001mr hayden mr cyrillo miss marmal here mr rossi miss fitzgerald mr lamontagne yeah present okay can i have a motion for uh minutes of mage 10 discussion changes all those in favor anyone opposed jerry would you be kind enough to give us a cash balance report please leo may i have just a few minutes oh i'm set up and then uh sorry come back back no no my apologies no no problem uh you'll notice uh there was a handout given for the consolidated cash reconciliation report uh revolving fund report in the budget report communications i see no donations articles there was a mtel communication and literacy test preparation workshop medical assistant health fair and a plant sale is there any public participation this evening none think so well i mean you can slow down if
002you want okay we have no student report this evening correct it's in the packet but we don't have no we don't have a the student i don't think she's going to be here this evening because we have we have uh school council right yeah yeah so becoming late right right but i don't believe maureen will be here no i think susan was going to give her oh sue is going to give her yeah susan's going to do this oh okay so susan will do it okay all right when she comes in okay all right uh graphics program do we have an update on that john uh oh okay yeah just to wrap it up for closing graphics is uh some data if you look at the i gave you a document says labor market trends
003in graphic design in massachusetts it shows that the job market was shrinking to the point where it's at about one percent over the next 10 years and very few jobs openings year after year so that was the number one reason why we closed graphics and then the second reason we closed graphics uh the other major reason we closed graphics was the we found that there was each year less and less interest in the program basically we believe because of the job market and was also getting difficult to find instructors in that career area for teaching and and then that the other thing that shows a a lack of job opportunities trends was over the last four years that graphic was uh that we had graphics that the numbers for co-op continue to uh be very
004small so in 2019 we only place six kids all year uh 2020 one student all year we could only find one job for graphic students in 2021 there was two jobs and this year we've had two or two two co-op jobs for uh seniors i believe they were the same jobs as the when they were juniors they continued into their senior year so that just shows that the job market has shrunk and having difficulty placing students so that was a rationale let's go through the rationales questions for the superintendent there are um some uh links on the bottom of the one of the pages if you want to do more you want to you can uh go to those websites websites and get more information as well that supports the rationale for closing graphics frank
005uh john can you email me uh a copy i can email that to everyone so they'll have the link i'll have susan send that out tomorrow thank you oh i can send it out then i'll send it out mr lilly i just want to confirm that we did find a position for the graphics teacher who was here the graphics teacher that was here is uh has applied for the opening we have in uh uh business to business tech and um so i we haven't we haven't gotten to recommend this principle i don't believe has gotten a recommendation on that position yet but she the graphics instructor has experience in certain aspects of the frameworks and business tech so she qualified so she would be a a possible candidate to teach that program if in fact
006they feel like that she's the best candidate so she was interviewed i think she's already been interviewed was the graphics teacher that's teaching this year she was interviewed in business tech correct have anyone made a recommendation to you yet sue on that yeah not yet okay so we're still waiting on that anything further thank you anything further yes sir vivian when uh a certain program there's some sort of decline um in regards to students enrolling is there a correlation as to how the school promotes the program itself during open houses or any other um any other methods as well i'm not sure what methods you guys use when you promote certain shops yep so most of our marketing for the programs is done through uh the work we do with admission so when we go
007out to all the schools we go over every program we have marketing i mean graphics was one of those programs so we don't treat any one program more or less uh than another in terms of opportunities or growth or any of that we don't give a lot of detailed information about that in exploratory the students get to explore every program and learn about the opportunities in that particular program open house all the programs promote do displays presentations within their shops and everyone is given the same opportunities we don't if we do any uh anything for the website if you go on the website graphics would have been in the website so we don't [Music] try to hurt a program and her this opportunity for bringing students into their program [Music] one against another based on
008what we think might be the best shop for kids to go into we treat them all the same regardless of whether it's medical assistant or whether it's graphics or any other program in terms of our marketing and our support of uh any particular program anything further jerry are you all set now maybe we're going to go uh we're going to go back to the cash balance report did the stefano oh i'm sorry branson frank sorry um leo before that can you introduce our new business um frank sure sorry i don't have the hairline want to introduce her but not that i don't want to it just said last name and the title because i just completely blended down the title john let me introduce our business manager sorry the problem yeah so we should have
009had melissa right on the first thing but uh i want to welcome melissa martel our new business our uh director of uh finance with us tonight uh today's our second day on the job yesterday was her first day and uh we have a deep knee deep into plenty of financial problems initially well not really just uh plenty of uh plenty of learning and things that she needs to to learn um there's a lot to learn a lot of things to remember so we we're happy to have her finally we uh we were marking off the calendar for the last three months waiting for her to come so we're thrilled to have you and i think everybody remembers uh melissa as you guys elected her yeah thrilled to have you welcome okay uh jerry thank you
010leo um cash balance report as of may 17 2022 count balance on may 3rd 2022 was 2162 196.41 we had deposits from may 4th to may 17th of 1881 848 spot 92 less payroll on may 12 of 9 51 281 26 and warrant number 21 on may 10th of 337 spot 37 leaves us with the book balance on may 17 2022 of 2755 763 70 with a corresponding bank balance on the same day of 2833 829 spot 47. in our mmdt account we have 8 million 816 544 spot 43 and a total operating cash balance on may 17th 2022 of 11 million 572 308 13. except the motion the most we're so moved to the second second discussion all those in favor anyone opposed thank you very much yes going uh going down now to
011the principles uh leo yes i'm sorry um going back to communications you forgot to mention the mtel communication literacy test preparation workshop no i read that you did yeah i did i know i know i read it i maybe read it to myself but i know i read it okay sorry um principal report please uh student report uh farsu yes um i want to report tonight that maureen's not feeling well so she's going to do her amazing student report at our next meeting but i did want to follow up and do a brief report on our after-school program jontos podemos that we talked about last meeting the um students and the um advisors put this together and so in lieu of maureen's amazing report she'll be back um you all have a copy of it
012but i'll just cycle through it a little bit um so juntos pozamos um has been uh an after-school program for about four three or four years um prior to the pandemic we started this it's together we can and what we found was that some of our english learners that were in the lower levels of proficiency really just kind of newcomers are working really working hard on their english we needed an additional support for them besides just our regular homework help so they could have a place where they can have access to ask questions and also work with other students that they may not see see during the day that are also you know learning english and that are multilingual learners so we've had amazing staff even last year through the pandemic and through our remote
013learning this this club met even remotely so it meets on tuesday and thursdays from 3 to 4 30 and we always have freshman to seniors which is very nice the team is english learner teachers as well as amazing paraprofessionals they work together they've this year done some crafting games it really is a safe space for that they can spend time it's also a great place for them to take risks and practice their practice their speaking and it's always great they ask some amazing questions there they have a google classroom set up so even if someone misses a class they're always able to take part in the activities or review videos or any updates and you know they always are doing different things and so the the goal of this program moving forward is we'd like
014to get our students find out what they're interested in and get them out into the community um and in doing some different things so it becomes homework help but it's more directed homework help for our students that are multilingual learners this year a big focus on crafts they made some cards and sent them out to different areas in the community and they were also able to make cards for their own families and friends they some of the most frequent questions they have are about after after-school activities how to join a sport some questions about even school because sometimes from a student that's transferring here from another country they school may look different for them so they ask questions just about like almost like the rules of school also we spend a lot of times talking
015about college and scholarships and also a big question is how to get a co-op job or how to get a job so the staff supports all of our students um with that um and again there's always uno and dominoes those are two some of their favorites um [Music] a [Music] so he helped me [Music] awesome thank you girls all right oscar why don't you tell us what was your experience this year at does foreign well i heard from the program due to one of my cousins she used to go there and i was very impressing this one because i wanted to like good friends but then i saw the importance of it and miss lafay she really helped me in this past few months because i struggled with chemistry and she really helped me do
016homework projects and everything she understood everything that happened in my background and everything she tried to like help me and everything that i wanted to accomplish so from the from the students and that's our program and that's my report any questions for our principal yes yes frank first of all thank you for thank you and everybody else who put this together especially hearing from the students the benefit of the program it's great to know that there's programs out here that we have here that's helping our second language learners in the different aspects of what it is within the program i think it was the first time i've heard about it was that i'll ask you it was became a question of what does the program do and how effective is it and it's great listening
017exactly from the kids why these are the things we need to highlight a little bit more um once again thank you to everybody that puts us together the students for actually speaking um and definitely i would like to at some point for next year pass by and that's what i mean all next year great the other thing i did forget to mention is that this program is um it is funded by title iii so title iii is a specific grant that is directly used to support multilingual learners as well as parent engagement yep quit not a urinal pamper engagement how do we have any of the parents act um supporting or actively engaging in in this program as well with their students we don't have specific parents engaging in the program but we did just
018have our english learner parent advisory council meet which was the first time we had it in person for a couple years and we had a great turnout and part of the parent engagement for our english learners is also to let the parents know about this program because sometimes you know maybe the students might not go home and say hey there's a homework help program or there's another way for me to learn more english and so we got a lot of parents at the end of the year also interested in it for next year anything further thank you very much superintendent lavoy will update the district committee on the new hire demographics for the last five for the past five years so you you have a handout in your packet that shows since 2017-18 each year
019up until this year how many new hires we've had and how many were female male caucasian african-american hispanic latino caucasian um and um four let's see one two three four [Music] been about between 25 around 25 percent maybe a little less than 000 when we had 43 hires that year a lot of hires that year but we're somewhere trying to maintain we'd like it to get closer to 50 percent as we continue to work towards making changes in my upcoming goals report i'll go over with the committee some of the changes we've made and some of the upcoming changes we're going to be doing to try to address the need to recruit more people of color into our into our school any questions for the superintendent yes vivian is this including administrators in this graph
020because it includes staff so it's all staff i'll staff um what strategies have you put in place so far because i'm just looking at these numbers and they're pretty atrocious in terms of the amount of hires that you know every year and comparing it to how many you're hiring um like i'm not seeing diversity at all so i know that this has been a topic for for the past few years i'm not sure how far back this has been an issue or a concern here but what strategies are we actively doing i want to know what are we doing now well now we've been we've been working on putting together a a new booklet for hiring practices which will include new strategies that we're going to use to try to which we have been learning
021from a program we have four staff members who are attending a dsc program on on recruitment for um minorities and we've had eight sessions this year in those sessions we are working with about 150 other schools are in this program as well which we have an opportunity to have conversations and work on different methods and strategies so we're working on putting a plan together moving forward from this year as to some strategies and methods we may use which include which includes this year looking at everything from our our website to our documents that we use for posting so we're looking at all kinds of data to take a look at what we have that may have an impact on staff putting put together a we put together a committee to look at our culture and
022does our culture is our culture impacting our ability to have growth in the area of bringing in new more more minorities into the school so it's a work that we have been working on for the last three years and have attended different workshops and trying to change the numbers that we have we're not unique in the state almost every school district across the state is trying to find more minorities to come to their schools it's a problem across the state that's why the department of education has promoted different uh this particular program we're involved in in trying to uh determine methods to get more not only more people of color into our staff and hiring more but also in terms of developing more equity within the school in all areas everything from programming to opportunities
023for students in uh that are fair and equitable uh for programs and um in learning uh so that's uh we've been actively involved in that this year and uh looking at uh that anti-racist uh uh strategies to improve the quality of our culture within the building it's uh it's been a priority for probably the particularly this year not only for us but for across the all schools and across the state and trying to work at it so that's something we've been doing right now at this point we this year the past year this year when we post we have two companies that uh that are experts uh provide expertise in uh posting and helping us recruit a student uh staff of color um and have we've our hr director and i believe our principal went
024to a workshop um a a job fair about a month ago for the purpose of trying to recruit people of color and also get the word out so it's a a comp i can't remember remember the name of the company susan that's that we are now part of where we get information on all job fairs and they post all our jobs specifically for hiring minorities so we are doing things but it's a process and we hope to continue to grow and improve in that process when you speak of strategy are you implying that there is a lack of candidates people of color who are applying um for the positions that we're putting out there um and the reason why i asked that is because i know not all positions but there have been some positions
025that i'm aware of where there are candidates of color who are applying and they're just being overlooked you know and it could be based on qualifications or a number of reasons um so that's the point of my question is the strategies that you speak of are you implying that we are just having a lack of candidates of people of color who are applying or is there other issues that we're not aware of well it depends on position certain positions yeah i would say that there is a lack of of qualified or strong candidates for a position generally that's not the case in every situation because if you look this year we've hired or 2122 we have hired uh nine people of minorities so it's not that we're not hiring any out of 34 positions that's
026everything from a custodian to administrators so in some cases we get no candidates of color and other times we may get candidates of colors or minorities but we uh i think we're fair and we have a a hiring practice which i think is fair uh to all people who apply here at glts we have a strategy that we use where we put together a a team to do interviewing made up of for the most part teachers and administrators particularly if they're educational positions then it goes from there to the principal from the principal to myself so i don't think the practice that we use i think is done in the fair and we do understand how important it is to hire staff members that are that are of color based on our demographics students and
027the amount of students we have in the school so i think the biggest thing for us is to try to find get more candidates of color to apply uh for our positions get the word out um and i think you know a lot of times one of the things that we're learning is that people will if they fear if the word on the streets is we're at school that uh that has a culture of acceptance of of of minorities and people of color that they're comfortable uh you look at everything from our our all of our documentation our culture within the building relationships uh how comfortable the people of color here in the building are in fact we're putting a committee together strictly looking at putting together a committee of all of our staff minority
028staff so that we can get more feedback from what's their experience here at greater lawrence and how do they how do we get the community and people outside of our community to believe that they're welcomed here so you know we realize we have to do a better job at it and we realize that there's more work to be done on it but i don't think that we don't give opportunities anyone that that does apply uh i do think we need more people of color to apply if if someone hasn't gotten a job um it certainly uh you know isn't uh that there wasn't a fair opportunity for a position that we that we may put out there for the most part yes what no whatever you have i just wanted to add one last thing
029and it's uh you're intrigued me superintendent when you commented on the fact that we do hire minorities ranging in positions from custodians to administrators and it's hard to tell with this graph as to you know to differentiate as to um because to me it's a big difference um the administration side versus the rest of us you know the rest of the positions in the school are we able to kind of demonstrate that in this graph i can i we can break it down to uh if you'd like me to break down which positions they are and um and and give you the demographics on that i certainly can do that as well so we can break these numbers down so you can see you know how many uh teachers were you know uh teachers that
030were people of color and how many were how many were administrators how many were uh uh maybe custodian or yes we're hiring six custodians it's like yeah thank you that's nice but i would like to see also teachers of color um teaching our students as well or us a candidate of color who's in and you know in the administration side so if you're just hiring them for custodian or um at the cafeteria again yes it's thank you that's a it's a step forward but yeah we should and could do better yeah i don't think that uh we're looking at when i look at eight staff members there that you know the majority of those were custodians or my i think probably the majority of them are probably teachers or uh paraprofessionals yeah i'm not specifying
031yeah i'm not specifying i have no clue i'm just going based on your comment that we do hire them um in a range of positions so it didn't intrigue me as to seeing what those numbers look like to have a better idea and more detailed information as to where exactly you know we should be looking into and how to improve sure well i have to i you know when it comes to hiring teachers which almost in particular on the technical side of house we um it's a challenge to find people period never mind people of color to apply for some of our positions you know we've had particularly in the technical side of the house this year we've really struggled uh just we just recently had a posting for plumbing we had three candidates um
032and we have three openings in plumbing i know we hired [Music] one person of color in plumbing and we hired a caucasian and the third person we're looking at hiring i believe is a person of color um which are both and of those three two out of the three were graduates of the school it's fine one of the strategies that i had we had talked about the other day was you know over the last um at least the last 10 years um you know a high percentage of our students were students of color and uh what we're looking at is to try to reach out to our uh our um students that graduated from the pa our alumni so we're doing we're working on doing a posting out to our through our alumni association to
033try to encourage more alumni uh to apply for our positions because there's you know 80 percent of them are our students of color this year going out doing uh trying to recruit doing a workshop for uh people to come into the education where we did a workshop we had 40 people apply i mean uh fill out an application to come to the workshop of which 20 came and out of that we've had four people out of that workshop who applied for positions so far this year of which two were people of color so we are making some effort and doing some strategies but it's um it's not we we clearly understand how important that is given our student body and having role models that are our educators and that they can feel connected to and
034and feel like everything's possible to them anything in the world's possible opportunities in terms of jobs it doesn't matter you know in terms of who you are we believe everybody can succeed uh and we have high regard for our students and i feel our students feel um that we believe that and they have good relationships with you know whether teachers a teacher of color or whether it teaches caucasian um one of one of the things we pride ourselves is in the kind of relationships and support we give our students so but we will continue to work hard and come up with and implement better and and strategies for our hiring practices to improve from where we are today mr sorel oh oh saw i thought it was you mr here oh mr hayden mr lavoy
035when you compile that report that vivian was talking about you tell us how many people are coming can you tell us how many people of color have not stayed have say the last five years so you want to take you want us to take a look at the retention rate for our for our people what our retention rate is that's fine sure we can do we can give you that as long as you've given us everybody just people of color retention rate of just the people how many people of color have left or all people that's what i was interested in but all people would be fine okay well we'll break it down so you'll see mr solo yeah i would like to table this until we get the full data because in order for
036us to make informed decisions at this level we need to have the full spectrum of the data i mean they are we when we talk about diversifying a system it has to be all levels walk through the school and where you have the moral concentration of um people of color is in the cafeteria cafeteria staff so we're failing i mean looking at these numbers we're not really diversifying at all um we have some in nine out of 25 that's not that's to me that that's not great we did and then and i was here with john um i want to say sue was there at the um teacher thing we were trying to recruit teachers no um they were a mix of teachers of colors and we had 40 people that applied for that workshop
037informational session i think only 20 showed up so we we have to put a better strategy plan in place and that means going out into the community um and looking at what shops we have here and going out to the shops to garages um all the places that to see if we do a better level of recruitment so one of the strategies that we're using so just to give you an example um this friday i'm going out to two different companies uh for the purpose of trying to recruit teachers and then next week we're going to two other companies to go out and we're trying to connect with the hr's in those companies and take a look at what kind of uh specifically targeting some of the uh openings we have here at the school
038to try to find teachers and part of that is to try to take a look at companies that that may have people minorities working for them that we can kind of recruit from so uh that's part of another part of our strategy that we're actually going out and i'm doing the first four with a team and then we'll continue our goal is to continue to visit companies for the specific purpose of recruiting staff members um so we've we've made a list i've and we've got the names of these companies to our advisory uh committees um i asked for names of all different companies that they thought we could go out and visit so we're we're starting with these four and we'll continue an ongoing process of going out and visiting these companies for the specific
039purpose of trying to connect with uh people of color at these different companies just just to get our foot in the door and and see and then what we're hoping for is to be able to put advertisements on their bulletin board so instead of just depending on school spring or or indeed or some of these others these are all local big corporations and companies and smaller ones as well in the construction areas that we're going out to visit for that specific purpose yeah and i know in this climate day and age right now it's hard to recruit any teachers in general or educational staff it's been a struggle throughout the commonwealth that i want to say far more most likely in the nation um but we have to put better strategies in place and to
040go out there and start recruiting um and it's also looking at the colleges because we're talking about all right we have two sides in our house career and academics so we have to start managing both as well as an administration side so i would actually want to make a motion table until we get the full um information that was just requested today yeah we're not voting on it so no we'll just put it back on the agenda we'll be back on the next uh the next agenda we'll make sure it's back to the next agenda okay superintendent sure okay yeah i'll get that information okay but also have it put on to the agenda please okay thank you also have it put on to the agenda the gender police that was to the superintendent sorry
041okay anything uh anything further on this matter uh sue i just wanted to share the the name of the organization that superintendent lavoie talked about that we recently joined it's the massachusetts partnership for diversity and education and uh that was our first school like we went to a recruitment fair that was our first one but we'll be working more specifically more closely with them they also are going to partner with our hr coordinator in terms of thinking about they post our job so that's another place where our jobs aren't just on school spring and they specifically target um diverse candidates um you know and you know it was it was a good it was eye opening for us it was also a good first step in terms of looking at different ways to recruit rather
042than just posting jobs anything further yeah um mr hayden mrs zielinski just to follow up on frank's this is for vocational and academic teachers all teachers all employees yes for all positions okay okay uh superintendent lavoy will update the committee on the shop student teacher ratio john so the data on different programs how many teachers and how many students um i gave you a um a document that that lists the number of teachers uh and how many students were in a particular program that information was requested and i provided that information any questions on the information that we received yes vivian so in terms of the number of teachers and the ratio of students do you find with the numbers that you see yourself here superintendent are there any shops that where you would recommend
043that there is a need for for more hires so based on the shops that we're seeing here and the number of teachers do you find that there are any shops that we do need to hire additional teachers and if so which ones the the number of teachers in any particular program i sit down with the department heads that's part of our budget process we sit down and look at how many students and how many teachers and we weigh in on a lot of factors not just numbers but we weigh in on the type of instruction that's happening in the space in which that instruction happens what kind of equipment what kind of a lot of times a shop may be far more safe there are bigger concerns for safety issues in another shop there's space
044issues and also does the program itself lend itself to an instructor working with more than one grade level that can be the case at times so there are a lot of factors we look at when we determine uh also we look at the trends within the program to see if the numbers how big the how large numbers are sometimes a shop may let's say in the ninth grade have bring in 10 new french freshmen but every other year they brought in 20. so although the numbers may be lower all of a sudden we may not cut back on that particular program because the next year you may have another 10 so we wait till there's a trend we continue to look at the trend we also look at the data for job opportunities and growth
045so sometimes we find that particular program may be drawing small numbers but so we have to do some research to find out what's going on with that particular program especially if there's a strong job market and students are taking that particular program we want to increase the numbers into that program so we have to do work on figuring out what the issues may be whether it's instructional strategies whether it's the curriculum lack of knowledge in terms of what the opportunities are for a particular program so there's a lot of different factors then if the numbers are might go the other way too they might we may have a program where there is three instructors and their numbers are growing and increasing so the following year we may have to add a fourth instructor uh because
046of the of that so looking at the particular numbers we have this year there's one program that i see on there there's two programs that will be numbers will be increasing which is uh robotics will have two instructors next year and business tech will have three instructors next year because they're we're adding uh another year to the program and they've been able to recruit uh uh substantial numbers increasing their numbers in business tech in particular so that uh program will we'll be adding an instructor to that program biotechnology we we have three instructors as of now and we're looking at whether we should put a fourth instructor in there or not there's a lot of factors that we haven't made a final decision on that typically we do make a decision by this time but
047there are some other personnel issues going on within that program that we're trying to weigh out and resolve before we make the final decision in that particular program robotics has a small number only has five students but it will those students are moving on to the next grade level so we need an instructor for that grade level and so and we also need an instructor for the freshman it's also a brand new somewhat brand new program still where we believe there's a extremely strong job market and the future in this particular program has a large increased growth rate for job opportunities so we're not giving up on it yet we're going to go uh so we're going to uh and we're looking at um we've improved the space we've recruit improved the equipment we've made
048some changes in the curriculum to try to draw more students and we're also looking for a top-notch instructor right out of industry that's one another reason why we're going out to industry to try to find the person that we think is the right fit for that program not only uh that can deliver the curriculum as it's to develop and design by the frameworks but also that can motivate kids that to build interest in the program and increase it so you know looking at it quickly in each of these programs at this point but those are the i think too that stick out that i know that we're going to be increasing the number of instructors in those particular programs vivian even after increasing those the the numbers by one per shop do you find that
049every other shop including the ones you just mentioned have the adequate amount of numbers of uh teachers according to the ratio of students that they have in the classroom or do we have like a budget concern in hiring additional staff to cover i believe i believe we have adequate teachers for those programs because we've vetted that through the process and so i believe we have sufficient instructors for the program because even though the numbers in some cases might look higher than others the the nature of the type of instructing that's going on may dictate the number of instructors as well so the numbers don't always tell the full story of why we have certain amount of instructors in that particular program so i would say we're we're good to go for next year based on
050these numbers other than the two i said we're looking at increasing yeah and the reason for my request on this information was just to ensure that the where providing sufficient amount of support and backing on the teachers that you know they're teaching our students and we want to make sure that they're properly giving the necessary tools and resources to be able to teach our students that's the only way we could you know it will be reflective in our performance so you know i i would like to encourage that we're properly staffing each shop accordingly and i appreciate you taking the time to to give me the breakdown george welcome anything further uh zoila yeah i know okay i'm playing with it robotic automation technology you mentioned that this is a new program that's why he
051has five students and one teacher robotics automation has not had a good draw they've had difficulty in getting students into their program for a lot of various reasons we've had some struggles with finding the right instructor in that particular program we've had uh no i asked if that's a new program oh that's this is a third this is their three years old this is their third yeah this is their third year i thought yes so it's still a relatively new program who has only five students because they've had struggles recruiting the program uh each freshman classes they've had a hard time getting students into the program now they've had if you look at there's no students in being the third year there's no students other than in the freshman class the reason for that is
052we've had two one year so this is the third year of uh recruitment the first year they recruited one student second year they recruited two students we moved those students into other pro into the engineering program because the numbers were so low and it's very there are some part of the framework parts of the curriculum are similar in engineering as they are in robotics and given the low numbers we didn't want to hire a teacher for one student so we moved them in but now that we have five students and we're going to start to build that program with those five students and try to next year we'll be bringing in 10th graders next year and we're going to try to bring in more students into that particular program when we bring in transfer students
053so we always bring in a certain number of transfer students so that's one of the programs we're going to try to bring in 10th grade students to increase those number of five to at least 10 students through our transfer process that'll be one of the shops where we have openings and opportunities for transfer students to come into so we are we feel that we'll try to run that program with two instructors one for the sophomore class and one for the freshman class um so it just brings up a couple questions because i'm looking at business tech and this is based on year of graduation am i correct for my assumption because business tech shows like for 2022 there's no um no students graduating for that year 2023 is the same i thing um then you
054got graphics we know that's gone biotech 2025 we don't have any freshmen and in robotics we only have for year 2025 because it's a brand new program and we don't have any students for this program but we have tons of students that are still on the waitlist that could have been easily selected and put into some of these programs yeah so what happens let's take this year for instance we have where our goal is to have four 400 approximately to 440 freshmen come in so that's our target we don't know at this point how many students are going to go into one program so we've also got to consider our academic programs how many students our student teacher ratio and the academic role i could take i could probably take another we could probably take
055475 in order to fill every single program to capacity but we don't have enough space number one academic classrooms nor do we have enough instructors nor do we have enough common space like our cafeteria is a problem over over uh too many students in their lunches so there's a lot of other factors we do but so we figure at 440 which is a high number for us our goal really is 430 students at the end we may start with 440 but in the beginning students uh leave and go back to their regular high school we're hoping to end up by october 1st at 430 students but we don't know if out of that 430 who's going to pick which programs so in the end at the end of freshman year we do exploratory and exploratory
056they select their shops at the end of exploratory we've had very few students take robotics automation technology and that's why the numbers the number is so low so what we can do is take them in tenth grade so we can encourage students that are we take in transfer students what we do is try to fill in 10th grade where we have openings in the shop and so if we have where we have the numbers start to drop off in the 10th grade we can start to fill so if we had 20 openings we try to fill in with those 20 students in the shop program center that have space that have openings in so robotics would be one of those programs where we can bring in more students in the 10th grade but the wait
057list we still only even though we may have room in the sophomore year the waitlist is in the freshman year and so we still can only take so many students in that year because it compounds for year to year so if we took 440 this year and we maintained 430 the following year in the following year our numbers get to uh like we're at 1635 right now which is high for us it's the highest number we've had since the school opened i believe so the numbers are extremely high right now and the common space is where we have challenges where the academic programs and um our cafeteria and the hallways get overcrowded when we get beyond that number so that prevents us from you know even if we had a few openings in the shop
058we couldn't fill those openings without causing an overcrowding issue because you you mentioned earlier that this program is combined with a different program correct with different shock yeah i'm sorry you mentioned earlier that this program was combined with a different shop what was the shop again engineering oh engineering we move some they're not combined with them but they have similar the framework there are similar competencies in engineering and in robotics so some of the framework there's crossover so i mean similar to we have other programs so if you looked at hvac there are a lot of electrical um competencies in hvac that are common to electrical so we could do cross-training if we had low numbers in those particular programs so in engineering because there were there was low numbers in engineering at the time
059we could move kids we were able to move those few kids in robotics engineering and we can differentiate some of the instruction in engineering to try to target some of the more uh more competencies within the robotics when we know so the goal was those students that were in robotics that we moved to engineering that we would differentiate some of the curriculum for those particular students so their projects could be more robotic based than a different area of engineering whether sometimes there's many disciplines of engineering that we offer the students sometimes as a little civil sometimes it's a little electrical engineering so we're able to target we differentiate for some of the kids some of the different disciplines of engineering when we can um and this is the first year we're doing this this program
060robotics yeah no this is our third year third this is our uh yeah third year doing robotics we've only five so i can't justify in in the budget why we have five students who are one teacher um so when we're looking at i would have to see what the data looks like next year and maybe that program needs to be merged with a different program in the case of robotics there are five that those that's five freshmen that are going to be sophomores next year and here's the thing with robotics is several things to consider in robotics number one we believe we can uh take in transfer students five more transfer students and then there'll be 10 students in there it's a it's a program we're trying to promote because of the great opportunities for
061jobs and pathways in robotics we're uh also starting a postgraduate program in robotics uh because we believe that uh the the job market strong it offers many pathways for lots of different opportunities when students graduate so sometimes it takes us a while to get programs off the ground i'll give you an example hvac when we opened hvac the first four years after four years they had eight students today they're there they have maximum students it took us a while to get first to write and what changed it was getting the right instructor developing a curriculum and understanding what motivated students to want to take that program and developing that in that way and hvac was one of those programs and today it's one of the most uh explosive industries out there there are more job
062opportunities in hvac almost more than any one of our programs and that and the job markets continuing to grow and getting when we work with we've been working with the clean energy center recently and and we've been working with the mass hire which are all telling us train more electricians train more hvac technicians because of the future in those industries there is going to be a need for twice as many in those career areas we have so a lot of times it takes a while for a program to get off the ground we're not going to shut the program when we know that this is a program that offers great opportunities for kids it's for us to figure out how do we get students into those programs so that's why we've kind of taken it
063slow the first three years of this being the third year with the program and we've learned a lot and we've been continually working with our advisory committee we have a really good advisory committee in fact in that particular program that's working with us to try to figure out ways to get more students into the program and i think the most important key factor in any of our programs is top-notch teachers that really understand what the career is all about and know how to work with kids so that formula we haven't really figured out yet and i think that's one of our goals this year is that's one of the reasons we're going out to we've got a list of 10 companies we run out to visit specifically to try to recruit teachers in that career
064area as well as a few others but one of our main goals is try to recruit in that particular area because i found that robotics robotics is an area that we can post to the cows come home in uh school spring and we won't get any candidates it's just not the kind of place we've been we've posted in indeed we've posted everywhere we possibly can and have not been able to find can a good strong teacher for this program to get it off the ground we have a few leads uh going into next year that we're working on that we're hoping will pan out for us that we think can turn that program around but it's we i we believe it's a really kind of a career that can make a difference in life so
065we don't want to give up on it so we're trying to figure out to get enough kids in the program and still cover the what it takes to make it work [Music] okay um are we taking any of the kids through any of the robotics competitions uh last year and this year we haven't had a robotics uh club uh or we may have a small initiative we have a small one this year but they haven't been competing that i'm aware of so there's not a lot of kids in the club so it's not not competing just taking them to the competition for they could see other schools do the program and hopefully that motivates the students to want to join the program that's not part of the exploratory program the students are only in there
066two days and you know all 430 students go in in and out of that program so we haven't targeted anything of that nature it's because of the time and uh and it would be something that was done after school so we have not gotten enough students interested in that area yet in order to uh use that as a strategy as as you might be that you're talking about we've had a small even not a large number of students that have even participated in the robotics club but again i think that's a problem of finding the right instructor and the right coach uh to make that work we haven't shown them webinars or videos of robotics competition that might not even just taking them to the thing but we're using that as as a instructional tool
067or recruitment tool in the sixth seventh and eighth grade of most of our ascending communities that might also be a strategy of opening up their minds to what's possible because i know lawrence had um several of their students go to the robotics competition actually win some of them and we have a robotics program i know that we could definitely compete against lawrence public schools um better but it might supposed to be how we packaging and promoting the program yeah thank you you all said john vivian um my question is targeted towards your comment regarding transfers um so if we're getting transfers and plugging them into this shop is it based on the student's choice because they wanted to pick that shop or we're just trying to fill it to increase the numbers so when we
068have if we had 30 students that want to transfer to greater lawrence tech and we we may have 20 openings so we can only take 20 of the 30 let's say these are the programs we have openings for if you want to come to greater lawrence you can pick any one of these let's say there's five programs so they have a choice of up to five programs now as the numbers dwindle after 10 students may have picked their shop robotics may be only one of two shops they can pick if they want to come here and so then at some point five students are going to come into robotics if they want to come to great lawrence tech anyone else yes i'm still stuck into this robotic tech because i mean since i started here
069three years ago i remember going into um open house and and seeing the program actually and they earn energy the people and just seeing this graph with five people that are going to graduate because this is year of graduation right 2025. so i don't if the program is three years old why we don't have any students graduating uh next year i mean unless i'm listening to something else i'm not sure you please qualify and get me to so the freshman class last year had two students take it so year 2024 they would have been in the class of 2024 if we had run the program with two students the year before that there was one student for so you'd have one student that would be a senior next year in the program we weren't going
070to hire an instructor for one student so we moved them into engineering so that one student that was in robotics is now in engineering and the two students that were in robot that took robotics last year which would be a 2024 students are in engineering and they're still in engineering today so that's why we're not going to have any graduates until 2025 coming up graduating out of robotics which we hope will be 10 students graduating out of robotics any student that goes into robotics if we took five sophomores next year and we had 10 students in robotics and 5 new students and they go through the program they're going to have great opportunities for great jobs or going on that we also prepare them for post-secondary particularly in a program like robotics because it's strong
071in mathematics and science and so those students will be well prepared to go on and succeed either in college or in a job opportunity because what we're really trying to do is train students to be robotic automation technicians not engineers but technicians that can do in some engineering but what they do is they learn how to fix robots cnc equipment do retrofittings for robots in working with cnc machines everything from the medical field to the transportation it's numerous amount of industries that robotics are embedded in today so the job up it's it's you know unbelievable the amount of opportunity even in the aviation industry robotics is a big piece of that industry as well so that's why we think it's so important to try to get this program off the ground and make it work
072anything further okay moving on in your packet uh we had the june calendar any any questions concerning that document okay um john uh job posting the uh the vote on the superintendent will ask the district committee to approve only new job postings positions and job postings for the year 22-23 john are you talking about agenda item by oh okay sorry jill accept the motion to a table uh you have second discussion why we tabled in it john because i wanted to present some uh information from other schools and districts that i haven't had your microphone john please i'm sorry because i'm trying to collect some data from other schools on the rationale for uh uh this request in which i haven't had time to get this week uh since our last meeting so i'll have
073that i should have that all put together by the next meeting it should be actually true um should have had that today and you should be able to articulate why the reason for for your decision to what you have put on the agenda today so i don't see the mean the need to table well first of all i think the motion the recommended motion i believe is important in terms of moving our meetings forward in and using an approach that typically used by 90 of the districts out there um i believe it will cause um uh less conflict make it easier for us to move job post things along at a more reasonable rate when we have challenges often we have uh we may get a opening that i may have to wait to get
074approved from the committee where if this were passed i wouldn't have to wait for that it would be in a more timely fashion so my need to do some research with other schools to see the rationale and also how many schools out there what percentage and why what they have found to be the approach that works best in terms of job postings and delivering them having them presented to the school committee francis thank you leo and that's great but that what works for one school one school district might not work here um so that alone to me is not rational to table um this this issue because you took the time to put it on here and you talk about conflict in in conflict and the rationale to get something posted um right away i
075don't think you've ever had that issue i mean you contact leo you contacted me to get something in so honest i took i truly don't see the need to have the item put on the table i'm also uh do leo have a motion in a second on that doom not to take no wasn't it to table right right but i'm just right the same we did who made the motion well okay anything further on it all those in favor anyone opposed did you call the roll uh please miss fitzgerald miss dizza mr hayden mr cirillo miss marmal yes mr rossi mr lamontagne yes okay out of state travel mr charles kennedy and mr tim lane electrical instructors and electrical students to travel to paquette and howard electric in plaistow new hampshire to have students experience
076working in a complete electrical shop on june 9th 2022 there is no cost to the district a motion on that please second discussion they're graduates aren't they john yes yeah well they're graduates i meant the paquette contractors yeah the contractors are graduates here yeah all those in favor anyone anyone opposed okay added to the agenda this bid the superintendent will update the district committee on a bid for metal fab for metal and auto body shop welding hoods project so the reason it's in the last minute in the agenda last minute is we just got the bid openings and we're trying to get this out on the street as soon as possible so we can get this work done this summer in the middle fab shop so basically what we're doing is we're upgrading the metal
077fabrication shops ventilation system so that we can get the fumes from the welding out all the boots uh more efficiently out of the shop and get the the air quality safer and better in the shops and so we had a bit opening and um and the low bidder uh we're looking to award the bid to the low bidder for 670 uh dollars this was put out in rfp [Music] and blw the engineers designed and developed and put the rfp out there and recommends that we go forward with the contractor that was a little bit and that's your recommendation that would be my recommendation we need a vote on that you have a motion on that please still move to have a second excuse me no it was seconded i didn't hear it no all right
078um mr cyrillo i i i see the bid the lowest bid but i don't see it i can't compare it to what with the other bids do we only get one bid how many bits do we get on this um i believe we got three bids on this this was by far the low bid so the committee should have gotten all three bids but we could see what which one was actually the lowest this is a little bit i see i hear that from you but i can't compare that to the other bids so are you saying the other bids are higher i can't say that because i haven't seen them they when you bring in you think i'm going to bring you a bid that's not the low bid and tell you it's a
079low bid once again when you bring in a bid to the committee it should show all the other bids as well and i'm going to take you on your word that this is the lowest bid but i can't say that it is the lowest bid or is the highest bid and i can't compare it to anything else so when bids are to actually come in they should be what the bids were then explain this this is the lowest bid and this is why we're going with this one anything further yes sir i mean i'm sorry zoella pardon me pardon me um just to go on um on um mr cerello's question i mean comment we do want to compare to the other bits and have it documented because this is not the first the second
080or maybe the third time that we have asked to get all the information for all the bidders so that we have them and we can compare and we can say yes we're not you know without asking all these questions we have asked this many other times ah thank you mr sorello who you're right yeah but this joint is all set yeah okay i removed my um second for discussions for final vote okay anything further as far as discussions on this matter okay all those in favor all those opposed oh once i didn't see you i'm okay i'm sorry zoila yeah yeah go ahead i'm only convinced my question is is it normal practice for when we put out bids that it comes back to the committee showing presenting all bids not in the past no
081oh well oh i'm not saying that you haven't been i'm talking about glts yeah yeah that's that's all i can that's all i like is i can bring you two other bids one would be 800 000 one might be 900 000 i don't know what you want to compare 800 900 five not much to compare six seven eight a little bit but i can do that but that's fine so so but it's a matter of time and putting stuff together so we put this together real quick i just got this uh given to me yes late yesterday so i threw it in here but you had people in the office were not in the office that helped work on this so i couldn't get the other bids from that person but i wanted to get
082it approved because it's timely and important if i don't get it in quickly we're not going to be able to do the job this summer so if you turn this down tonight we probably won't be able to do it this summer and it's an important job because we try to do it we want to do the thing is you got the three bit the four three bids you have the amount you have the name of the company and you have the amount that it bid there's not that much difficult nobody said that i mean we still haven't voted on it so you don't know if we voted we voted in and out but we voted it down yeah anything further i'm gonna ask you on this but oh i'm sorry mr hayden maybe the business
083manager can give us some clarity on procedure maybe not for this one because you weren't here but for the future please yep and awesome so typically when there's a bid opening like this there is a listing of all the bids that came in as you said i've never seen that been brought to a school committee meeting but it would be an easy enough process for me to include it in the packet if that's what you would desire anything further okay i'm going to ask you to call the roll on this particular vote um and the motion was to approve please the motion was made you you second you seconded i believe yeah he changed his uh promotion i'm sorry okay mr rossi miss fitzgerald miss dizza no mr hayden yes mr cirillo miss marmal i'm
084sorry no mr lamontagne yes the motion carries three two okay uh in the future john if we can uh put the uh list of bits straight on if we can't possible okay i should ah it's melissa because she's gonna be the one listing the bids as far as that's concerned and i don't think there's a i don't think there's a legal precedence as far as that's concerned whatsoever listen the company name in the bid i don't think there is i'm sorry right but no but i mean as far as presenting it to us you know what i'm saying because the the opening of the bids is public whether people show up or not is a different thing but they are sometimes other bidders can show up at the empty openings and stuff okay all right
085so we'll uh try to make a practice of that uh in the future uh report from committees uh all business district committee priorities uh this isn't a priority but i'd like to put on the agenda next time um i'll vote for our summer schedule john i'll vote for our summer schedule if we're going to do the summer schedule or not okay for the committee itself yeah yeah yeah okay just on the next agenda please any other priorities yes right okay uh policies this will require a vote uh section b b b b a school committee member qualifications and section b b b b b sounds like a stutter school committee uh oath of uh office a little motion on those discussion all those in favor all right anyone opposed okay new business anything uh no
086table matters to come off the table you're off the floor i mean i don't think we don't you're all set john you said that there was um oh no i'm sorry personnel consider considerations no resignations no leave of absence uh no retirements appointments a mr tyler peters a plumbing instructor effective august 30th 2022 ms colleen reynolds a math instructor effective august 30th 2022 ms deborah reyes school adjustment counselor august 30th and mr ramon cruz guidance counselor august 30th 2022 the following are job postings superintendent he's require a vote john looking for a full-time uh night uh custodian this is a replacement position okay we're gonna do one at a time there's only three this time i have a motion on that please i'm sorry yes so move the second discussion did the person retire from
087this one i can't remember is returning yes someone retired yes there's a gentleman retiring at the end of the school year anything further all those in favor all right anyone anyone opposed parent liaison parent liaison truant officer per para contract this is a new position to use this particular position to support some of the outside um security as well as doing home visits which we don't have one right now so we're looking for someone that can do more home we can do more home visits we do some now but we need to do more and also we want to upgrade the work of the security person at the gate so we need someone that can cover that that's that's the rationale for this particular position i have a motion on that please uh some move
088have a second second discussion right so this is a going to be a brand new position we've never had a truancy officer through glts before not someone that's designated as uh that is part of their jobs in their job description right now the um uh disciplined um director of discipline the dis discipline office uh typically the dean of discipline has done some visits but it's becoming more and more difficult for them to get out they will still do some depending on the case that's going on the situation going on but in order to be able to go out more often than we do at this time i believe that there was a request and looking at the amount of uh visits we do and the need to do more visits um is the ration or
089the reason and also this particular the person that's going to be part of doing this will also be doing working out of the guard shack as well uh be working with the person that's there now or no they will be covering the guard check when not doing so we're gonna utilize our own personnel to uh we're looking to utilize our own personnel at the guard shack we feel like that we need to have better control and in order and more knowledge about what's going on in the school so when people come to that to guard shack and talk where they're going that the person in the guard track has a better understanding of what's going on in the school anything further all those in favor anyone opposed uh summer school nurse john summer school nurse
090to provide full nursing coverage during summer school per teacher contract july 11th to the 4th 7 30 to 10 12 p.m this is the annual position a motion please it's almost have a second thank you uh discussion this is a is this a new it's not a new position uh no this is a replacement we do we hire someone every summer anything further all those in favor anyone opposed future agenda items okay there's no need for an executive session john no okay this time the chill accept a motion to adjourn all those in favor anyone opposed thank you very much and uh what's the date of the next next meeting please you have it good thank you night after school not after school closes after graduation [Music]