my sons say to me when i do something that's not quite right oh you're such a boomer mom right um and so i think that that will be helpful to us too um other thoughts i know it's our first meeting and so we're really just getting started and it's hard to build rapport right when you're just boxes on a zoom meeting but what i really do want us to start thinking about is how we move forward and how we build momentum and how we make progress on this to me it seems like it might
038make sense for us all to do some reading and thinking in advance of our next meeting um we can share um uh some statistics we can do maybe a little informational presentation at our next meeting we can think about our charge and we can think about some of the ideas that we've floated and how we want to do this i will say in talking about plans i've seen a couple of different models for diversity committees and how they operate one is to have the the whole committee sort of focus on one or two critical issues at a time so we're really like all collectively working on this one thing and then we move on and we all work on the next thing and so it's broad and then all of us are working but narrow
039in focus right so that's one option the second way i've seen committees work is they work on multiple issues at a time and they divide into smaller like working groups right so maybe a couple of people are researching about mascots and someone else is researching about transgender issues right and then those work groups kind of come back to the committee and we talk about those issues i don't have a strong preference for either mode of operation um again i'm throwing a lot of ideas out at you in part because i can't throw them out at you in email because that would be a violation of open meeting law so i think it might make sense for us to just sort of throw some of these questions out there right how do we want to operate
040and we think about it we come back together and get another meeting do we want work groups or do we want to focus sequentially on issues or is there another mode of operating that i don't know about we have a list of things that we might get started with let's think about sort of what those how we want to prioritize them right and then come back and discuss um the third thing i would say is that charge right let's all look at the charge and see if we have any concerns additions questions um i think that would be good are there any other items that and we can also think about what other items we might want to discuss right as part of that homework maybe we'll call it are there any other items we
041want to sort of get out on the table for the committee to think about before we do our next meeting i've got the mascot i've got issues around gender particularly transgender dress codes client we've got sort of climate right just sort of broadly and an assessment of climate and then some information right those are some different topics that we can we can we can work on i think doing information makes sense at our next meeting and then we can sort of talk tackle about those those other tasks um mr tebow may i ask you about i want to not forget this and circle back around about having a student member i know we're super late in the school year now um and so i just kind of want to hear your thoughts about um the
042idea was i think you were going to find someone from the high school to be a member of this committee yes um that was the plan and so we have a diversity equity and inclusion club that's only met a couple of times this year um we were in par waiting for this group to to meet um that's a small group of students i know lily has the um multicultural club you know i'm sure there'd be students interested from that group that would obviously bring a perspective here as well you know i don't think we'd have a problem finding a student if it's just one student we're looking for um you know we've had other we've had i've had multiple students express interest so how you would want me to go about selecting one particular student
043you know i'm open to because i think there are multiple student groups within our school that would generate students who are interested in this type of work so um i don't know i want to say one thing and then miss scott i'll come to you and see your hand up so one i will say right now the school committee has one slot for a student right now so we don't we would have to go to the school committee to ask for more slots for a student um if we want the intention is though is that student will be a full voting member of this committee oftentimes student members are not voting members we did not make such a stipulation so that that student would be a voting member miss scott you have a question comment
044it was just related to that do we have to be limited to one student or could we possibly have more than one i guess with voting rights um especially if the student senses a power dynamic even if it's not really there it may be helpful for both students to have each other and help them to feel more comfortable contributing to the group it's just a thought sure and and again i think the school committee is fair to say kathleen correct me if i don't think i'm wrong was very open to our input about to make these changes so i don't want to suggest the school committee was like no you cannot it's just under the way the rules work that's how we have to ask them and then they have to authorize us so if
045we feel like two would be fine i can we kathleen and i can go up and do a report and ask and we can have that vote um so other people's thoughts on one member multiple members lily can i ask you i know you i have mr tebow said you're a adviser to that club you know i i i'll be honest most many of my students are graduating this year so i'm going to be recruiting a bunch of new students next year and i don't think it makes sense for us to have a senior on the committee correct um but i also think um you know we have the the gsa is it still called the usa ross but it stands for something different anyway yeah we still have we have the gsa also at
046our school and that might be another place where we might find people who would be interested in being on the committee but um but yeah i think two would be better than one i think it's hard to be the only kid in a group like this for sure yeah other thoughts comments so i agree about the idea of two more than one i think that would increase comfort for students okay so it seems to be there's some a little bit of consensus here that we would like to ask the school committee to allow us to appoint two student members to the committee is that correct right so i will entertain a motion to formally make that request of the school committee would someone be willing to make that motion shelley you will make that motion
047um go ahead shelly so do i i move to request formally from the school committee that we have two student members thank you and do i have a second i'll second that all right so mr tebow seconded that you have a motion by ms scott and the second by mr tebow to request an additional member which would bring us up to two um up for the school committee um is there any other discussion about that i just have one other question for i want to ask mr hayes mr hayes i think we're all working under the assumption that probably middle school not quite be ready for this but i just wanna it might feel intimidating for an eighth grader but i just wanna verify that with you since you work with middle schoolers um whether
048you think we should have someone from the middle school a student um i i do think that it could be a challenge for you know what we'd be talking about as a seventh grader incoming eighth grader um to be the voice of the building in effect um it is certainly you know i i think from my perspective i think one of the most important things that we can do as a group is and it was brought up already is to make the school building a comfortable place for all of our students and staff i think from from my perspective that's the most important piece here uh for for educational purposes for you know comfort at work purposes which then directly affect our affect our students education um so i do think you know from with
049myself and miss massari on the committee i think with that we're hopefully able to garner the voice of the middle school it might be tough for a 13 year old to do so but i'd like to think and hope that we're able to bring that to the community i 100 agree i just wanted to i didn't want to operate under an assumption um and so i just wanted verification that the assumption that we were making was correct so we're asking to add another high school student right so two by students would mean high school and i just wanted to verify that any other comments concerns any sort of discussion about that okay so i will roll call this one uh miss amarill yes uh mr tebow yes mr hayes yes um ms bloom yes miss
050chamberlain yes uh ms masari yes uh miss murphy yes uh and miss scott yes um and i will also vote yes all right so that's unanimous uh miss amarillo and i luckily i'm the chair of the school committee too so i get to make the agenda so i'll put us on the agenda um for our next meeting and i will we will make that request of the school committee i don't think there'll be any difficulty with that um mr tebow i'm not sure that doesn't really answer your question of how to select these students um but i guess i might say that i i don't know if any of the i don't really know i'm not sure i can offer you guidance you know your school and your students best um is the committee comfort
051comfortable with maybe sort of empowering like mr tebow um and maybe incorporating input from ms chamberlain and other people in the high school to identify those students or are there any things you would like mr tebow to do in identifying those students any thoughts on that miss scott i know when i'm looking to identify student leaders here at the university for students to be involved uh there's a freudian slip a lot of times we have the same student leaders that do everything so i know i have to challenge myself to really cast the net very widely and really try to reach those students that just because you're not you know the the student government president or what have you you're not the that you may still just have excellent insight because you are more the
052every man or every woman at your school so i don't really have a method for doing that other than maybe marketing really well or sometimes asking teachers to nominate students sort of like the unsung hero type student um so i don't know if that's helpful or not but just a thought and something that i try to do in practice in my work too i i think that's a great idea and i will add on my two cents um looking at us i'm so grateful that all of you have volunteered for this committee but we are a very white committee we are and i would very much like to give priority to consideration of demographic characteristics when picking students who are going to be on this committee i think it's important right as a social scientist
053i know um group discussions who you have at the table matters and so your discussions are better and richer when you have different voices and different viewpoints at the table and i know as a white woman that i don't i experience the world differently right than than people with different demographic characteristics so i would really hope that um that we can add um you know here's what i will say principles of affirmative action if you have equally qualified candidates right then these are these are the things that should matter and that's what we should consider so i'd like for us to cast a very wide net to miss scott's point um and if we're like wow we have five really good candidates then i think that the considerations of diversity should uh be important in
054that decision that's my um point of view um again i'm open to i would love to hear other people's thoughts i agree with you all right so does that give you some guidance mr tebow i've gotta go about doing that yes it does yes it does thank you all right so i know it's late and everyone's had a long day um we've mostly gone through the items are our agenda there's one other thing i think i really want to discuss with you all with respect to plans um and then i'll see if you have anything else my other question is about sort of meeting dates times frequencies um we're all here on a tuesday night at 30. does that work for people generally speaking i know not everyone's going to be able to make every
055meeting but if someone's like you know tuesday nights don't work for me i had to rearrange everything to be here i want to take that into consideration does anybody have any sort of long-standing permanent commitments on tuesday nights okay i'm hopeful um you know we talk about things we might want to keep from the pandemic and while i am tired of zoom zoom nighttime meetings are really nice i'm sure dr gifford agrees as a superintendent mr team mr hayes right having to go to nighttime meetings all over the place it's nice to be able to zoom from your house and um that's not to say all of our meetings should be in zoom but i'm hopeful we can continue some of this because it is really quite convenient um how frequently do we want to
056meet um i know we're just getting started most of the committees that i've seen the diversity committees are once a month which seems about right to me once we get going right i feel like now one month from now is really a long time from now too much so do we want to do two weeks from today three weeks from today what are what is i think like again as we're getting started maybe a little bit more frequent um and maybe through like may and june maybe have a few frequent meetings and then in the summer maybe give everyone a little break and then pick back up maybe monthly in the fall but what do you think two weeks from tonight or three weeks from tonight whatever shelly i see a two elizabeth lily two
057all right i see lots of twos all right so that seems to be a straw poll so that would put us at i'm going to whip out my calendar here um let's see what's that that would be 18. the um 18th right so we would meet again on tuesday may 18th at 6 30. sorry about that confusion around 6 or 6 um but um we would do 6 30. um we will um sort of write up the the the minutes that i will send an email to you we talked about doing a little thinking and research before our next meeting um and that would be i will send you the charge to take a look at that we're going to sort of think about that see if we want to make changes to that um
058two we're going to think about how we want to operate cereal one task at a time with all of us into smaller working groups um we are going to come back around to discussing like what it is we're going to move forward on first one or multiple things and then also um next um next meeting we'll start off probably with a little presentation some background information um i will work with dr gifford on that if there's anything in particular that you want to learn more about you have data information that you want to know let us know and we'll see if we can find it are there other things that you would like to discuss around our plans our charge any of that miss scott go ahead just really quickly i forgot to mention it
059before land acknowledgements and i have done some research on that and i'm not an expert but i could share some information if helpful that would be great um well you know we're working on that issue at umass dartmouth you and i have had some conversations about that for those of you right not familiar with land acknowledgements but land acknowledgement states statements are just um acknowledgments by institutions right of sort of the origins of the lands on which our institutions reside as an acknowledgement of that history um you know they started i believe shall we correct me if i'm wrong in canada as part of sort of a native truth and reconciliation commission and so they have been more common there's some controversy surrounding this um in part because if you just do a land acknowledgement
060statement and that's it i might personally say if you do a land acknowledgement statement and have a mascot you know i don't know but i also think maybe that could be folded under that sort of broader umbrella related to that um i'll also note um one of the things that i'm working on on campus and i say this to mr tebow as we look to next year some of these things are great student projects right like i think having a student do research about the history of our i can think of that as being great for like an ap research or an ap capstone project right um so some of this work i think from my perspective it would be great for some of our students to do because it's kind of the ultimate engaged
061learning experience um so that's something i think we as a committee can do to think about how we can engage students in the work that we're doing to help us accomplish that work i'm always a big fan of that other things to add comments questions concerns lily sorry so are we gonna try to have that sorry i'm gonna try to um get the students at the next meeting that would be the hope um i know it's a short time frame um when is our next school committee meeting um our bonnie do you remember not monday may 17th okay so we can i think i think we should be able to get that authorization to add that second student at our next school committee meeting um so mr tebow do you think you can make that
062that that 18th date yeah i think i think that's doable okay fabulous so that's a good question we will try to make that happen because i think the earlier we bring them in the better i think that that would be good sure and just one more question i don't know dr gifford if we have information about linguistic diversity like how many people speak a different language at home i mean sometimes that shows we don't know well we do the yearly um english you know other languages at home but i'm not quite sure how we to be honest how we uh tabulate that or keep uh keep that and i'll have to check that in the office that's okay just just wonder if we had that information so i mean it's interesting though too right as
063we think about like the data you keep oftentimes matter right and reading a book about um like equity the equity data walking the data walk and talking to data talk right and we can't have do do the work right without having data um and so some of it may be is per our charge like maybe we want to recommend that we collect data on what languages are spoken at home right so we have a better sense of that and so i think we learn as much about what we don't have sometimes from what we do have so that's that's a great question miss chamberlain other questions comments concerns i would just say that i think that sometimes opens up a whole different set of questions too because if you're trying to get at what languages
064people speak at home how are you trying to get that information in what language are you doing so so that means we need to look at some of that to potential because there can be a lot of communication issues good point yeah other comments questions all right well again i really want to thank you guys all for volunteering um to serve on this committee um you know i know the district and our schools do good work and we focus on this but i think the more eyes ears and brains you have working on a an issue better and i'm looking forward to working with you all on these issues i will send an informational email with the charge with the questions we decided on um for you to work on um we will also circulate
065an agenda in minutes prior to the next meeting but in the meantime i guess i will entertain a motion to adjourn unless there is anything anyone else would like to talk about i'll make that motion thank you miss amarillo i thought we're going to be here all night so i have a motion by miss amaral do i have a second miss murphy thank you all right a motion by miss amaral in a second by miss murphy um to be i know i think that is also going to be unanimous but i still technically got to do the roll call miss scott sorry sometimes i go backwards and i throw shelly off that's a yes okay we all see that miss murphy yes yes all right miss masari yes uh miss chamberlain yes i'm miss bloom
066yes mr hayes yes mr tebow yes miss amaral yes and i am also a yes thank you very much um i really look forward to working with you guys have a great evening thank you thank you you