001order. Members of the public who wish to watch the meeting online may use Acton TV's YouTube channel found at the top of the agenda. This meeting is being recorded and will be posted to Acton TV's website at actontv.org. Welcome everybody. Really glad to be to the point that we are actually getting some progress on making a decision and we're glad that you're here. It's going to be a busy evening. We have a big vote and then we also get to look at the budget and hear how that's going to work out. So, let's get down to it. First thing I want to say is I think you have some you may have some QR codes near your seats. On there, if you are looking for the AB forward form, it is now closed. That public
002comment form is closed. So, if you're looking to submit comments to the school committee, use the email address that's on there, please. That will hit all of us. All right. So, for public participation, we are going to have a 20-minute public participation period with speakers allotted up to 3 minutes based on the number of people indicating a desire to make a comment and that is per our policy BEDH. Public participation will only take place at this part in time in the meeting. So, if you have something to say about AB forward, you can talk at this point. We're not going to do a speaking portion from the public later on. And the committee does not typically respond to comments during public participation. Can I see a show of hands of how many people would like
003to make a comment this evening? Okay. So, let's go with 2 minutes. That should get us through this. And you don't have a 2-minute timer. >> [laughter] >> It'll take me way too long to make one. All right. That's fine. [laughter] I have a I have one but you don't have a timer. That's okay. All right. Come on up. Good evening. I'm David Martin from the Acton Select Board. The Acton Select Board has received a number of emails expressing concern that choosing option 5V2 would affect town budgets. I just wanted to assure folks that either AB forward option reduces costs and therefore budgeting makes budgeting easier, not harder. Option 5V2 offers more flexibility long-term and therefore helps with future budgets. Does it solve the whole problem? No, but it makes a significant difference. Some are
004also concerned about changes to the tax base. I don't see that happening but even if it did, it would not affect the budgets. I understand that AB forward is an upheaval for parents but my biggest worry is long-term school funding. We must have sufficient funding to properly educate our kids in the AB tradition. The towns will both have to work hard every year to make everything fit but AB forward is a significant step. Both towns already fund the schools at a rate above proposition 2.5 limits. Since that obviously isn't sustainable, we have to do everything we can to help future funding. It's going to be very difficult to ask the towns to support a continued high level of school funding if we don't do everything that we can do to make that funding go as
005far as it can go. It's also essential that we make this change as soon as possible. If we delay further, it makes the financial problems more difficult risking the quality of our schools. Thank you. Thank you. >> [clears throat] >> Good evening. For the folks watching at home, my name is Mike Balulescu. I'm an Acton resident, RJ Gray parent and president of the ABEA which is our district's teachers union. I've avoided making public comments on behalf of the union during our community's AB forward dialogue for the obvious reason that the members I represent have diverse and sometimes conflicting views about reorganization. But one thing that almost every teacher agrees with, no matter who I talk to, is that any changes to staff assignments next year should be done thoughtfully with as much educator input as
006possible. I have heard during public comment and read on social media the suggestion from some community members that if the district elects a major shakeup of student school assignments, we should do the same shakeup with teacher assignments. This is a terrible idea. I can't emphasize enough how strongly many educators feel about this. The most important reason to avoid any wholesale changes to staff assignments is for the sake of stability and continuity. Whichever option you vote for tonight, our elementary schools will look very different next year. Students and families will need at least some teams of teachers with shared norms, practices and experiences to help foster the creation of new thriving communities. To be sure, not all teachers have the luxury of advocating for their own status quo. Educators at Merriam, McTee and especially Conant may
007be asked to manage new classrooms and new colleagues no matter what. And I'll be the first to acknowledge that some changes to building and grade level assignments will be necessary to make sure that every [snorts] staff members preferences are considered. The need to keep some existing teams in place will have to be carefully balanced with the need to honor the input and feedback from teachers who must be moved. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. My name is Shauna. I have a kindergartner at Douglas. You're tasked with a difficult work stewarding budget, making hard tradeoffs and ensuring long-term sustainability of this district. But I want to remind us all of something fundamental. The budget is not the mission, the children are. The budget exists in service of them. I remain deeply concerned about option 5V2 especially with
008a lottery or unphased geographic enrollment. The community survey showed that one of the top concerns was student disruption. Options with the most displacement were among the least favored. Option 4 was actually the most popular option and received the highest number of first choice rankings and yet we're moving towards options which will disrupt nearly every elementary student. There's research including Hanover materials provided to the district that shows fewer school transitions are generally better for students social emotional well-being and academic outcomes. Peter, I saw you talked about that in the agenda notes for tonight and I appreciated that. The point is any parent can tell you doing the right thing for kids often means slowing down. Doing the right thing for kids is often inconvenient for adults. It means resisting the urge to rush to closure. It
009means acknowledging when an option is not yet ready to be implemented well. So, tonight I'm asking you to lead with care and courage. If any part of you feels that a vote for 5V2 is too risky for our kids, please vote for option 4 instead. If your heart tells you one thing but your head another, the kids deserve for you to go with your heart. We can solve our budget problems in a myriad of ways but we can't solve the harm we do to children so easily. I'm not endorsing option 4 fully but I'm imploring you to please vote for option 4 because it aligns with community input, avoids unnecessary disruption and offers the same financial benefits or postpone the vote on enrollment until more options are viewed. Choosing what's best for children even when
010it's inconvenient is the heart of your role. I hope you will choose that path. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Andrew Boncoddo. I'm a Boxborough resident, a McTee parent and as soon as I get these signatures, I'll be a school committee nominee as well. So, um pending reorg, 5V2 is simply the better option. Any other vote makes it clear we're not avoiding targeted impact altogether but rather avoided targeting targeted impact on Conant families specifically who have no stronger claim to the Parker Damon building than students who are already there. On enrollment, I read the memo put out last week detailing the challenges of phased approaches. Every scenario boiled down to it's difficult to administer and not everyone will get what they want so we shouldn't do it. Let me be clear. Every aspect of
011this process is and has been difficult. That doesn't disqualify these options from serious consideration. This district has always put children's well-being first when considering change. Countless studies have reinforced stability as a key component of student well-being. A district-wide geographic reallocation without a realistic and comprehensive option to swap across schools and towns would shatter that stability. Expanding displacement, increasing student anxiety and further straining already fatigued support systems for the sake of less than 10% of our student community is neither proportionate nor justified and isn't a prudent use of district resources. Empathy does not require capitulation. A phased approach that allows current students to remain in their buildings, distributes displaced students among the remaining schools and applies geographic assignment to new students with appropriate exceptions may require more administrative legwork in the short term but does much
012less harm to the student community while still addressing a failed open system. The well-being of children across the entire district deserves careful, balanced consideration and should not be treated as an undue administrative burden in pursuit of an unnecessary wholesale reset. Thank you. I just have to get this up here. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Rosaria. I have a son at Gates in third grade and I disagree with the idea of location or geographic allocation. We came here to Acton with a sense of familiarity with the strength and professionalism of the leadership and the quality and equity within the district. And the district's mission we see right up there. Our mission is to develop engaged well-balanced learners through collaborative caring relationships. This impedes upon the legacy of a strong and equitable community.
013I entrust in you, all of you, to make the right choice. Sorry, a little nervous here. The mission here is kind of read this wrong. All right, so I entrust you and you to make the right choice. As an award-winning author, Rick Riordan, so eloquently stated and I live by this work and everything. Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same thing. Fairness means everyone gets what they need to be successful. This redistribution is far from that. Ripping apart an entire district is equal but not fair. So, when you make your decision tonight, please consider that. Thank you. Hello, my name is Johanna Chew. I have two children in Douglas. I am coming to this meeting to talk about one child who has an IEP. We transferred to Douglas two years ago from Blanchard so
014that my daughter, who has needs, can get those needs met by the IEP teachers in Douglas. With the restructure of 5 V2, she's going to have to be moved again to Parker Damon so that she can follow her IEP teacher. This is untenable. She has a social emotional challenge and the social networks that she has built over the last two years are going to be destroyed again. This doesn't just affect children with IEP. This affects all children. And even my daughter, who's the other daughter, who's you know, doesn't have an IEP, she is scared of the idea of losing her friends. So, to think that you're going to disrupt every single child just to have a sense of equity doesn't make sense to me. The Conant community has to be moved. Their building has cannot
015be repaired. Why don't we choose the option that minimizes the number of children that are going to be negatively impacted by this? And one last point, too. 800 parents signed a petition objecting to 5 V2. You are assuming that parents will obediently move their kids to where they're assigned even though they you know, object to it. 30 seconds. So, is it not possible that these parents rally together in civil disobedience and not move their kids? So, my name is Johanna Chew, the people who organized the petition, please get in touch with me. Thank you. Thank you. So, before you get started, I'm just going to notice that the end of the line is growing. I am going to stop us when we hit 6:54. Hi, I'm Senthil Sampath. I have a first grader and fifth
016grader at Conant. Equity matters. Every child deserves access to to the strongest educational practices our district has to offer and that's why so many of us have moved to this community. The stereotypes about who attends which school, which type of learning happens in which building needs to end. That is creating division among the community. Our community has already been divided by vastly different school philosophies. You can frame that as unique to Acton or it's also a strength for Acton but let's be honest, AB is sought after not just because of the six different school philosophies but the overall AB school district. For those who advocate for targeted disruption, please reflect on this. In pushing for options that disproportionately impact one community, we risk undermining one of the key contributors to AB's overall strength. The divisions
017are real and publicly visible in data, academic outcomes, demographic patterns, school profiles. You name it, you can see that. This is already a divided system and decades of choice have only made it more dependent on that divide. Minimal disruption can mean different things but in every scenario except V2, 5 V2 with a true geographical split, the maximum disruption is concentrated on one targeted group and our most vulnerable students because they they would be separated from their general educational peers and teachers. Creating max dis- maximum disruption in one group in order to reduce disruption for several others is neither equitable nor logical. You have a golden opportunity to fix it. Do the right thing. Your position should focus on minimizing average disruption across the >> entire district, not minimizing disruption for some of by disproportionately impacting
018some groups. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Brian Sar. I'm a parent of one student at RJ Grey and two at McTee including a fifth grader. I'll be quick cuz I'll mostly echo what was said by a previous speaker which is my view is that 5 V2 sort of enables more equity across the district by disrupting multiple school communities. I understand the the equity argument in the long term for geographic distribution but I would urge you to consider phasing that in even though it has a larger administrative burden, particularly as Peter pointed out earlier in an earlier meeting, the fifth graders you know, are sort of the youngest class that had major disruption to their schooling from COVID. I would encourage you to let them at least, you know, finish out through as much as possible
019with their current communities and to phase in as new classes come in even though there is a larger administrative burden for that. Thank you. Hello. All right, I'm going to try not to talk in circles. I've got three different hats to wear right now. I'll start by saying that my family moved here in 1950 so we are three generation AB family and back in the 70s, my brother attended Gates because it provided a curriculum and it provided an instructional model that met his needs. He was schizophrenic. I was at Blanchard. Move forward to my kids. My son, Blanchard used to have looping. It was great. My son benefited from that. My daughter didn't need it. Blanchard ended that but it was monumental for keeping my son happy at school. Now we're where I am now.
020I have kids in three grandkids in three different schools and again, it's the instructional differences that make such a a big deal for us. We don't have to outplace them. So, I think our special sauce is our instructional differentiation so I'm really hoping you're going to consider how to save that. Now I'm going to put my realtor hat on. I represent a fair number of families moving in and out of Acton and Boxborough as does my team and they come here for the schools. 20 years ago when I started, it was commutability to Boston. We are no longer commutable to Boston and Cambridge in any real sense of the world. So, now it's for the schools and I manage all my own open houses. I'm meeting these people. A lot of them are in this
021audience. They came here because of school choice and the ability to give their children what I would call a virtual private school education understanding the financial ramifications of that. So, now I'm going to move to my select board hat. Westford well, combination realtor select board. When Westford's school ranking started to slip, we started seeing all these families from Westford moving to Acton and Boxborough because our Thank you. Our rankings were still high. If we don't continue to provide excellence and we don't continue to maintain our rankings, our real estate values are going to slip and my select board hat says, when that happens, our assessments are going to reflect that, our local receipts are going to go down and we're going to have a budget issue. So, all of those issues come together. I know
022you have a hard decision. To me, it's option four. Least amount of disruption, maintain our academic excellence. I understand the ramifications but we have to look at everything. Thank you. Hi, I'm Vishal. I'm a Conant parent. I've been involved in this process pretty much from the beginning and one of the things that kept me motivated to stay engaged was the outcome that we are trying to achieve which was to create financially sustainable, inclusive, truly inclusive and highly functioning school communities but this requires all of us to think beyond our self-interest. I, as a Conant parent, could have advocated for options that keeps Conant intact. Instead, I chose options that thinks about not just my kid but all the other kids in the district. So, this is an opportunity for all of us here to be
023bold and set our district for success for years to come. So, I am I implore you to consider option 5 V2 with geo distribution. Yes, this will impact everyone but I would rather be our decisions be driven by hopes than fears. Uh the choices we make reflect and determine who we are and so let's make a choice that reflects our core values for our school district. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Rochelle Horowitz Martin and I'm a Conant parent. With utmost respect, I disagree with Dr. O'Reilly's characterization of minimum disruption. In my view, aside from moving the Connections kids away from Conant without their gen ed friends and teachers, the most disruptive outcome is placing children in schools whose pedagogy is a poor fit for them combining with combined with placing them in
024an environment where they are the new kids. Right now, there are five to six schools to choose from and open enrollment kind of serves as a safety valve. It's not perfect. We already have 146 kids on waitlist, but under 5E2 with continued open enrollment, that safety valve, there's some semblance of one disappears. Many families will effectively have only two choices and if they're not placed in their preferred school, their only alternative may be a poor pedagogical fit. Unlike a transition, which is one time, a poor pedagogical fit is a long-term problem that will affect families including those moving into the district for years to come. Geographic enrollment creates a forcing function a forcing function that pressures schools to adapt their pedagogy to serve all students. We need to think about the long-term and as much
025as my heart wants option four for my own kids, I think 5E2 with geographic enrollment which ends open enrollment is the wisest for the long-term. Thank you. Thank you. >> [clears throat] >> Hi, my name is Mike Lee. I'm an Acton resident and my daughter attends first grade in Blanchard. I'm here to comment about the the idea of the one-time district-wide re-enrollment lottery for the children. It is First, let me just acknowledge I understand there are contrary opinions here and I understand that everyone is here because we care for our children and I hope that even though we have different opinions, we can recognize we are speaking from that same place of what's doing what's doing what's best for our children. And so I'm talking about this re-enrollment lottery. It is undisputed that moving a
026child taking them out of their school and placing them into a new school, that disruption will impact them, will cause some kind of harm, will be something that they have to overcome. It's unfortunate that we're in a position where that has to happen to at least one school. My thought is that why maximize that disruption by putting the entire district into a position where they're going to enter this lottery and potentially be placed in a school new school environment. Whether they end up through that lottery back at their current school, there's the potential that they will have friends that don't return to that same school as well with them. Again, it's unfortunate that schools or some students have to face disruption, but I believe if we have finite resources available, why not minimize the number
027of students that have to be disruptive, that had to be moved, and then focus whatever available finite resources we have to support them, support their transition, support their re-enrollment. Thank you. And do what we can to perhaps keep certain student cohorts, groups of students, preferences that these disrupted students have to face. Focus on that smaller group that has to be moved versus having to do that for the entire district. Thank you. Thank you. Come on up. My name's Abby Jaffey and I have two students at Merriam. Transition plans matter just as much as decisions that will be made tonight. A phased approach with optional grandfathering will give families agency. I hope we can let current students remain at their schools through sixth grade if families choose while allowing families who want to move to geographic
028assignments now to do so. New students can start to enter the geo placement from the start. For siblings, consider guaranteeing placement with grandfathered older siblings. Alternatively, let families choose to move all of their children to geographic schools now or accept temporary separation. Either way, give families the choice rather than forcing one approach. Yes, this will create more operational complexity and extends the transition timeline, but these tradeoffs are worth accepting to keep families together and minimize disruption. Implementing major reorganization in seven months is incredibly tight. If we rush it and it goes poorly, we undermine the confidence that reorganization and future budgets will require. I urge you all to choose option V 5V2 with a phased transition that prioritizes family stability and choice. Thank you. And thank you to everybody who got up to speak and
029I'm just going to acknowledge like it's hard to get up in front of that microphone, especially when we're all talking it's about stuff that we're passionate about and we know that not everybody in the room is going to see this the same way. So thanks for doing that. We Peter says we're going to skip the superintendent's update. All right, fair enough. In that case, um So moving on to AB Forward related things. So I want to start out first by just addressing some things come up in some of the emails that we've received about bias on the part of the school committee. So having talked to our legal counsel, it is generally not a conflict of interest for school committee members to have children who attend school in the district. In fact, that's actually fairly
030common. It would, however, be a conflict for a school committee member to seek special consideration consideration for their child because they're on the school committee or to abuse their position to gain some kind of advantage for their child. The most important thing is that school committee members are able to act objectively and follow all normal decision-making processes and rules with regard to decision and voting on this issue. So we are now going to do a show of hands. Please raise your hand if you have ever had a student in the district or been a student in the district who is a member of your immediate family. Okay, you can put your hand down if you no longer have a student currently enrolled in the district. So keep your hands up if you have kids in
031the district. Okay, now keep your hands up if you have An elementary school student, somebody who's in an elementary school. Okay, you can put your hands down. Across our committee, we currently have children enrolled in Blanchard, Conant, Douglas, and Gates. There are no school committee members' children currently enrolled at Merriam or McCarthy Town and I'm sure somebody's going to wave at me if I'm wrong here. Okay. So as the Massachusetts Association of School Committees Code of Conduct Code of Ethics reminds us, our primary responsibility is children. We represent the entire community at all times. We make decisions after all facts have been presented and discussed, which is why Peter >> [laughter] >> told us to move along cuz we have a lot to talk about. And we are one team and we must abide by
032and carry out all committee decisions once they're made. So is there anyone on the committee who does not believe they can perform their official duties objectively and fairly? All right. And you know, I also want to acknowledge that many of you have shared in your in your emails and your public comments that you recognize the tough position of everybody sitting up at the table right now. And I just want to I want to also articulate that you know, we're the elected officials in the in this process and our children are not extensions of us. They're students in the district just like any others. And they deserve the same safety, dignity, privacy, and sense of belonging as every other student and they should not be drawn into adult disagreements or treated differently because of their parents'
033role on this committee. So here we are and I have to say that it's been an interesting week for me in my own school. We've been doing portfolio presentations and a number of our high schoolers are studying philosophy and many of them chose to comment on the trolley problem. If you're not familiar with that, it involves a trolley that is going down a hill and its brakes are out, you can't stop it. And there are on the tracks in front of the trolley a number of people. And you on the trolley have the choice, are you going to pull a lever that will switch you to a different track where there's only a few less people. So larger group of people, less people. And they all presented their various philosophical views on, you know, you
034could use this different lens to look at how you should solve this problem, but I think my favorite solution to the problem was the student who said, "I want to go find the person who designed this in a way that there could be people in front of the track where my trolley is coming and stop this from happening to begin with." And I just want to acknowledge that I think we're all kind of there. I think it's been awesome getting a lot of the email comments about could we look at it this way, is there this can we get out of this problem that feels like we can't come up with a solution where everybody is a winner, right? So also had some Star Trek references to the Kobayashi Maru challenge channel our inner Captain
035Kirk recognizing all that's out there and yet here we are with this challenge which put some tensions out there that are diametrically opposed and makes this decision really hard. I also want to acknowledge that this process has resulted in known losses right now for three communities. Our Conant community knows that at a minimum, it will not continue in its present building. Members may be spread across three buildings next year. Members of Merriam and McCarthy Town's communities know that at a minimum, their school will not exist in its present state next year and at least half their combined members will be spread across three buildings next year. In either reorganization option, they're all going to be part of creating a new school. And these are just the changes that we've decided on this far. In addition
036to AB Forward Steering Committee feedback, we've received over 200 public comments, 350 emails, two petitions, and close to two hours of public comment. And they highlight two desired outcomes that are in direct conflict with each other. The first is a desire to minimize disruption of communities and routines by changing building assignment for around 400 students. People are worried about the impact of transition on academic outcomes, mental health, staff workload, and family routines and want to limit the number of students who experience change. The second is the desire to experience to share the experience of change more broadly across school communities. People are worried that students from communities whose building or program has been closed and who are entering pre-existing groups in terms of location, traditions, and social networks will not have the same opportunity to
037make friends, feel included, and have the same sense of belonging. There are additional concerns about bullying based on differences in race and school of origin. There's no option that can eliminate these risks for all of our students. We have to discuss tonight how to address these concerns and how to take that account in our decision. So, next up I think we're going to have a review of voting math and I'm going to turn this over to Adam to talk about how this works so that we're all tracking that as we swing into actually doing the mechanics. Thanks, Tory. And I just researched some stuff that changed even what we discussed previously and it's about abstentions. So, first of all, I do want to say that called out in our regional agreement, every member from Acton
038when they cast a vote, they actually cast two and a half votes and every member from Boxborough when they cast a vote casts one vote. So, if you do the math, if everybody's present like we have this evening, we have a total of 21 and a half votes. All of the votes that will be taking tonight are majority votes. And what I've just recently learned is that the majority is calculated of the yeses versus the nos. The abstentions are removed from the calculation, which is different than what you and I discussed previously. So, for any vote to pass tonight, it needs to be not a majority of all of the potential votes, 21 and a half votes, but it has to be a majority of all of those who voted yes versus no. So, you
039have to have more than half of the people who vote yes to for something to pass or more than half the people who vote no for it to fail. And so, we do have a spreadsheet here that hopefully will make this go a little bit quicker, but what I will say is as we go through this evening, we might slow down the pace of some of these votes so that we make sure that we're capturing who's voting and it's important to capture who votes because some of us have a different quantity that we vote for versus the others. Thank you, Adam. You have in your packets as of I think about noon today some questions and answers. And I just want to draw attention to everybody who's following along the the agenda has gotten updated
040with with information as it comes in. So, if you haven't looked at it since noon, you can follow along and listen to some of the things that I think Peter's going to hit the highlights for us now. All right, thanks, Tory. So, this is not one of my more complicated slideshows, but I just wanted to hit a couple of the the key updates. So, first in your packet, we did do a breakdown of what we could reasonable reasonably foresee as our one-time costs. These come just under about a million dollars in one-time costs and you can see how they're broken down in the the chart that we provided. We did all of our estimates at the conservative end of the range. And then we also added an additional to about $200,000 of contingency. We are
041proposing to use that out of the district's excess and deficiency or reserve funds so that we don't impact next year's operating budget. So, that is something that is not reflected in the budget presentation that you're going to see later tonight yet, but when we come back on February 9th with the next iteration of the budget, you will see that incorporated as well. So, just wanted to draw your attention that that is in there. Additionally, we have been working to try and have a draft timeline for how the implementation process will work. We decided to start our work focused mostly on student and staff impact so that families would have a sense of what the timeline would be and when major decisions would occur. And same thing for our staff. We just wanted to provide that
042overall timeline. There are other items included including special education has its own category as well so that you can start to see how that would be broken out. I will say this is a work in progress and may be subject to change as we go, but in order to try and be as transparent as possible, we wanted to give you a sense of what that looked like. And then finally, we had received a number of questions from school committee members over the last day or two. And so, our team did a lot of work in about the last 24 hours to try and respond in as much detail as possible to the questions that came in. So, I think you have about a I apologize cuz it's a pretty dense 13-page document, but just trying
043to respond to as many questions as possible. And I think, you know, I just want to thank those of you that asked questions because I think you asked a lot of the questions that reflected various community questions and concerns that had come into the school committee shell as well. So, those are in there. One thing I'm I'm not going to try and hit on all of the different documents in the packet, but I just wanted to talk to some of the mitigation strategies that we are looking to have in place as we make this transition. And this is regardless of which option we choose. Though I will say, you know, the the breadth of some of these may need to shift whether in option four or option five and based on enrollment options, but the
044general idea will be consistent across all of our options. First, we are launching next Tuesday. We're going to start a series of webinars and in online meetings for our staff are going to have webinars every week on Tuesdays. And then for families, we're going to do one every other week. That's just simply because we initially will have more updates for staff coming out in the near term and families we're going to be working through that process, but we'll be doing every other week for families. We will record those and make sure that we provide detailed notes online for all families to be able to access. So, even if you can't make one of the meetings, you can make sure that you can can stay abreast of what's going on. We also will be launching implementation
045surveys for our staff and our families early next week. The implementation survey is designed to better understand what questions people have and what priorities you want us to be able to address. And the goal of doing those implementation surveys, which I believe we will probably do several times as we progress through the spring, is to make sure that the questions that you have continue to diminish as time goes on so that we're continually addressing the things that you find most important. We are going to make sure that our educators for the current students we have in our schools now are deeply involved in the placement process of students into cohorts next year. And as part of that process, we will be collecting information from families about potential peers that you believe students should be placed
046with. We will not be able to collect information from families until after the school placement process is done based on whatever option is selected tonight because we don't want to end up collecting a lot of information that may not actually be relevant. But once we know where students are going and we've been able to inform you what schools students would be placed into, we will reach out to you and ask you to identify peers that you feel would be a good fit for your student. We can't guarantee any individual students might be able to be placed together cuz there are sometimes competing interests at play, but we want to try and be able to, you know, have a combination of family input and current educator input into the process of placing students into logical cohorts
047within classrooms. Um We intend to start sharing our administrative teams for the schools at some point next week. I don't know what day we'll be able to share that, but we do want to start sharing information about the principals at the schools. And one of our goals is to the greatest extent possible, we actually want to leave our administrative teams intact because there is a deep working relationship that principals, assistant principals, counselors, psychologists, and often times our special education coordinators have over time that will allow them to build the new culture of a school effectively and not feel like they don't know how each other works and are trying to build a, you know, build a plane while it's in the air, so to speak. And we think we need to make sure we're accelerating
048that process. And we will be able to be sharing that information starting next week, but it may take us a couple weeks to be able to share the full information on that. Um When we and I skipped one, but as we get to educators, and I know Mike Balesco spoke to this before, but we are working with the ABEA to make sure that we collect feedback from every educator at the elementary level about what their priorities are for their own personal placement into next year. And we want to think very deeply about that because it's important that we support our educators in making this transition. At the same time, it's also very important for our students to be able to see some familiar faces in all of the schools. And so, one of our goals
049is to be able to work through our educator priorities, match those with what we know as student needs, and be very very thoughtful in how our educators are placed across the district. So, that's something we're considering as well. Um We hope to be able not hope to, our plan is to be able to share school placements after April vacation with all of the families. The reason we're planning April vacation at this point is because we don't yet know what option we're in. We do know that if we end up in a geographic option tomorrow morning, we actually have to start sending data out to a consultant to be able to work through what geographic zones look like, and that's going to take a couple of months. So, we're intentionally trying to be very conservative in
050our estimates, but right now we're planning to be able to share school placements with families after April vacation. And one thing we are doing this year that we have never done before is our intention is to also be able to share student classroom placements before the end of this school year so that students and families and educators know what students will be in all of the classrooms as we head into summer. The reason we also want to be able to do some of that work is we want to be able to offer school tours at the end of this year for students and families who might and educators who might be moving into new spaces so that there's a sense of familiarity around that. And then I think one of the opportunities that's not listed
051on here, but we are also hoping to be able to reach out to maybe some groups of families over the summer who would be willing to help gather informally with classrooms to start you know, kind of forming some of the peer groups that might take place in classrooms, use our playgrounds, things like that where families can start to get together with the students in classrooms. And then at the end of summer, once things have started to move in, we would definitely be doing summer tours of all of our new buildings for any new or vulnerable students who are coming into that school building. So, that is only a partial list of some of the strategies, but I wanted to give all of you some highlights of what that might look like as we we progress
052through the spring into the summer and even into the fall. And then finally, there was a request um from some school committee members to just have a clear slide about what we were really talking about in terms of not only the reorganization options, but what enrollment models were still being discussed. And so, based on all of the notes that I have, you know, there are two reorgan- reorganization options still being discussed. The first is option four in which Conant moves to the Parker Damon building. And I'm using the word merge not because out of insensitivity to the Merriam and Tee populations, but because that's just the word that has been used all along, and I don't want to change language late in the process. But the idea of merging those two populations, which also means
053that we're are distributing about half of that population into the other schools in the district. Um and then the only enrollment model for that one is maintaining open enrollment, just to be clear. When we get into reorganization option 5 V2, that is the one in which the Boardwalk and Parker Damon buildings become K3 and it should have been 4-6 schools. I apologize for the typo in the slide. And Blanchard remains a K6 school. In that, we have four different enrollment options that you have motions for in your actually on your table, I believe you have the the language of each of those options. So, the four enrollment options that we've provided you language for, one of them maintains the traditional open enrollment process. That is the one in which students at Conant would be placed
054into the three remaining schools in the district. The second one is a full re-lottery with open enrollment that's still maintained. Um Both of those options, enrollment models one and two on this list, maintain the district's current open enrollment practices, just to be clear, because we're talking about either maintaining open enrollment and placing Conant students into the other buildings or maintaining open enrollment and doing a full re-lottery of students. Options three and four move away from the open enrollment system into geographical based system. And three is a one-time geographic placement of all students in the district. The other one proposes a phased geographic placement of students within the district that would occur over time. So, wanted to be clear about what we're talking about tonight. Happy to take any questions. Lisa. I didn't see the controlled
055flexibility mentioned. That was one of the things that we had for geographic placement with controlled flexibility. So, that was not a choice. We just had the memo on that. That wasn't going to be So, I have Yeah, there was there was a point in time where there were so many things being discussed that we had to just stop. But I have all of those motions that you have on the table or in a Google Doc. And if someone wants to change language from a motion, I have it that I can post and we will just add that in, post it to make sure the whole committee is clear about what's being voted on before we take a vote. Uh Lakshmi. Just a small thing. I think there's a typo there. 4 to 4 through 6.
056Yes. Yes. Yes. Yanchen. Um I have a question regarding option four. So, that option keeps the open enrollment model. My question is that with, you know, early morning news coming in, where Framingham is looking at a million dollar budget cut, which affects potentially 100 staff can be cut. We're not sure about the financial future of our district, any district in the in the Commonwealth. If we run into a big budget cut again, wouldn't that affect one individual school if the school is smaller? Or the enrollment is low in a particular school, would they would the cuts be not like equally distributed? I don't know if I'm making myself clear. I I think what you're saying is if we have future cuts, is either model are the models different? No, no. I What I'm saying is
057Okay, let me What I'm saying is if we keep open enrollment with option four, potentially the number of students in each of those remaining schools can be different. Some school might have higher student numbers of students and some school might have lower number of students. If we have another budget gap that need to be closed, there will be staff cuts again. That can potentially affect those schools differently, right? Yeah, I think there's It It's a little hard to speculate. I mean, I I do think that one, I think your assumption that future budget cuts are are still possible is is accurate because I think we're we're just in a funding pattern that seems to be playing out very similar to like the late '80s, early 1990s where there was just a a long-term funding problem
058for schools. Um >> [clears throat] >> I think that the the fewer sections you have in any one school, the more challenging it is to be a little bit flexible with that. And simply because you if you have to go down a section in the school, it can be really hard to do that across sections. I will also say though that there's other places within the district that you can also make reductions where you might not be reducing sections. I think we're going to be at a place where our elementary sections are at the very upper end of school committee guidelines next year. And so, I think we're going to have to be really thoughtful and cautious about continuing to reduce elementary sections. I think you know, my personal hope is that we've made that
059adjustment now at the elementary level for classroom sections. The problem is if we have continued funding, it means that if we don't reduce elementary classroom sections, we're looking at either the support systems around kids, we're looking at junior high, high school for additional reductions as well because there's only so many levers that we can we can continue to pull. You know, I think as we we get through this, we're going to have to have more of a serious conversation on the revenue side of the budget and really be talking about what revenues look like long-term and not just how do we manage the cost side of it because I think we're getting about as thin as we can be. Andrew. I know we've been working on this particular project since the beginning of the year,
060and we've had the steering committee go through things. We've been this like our fourth meeting where we've been focused since it's come here. It's also the first time you brought this and the implications of any of the changes to us and anything regarding your strategy for implementing this. Um with a lot of the community coming at us and talking about what's happening next, what's happening next, had we had this information, even this part of the information up front, it would have helped, I think, solve some of the issues and some of the friction that exists inside the community. As a district, we're not great about follow-through. Uh the mascot's a good example of that. We changed the mascot, but if you look at our sports teams, we've got Colonials on the varsity. We've got Revs
061on varsity. Our football team's called AB football. We've got Colonials everywhere. We're really bad at follow-through. If we can be more up front with the plans, the strategies, the intentions, it makes these conversations less difficult and makes the people that were were our constituents, these people here, less afraid of the decisions that we're making to ensure that we're protecting the kids and protecting what we're doing. So, I I would appreciate as we go forward for you to be more forthcoming and to be I guess more advanced in what you're thinking about doing to be able to manage what's happening next. No, thank you. I I that's a great point and I think, you know, I recognize that um and I think that that really speaks to maybe the challenge that I brought up in early
062December where I had said, you know, at that first December meeting that if we continue to be asked to explore new ways of doing things and new options within this, then it's going to be hard for us to now actually focus on what it looks like when it's implemented. And I think one of the challenges we've had as a leadership team is as we've been asked to explore a new enrollment option this way or nuance of an enrollment option that way, what it's doing is it's taking our team away from being able to focus on what it looks like in implementation and instead kind of trying to come up with new ways. We just don't have the staff to be able to do both at the same time and I think that is one of
063the inherent challenges we've had and I recognize that that also means that, you know, we haven't had the information maybe that everyone feels like they want. I think partially that comes down to just the format of change management which our consultants can provide us with which are templates and you can say we have six different things we need to do. This is the last night we're deciding this. This is the first time we're seeing this and it it is a bad bad view for the community for us to be in this position. Glenn. So, I'm looking at um the memo about phased approach and I'm looking at consideration four with the grand fathering option for only the rising sixth grade cohort. So, my understanding from reading the memo is that with geographic enrollment where it's
064everyone all at once, that's pretty logistically it's feasible but pretty logistically difficult and burdensome. Like if the I probably wouldn't be able to articulate the sibling problem with the specificity it requires but that that's one thing. But if you do just the rising sixth grade cohort and you phase that in, then that's less burdensome from an administrative standpoint and it can help reduce disruption in the fifth to sixth grade transition which is notoriously tricky and bumpy. Is that a Is that Would you say that's a fair understanding? Yeah, it feels like we're headed that way. And Andrew, do you want to come join us over here because I think we're going to ask you questions. >> Perhaps Perhaps this [laughter] is a good segue then. You do but that but it's hard for us to
065find you. Um let me just ask before we transition here, does anybody have a non-enrollment policy-related question? Lisa. Uh one of the things that I just wanted to point out and ask with option four before we shift to enrollment was that there was a chart that talked about if we increase class size, how many sections each of the schools would get under that option and you know, how many sections it would look like with 5E2. Um it I think one of the questions I've had was for example, some of the grades only have two sections per school. So, isn't that still requiring some movement from other schools to a school that they didn't choose or weren't initially part of because I don't see how logistically you could increase class size and if there's for example,
066my dollars fifth grade class there's 20 students in each of the fifth grade classes, if we're raising the class size, wouldn't schools wouldn't students from other schools have to come there? So, doesn't I think a lot of people have this idea that with option four, no one's moving and they're staying with their original schools other than Miriam McCarthy town. So, I just wanted to take a moment to ask about that. Okay. Um so, I think clearly we're going to now talk about the differences in some of the specifics of different enrollment models if we move to option 5E2. A couple things that I would like to clarify certainly just um for a variety of reasons but most importantly um as you deliberate on the merits of different enrollment options. If the language of those memos
067suggested that one of the challenges and one of the considerations was sort of administrative burden or logistical challenges, then that's a fault in the language that I used. So, please certainly um ignore any suggestion that you think that the memo um offers in asking that logistical or administrative um processes should be a variable. All of them have elements that uh we'll have to manage but it's not something that we would want you to think, oh, this is going to be really hard to manage. Instead, what I think the what I know the memos are trying to articulate is to be very clear that there is no silver bullet uh enrollment option that meets every single uh objective and hope and dream that we have um for our students and for our teachers and for our
068schools. Instead, each each option uh highlights and emphasizes some benefits that are different from other options and also requires some sacrifices and an acceptance of certain things that perhaps in other models are available. That's the only thing that you really need to think about uh through these memos in terms of what you want to prioritize both in the short term and the long term. Don't worry about the operations of it. We'll take care of whatever plan you have. You just I would just like you all to accept and sort of say, yes, Andrew, when we vote on this thing, we are saying that we understand that in this option, these are the things that we can do and these are the things that we cannot do. Not because of administrative pieces but simply by virtue
069of the actual plan itself. So, what what I mean by that is let's get into the the phased geographic enrollment piece. Um in that memo, we can certainly do a phased geographic enrollment. What we're asking is that certainly there just be an acknowledgement up front that when we move forward, there are certain things um that may either be inconsistent on the short term uh or not feasible um during that process. So, the biggest one that I would ask you to consider is the sibling piece. So, if you have um if you legacy current students who are in their schools and they are at their schools but then for kindergarteners starting next year, incoming kindergarteners moving forward would be placed geographically, if you have a legacy student in their current [clears throat] school and their kindergarten
070sibling, if they have one, is placed in their geographic school and those two schools are different, they are in two different schools. We cannot keep them together. That's fine. We can do that administratively. What I'm saying to you is you would have to accept and you would have to explain to families that that is the cost. The benefit is you you legacy in all these students and they don't have to transition and that is a huge win for a lot of people and so I think that that's an important consideration and the underbelly of that is that any one of those students who has a sibling who is in a school that geographically is different than their legacy school, they are not going to be in the same school. And as someone who's not currently
071with young kids, I don't know what that looks like or feels like to have two different schools that you might have to think about. Maybe it's not that big of a deal. Maybe people are like, that's okay. I'm I'm comfortable with that because I know that my older child can remain in their current school and that will adjust and that my younger child is going to have more, you know, more of their neighbors in their school and there's benefits to that. On the other side of it, if I'm a parent who's got two kids in extended day and they're in two different extended day schools, what does that mean? I have no idea. So, that's really I want is us to be transparent and up front that if we do this, families need to be
072prepared when they say, hey, can we actually move my kids together? There is a strong chance that the answer is going to be no. So, that's one thing that I want to be up front about. It's not a logistical issue from our standpoint. It's more about what you can and can't do with this phased model. The other is just to be up front that when we talk about preserving students in their schools, we are we are excluding Conant. And that might just be something that I think we have to be transparent about certainly for the Conant community when we keep saying the benefit of this phased model is that kids get to stay in their schools, it's only true for the schools that the students in the other schools. And that might be something that
073we can accept but let's just be up front about it. If we do this, Conant students, first and foremost, we would we would first place in order of operations students who are in special programs who are be whose programs are moving to a different school, then we would work with Conant current Conant families in saying, let's um participate in a one-time re-lottery. Here are the options that are available to you. Please list the preferences. And then we would go through a traditional lottery system. You you would all have to decide and it's draft language in your memos. In that one-time re-lottery for Conant, are we also continuing with the sibling priority, meaning they would go together, and also um walker status, meaning if you're within one mile of safe walk distance to a school, do
074they get priority? So, you'd have to decide that but if we did implement that, then we would place Conant students based on that lottery piece. You'll have to be prepared that I I will just admit my prediction is that you will have a good number of families who may not get in Conant families who may not get the school that they are listing as preferences. Um and we just have to accept that as well. So, that's another piece um for that. The other piece that I'm just I can't sort of um I can't predict, but this intellectually wondering is certainly in this model, if we have newly registered students who are also placed by geography, you know, what happens is if we do have families who are moving out, but they're moving out in their
075legacy schools, but then we have families moving in to say even those same homes, and they're going to their geography school, there's not necessarily a one-to-one trade-off. That may not be an issue, I have no idea. So, that was more of just saying, "Hey, as we think out loud and as we think year to year, is that going to collide?" One possible solution that we would probably ask you to consider and work with the vendor on is does that sort of demand of us to preserve class sizes? So, again, this is the goal, it's not an administrative challenge, it's more about meeting goals that you want us to set to have much more generous flex zones. So, perhaps the flex zones during this phased-in period are much broader, where you have more residential areas that
076are within a flex zone that allows us the flexibility to say, "In order to preserve the desired class sizes, we're going to have flex zones that give the school district the ability to place students more flexibly in one of two schools." Again, it's not about administrative challenges, it's more about um being able to say, "Yep, we don't want to have a school that's going to have uh an uh class sizes that are far above the recommended class sizes." So, again, that just may have to be something that we all consider and are comfortable with. Um so, that's the piece about the phased geographic. So, again, this whole idea of the perhaps only doing the phased-in for um rising sixth graders, current fifth graders, not about administrative stuff, it's more about saying that could limit the
077sibling piece, um and it could limit some of the other pieces if we felt like sixth graders were a a class that we wanted to prioritize. Not a recommendation for any other reason than we have heard some people want to highlight uh some of the older students knowing that they're going to then transition to the junior high the year after that and trying to minimize it. So, hopefully that offers you a bit of an overview for um the phased geographic option. We can do it. Um I would just like everybody who's advocating for it just to sort of be all be on the same page that when we say this is what we're doing, these are the benefits, which we've highlighted, these are the things that unfortunately during that process will not be available. In
078terms of your point, it was for um option four, right? In option four, if we are if we're if Conant moves into the Parker Damon building, and then the Miriam and McCarthy town families are combined into one school, yeah, approximately half of those students would not be able to remain in McCarthy town and Miriam, and they would have to be redistributed to the other um remaining four schools. What we sort of need to remember is that we are taking um sections from Conant and bringing them to all of the schools. So, there will be additional sections that don't currently exist in those schools to place students. So, it'll be both that all all five remaining schools will have more sections than they currently have now, um even though we're 11 fewer overall as a district.
079So, you would take those students and you would place them in those sections. So, you have more sections and higher class sizes, that's how you would put them in. Um Maintain open enrollment. We could maintain open enrollment, and what we would do is we would re-lottery um Conant families in a one-time setup. Um like I described for the for the phased piece. Uh and then that would be that, and then we would move forward and we would continue with open enrollment. Um again, I think one of the philosophical questions, not administrative, is as we think about three options, um Parker Damon, Boardwalk, or Blanchard, what are the what is the choice that you're hoping to preserve um in terms of your purp in terms of our institutional purpose? Now that we have three uh school
080settings, is there an expectation institutionally that there be enough difference between those three schools where a choice makes sense, or are we sort of working on having some element of consistency to the point where perhaps making a choice feels um not necessary. So, that's another question that people have to answer, but maintaining open enrollment is certainly there. Full re-lottery. And yeah. Um before we get too far, can I just you're hitting us with a lot right now. Can I just pause and see if people have questions about what you said so far? >> [laughter] >> Oh, yeah. Okay. Lakshmi. So, I mean, after the after whatever choice we make and the dust settles, when we have merged schools, the question that pops up pops up in my head is that these schools differentiate themselves on
081certain philosophy, right? With some instructional practices being very different. So, how does that look? Are is that no longer a problem because we're moving towards I see a nice paragraph in Peter's thing. We're moving towards MTSS, and that enrollment option probably parents may not realize won't even matter. Let me see if I can sort and organize us a little bit cuz I can see that we are going to be all over the place if we don't organize this. Um so, I think how we need to approach this here, um is let's start out by figuring out if we did option 5v2, which enrollment option would we do? Let's lock that down, right? So, that then we can compare the big picture, and that was a big picture question. We need to get there. So, just
082write that down, hold that thought for a moment. So, then we can compare four and five, right? Um so, if we can maybe keep ourselves focused on five and talking enrollment, and if we've got questions on what Andrew has already said, and then we'll do another round. Sound good? Andrew's Andrew's got a question, go for it. Andrew, thanks for putting all that documentation together. I know that you are also looking at, without meaning to, if there's work for me here. Um one of the things you mentioned inside this is that there is like we can't do this, we can't do that. What is the limiting factor? Cuz I mean, ultimately, we're making the rules up ourselves. What's the limiting factor that you see that stops us from doing any one of the things? Grandfathering was
083the first one that caught my eye. Um There's nothing that limits us from keeping kids currently enrolled in their school in their school. What is limiting is if we then have if we then rotate in terms of then the younger siblings, if they have if legacy students have younger siblings who are not yet enrolled, but in the future they're coming in through kindergarten, and they're placed in their geographic settings, if the legacy student is not is if their legacy school is not their geographic school, and their younger siblings are in their geographic school, they're in two different schools. I I was asking just cuz like the first thing the first document that comes up for the phased approach analysis memo, consideration one, Conant students cannot be grandfathered. And there the limiting factor that you have
084there that says something cannot happen was my question, and where that >> Well, for how that flows Not not for that particular moment, but as you looked at the whole thing, what was like the overarching limiting factor that stopped us from saying, "Yes, we can do that with a effort. No, we can't do that." What's that What's that point? Try Can you Can you restate the question? I'm trying to figure out what >> of the analysis that offer considerations. Parts of those considerations say, "We cannot do this." >> Yeah. And it's like you can't go over 70 miles an hour on route two. What's the limiting factor? Speed limit on route two? The counts. >> So, the the limiting factor for the first consideration is that Conant is closing, and so therefore Conant current Conant
085students cannot stay in their school. So, that's item one. And I just want us to be upfront because I do think that as as the narrative comes through as to the benefit of a phased geographic enrollment, is to say, "We allow students current students to stay in their school." There has to be a giant asterisk that says, "We allow students at Parker Damon, Blanchard, and Boardwalk to stay in their legacy school." We do recognize that because of the limiting factor that we are closing Conant, that is not available to them, and they will they will have to be um relocated to other schools. So, that's the first one. The next one with the sibling piece is that if if by design younger siblings in kindergarten are placed in their geographic placement, if they have older
086siblings who are currently in a school that is not eventually what would be in their geographic placement, then they are assigned to two different schools. If the question is, "Well, then why can't we take kids who've got siblings and put them in those schools?" I think that that's sort of diff A, I can't plot out what it would look like, but I do think we have to be prepared that there's a strong possibility that the the class sizes would not allow for that. Um in addition, at what point does that end if we're trying to transition? So, you have a fourth grader this year, they're going to fifth grade, let's say at the Boardwalk school. They're they have a younger sibling who's coming into kindergarten next year. Based on their residence, they would be placed
087at the Parker Damon school. So, if we say, "Oh, but because they're at the Boardwalk, we're going to place them at um at the Boardwalk." A, I don't know if their class sizes are available there, but let's say there is. Then they come in, two years later, there's a third child in that family, and they get placed. Are they going to just continue to be sort of coming into the non-geographic school because they have a sibling in the legacy school? It's sort of how does that When does that phased piece um end, and when does that collide with I would imagine, and I'm making the assumption that class sizes is a priority that we would have to maintain some semblance of consistency and equity in terms of class sizes across all of the school buildings.
088So, those are the main things that we can't do. I think the piece that I'm saying to you around newly registered students, meaning you're moving in from another town, another location, and you come in, is I think we would need, depending on because we could have families who are moving in with kids who are not coming in in kindergarten, but they're coming in in second grade, fourth grade, sixth grade, we would need, I think, what I would predict, generous flex zones to be able to say, "All right, you're coming into this grade. This grade, because these students have already been legacy'd in, are already quite full. We need the flexibility to place you at this school instead." So, that's what I would say is the solution to that, but you would have to be comfortable,
089I think, with saying to families, "We have more generous flex zones where if you live in this area, the district reserves the right to place you not at a single school, but potentially at one of two schools." So, I think those are the those are the variables. Lisa, did you get your question answered? Yes. Okay. All right, Vikram. Uh I've a number of things. Um Where do I begin? I guess to piggyback up what was his question really, I think, is pertaining to the siblings, right? Uh I'm going to go whether geographic is the right way or not, uh but putting that aside, um this just seems like we have to dig a little bit deeper into the math, right? So, how many people reasonably have, say, six children that will consistently go to the
090same school? Let's hypothetically say that's the case. What's wrong with them saying, "Okay, this family, we're going to allow them to continue to go to that school until all their children have graduated." What's wrong with that? And when you bring up, "Well, the class sizes." It seems that, in fact, open enrollment has optimized class sizes. In fact, the study we did last summer showed that, in fact, that effectively did just that. 100% And then also, when you say, "Well, we'll expand the flex zones." Currently, the flex zone would It seems to me that you wouldn't be stuck with one, but you would have the option of two buildings. Correct. But since there are only three, if you expand your flex zones, you're essentially saying, "Well, then you can pick any of the three." Which, in
091fact, brings us right back to open enrollment again. Which, to me, seems to optimize class sizes to begin with. Correct. >> wrong in any of this? Well, what I would say to you is in terms of being able to balance class sizes, you're 100% correct that if we maintain open enrollment, where we could say, "Sorry, these sections are closed. We are placing you here." You are 100% correct. What I think this whole process has done, however, that I think is a bit I'll just add personal commentary, a bit long overdue, is to recognize that open enrollment is different from choice, because in every year, you're going to have families who don't get their choice. So, that is the underbelly of open enrollment. We do administratively benefit from being able to place students based on what's
092available, but that does necessarily mean when we say, you know, family people come here and people celebrate the idea of open enrollment because they get to choose the school that they think is best for them, that is not true for a significant percentage of families. But wouldn't that actually continue to be the case is my point. It would still be the case regardless, because people still have their first choice. They're not necessarily going to get it, right? Vikram, actually, I want to I want to highlight something. I think you're thinking about a flex zone as the family's making the choice. >> Yeah, they're not making the choice in the flex zone. >> district making the choice. Right. So, a flex zone, we would be making the ability to choose what school based on class size
093availability. We're not saying, "Hey, these are two schools, which one do you want to go to?" So, we would retain that flexibility as opposed to family saying, "I'd like to go to this school or that school." We would say, "At this point in a geographic place, we're going to place you at one of these two schools that that would fall within this flex zone." As for the the sibling piece, yeah, I think I mean, the the challenge that we have here is there's potentially if you have a first grader who gets legacy'd in, their sibling might not even be born yet right now. So, I don't even know sort of who's coming in at at a certain point and in and what year later on, but I but I would also say that at a
094certain point, if we promise siblings get to stay in the same school, then what you're going to do is you're going to have that override potentially a a grade or a class section that may already be at capacity. If we are at capacity and we have already set a policy that says siblings get to go where their previous older sibling went, then you are then saying we are prioritizing that over the district's ability to preserve class sizes if those situations emerge. Could we do an analysis about where that is? I honestly don't think we could for the simple reason is we don't know how many people like I wouldn't be We don't have a census that is able to say these are the school-age children coming in from who have been born who are 0
095to 5 years old right now, and these are the neighborhoods in which they live. So, that just would be uh plain impossible. I think I think, practically speaking, you would have I would suggest that you cannot say siblings can go where their legacy siblings are, just practically speaking. I think you would be making a promise that would really handcuff us around class sizes, unless you want to accept the possibility that that's more important than maintaining certain class sizes. And what I would say to that is we continue to give lip service to teachers and how hard this job is. If we start saying, "But the sibling piece is more important than maintaining appropriate class sizes." I think that that then counters the continued worry and concern about also preserving appropriate working conditions for teachers. So,
096Lisa, I see I want to wrap around. There are a couple of people that haven't gotten a question yet. I It's clarification of what Clarification, okay, go for it. Sorry, no, just quick clarification about the answer that you gave Vikram, just to check for understanding before other questions, so I don't knowing it's lost. Are you implying that there would be a greater geographic flex zone required for the phase-in versus just geographic without phase-in? >> Correct. Okay, thank you. Sorry, I just want to make sure I understood it before we moved on. That would be a speculation of mine. If if somebody said, "How what would make you feel comfortable about not administratively, but about meeting class size guidelines?" It would be if we're running two sort of placement processes parallel, meaning a legacy'd system and
097a geographic system, I do think, logically speaking, having more flexibility to place students not at a single school, but having choices for the administration to do would allow us to preserve the class would give us more bandwidth to do that. Okay. Uh Go for it. One of the other reasons I think why we're going to need larger flex zones potentially, if we do a phased approach, is we will not when when a consultant would have to draw up residential boundaries for us, the timeline for that, if we're only transitioning kindergarteners, they would have very little information about existing students in which to draw residential boundaries. Um they could kind of guess based on the number of houses in certain areas and things like that, but the the bottom line is most of the population that
098would then be subject to the residential boundaries they draw now wouldn't be entering the school until, you know, next year, but then really five, six, seven years from now. Um and so, I think they're going to need more flexibility during that time, so that we don't end up in a situation where then we have to redistrict sooner rather than later. I just had a question about this clarification. All right. I'm really sorry. I just want to make sure that I'm clear on the thing that you just said that was clarifying the thing that he just said about the thing that I asked about the thing that he asked. Sorry. So, >> [laughter and gasps] >> are we implying that um the efficacy of the district drawing and the geography-based study would be reduced as a
099result of the phased approach and having limited information and being it based on kindergarteners? I just It's efficacy question. I think it depends. I mean, I think there's certainly from from what I know, and I don't know a lot, there's certainly about real-time information that is critical, cuz they've already said here that here's the data points that we would like. That being said, some of the data points also include just sort of residential density areas. Like, they've they For those who are wondering, they are fully We are fully aware of the new development on Powder Mill Road. I drive by it every day to work. And so, even if those aren't full yet, there's already calculations and predictions about how many school-age children would ultimately be there. We got a updated NEZDEC report about that.
100So, even if they're not there, there are ways that I think people who do this work would make what they would feel are reasonable predictions. Okay, does anybody else have a follow-up on this before we move to people who have not gotten to ask questions yet? Andrew. Real simple, and following specifically to what you said, the way the data works is that you can model the data on what we have right now, and then choose to implement decisions based on the results of that. So, if we choose to do a phased approach where we only let kindergarteners, only let first graders, choose to only move fourth graders from one school to another. The data that helps make that decision exists currently. The insight of that data to turn into information you can use comes from
101that, and we can choose how to implement it. So, our consultants could be told use the data as existing school district is currently to define a plan for full implementation, phased implementation, whatever. It's all the same information. >> data to >> Yeah, it's all the same stuff. We're not going to know anything about what's going to happen 3 years from now differently if we move everything versus we move one piece. So, the consultants can do this. It's part of data analysis. It's just a part of what they do. So, it's not going to be some special magic thing. All right, I saw hands over here. They've disappeared. All right, who else hasn't had a chance to ask a question yet? Okay, we're on for second questions. Do we still have questions about enrollment models? So,
102we'll go to statements later. Just let's let's wear Andrew out here with our questions. What else have we got? Vikram. All right, I guess I'll be brave here. Um So, um Let me see. How do I how do I phrase this? So, if if we're looking at these, it seems that that option five is really quite tumultuous, right? It affects 100% of all our kids. Isn't isn't then um changing from our current open enrollment to another thing is is that adding uh an exceptional amount of chaos on top of already that what's considered to be exceptional chaos? And then and and by that I mean it seems that we're potentially taking all sorts of kids and just saying um go to this school or go to that school and and people no longer have any
103choice uh at all as to what school they want to go to. Is that it? They they'll completely lose the ability to choose what school they want to but in rare circumstances. >> If you shift to a completely geographic process, then correct, you are eliminating a model that has >> would take that away from our community entirely. Yes, except there that's where the piece there was a question where there was some interest if you did a geographic model, could you incorporate what we call the controlled flexibility of stage two where once if people have been placed in their geographic placements, you would then offer and Wellesley does this now, you would then offer the ability each year for family to say, "Hey, I got my geographic placement. I'd love to be considered for a different
104school that's not in my geographic placement." What we would do in that model is you would look at available class sizes in those schools. What could theoretically happen is if you have a fourth-grader over here who wants to go that way, fourth-grader over here wants to go that way, then potentially they could swap. But those would be rare rare exceptions essentially. >> Have no idea. But but for the large part of it, people would lose the ability to choose their school. >> That is that is correct. That is correct. >> Okay. And so, one of the core tenants of of this school district would be completely removed essentially. That is correct and that's where I think as a school committee you have to decide what are the pros and cons of an open enrollment system,
105what are the pros and cons of a geographic system. That's where I did say, you know, I I do think and I I will be the first to say I think there are wonderful benefits for both families and for the school in open enrollment. And if you if we choose to keep that, you know, I I think that we can continue to um celebrate and capitalize on the strengths of open enrollment, but what I do think just having been someone who's been for here for 18 years and watched it, what I do think is an important acknowledgement um and acceptance and it's one of those things where it's a reaffirmation of yes, this is the cost is to accept that you actually always will have depending on um interest, but also depending on the time
106of year that you move into this town, they do not have choice. So, to say that this is a tenant of the district is a false statement for uh for 100% of >> you're saying with some rare exceptions, some people don't get choice. >> No, with a lot of exceptions, some people don't get choice. >> But we would have 100% exception if we went to the I see. So, at least people have some choice now where if we did the the geographic, we will have zero choice with very rare exception. I see. >> Thank you. And in in this model, just because I I also appreciate C-PAC's point about trying to make sure that there's transparency, any student who's in a specialized program never has choice. Adam. And that would continue, you're saying? >> And
107that would continue. >> Vikram. It's Adam's turn. Thanks. Trying to to sort of visualize what open enrollment looks like with just three buildings. And so, I guess my question is today with the six distinct schools, roughly how many people what what percentage don't get their first choice? Um >> [clears throat] >> it varies by year and as people pointed out, it varies by um sort of just the fluctuation of interest, but I can tell you that last year I think the incoming kindergarteners who wanted Douglas was 90 some odd students who wanted it as their first choice and we have 54 spots. So, that just gives you a small data point just for one school. Um in addition to that, the number if you come after the kindergarten lottery, you get what you get. And
108sometimes there what they want is available, um but in many cases uh they are placed in spots that are currently available. We had students who enrolled just this past week and the registrar at I just said, "Where's there a spot?" They didn't even get a choice. We just said, "Yep, there's a spot at at Gates in this grade. That's where they're going." So, um I think I did a study about 3 years ago where I think probably between just the choice the lottery results and families who move in after the lottery, I and I'll have to double-check, but I I wouldn't I don't think it's incorrect for me to say at least 25 to 30% of families who eventually go through the elementary schools um don't necessarily get their first choice or have a choice.
109So, I I guess what I'm thinking about is that's 25 to 30% when you have six options and we're going to move down to three options, but those three options then will have hometown priority, walker status. There's there's so there's already a lot of limitations and so then what I I guess what I'm struggling with and this is not really a question for you to answer, but what is the choice that they end that you end up getting? It's a it's a binary A or B. Do you want this one or that one? Maybe you can get into the the third one if there's a space. So, that's you know, what my my fear is that choice as it stands and and remember the the maintain open enrollment, we're sort of discussing that as it
110relates to 5v2. So, that would assume that we've already sort of consolidated to three schools and so I you know, may maybe you can speculate quickly. What do you think it looks like in terms of the number of people who don't get their first choice when there's only three choices and all those other caveats and things. I think before we can even make that prediction, I think what what would need to be ex what we would need to hear from the school committee either as direction or giving us the ability to offer you a recommendation is what is it that we are asking of each of the three remaining schools in terms of um distinction worth offering a choice. If the directive or the recommendation from somebody is Okay, I excuse me. Is that for
111real? Oh, sorry. Yeah. No, public comment is closed. >> leave because I was working two jobs so I could afford this school district. So, we're we're we're going to continue. You are out of order. Thank you. Please continue. >> me. This is You guys are coming up with new information two nights, new memos and you're going to force a vote when there's so many concerned parents. Andrew, go ahead. Okay, I'm going to leave. Thank you. I said my peace. Thank you, school district for doing such a phenomenal job, Peter Light. So, I think there would have to be some direction or consensus amongst those who are in this conversation to say, "What is it that we would like to ask of the remaining schools in terms of uh providing uh elements of a school that
112might have um something unique or different than the other two schools that would warrant uh wanting to offer parents the ability to to entertain different schools." So, I think that's the question that we have to to answer. And then you could then you could go uh to the next question that you asked. Okay, so we're going to hold that for our conversation. I have a question. Um Andrew, can you talk to You talked about the potential of having siblings in the phased geographic enrollment going on for a long time. I'm also wondering what the transportation impact looks like and um whether or not we think we can handle that with what we have now or if we would have to temporarily expand or >> Yeah, that's a great question. I we were talking about it
113this morning in our operations meeting and and it's it I think on our knee-jerk reaction was, "Oh my goodness, we could have in one household a student who gets a bus and goes to this school and then their younger sibling gets on a different bus and goes to this school." That being said, what I realized is in this pure open enrollment system, that's already a possibility, right? So, actually the the the system that actually may offer the most variability is already the system that we have, at least on paper. You could have a student who is um placed in that new apartment building in Powder Mill um want Blanchard in an open enrollment system and we would have to provide a bus route that takes that student from Route 62 over by the Maynard border
114and bring them all of all the way to Blanchard. So, I think at least on paper, my sense is even if you had um progressively each year grade um grade levels that were more neighborhood oriented, I'd like I my suspicion is that that actually might be somewhat helpful. I could be wrong. I I do think that our transportation office is like, "Oh, I really want to think about what that looks like if you have multiple households that have kids going to different schools." And yet, I don't know how different that is than um a household that has the kids in different schools than your neighbor who's right next door to you is already going to a different school. Does that provide sort of the same level of transportation uh churn that we have to deal
115with? Okay. I'm just going to keep working my way around here cuz I've seen lots of hands in the air. I'm looking at Lila and Yenshin. Either of you have something? Um my question was about option four. Where will the there's no way to fit three schools of community >> Let's Let's hold on to option four questions for the moment. Lila. I was wondering about um the geographic with some flexibility. Um and I was wondering if you had any more information around the kind of flexibility part. A, have we gotten any more information from Desi around our requirement to provide transportation? >> He did. And he said that it's okay for So, to the to your question, just to clarify for the audience and for the committee, one of the pieces that we um had
116initially drafted is in this controlled flexibility piece where you give people a window to say, "I'd like to be considered for a school other than my geographic placement." If they are granted that request, our our draft uh proposal uh stated that a requirement is that if they accept that alternate placement, they would be responsible for transportation. Um Desi has said that that is uh something that is acceptable because we are offering transportation in their original placement and if they're choosing a different one, then that could be a caveat. Well, not to say that we're apples to apples, but Wellesley does the same thing where if you accept an alternate placement, you're responsible for transportation. Can I ask a follow-up question? Um I appreciate the idea of some choice in a model that does not provide
117much choice by default. Um I think my concern is that our communities are set up that if you can afford things, you get more opportunities like afterschool. My concern is around um families who can afford to transport getting more choice. Um and wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about what it would look like if we actually just provided transportation. I have some thoughts, but wondering if you could elaborate a little bit. And um could there be an opportunity to be more inclusive of, for example, families that are at the federal poverty line or qualify for free or reduced lunch or things like that? >> [snorts] >> Yeah, I'd want to think about it for a little bit more time and not when I'm on TV, but that being said, um a couple of
118thoughts. One is um to your point about potentially offering transportation even in that model, we already are committed to doing that for students who are in alternate non-geographic placements for specialized programs. So, we already are legally obligated and morally committed uh to that um to that plan. So, there will already be students who, if they're receiving transportation from us, will be on buses um that have to pick them up in locations that are not part of their geographic zone. Um my top of the head speculation is that if you have everybody in their geographic zones, the one of the benefits is certainly um more condensed bus routes because the buses are not going all over town, but they're staying within certain neighborhoods. So, I think the bus routes would be shorter um and that may
119also uh reduce the number of buses that we might need or the number of bus drivers. So, I would think that A, we might need to then be prepared for either additional um bus drivers or not necessarily additional to what we have now, but certainly more additional to perhaps what we would need. Um and you'd have to be prepared for at least some routes or or a number of routes depending on how many students are going to a non-geographic placement of longer bus routes that might be more akin to what we currently have. So, um so, I think that is a possibility. So, I think it could be more buses and it and it certainly would be for some bus routes that incorporate those um addresses, longer bus routes. Andrew, did I see your hand
120earlier? I'm going to wrap back around. I'm getting this side of the table right now. Did I see your hand earlier? Okay. Lakshmi? I'm a little confused on this whole open enrollment business. I mean, I from Roxbury, my kids went to one school and our energies were focused on just getting that one school to kind of meet the standards, what we needed, right? But you put your microphone closer? So, the whole concept of open enrollment and the choice implies that there are there is a priority, there is a ranking. And that concerns me a lot. They should not be All schools should be good. And Is this Is this a question or It is a question. I'm coming to it. I know you told me not to ask this, wait, but I think it's coming
121back to the same thing. My question is, why are we perpetuating the idea that open open enrollment is an an option that is excellent when we're trying to accomplish all schools to kind of provide all the services we need for the students. And going through the MTSS and making sure we meet the kids where they are, right? What is the point of kind of making these differentiation creating the differentiation between schools when they're we're trying to get them to be uniform. This whole myth of open enrollment, I just don't understand. It's It's dividing the communities. It's It's the major argument and conversation here. We're spending so much energy on this. Whereas, the main problem still there. We are not even talking about them. So, do either of you want to comment on this? I'll just
122comment briefly, which is one, I think, you know, we're talking about it because it's been tremendously successful in the community for decades um and served many, many families well. I think and there are nuances to it that some families in the community have thought didn't serve the community well. I don't think that's our question from an administrative standpoint to answer. I think that's actually the school committee's question that that you all have to grapple with and answer in order to make the decision. So, my question is that the whole model we are adopting with MTSS and all that, isn't that counter to this differentiation model? is my question. I don't know if it is it is in school committee, right? It is more I feel like it's in the administration. I I don't I don't
123think they're mutual I don't think open enrollment as a model and MTSS as sort of a a goal within elementary schools are mutually exclusive. I think you could have both. I think MTSS is a mindset about supporting students and and providing them what they need in different settings and in different ways. You could still do that in an open enrollment model. I I do want to clarify or sort of at least confirm as again, I think there are logistical pieces about how we frame open enrollment in terms of choice and that's where I I sort of that's my big pet peeve is we shouldn't never call it choice because not everybody gets a choice. What I think is important to say is if if we had the the money and the time and the staffing
124and the space to shrink and expand schools based on parent interest, open enrollment would be an unbelievably successful model because of all the of of the benefits that we already see with open enrollment. The challenge that we have as a public school uh is that we can't shrink and expand schools based on interest. That's really the challenge. But the actual idea of offering parents the ability to say, "I'm invested in that school because I think I see a connection between how they think about schooling and teaching and learning and and child development really matches my family." I think is a wonderful thing. It's just that I think we also have to be open and upfront that that's in in in the limitations that we have, it's just not available um to everybody. So, Lakshmi, you
125hit on one of the key conversations for us to have. But yeah, ultimately this that the answer to your question ends up being a school committee decision. So, hold on to that question, we'll come back to it, Glenn. So, one I saw a lot of I see some things where I Well, let me try and clarify this. Regarding the transportation responsibility part, where if okay, you want you want your kid to go there, okay, well, please provide transportation. One thought I had is say a family says, "Okay, we're good for transportation." Then year one, it's fine. Then year two then year two, three, whatever, a grandparent gets very sick and all of a sudden it's just a lot harder to make that transportation part work. What happens then if the parent just can't meet the
126obligation? >> [gasps] >> Yeah, I think on paper, and this is not a human answer and we'll get to the human part in a second, what happens is if you accept a placement that's different from your geographic placement, that becomes your default placement. You've accepted responsibility. If we're giving you a school that's not your original placement and and the conditions that are there, i.e., you have to provide transportation, you can't then say we we've changed our mind either because we can no longer provide the transportation or or we changed our mind. It wasn't the school we thought it would be. We want to go back to our geographic placement. The model that we have says the only way you can go back is to actually re-enter that controlled flexibility to request a move back. That's
127not a very sort of um helpful answer in terms of if a family It's not I think your example is less about sort of choices and more about circumstance. I think the the the clinical answers are fortunately you know, you're in the situation. If they reach out to us and say this is the circumstance, perhaps we have a way to to make exceptions based on the available space. But then we would have to provide, you know, I think I think at a certain point we have to we have to sort of say to ourselves what are the conditions in which we would make exceptions, what are the conditions in which we wouldn't. That's that's right. And I guess the the reason I'm asking this question is for me it's just I just see more things
128that can go wrong in Sure. in this scenario. And like for like for instance, joint custody. Like if you have one parent that their things are going fine and the parents are in agreement, then one parent says, "I really want my kid to go here." Then the other parent says, "I really want that kid to go there." And then now the parents are fighting and the poor kid's just sitting through it. Like I'm I I I'm glad that that the joint custody issue was at least acknowledged in the memo, too. Um I'll just wrap up here. Like I between these two things like the joint like Glenn, do you have a question? I'm all set. Thank you. >> Okay, good. So, are we at the point that we want to talk or do we still
129have questions? Okay. I see some questions over here. Lisa. Um I have a a question about the controlled flexibility for geographic placement. Um I think I was looking at this and when you had initially talked about it and I mulled it over later, I was thinking, "Hmm, there's you know, 80 Boxborough students that attend schools in Acton. There's about 103 Acton students that attend schools in Blanchard and Boxborough." And I was wondering if there's those you know, flex zones because obviously with pathways removed from Blanchard, there would be created you know, more openings for students. And so I wondered if it was possible for that controlled flexibility to solve that problem by saying you guys, you know, don't want to switch places. Leave you there or is that more meant to be on a more
130limited case-by-case? Just trying to understand the spirit of it. The controlled flexibility? >> Yes. I I don't think the controlled flexibility is really about addressing a specific uh enrollment challenge. I think to be clear and and hopefully this is clear, but maybe not. In in a geographic zoning um I think there's a strong possibility that a portion of West Acton would be zoned to Blanchard. And so if we created those zones, you would have people based on geography in Acton who would be assigned to Blanchard. That being said, to your point, let's say there's current Acton students Acton residents who are placed at Blanchard and they're placed geographically not at Blanchard. In the controlled flexibility, they could say, "I'd like to go back to Blanchard." What would have to happen is that you would have
131enough families or enough spaces separate from that of families placed at Blanchard who say I'd like to go to the other way. And then we would match that. Um and so again, if you have the ability of a one-to-one match, then that's great. If you don't and you only have so many spots, then that's where you conduct a lottery to say you have 30 families who want to go to Blanchard, we have 15 spots available. You draw a lottery. No, I thank you for answering that. I think the reason why I was asking was because if it was meant to be more stringent, then we would operate underneath the assumption that those 80 Boxborough students would stay at Blanchard and that you'd have less space available for anyone from Acton to fill that and then
132the flex zone would not be need to be as large or there'd be less people pulled from the flex zone. So, I was trying to figure that out. So you're right in that I would assume that the Box current Boxborough students who are who are at an Acton school would likely be zoned into Blanchard. You're correct. Even with that, just based on the enrollment, there would still need to be Acton families who are placed at placed at Blanchard. Of course, yeah, just less if you Yeah. >> Vikram. So, um my understanding is that um open enrollment and and the idea I guess between geographies is sort of it limit the number of buses and bus routes. But my understanding is that the costs for these is negligible to us. So, it's really a rounding error
133in terms of cost. So, really my question is, what problem are we really trying to solve with the geographic thing? Like what is it about open enrollment that's so bad that we need to entertain geographic enrollment? Uh you know, what I don't I don't understand what what problem are we solving because it seems to me that we're opening up all these cans of worms that seem to be much much worse. I mean, if I was a parent, I had a child going to this school and that school and I was a single parent working and then I had to deal with two kids at two schools. That's a nightmare scenario for me. And if that seems to be a hard no, I'm just curious it seems we're opening a huge can of worms with geographic
134enrollment that none of these things currently exist with with the current open enrollment. So, so what problem are we fixing? >> My impression is that the consideration of a geographic enrollment process is not a financial consideration for the reasons that you pointed out. I do think that from an experience point of view um and and may this may not be a high priority, but I do think just based on the experiences and the conversations I've had with principals, long bus rides aren't great as a as a student experience. And I do think that there's a lot of time spent on um if you can imagine um 60 kindergarten through sixth graders sitting in a bus for 45 to 50 minutes where the bus driver has to look this way for that period of time. Some
135students may love it, other students, you know, um idle hands are the etc. etc. etc. So, I think the degree to which um long bus rides are a challenge, I think there are people who have an environmental consideration who feel like buses going across town all over the place just is not good sort of uh stewardship of the environment for for others people. But again, to your point, it's not the geographic piece isn't about transportation. I think it's about the idea that um are there when someone does an analysis of the pros and cons of open enrollment I think they would say for them um the the benefits do not outweigh the costs and so therefore they would rather not have the choice piece, but instead uh focus on developing great schools in a geographic
136setting where the where choice isn't part of the equation. It's not necessary It's not for me to say which one is better or worse for this community. I think different people have to do You all have to do that calculus of what are the pros and cons and which ones do you want to prioritize. So, Vikram, that's also another one of those questions that actually should probably be more for our discussion amongst us because the request to look at an alternative to um the original enrollment model that was provided for 5V2 was a request that came from us after listening to um some of the community feedback. Okay. So, we do need to get to a point where we actually make a decision. Are we ready to go around and you know, kind of what
137I'm thinking this looks like is everybody take about a minute. About a minute. Let's I'm not going to time everybody, but let's not abuse this. Take about a minute. Say whatever it is that you need to say and then we've got lots of motion language that we can play with. Um so basically the way that will work is after we've gone around, whoever the bold person is that wants to put the first motion out there, we'll put it out there. We'll have a conversation about it. We'll either vote for it, table it. Whatever we're going to do, move on to another one, but we need to come to tying an enrollment model to 5V2. Sound good? Okay. Who wants to start? Do we need Andrew to stay there? >> Thank you for asking the question.
138>> could you could Yeah, thank Thank [laughter] you, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. All right, Andrew. You may go. We're about to make a generational choice, a change really. It's more a multi-generational one. The decision tonight's not simply about matching a budget number. As the former mayor of Chicago said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." The steering committee decided to close Conant. And it in itself solves a budget problem, removing the facility and the employee costs to maintain other operations. The structure of the district made that decision for us. It was the only building that was separate. Everything else that follows is a choice. And we're not a company. We can't eliminate a facility and move on. We may have the We may not be able to support a building, but we still have a
139responsibility to support the students, the kids who called that building home. How we do that will define what Acton and Boxborough become going forward. I'm not going to revisit process or you know, despite my reservations, nor the word choice in communications. Instead, I want to focus on the consequences, the immediate, the short-term, and the long-term of drastic change. Because this committee's about to make decisions whose impacts extend beyond our authority and into the future of our towns. The immediate impact if we adopt 5V2, and I only start with this because it's the choice of maximum change. The immediate impact is instability. Students won't know where to expect next year. They won't know who will be in the classes, where they'll go to school, whether they'll have any trusted adult around. Teachers will not know where
140they land. Also, schools are dissolved. PTOs, 501c3 organizations that are tied to very specific schools, will have to be dissolved. Support systems will disappear and must be rebuilt from scratch. >> pause you for a moment? It sounds to me like you're talking about 4 versus 5v2, right? >> about every aspect of what we're doing here. >> Okay. We're trying to decide enrollment model for 5v2. I am still then talking then I'll talk about this with this, but I think we're we're we're going at it wrong. The thing with 5v2, specifically with regard to geographic, is that we are changing the nature of our towns. By going with a geographic and going away from open. As it stood, if you bought a house, if you rented a house, if you had a place with an address
141inside of Acton or Boxborough, you could go to any school barring availability, but you could go to any school. With barring availability, that's part of the availability. Special education is available only in certain places, correct? Correct? At the district's discretion. Barring availability at the district's discretion with regard specifically to special education, you have the ability to go anywhere. That is a way of being able to say that anybody in the district can go to any school. But now what we're saying is there's going to be an an economic barrier put up. That because of where you live, because of where your parents can buy a house, because of what you're able to do, you know, what your parents are able to do. That will determine what school you go to. And even if the schools
142get the same amount of money, the one thing that we've learned is that the amount of time and effort and energy that the families are able to put into these schools, that they may or may not have based on their economic situation, adjusts the way these schools look. And one school ends up being a good one and one school ends up being a bad one. Just because there are two. And because we're using geography and where you live and your address as the place to to define what school you go to, that will build a barrier in this town that we haven't had yet. That will impact which parts of town are considered good, which parts of town are considered bad. And it will further alienate Boxborough from from Acton because Blanchard's going to be
143separate from all of this. We are making a choice that's going to change. And I think it's really really important for us to remember that open enrollment is about not just choice, it's about distribution. And it allows the entire community to be a part of itself. Okay. Who's next? >> [snorts] >> And um by the way, if we all go 4 minutes, that's 45 minutes on opening statements, folks, and it is 8:22. Lisa. Open enrollment has not served our students. Achievement gaps, declining literacy, and imbalanced classrooms are just a few examples. Note, students requiring a special program never had a choice to begin with. How can we say that we worry about equality with geography-based enrollment when McCarthy Town has a student population that is 67% white and has 24% of the economically disadvantaged students,
144the most in the district. Merriam, 65% white. Douglas, 63% white. Just dispersing Conant students means we are taking mostly children >> [sighs] >> of color from marginalized groups. Sorry, and dividing them. I'm really sorry, between two buildings. One of those buildings currently houses two majority white schools. Those students will experience a double impact. >> [sighs and gasps] >> I'm so sorry. Being outsider and having very few people who look like them. Students should be set up for both academic and social success. This means everyone is the new kid and we draw lines to ensure equal representation in all the ways we know matter. >> [sighs] >> These early years are critical to learning how to to navigate friendships with people of different backgrounds and what we choose in this moment will define us as a
145district. Vikram. Okay. Glenn, you've been pointed at. So I I want to just share my thoughts briefly. Um So I understand that many community members feel very strongly about open enrollment, its history for decades, the sense of the choice that it gives parents. I still do strongly feel that I think it should go away. Like not because that anyone's bad about this, but like we've seen that how throughout this process over the past God, it feels like 10 years. It's only been months. Um Like I really do think that the way open enrollment has struck has structured in this sort of way, like I really do feel it cultivates and breeds conditions that exacerbate unnecessary levels of tribalism and entrenched resentment. And like we've we've seen it throughout this process in varying to varying degrees.
146I think contempt is a very dangerous emotion. And I don't think it has I don't think I think contempt showing up is inevitable and I also think it we kind of have to nip it in the bud when it does appear. Um And I think that if we have this unnecessary fault line, which I believe open enrollment exacerbates, that it causes unnecessary tribalism, it increases community conflict, it entrenches preconceived notions, it brews resentment. It just seems so unnecessary to me. And we're only going to have three if we choose 5v2, it's like, well, I want my kid to go to Boardwalk and he's at Parker Damon. It's like I really don't think it's I think I think your kid will be very well educated at both. And I think that the way open enrollment has
147brought this situation up, I think it's time to move on. So, those are my thoughts on at least that part. Thanks. Vikram. Um So, having myself gone to about 10 different schools by the time I graduated high school, I've bused, I've gone to all sorts of things. I've been living in this district for a long time. And I think moving to a geographic enrollment is a big mistake for the reasons that Andrew has outlined. And in fact, in fact, to your both of your points that what you're talking about. In fact, my children are minorities. I myself am in fact a minority, right? So I'm I'm very very cognizant that my wife is black. Like very very This is a sensitive point when we start talking about minorities, right? >> are too. Yes. No, I
148I I get that. I wasn't talking about you. I'm talking about me, right? Um So with that being said, when you pocket things, if you live over here, you go to this school. If you live over here, you go to that school. I grew up in the Brookline district and that's what happens is you have kids who are economically this way or that way winding up over here or over there. So what it does is in fact exacerbates the points that you guys are both talking about. And with open enrollment, we see kids My kids have friends coming from all over Acton and Boxborough, from all sorts of different economic backgrounds, right? They're come from different parts of the world, right? They're not pocketed and we do see If you drive around Boxborough, Acton, right?
149You'll see pockets of small houses close together and then you see huge houses, $2 million houses. They're all clustered together. So those will all sort of congregate over here, congregate over there. And what open enrollment does, it breaks down those barriers. So kids see each other as kids, not as kids from over here or kids from over there, right? This is a very very important point that I think has to be very very clear. Adam. All right. I I was sort of thinking about what I was going to say and you know, I think we all have our our thinking right now and I wanted to just sort of step back for a moment and really just recognize the committee members around the table. We're not going to agree on this. Um but what I
150am just so so proud of is that there is a committee of 11 people here who are deeply engaged, deeply passionate, thinking about what's best for students. And so I really just wanted to as we're getting into this, just take a moment to to thank all of you for showing up and for being prepared and advocating for the thing that's important for the students of the district and those families, not just for now, but for the long term. And so, you know, I think we're we're going to have some votes tonight, but I just wanted to take a moment cuz I know that this is going to be a a difficult night and just thank everybody for for their participation tonight. Thanks, Adam. Um Lisa, thank you for your opening statement. I have blended children.
151And I served on our district's DEI Family Advisory Group. At the time when I was serving on a DEI advisory, I heard many parents, majority minority minority, voice their opinion of open enrollment. Racial segregation is a byproduct of open enrollment. My children didn't get to choose which school they go to cuz we arrived late. My third grader had students in her class telling her uh telling him um COVID came from China, you are Chinese. I have kids who have peers telling them, your mom shouldn't get on a boat and go home. Again, that's the byproduct of open enrollment. Does it have a lot of positivity? Absolutely, yes. But we can't ignore that. So, with that, I will go I will say that What was I supposed to say again? Like, just choose? Choose enrollment? What
152was You can say at this point whatever you want to. We haven't reached the point that we have motions on the table. So >> Okay. I think I'm ready to choose option 5E2 with geographic enrollment. All right, who else hasn't had a chance to say their first piece? Hang on, hang on. Let's let people say their first piece and when that motion looks like motion, people, you are reading some language. We're not there yet. Okay, who else hasn't had a chance to say their first spot that has something they want to say? Ben. I'm still I'm still trying to like collect my thoughts and all of this. >> Okay, keep collecting them. I'll try to be very brief about this. As a parent of an student who's on an IEP, I can tell you that
153open enrollment is an illusion for a student like my son. Um, while we've been very fortunate about the school that he was able to go to in elementary school, I can say for from experience that there is no choice for student on an IEP. That student has a plan. That plan is set up. That plan is executed and revisited year over year. And in some cases, every every three or six or nine months. It just does not exist for everybody. I think that when we look at the different models out there right now, we need to take into account all the students within our school district and really look at the impacts that open enrollment has versus a phased geographic enrollment or geographic enrollment in general. That's what I have right now. Okay, Lila, Liz,
154either of you have thoughts you want to share? Actually, it's not an opening statement. It's more about the question. What are we trying to do? Pick one or based on the philosophy of drop open enrollment versus geographic enrollment? >> So, what we're doing right now is we're figuring out if we selected 5E2, which enrollment option would we have? >> So, we're going to >> then after that, we'll go and we'll do the four versus 5E2. Okay, so you want to pick one out of the four. Yeah, so right now what what we're talking about is what are what are your thoughts on which enrollment option you think we should do or which one you think we shouldn't do. Let's Um, I debated whether or not even to say anything sort of um, opening. What I
155will say is that open enrollment is our current model. Our current model cannot deliver the level of services our student need within the financial realities that our communities are in. And I just want to highlight that. Like we're here right now because the current model, six different schools, six different ways of doing, you know, approaching the education, that is, you know, why we're here to change. So, I just want to make sure that we are moving forward with something that's going to be sustainable long term. Actually, Lila. All right, Lila. Yeah, I um, I feel like we all have been holding a fair amount and hearing a lot of feedback that is filled with emotions and fears and hopes. Um, and we got to this point because of chronic underfunding of schools, public schools in
156particular in Massachusetts. I'm just wanting to name that that like we are in this process um, not via choice um, in many ways. I think I have been holding how much um, uncertainty staff in particular are experiencing with these conversations happening and them kind of continuing their jobs. Um, kind of the burden of this process for them and for families and also some really significant gratitude for the ways that families have engaged in this process. Um, folks were not elected to this and have no real responsibility to be keeping up with as much stuff has been put out. Um, but folks were filling out surveys, um, filled all of the focus group slots, um, have showed up at public comment, have sent us emails. And so, I feel really grateful that we have so many
157families that are so engaged in the school district. Um, and I think also just that kids are experiencing a lot of emotions based on a variety of levels of understanding of this process. Um, and I think none of this has felt great and had a lot of anxiety coming to this meeting. Um, and I think the opportunities are like after we choose something, then we can put energy into figuring out what this looks like in reality. So, not to minimize the this decision, but I think there's a lot of work to do after tonight. Actually, do you want to jump in? I know now now that Do you have more thoughts that you wanted to share? You were just asking a question earlier. No, I'm all set. I'm ready to vote. So, I guess that
158leaves me, right? I guess I'm the only one. Um, so I've been wrestling with why open enrollment would make sense with 5E2. Um, with our current footprint, what that would look like is you would have Miriam McCarthy Town and the students placed from Conant in the Parker Damon building building a a new school together. And Douglas Gates and the students placed from Conant um, building a new school together. And I just have to say that I'm struggling right now with the friction in our community and visualizing visualizing what that would look like. And it is not for any lack of doubt or any lack of confidence in our leadership and the professional professionalism of our staff and, you know, all the hard things that we've overcome before, but I just want to recognize that that
159feels like a really big ask. Um, and it also makes me ask myself, so whose voices then are strongest and what does that mean for new school creation? And in 5E2, it feels like that would be two fairly distinct schools potentially. Maybe not, I don't know. But if they're really different, then kind of the follow-on is if you don't get your first choice, you're probably getting your last choice because of hometown priority. And so, you know, that doesn't feel the same with only really two schools than it would with five or six. I I just don't see how open enrollment works with this option. Um, and I think something that really helped me thinking about the transition risks, which I recognize with geographic enrollment. I hear what everyone's saying about that. I I have felt
160that in my own life over many moves. Um, I was I was very grateful actually to get the details that you shared um, in today's memo, Peter, cuz it again, that's the piece that gives me confidence that wow, look at the things that our team has already thought of that we can do here that we can support families. I feel like there I feel like there is a way ahead. So, I feel like I'm to the point that I could talk about a geographic version of 5E2, but I'm not comfortable with an open enrollment one. So, with that, anyone want to play with some motion language and get us going here? All right, Adam. Uh, I'm going to start with a comment that then leads to a motion language. And that is um, the geographic
161enrollment model with controlled flexibility felt really good to me. It felt like the right compromise um, until we started to consider the underrepresented folks who have been speaking to us. And we did get an email from a parent who said, I'm a single parent and I work standard working hours. And if I were to choose to have my kid go to the school that they are passionate about and I were to get into that, I wouldn't actually be able to provide the transportation for them. So, there felt like there was a real um, equity challenge there. Um, but that being said, I think Lila, you brought up some interesting ideas. Um, but I also know we need to make a decision. And so, one of the things that I that's leading me to make this
162motion is that we can we can start um, with a geographic based enrollment model. And as we're going through the geography and that consideration, we can actually look at flex zones. We can look at the controlled flexibility and feasibility of transportation through that that next phase. And that is not something in in voting for a geographic based enrollment model, it does not eliminate the possibility of controlled flexibility with some equity lens sometime in the future. Um, so, that's that's where my thinking is right now. But I think we have to start with a very clearly defined decision. Which is to say that I move to approve the following enrollment model for elementary age students if option 5E2 is selected. Discontinue the district's current open enrollment placement process effective June 30th, 2026 and and a geography
163based enrollment model. Students placed in specialized programs within special education will continue to be placed at the school where their respective program is housed. Second. All right, so that was moved by Adam and seconded by Lila. Any further discussion? You seconded by Lisa. Lisa, oh my gosh, I did that again. >> [laughter] >> That was C, yes. Thank you. I'm glad you are all keeping me organized. Okay. Further discussion. Lisa. I have a question about this um because I was wondering if we have to include or if we should include within this um the inclusion of the um controlled flexibility piece or if that's something that we would be voting on this assuming that the controlled flexibility would be in place. Adam, since you made the motion. >> The The motion doesn't include the language
164around controlled controlled flexibility um and I think I I would pause here for just some other things that I've been thinking about and I think we've discussed. This is a change to our enrollment policy um and so we will also at some point have to vote to to suspend our enrollment policy to be able to put this in place before we can rewrite a full enrollment policy. Um and so the the the language in the motion does not say there's controlled flexibility um but I guess the spirit of my conversation is to consider that as we move through with the possibility and we know we're going to be taking a whole bunch of votes to sort of really put this into action with the possibility of revisiting that after we see what this looks like,
165what the feasibility of some of the transportation needs because we you know like we just asked Andrew new questions tonight and so I you know I think that I want to move things forward. That feels like it's a an an option that may be simple enough to put into place later on. So but the the language is no controlled flexibility at this point. Vikram. So we're we're saying no phasing, just a straight up geographic based enrollment. So breaking breaking all the friend groups that currently exist, we would just completely terminate that by voting yes on this. Is that correct? If I my my children have friends that are outside of their zone, those friendship would essentially break because they would no longer be in school together. So that's that's the those school friend groups from
166kids coming outside, those would immediately break if we voted yes on this, correct? So two questions for you. One's a rhetorical one. Do you have to go to school together to be a friend? And the second one is I honestly don't know and I don't know if we do know like we don't know what this looks like because we would have to map out your friend groups and then we would have to know what the model was before you would know who you would be in school together. Like that you would know that in June. We don't know that answer right now. Right. I I guess the thing is what I'm saying, I know there are the kids that that go to various schools coming from considerable distance. Uh and certainly it seems to me
167that having a a geographically based things, they would certainly not be uh within the vicinity. So uh it seems to me this would immediately break those school relationships and I just want to confirm that's the case. Adam. Um I I think Vikram, I hear what you're saying and I I guess what concerns me is that that feels um overly simplifying and maybe downplays the power that our parents and our families also have in this. So if that's the parents' decision to immediately break that friendship, that that's their decision as well. The decision that we're making is that there's the possibility that those students, those kids will not experience the same school hours together. So I I just want to like I want to I want to be very clear. Yes, that those school based experiences
168will change but I also want I want everyone to have a sense of accountability. You know, our parents here play a very important role in their students' upbringing and they also, many of them have choices and I recognize some of them don't because they've got financial issues and work hours issues and extended day and all of that but there's an opportunity here for parents to continue those friendships and to foster that and to in general take this difficult transition and model what it looks like to be successful in that. So the answer is yes and. Right. And I just I just want to make clear that I fully understand the friends outside of school and so on and so forth. But we know that what what we're doing was we're upending the lives of the
169most delicate in our society, right? The children in grade schools, they're the most affected by this and breaking strong relationship that they have with their friends that they see every single day suddenly seems to me uh it it seems uh I I um I I just want to make sure that that you're keenly aware that this is effectively severing those relationships. I'm sorry, I'm not aware that this is severing their relationships. >> Well, they're school relationships. Okay. You're aware well aware of that. Just to make make sure everybody's aware of that. I'm going to work around the table this way. Lila. Yeah, I'm just wondering if we could remind ourselves about the way that these meetings function and that we have to be recognized by the chair to speak. The like back and forth, I
170can feel in my body is just regulating me a little bit and I'm wondering if we could like chill out a little. So Vikram, that was actually actually the point Lila was making. >> [gasps] >> I'll try and come back to everybody. Um Andrew. Adam, um as you're looking at this, I know you the spirit of this is to be able to add a corollary at some point. Is there a way that we can add the anticipated corollary to the motion so that it is not clearly this but that there is the expectation that we'll have the flexibility to filter what this geography means as we get deeper into it? Cuz that's what you said. You know, the spirit of this is that it's a geographic break. Pure geographic enrollment but we hope to refine
171it in policy after. Is there a way to include that piece with this? Yes, Adam. Thanks, Tory. Andrew, it's it's a good question. So I think there's um There there would be a There would be an option and and um you know, what I would say is thinking about process, I wouldn't necessarily accept a friendly amendment to this that I would I would work to come up with an amendment that the the committee votes to add um and the amendment that I would suggest is to say with the request that the district um provide additional um information about the feasibility of transportation for um the What is it? Constrained choice with controlled flexibility. So that might be the amendment that we add. Um I don't even know if I would vote for it at this
172point only because um it's it's it's something that I think that in spirit we can say we want to do but I also want to be very clear to the administration, this is the thing we need to you to focus on first, which is get you know, a lot of the feedback even from you is we need more information, we need clear implementation plans and process and all of that and so I I worry about even putting a gentle request that they also consider this in the motion takes away from the work we know we need to do now. The question I The reason I ask it is because by voting on this, if we vote on this and it passes, this becomes kind of our law. This becomes our policy and it's very easy
173inside these deliberations to say we would like this but also this. But we're voting on this and once we vote on this, we don't need to worry about this anymore but it was a thing to think about when we're doing it. And having a way of tying barring additional information, having some other piece of this or even saying that you know, we can like a Lego plug in a piece of this later on would allow us to have the additional research necessary to be able to understand the right way of it being able to impact our community. And it might be transportation, it might be you know, the special It might be some other piece but if you if you walk into this with saying I want to do this motion with the understanding and
174spirit I'd like to do something on top of this I think we should at least add that into what we're talking about tonight. Before I turn it to Peter. Sorry, Peter. Tory, may I may I go? Um Andrew, first of all, I I I appreciate the the sort of the the thoughtfulness of this um and and like I said, I I don't quite know and that's why I'm I'm going to want to look at Peter in a second um but I will tell you from past experiences where we sat around this table as a committee and we voted to reduce our kindergarten tuition by X amount of dollars with the goal and desire to at some point get to free all day K um it we don't have free all day K. Right. And and
175um as we've had harder budget challenges, um we've we've even come back on that. So I think that the spirit of us wanting to do that and and I'll actually the other thing I would say is we still have the discussion about free all day K. So I guess my question might be to Peter is this something that the administration is able to consider as they're doing this and does it need to be and then question for us, does it need to be in the vote language? You know, as as Andrew was talking, I I would actually be intrigued where about you know, if you pass this one and option five were chosen, right? Just to be clear like there's another whole step in this process too. But if that was the case, tomorrow we
176would start with a consultant who specializes in doing this work. I actually think that providing the consultant a little bit of flexibility to come back to us with potential creative solutions that they may think of that we cannot think of because we haven't done this. Could be very appropriate. I mean, I I understand the need for clarity and you know, as it from an administrative standpoint, I appreciate that. But I haven't done, you know, moved a district from open enrollment to geography before in my life. So, if we can find someone that did and they can think of something that maybe we're missing, I think we somehow might want to remain open to that. Yes, Adam. All right. So, then I'd like to make an amendment to my own motion, which is to add at
177the end of the existing motion with an additional request that the administration work with the consultants to understand the feasibility of And I forget it again. Controlled I would make it just the transition transition and give the give the consultant some flexibility to do the additional work they need. Make it instead of tying them specifically to one option, make it the transition from open enrollment to geographic enrollment. With additional With an additional request that the administration work with the consultant to understand transition from open enrollment to geographic enrollment, which allows us the flexibility to utilize their experience and gather more data. That's my corollary, not yours. Uh admin work with the consultant to manage the transition between open enrollment and geography-based enrollment. Uh understand. I understand. >> Understand and manage, yeah. So, understand and manage.
178Yep. Understand and manage the transition. So, yes. Um Lisa, do you accept that friendly amendment? Yes, I accept. Okay. All right. So, now we have our updated motion up there. Good good work, team. >> [laughter] >> Lakshmi. Just a comment. I think this looks like an abstract form of option D, model motion D. No. Wait, say that again. I think it looks like an abstract form of motion D at this point. Motion D specifically talks about schools and how they move. This one takes the whole district. This one takes the whole district and says we're moving to geography. Motion D specifically talks about what happens with schools. Motion C does not. So, it's actually more concrete in that it works with everything or as concrete that it works with everything. It does add the additional
179point where we're gathering additional data from experts in the field who can bring more insight into the feasibility of our transaction. I'm not campaigning for one or the other. I'm just it's an observation. Okay. I think I think the other thing is that it's a it's a temporal change. This is everybody all at once, bam. Whereas D phases it in starting with kindergarten. So, over time. Glenn. Uh Point of parliamentary inquiry. So, right now the amendment is the thing on the table, right? So, that was a friendly amendment, so that motion is on the table as written. The motion is on the table as written. Yep, that's the thing we're talking about. Can we adjust it? And we adjust it. So, the amendment that the amendment is now on that. There was no official amendment.
180There was a friendly amendment, which didn't require a vote. >> Which didn't require a vote. Okay, that's the Good. I used a point, yay. Um Okay. Now that that regarding the motion, can you ex- I initially thought phasing was sounded great. Can you share with me your thought process on why this and not phasing? Is that a question for Adam? Yes. Thanks. Um why this and why not phasing? I think um I think as I looked at all of the considerations on phasing, uh there's there's just a lot of caveats. There's a lot of considerations. And you know, even as we started to talk about it this evening, so let's say that um we feel what's best for kids is that if you do uh phase it in and you feel that siblings together are
181important, um what that means is you've really extended this time during for this phase transition. And in doing that, we want to be able to and we as sort of the administration plus the the school committee want to be able to manage class sizes. Um and so you have the possibility of some fairly lopsided class sizes. So, then Andrew's response to managing the lopsided class sizes is to have bigger flex blocks. Um and then what we learned about flex blocks is flex box is choice, but not for the community, for the administration. And so now there's a great deal of uncertainty about where you move and if 2/3 of Acton becomes a flex block, then there's no actual no choice because, well, we've got this grandfathered in thing, so maybe we shrink the flex box
182in 15 years. And believe me, after 15 years we're not going to I think uh when they moved, he was in fourth grade. And there were his old friends track him down through basketball practice. And his new teacher told me that about a week after his transfer, one of the children in the classroom said out loud, "Thank God, you finally got got me someone I can talk to." So, kids are fine. That's my comment. All right, Lisa. I just wanted to mention something in relationship to Glenn, the question that you had about the phased geography approached. There is targeted disruption with that. Speaking to Tory's point, and I just wanted to point out some really insightful things that we actually received from, you know, we've gotten a lot of really great insight from our emails
183from parents, and there was one in particular who was an epidemiologist and did a considerable amount of research, cited her research. I was ecstatic. I love good citations. And there was I just want to read some things that I felt are very compelling. And it was talking about how targeted disruption is developmentally worse than a shared disruption. It was kind of circles back to what I was saying trying to get through my speech when I unfortunately got a little emotional, but I was trying to talk about the fact that having everyone kind of come together as the new kid versus there being a dynamic of someone being an outsider and some of the things that they had mentioned as part of their research and seemed to be quite extended extensive was the clearest findings in
184child and adolescent psychology, targeted targeted disruption creates us versus them dynamics, outsider >> [laughter] [snorts] >> creates us versus them dynamics, outsider status, identity threat, disadvantage within social hierarchies, shame responses, especially ages 7 to 11. And um then of course the um you know, evidence for the cited research there and just talking about um children entering already formed peer systems show higher anxiety, slower friendship formation, increased behavior disregulation, temporary academic disengagement. So, I think that's why there have been some feelings when we talk about what a full systemic reset would look like in a community-wide lift. It would be students coming together and having these shared experiences and there's not an outsider and you know, I I'm I think the the standpoint that I have is particular concerns around reducing bullying. Okay. Vikram and okay,
185I'm just going to pause before before you launch. I just want to highlight that it's 9:00. We want to make good decisions. We need to make them while we're all still functional enough to do that. Okay? So, let's I see Vikram's hand up. I see Glenn's hand up. Let's see if maybe we can get to a point that we can decide if this is what we're doing. Vikram. Um I just want to say that we were elected by this community to represent their children and the best needs of their children, right? And research shows that the more you disrupt children, the worse it is for them. These children have been disrupted by COVID. Some kids have had their buildings torn down, Gates and Douglas, Conant is now having to shift. So, to it it seems
186that that this again just just moving directly to geography-based enrollment. I mean, I suppose if you don't have kids, it doesn't really matter. But if you do have kids and they have friends, they're deeply affected by this. Friends that they've had for years are not they're not going to see them every day anymore, right? Certainly you keep friends outside and so and so forth. We know how that goes. But we're tasked with taking care of these children and it seems that we're doing exactly the opposite if we vote this way by disrupting them as much as is possible. In fact, that's your point to saying have a full systemic reset by absolutely upending everyone is better. And in fact, all the research does not show that. One person wrote that. A good friend of mine
187is a cognitive psychologist. I had a long discussion with her over this weekend. And we've had numerous people feedback on this that disrupting children is bad for them. Breaking up friend groups is bad. Having stable environments for new kids come into is in fact good for them. So, I just want to make that very clear and put that on the record. Glenn. I move the previous question. Oh, we went there. Okay. So, um there's a follow-on to that. He made motion. Move to vote. Okay, so are are you seconding, Glenn? Second. Okay, so it's been moved the previous question that we cut off debate and vote. And so that was moved by Glenn, seconded by Ben. Thank you. >> [sighs] >> All right, all in favor? I. Any opposed? You want to you want to
188keep talking. That what you're voting right now is whether or not you want to continue discussion. Oh, I do not. Okay, all in favor? I. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Great. We are going to stop talking and vote. So, let me make sure I've got that written down. Okay, good. Um This little Robert's Rules card has come in. It is handy. Good good job. Glad you brought that. Um okay, so the next thing we're going to do here is when I say all in favor, you're going to say if you are in favor, in this case you are voting for the enrollment yes, the motion on the screen. If you are voting in favor of that, say I and leave your hand up so we can go around and make sure we've got this. Lila and
189Adam, did you get the okay, you have the spreadsheets. >> Yes. Would you please read the motion? I would be delighted to read the motion. >> everybody hears what the motion is. >> Okay. So, if you are voting for this, you are voting for the selected enrollment strategy to go with option 5V2 to be motion C, geography-based enrollment model, no phasing. The committee moves to approve the following enrollment model for elementary age students if option 5V2 is selected. Discontinue the district's current open enrollment placement process effective June 30th, 2026 and implement a geography-based enrollment model. Students placed in specialized programs within special education will continue to be placed at the school where their respective program is housed. With the additional request that the administration work with the consultant to understand and manage the transition between
190open enrollment and geography-based enrollment. All right, so I'm going to pause cuz we got to record all this. So, all in favor? All right, so I've got Glenn, Lakshmi, Yenshin, Lila, Tory, Adam, Liz, Ben, and Lisa. Okay, you guys got that? Almost. Almost. All right. All opposed? Vikram and Andrew. Any abstentions? Okay. So, I'm pretty sure that motion passes. It passed 18. >> Ben voted in favor. 18 votes in favor, three and a half votes against. >> Okay, so that motion passes. So, now we are on to the conversation of option four versus option five with this is the understanding that this is how we would do the enrollment. So, um same thing. Let's go around give everybody a chance to share their thoughts on this and then we can get them Okay, so actually
191let me clarify. When we get to putting motions on the table, we'll go we'll start with the option four one that is uh actually Let me rephrase this. It's just going to make sense for us to read the motion so that then we can discuss it and then we can vote it. If op if reorg mop motion A fails, we will then go to reorg motion B. Adam. Can I have a a point of clarification? Sure. Um we're being asked specifically to vote in favor of one option and specifically against another option. >> That is correct. So, that's what we're doing. We're going to tonight we will take two votes. Um It's not going to work so if if the vote on option four is a yes, then we would be voting no on option
192five. But we need to vote those specifically because of language that we have to do for what we have to do with closing schools and there's That's why That's why the lawyer looked at this. This is why we have to do this. So, one of them needs to be a yes, one needs to be a no. They can't both be yeses, they can't both be nos. That makes sense? Yes. Le- Lisa, grab microphone. Just for clarity, just cuz you know, it's 9:00 I'm asking. Um so, if we're not for this option, we're not going to vote for this that or you're saying that this is just to verify and clarify the enrollment option that goes with four. No, we have one enrollment option with four. Yeah, that's what I thought. >> So, what we do
193when we've when we consider this one, if you do not want option four, you are going to vote no. If you want option four, you're going to vote yes. >> totally making sure. Yep, triple check. That's great. We should totally make sure. >> [snorts] >> Adam. Are we going to have a discussion about these two before we put the motions in place or do you want to put the motion in place and then have a discussion Let's let's let's Let's put the motion in place and then have the discussion. >> Clear. Thank you. Okay. So, I will gladly read off this um motion language. So, um I move to approve the following school reorganization plan. Close the Conant building effective June 30th, 2026. Move students from the Conant building to the Parker Damon building effective
194July 1st, 2026. Maintain the Conant Elementary School at the Parker Damon building. Combine the student population of Miriam and McCarthy Town Elementary Schools into one population, approximately half of whom shall remain enrolled in the newly combined single school with the other half to be transitioned to other school assignments. Families who are interested in a new placement would be provided initial placement consideration. Remaining families would then participate in a lottery for the available spaces at the combined Miriam and McCarthy Town school. Students not assigned to the combined Miriam McCarthy Town school would participate in a one-time re-lottery to determine school placement at one of the other school options. Students in the Compass program at McCarthy Town will remain at the newly combined school and their siblings would also be provided priority placement. Second. Okay, so that
195was moved by Adam and seconded by Vikram. Um Before we have discussion, I just wanted to a point of clarification. Um so, we have talked about the Connections program as being part of Conant and we've talked about what the potential lay down for special education programming will look like. The reason that is not written into this is because we've never as a school committee voted for placements of specific programs. So, I just want to be clear that we understand that that discussion and that is external to this particular motion. Should that And Andrew, since you felt in some of this, do you think that the piece about Compass then should also be removed just for consistency? I don't. The reason why I included Compass is because that because of their siblings would then receive priority
196placement of remaining. So, it's really less about the Compass program. It's really more about the sibling priority piece. Good. Thank you. Okay. So, now we can have some discussion. Fickman. Um I'm in favor of option four because it limits the disruption to all of the 2,400 children in the district. Um and we have lots of teacher groups and PTO groups and friend groups. Uh and these things are very valuable. Our children are very fragile. Uh we think, you know, this is wise administratively to do this. We'll We'll just upend. But keep in mind where we were voted in by this these towns, right? Um and we're here to safeguard their children, not to upend all the lives of all their children and completely disrupt them, right? You know, when I was uh visiting my grandmother
197in India in a dusty village in Palanpur, uh I used to watch their wild pigs. And one pig got hit by a rickshaw. Uh and its spine was broken. But it didn't die. It was able to drag itself along, right? Um so, one might argue that the pig was quite resilient cuz it managed to survive. But it wasn't fully capable after all of this major disruption. So, I think we should all keep in mind the amount of disruption that we're putting onto this district. Sure, it might look good in 20 years and 50 years and, you know, that's wonderful and I know everybody's salivating this Shangri-La of how wonderful this is going to be. But we're doing an immense thing in an extremely short amount of time. As for somebody who's done immense statewide projects,
198this just seems I just uh I think limiting the amount of damage that we're doing to our children is what four does and uh I'm strongly advocate for it. Adam. So, while I made the motion, um I'm actually not in favor of this and I'll I'll sort of speak to a little bit of my thinking. Um option four maintains at now five distinct school programs. Um and those five distinct school programs, um will you you will will do some visioning, but they will essentially continue to run the way they've been running. Um and the part that worries about that worries me about this um is when I do think about what's best for the students of the district, we're unable to provide the resources that our students need and deserve. Um and that is because
199of the structure of these disparate facilities that run under different philosophies and run under different schedules with smaller um sections, quantities of sections in each of the buildings. And so, um what I see in version five that provides me hope for the students of the district um and not just in the future, but also in the near term is the ability for us to provide them with the resources that um not we believe they need, but what we're hearing from parents, what we're hearing from the administration, what we're hearing from classroom teachers and all of the experts that that we need to be able to give our students the resources that they need. And to me, version four in maintaining that status quo will uh impede our ability to provide those resources to our students.
200And so, you know, I I think we heard a lot of feedback from folks about do what's best for the students. And so, my belief is what's best for our students in the near term, I'm not going to say in the short term, and I'm not going to sugarcoat this. This is going to be an extremely challenging next 7 months. It's probably going to be an extremely challenging next 18 to 24 months. But the ability to give our students the resources they need almost immediately into next year and then into the future is what's really driving my thinking on this. Glenn. So, I I'll I'll be voting no against option four and I'd like to explain why. So, one thing that came up um reviewing the memos is that so, if you have special education
201paraprofessionals, multilingual educate multilingual educators, math and reading specialists, it is much more I based on what I read, it's more difficult to administer services in an efficient, effective way if you're perpetually shuffling support staff from one building to building. Every hour you're spending trying to coordinate schedules in the same way, trying to make the the allocation of the resources add up, trying to get physically get from one building to another. Every hour you're doing that is an hour that you're not being able to do things like administer services to kids. So, if I agree that disruption is an issue that will have to be that will have to be constantly thinking about these next few months. Um and I I'm looking forward to leadership's regular updates on how this is navigating throughout this. Um I
202think that if we are to minimize disruption in the best possible way in my mind, one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that we can have the support services like the special ed paraprofessionals, like the math and reading specialists, we need to give them the the smoothest ride we can. And if we're shuffling them from building to building to building, that makes it tougher to teach a kid to read. So, I know that I'm probably going to have some nasty looks at Trader Joe's when I'm getting my spinach or it's just like you did you did what to your It's just like the the This is my reasoning. Like so, that's why I that's why I'll be voting no. And I I'm not expect We're not expecting unanimity here, but
203I I respect this community, even the people that are going to probably write some mean things on Facebook. That's fine. This is what I'm thinking. Yanchen. Colin, I think that ship has sailed. I think the nasty things are going to be in our inbox, not on Facebook, which we can't ignore. Um I don't like I said, I support geographic based enrollments over open enrollments. But one of the reasons, in addition to what I shared before, is that I do worry with the fluctuation of enrollment in different schools, if we stay with option four, it looks like, you know, some students will be their lives will be disrupted and some will not. But in a couple years, if one of the schools are have really low enrollment, we probably can end up here again. And I
204think of all the emails we received, the one thing I remember that was repeated over and over is please don't put us through this again. Um with that said, I this if we don't want to go through this again is to get ahead of the curve instead of reacting to whatever the financial crisis will be, we have to get ahead of it. And I don't think option four will allow us to get ahead of the problem, as we all said. Andrew. Thanks, Tory. Um I'm not thrilled with any of these things. I feel like we've come to a point where we have there's this idea of a Hobson's choice where either one's bad. Um if we look at the choice of maximum change, which is maximum disruption, which is 5.2, there are things with that
205that I think weigh more heavily towards the bad than the bad that comes with four. I think there's the immediate, you know, the immediate instability. But I also think that as soon as we make the call to the Department of Education and to DESE and tell them we're closing five of our schools, that is a critical point in removing a lot of actually all of the support structures that exist. PTOs can't work with schools anymore. They're 501c3s tied to that. Those PTOs don't exist anymore. And with the commingling of students and the commingling of parents having to build that structure up is going to be brand new. You mentioned ranking and ratings from realtors. Um the moment we get out of the common core databases, all of our schools are no longer ranked and rated.
206Uh the the schools that are closed have no future. The schools that are started have no past. And we will have until we report at least 1 year of MCAS scores of to be able to be ranked and rated again. One of the main reasons people come to this town, it's not because we're closer to Trader Joe's, as Jim would say, it's because of the real of the the realtors come here because of the schools. So, we've got that. There's an the invisibility issue. And that's something that that hits the larger part of the town and the larger part of the schools. I'm also really concerned about the kids. You know, our research, the Hanover research, the University of Maine research, the data brought up, the research that's out in the world shows every time
207there's a transition, everything hits the kids socially, emotionally, educationally. We've seen it over the course of just the transitions we've had in the last 5 years. When Gates and Douglas moved to the Boardwalk campus, there was chaos involved with that. It took a number of years for those kids to be able to kind of get back on. When we went through COVID, you saw the hits that came from various class various standardized tests. We're still dealing back with it. The transitions into these new frameworks and they'd be new frameworks also will create those same kinds of hits to the kids. And I I have a great deal of faith. Our teachers are excellent. Our students are capable, but there's just a lot of time to stabilize learning environments. There's a lot of time that it
208takes to build up all of the support that exists outside of the district's payroll to be able to make these kids as successful as they can be. I talked a little bit earlier I talked a lot earlier about the the long-term impact of this. Um the trauma of moving everybody everywhere is immediate. It's something that's going to last with these kids. And sure, we're now giving a whole cohort of children great college essay material. But we're also creating trauma for them. And where we have spent the last year wringing our hands over this decision they're the ones who have to bear the consequences of it. Where we can feel some relief cuz we've come to this point tonight this is where their pain starts. This is where their transition starts. And to go with one
209side of this, where, you know, everybody's equally hurt, that designed harm inside that system is wrong. To think about how everybody's going to be hurt by this, so that's the reason we should do it. Which is what some of the emails have come through that said. It it hits me. Um four has less disruption. I'd even move to add a little bit of the same kind of you know, con- consultant transition stuff that we had with that other motion with this. But I think four is better for the kids better for the students and better for their communities, for our community than to disrupt everything with 5.0. So, Vikram, we're going to let everybody have their first shot here. Um anybody other else have first comments here? Can I make a motion to begin voting?
210No, cuz I want to say my first thing, too. So, I'm just waiting to make sure I've given everybody else a chance. Okay. Um so this is going to shock you all, I'm sure, but I made a spreadsheet this weekend. Um and I pulled out my old army risk assessment manual. Um how do you go down the list of things and I went through all of the emails and the things that people have brought up to just kind of classify what are the things that we're worried about. And then to take a look at how what's the impact, you know, how how many people are involved in this, how severe is it, um and you know, what there there's it's 9:00. I'm tired. Fig- figure out kind of cross section of like what what are
211the really what are the things that are we really need to look at hard. And I recognized as I was doing that, um that some of the risks that we're looking at are educational risks. They're things that fall under our purview as a school committee. And there's some of the things that we're talking about are I would call them community risks. They're things that um that are kind of the second and third order effects for for family and for community members and homeowners and all of those things. And ultimately, I realized that there's a set of challenges here. There is a set of risks that we can mitigate. We can recognize that they're they're hard to deal with. They're things we need to be concerned about, but there are steps we can take to make
212them not as bad. I'm not saying that it's going to be good. I'm saying they're not as bad. There are some things we can't mitigate because if we choose an option in which that flexibility doesn't exist we have made a structural decision that prevents us from doing certain things. Um and ultimately, where I fall on this is with option five. We have more flexibility to be able to shift resources where we need them in the moment. And that is serving students. We can't be afraid of something that is going to be hard and is going to I I recognize that this is not going to be a popular decision if this is the direction that we go. But we can't we can't do something structurally that ends up being harmful over time and even now.
213I mean, as Adam said, we already have students whose needs we're not meeting. Um I just and that was where I landed. Like there is there's no way I can see doing option four because I don't think it allows us to serve students because we can't get them what they need when they need it. Um so yeah, I'm going to stop talking now. Okay, any final thoughts here or are we ready to vote? Uh Ben. You have a thought, go. So, I have most of this written out. Hopefully, I can you know, wing it going forward. Having spent significant amounts of time in reviewing the two different plans and what felt like a myriad of different options within those plans along with speaking with constituents, I've been very torn between these two options, these two
214very different options. Option four, while it appears to have higher community support and fewer transitions long-term, it does not appear to be sustainable as enrollment continues to decline and is uh fiscally and financially risky and could lead to yet another redistricting plan, which nobody wants to go through again. Meanwhile, option 5E2, regardless uh or plan 5E2, regardless of the options creates efficiencies, yields greater long-term savings. However, it does create greater disruption in our communities in the short-term and potentially harm our children, which could take several years to to recover from. Each of these two options presents a tough no-win situation. We're stuck. We were elected to have the best interest of our kids and the emails that have come through have certainly reiterated that. It's a brutal choice to make and I wish nobody who's
215watching this to ever have to sit in the seats that we're sitting in tonight. Having to go through emails on train rides to work, being up all night reading through those emails and trying to figure out how to respond to constituents because their kids are our kids' friends in school, as you were saying, Vikram. Yet, I'm fully aware of the financial stability or instability our schools have. It is that financial instability which has the greatest impact on our kids alone. In the city of Boston alone just have to throw it into Google tonight, you'll see that there's a $53 million deficit forecasted for the next fiscal year. You think we have it bad here in Acton? I sure as hell can tell you that the city of Boston is facing numerous school building closures. It's
216having to deal with everything that we're dealing with on a on a larger scale. I think tonight that we should vote 5E2 option, whatever it was we just voted on, C because I think in the long-term while it's going to have impacts in the short-term, and this is where my notes stopped and I'm trying to to clarify everything. I do believe that long-term speaking that option 5E2, with time, will be able to to restore that stability within our our school system, will be able to to address scale ability issues. And to the point of my colleague, through you to my colleague Andrew our schools aren't going to be rated nothing. Our high school will still be rated as being exceptional. Our junior high school will still be rated as exceptional. And our schools or our
217school in Boxborough will still be rated exceptional. Those things that are changing in the near-term do not necessarily adversely impact what's going to happen for our schools in the long-term. So, I think I said it correctly. I don't know. It's 9:00 and I've been up 9:30 and I've been up shoveling since 4:30 this morning. I'm tired. Thank you. Vikram. Uh I just want to reiterate that this school district has been this way for a very, very long time and has produced countless exceptional students and people and members of society. And we, for the sake of the almighty dollar, are upending the entire thing, right? Uh it really seems to Shangri-La. I I see there are some benefits to to five that that may come to fruition. Um but the disruption that it's going to cause
218to the children of the people who elected us is immeasurable. Um and it's it seems to me it's it's a very deliberate disruption of their lives after COVID. Um children they're resilient certainly, but there's there's a level to that resiliency. Um you know, I like to think of my kids as pretty tough. They land on their feet. I've taken them all sorts of places. They're they're pretty strong and resilient, but I know that there are a lot of kids that are not like that. In fact, there are more kids that are not like that that really are going to have a lot of problems. They all are going to have your hands full with these kids. They're going to you're going to have all sorts of emotional disruptions, fights, all sorts of kids being maladjusted
219from this if you vote against for. Voting for five is essentially disrupting this entire district and all the children within it. Lisa Um I would like to sort of follow up to that point. Um you know, I do agree that we have very exceptional schools and that we have been recognized, you know, both state and country wide for, you know, our education in Acton and Boxborough. But the reality is that at least in the four years that I have been on this committee, we have yet to level service provide from year over year to our students. So, what we have is not working. We're not providing what even that looks like. We were specifically tasked by both finance committees to come up with solutions. They said you can't keep doing this and we can't keep
220doing this to our educators, our administrators, our district staff. We've we're already cutting through the bone at that point. I also don't love that this is now affecting our students, but we have made so many cuts and so many difficult choices to try and protect the experience of our students that now this is what we're left with. Glenn I call for the previous question. Second. So, that was moved by Glenn, seconded by Adam. So, what we are voting on right now is stopping debate and moving to actually vote on option four. So, all in favor of uh cutting off debate and getting on with this. I Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right. That's unanimous. Which brings us to um so, I'm about to read this. We are going to vote on option four first and
221then we will vote on option 5E2 if option four does not pass. Actually, no, we need a motion. Vote, yeah. Just a question. Supposing four doesn't pass and then five doesn't pass. I don't think that'll happen, but what would happen in that circumstance? I think that becomes a very long night. Would somebody like to do the honors? Oh, wait. We did the honors. Right. We did the honors. Okay, so here's what you're voting on. Um It is verbatim in my packet, but then it's small and I can't read it. >> [laughter] >> So, you're voting on reorganization motion A option four. Conant moves to Parker Damon building, merge McCarthy town and Merriam populations. Which would involve approving the following school reorganization plan. Close the Conant building effective June 30th, 2026. Move students from the Conant
222building to the Parker Damon building effective July 1st, 2026. Maintain the Conant elementary school at the Parker Damon building. Combine the student population of the Merriam and McCarthy town elementary schools into one population, approximately half of whom shall remain enrolled in the newly combined single school with the other half to be transitioned to the other school assignments. Families who are interested in a new placement would be provided initial placement consideration. Remaining families would then participate in a lottery for the available spaces at the combined Merriam and McCarthy town school. Students not assigned to the combined Merriam McCarthy town school would participate in a one-time re-lottery to determine school placement at one of the other school options. Students in the Compass program at McCarthy town will remain at the newly combined school and their siblings would
223also be provided priority placement. All in favor. It's Vikram and Andrew. Any opposed? All right. So, that is everybody except Vikram and Andrew. So, do we have any abstentions? Nope. Okay, so The motion passes 18 or sorry, the motion fails 18 against three and a half in favor. Okay. So, now we get to move on to the next one. I move to approve the following school reorganization plan. Close the Acton elementary schools effective June 30th, 2026. Move students from the Acton elementary schools into four new yet unnamed Acton elementary schools, two for grades K through three and the other two for grades four through six or to the Blanchard elementary school effective July 1st, 2026. Second. Okay, that was moved by Adam, seconded by Lisa. Can you square Yes, thank you. Okay. The motion's also
224in the back in case that provides a better photo. Andrew Your um Do you need to name the schools you're closing in this? I'll let either Peter or Andrew answer that. I think that's Ah, thank you. Okay. I'll accept the friendly amendment that's getting posted on the screen as we speak. Hm, person who seconded that, do you also accept the friendly amendment? I accept the friendly amendment. >> All right. Again, good job, team. >> [snorts] >> All right. Any further discussion? Okay, we All in favor. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Vote math The motion passes 18 in favor, three and a half against. All right. Good job, team, getting to a decision. I just want to acknowledge right now that there are a lot of unhappy people. There were going to be a lot of unhappy
225people either way this went and so I think the thing that I'm thinking about right now um and maybe something that I'd love some feedback from the committee. We've received a lot of emails um with really strong feelings on both sides of this. Um how do you feel about me sending a note um again acknowledging our appreciation to everybody who wrote to us and and an ask I think that goes with that. Um you know, so for some people they're coming out of this feeling like a winner. I got what I wanted. And for some they're coming out of this feeling like a loser. I I the thing that you're doing is the thing that I I am most worried about. And I think it would be good, you know, if if you were somebody
226who was advocating for 5E2 with this with this option to be able to recognize how hard this is for the people who are dealing with the thing that they are the most worried about. And the things that you can do to help them. And then, you know, the flip side. I I I don't know how this healing process starts, but I feel like maybe Andrew I'd like to propose the creation of a subcommittee specifically around transitions. Where we can work to bring ourselves together um starting as soon as we can um prior to even the work the district is doing to start identifying ways that we can bring our community together around this new organization. Why don't we put that as an agenda item for discussion when we're functional? Um I think that's a great
227idea to discuss further. But can maybe not right this instant. Okay. Yes. Uh I I would just say I I I love your idea and to make it a productive conversation at the next meeting when it's on the agenda, I would suggest anyone who has ideas about that from the committee share that with Tory so that there is some beginning language around a charter of what that subcommittee would do. I think it's a great idea. Cool. Let's make sure we've got some good input on that. Thank you for that. Glenn Something that I I feel is relevant. So, I'm the school committee's liaison to the district's wellness committee. Um I certainly hope we look at disruption over the next several months um and also I think that we can And yes, I wholeheartedly approve that
228message to the people who commented. Um I also think that peer support for parents specifically would be very good. I we've talked a lot about data gathering for students and and we've talked about summer tours of the new buildings. That's great. Um I strongly feel one of the best things for student well-being is parent well-being and I hear the strained breaths and sighs in the audience right now like people are very angry and I get that. And so yeah, I think I'd like to ask for going forward to also talk about supporting parents specifically, too. So maybe in the interest of time, if you have thoughts on what themes you would like to see echoed, could you email those to me? That would be fabulous. Um and I will work on that probably Friday, maybe
229over the weekend. Um okay. Vikram. Uh I would like to make the request now that these decisions have been made we work as much as possible to minimize the disruption to these children. Keep them where they are as much as is possible, right? I think intentionally upending people more than is going to happen with this. I think we should work, you know, and perhaps some people disagree with me that but I feel that we should really work to limit the disruption to children at this point given the choices we've made to as great an extent as possible. And not just the children, but also administrators and teachers and Peter you'd mentioned you're keeping administrative groups together, but those administrators also have been working for in some cases decades with these teachers. So we should try
230to keep those people together as much as possible as well. Um and I don't know if we can have a pledge or something to that effect, but I I just wish that at the bare minimum we can do that. So I think we have to be really careful about staying in our lane. Um but ackn- ackn- acknowledging the sentiment that you've shared. Adam. Um Vikram, I I completely agree with you and I think that um there's a lot work a lot of work left for the administration and for us to do as we go into this and I think that it's um I agree with you. I think we need to as we evaluate and as we shepherd through these transition plans to make sure that we continue to keep our students' well-being at the
231center of the work that we're doing. Um and and with that I want to make a call out to the entire senior leadership team who's here in the room tonight, some of whom have been going out to sort of console and talk with some of the upset parents. I saw that and thank you for that. Um and then lastly to the committee again, I started this by saying thank you all for showing up and being here and having a good discussion. I I just want you all to also take a moment and think about your own sort of well-being. Um while this is the end of the deliberation of what our choice is, this is just the beginning of what is inevitably going to be some difficult community conversations and feedback directly at us. And
232so I want you all to just take a moment and recognize that we did do something hard. We were not unanimous. Um but we should be proud of the process that we took to get here. We started talking about this at our workshop over a year not over a year ago, but last year. Um and we've been dealing with these struggles for many years and um I recognize some people are just coming to that conversation and they're going to be upset with us and feel that it was rushed and feel that it's not planned well. And I just want everybody to um take a moment and make sure that they're all okay themselves because this is this is definitely not the end. This is the beginning of what's going to be a difficult time. Thank
233you. Okay, I feel like we probably need to keep this show on the road because um the next thing we get to hear about is the budget. We do have to, yes. We are But unfortunately that budget thing and the budget timeline is what has been driving a lot of how we have to do this. Yeah. All right, so I'm going to we're going to do uh very high level overview of the budget tonight. Um recognizing, you know, it's it's quarter of 10. I'm just going to to get us moving through this. Our intent is to do the high level overview of this tonight and then go into the details when we come back in February to to really dig into, you know, personnel, more details around the budget line items, things like that. So
234um we'll get going. Um The bottom line is we're proposing a $121.3 million budget for next year. Um that is the gross preliminary budget. That is an increase of about $4.3 million over the current budget, which is about a 3.69% increase um overall. And so this budget was planned in conjunction with the work around AB Forward. As you know, we were proposing very similar staffing changes between both options four and five, so we were able to look at what reductions had been proposed as part of the AB Forward process and use those as the basis for how we might approach balancing this budget. In terms of funding sources, um most of our funding continues to come from the regional assessments. Um we are at 16.7% of our funding coming from the state. Um a very
235very small um less than half a percent of our budget comes from other revenue. Um and then regional assessments are the vast majority of that revenue, which regional assessments are the taxes that um residents in our two communities pay. This um I thought was a really interesting look at the major drivers of the budget uh because you get to see actually what the the major cost centers. So you can see um in FY26 what the base budget was of $117 million. Um and then we add on to that um one of the largest drivers, which is health insurance for active and retirees. That's a $2 million increase alone. Um and then we have personnel salaries, COLA, steps, um things like that. That is about $1.9 million or just shy of $1.9 million. Special education tuition,
236the net of that is up about 3/4 of a million dollars. Debt service is up about $100,000. And then all other net changes combined are about $264,000. So um you can see that we are largely driven in terms of increases to the budget by fixed costs that we have very little control over. In terms of some savings, we are proposing this year to reduce the OPEB contribution by $630,000. Um you'll see in another slide that um retiree health insurance is one of the major drivers of this budget. Um that's that's causing the massive increase in health insurance costs. Uh we are proposing to offset our OPEB reduction. We just don't believe we can make any further reductions as a school district this year given the number of changes that we're making. I think if we
237can get retiree health insurance to mitigate um in the coming years, we can return that OPEB contribution to to current levels. And so that gets us to the preliminary budget for next year of the 121.3. Um health insurance expenditures, this continues to be um a major driver of the district's budget over the last, you know, 5 years. Um and you can see we are scheduled to jump just about $2 million. 3/4 of a million dollars is just our retiree health insurance alone and that is a relatively small population compared to all of our employees that take health insurance. Um that was a significant increase in the base budget. I'll just note um as you look at the insurance increases here, these are actually mitigated by all of the staff that we've had to reduce over
238the last several years. And so if we had not been reducing staff, the increase to health insurance would be more significant than what you're seeing in the chart. Special education costs, um these increased by over $600,000 um largely driven by out of district placements. Um Out of district placements are up about 3/4 of a million dollars, which is about a 16% increase. Um and that is offset by special education transportation decreases of about $130,000. So the reductions, um I'll start here. These were all based on the AB Forward plan. Um so we have, you know, 11 FTE our elementary classroom positions, three FTE music, visual arts, and physical education. Another three FTE of elementary principal, assistant principal, and admin assistant. And then there are other administrative and general education assistant reductions. So just to be
239clear about how that balanced out. And the details of that were already discussed and presented in AB Forward. Um strategic additions, um we are proposing the addition of a literacy coordinator. Literacy has been the single largest trailing data point for us um over the last few years. We've actually seen increases in how our students are doing in terms of social emotional learning um has has been on on the rise. We've also seen increases around mathematics. Um literacy we've reduced. We actually several years ago had two literacy/social studies coordinators and we've reduced them both. Um and Heather Haynes is amazing. She was our math coordinator for years, but we cannot have one coordinator trying to do all of the coordination of curriculum at the elementary level. It is just not reasonable. So we're proposing that and
240we're looking forward to a future discussion of that position. Um we are also >> something quickly about that? Sure. Just to because we didn't put that in the note that that would be a conversion from a reduced instructional coach position. Thank you. Yes, so we're part of the AB Forward process reduced an instructional coach and so this would increase a coordinator. Um Um Support and special education staff were actually looking to go up nine staff. Um two of those are ABA positions for the junior high school um a BCBA. Um that is largely related to um a cohort of students in the Pathways program who are in fifth a sixth grade current that will be moving to seventh grade. Um so we need to add those positions to the junior high. Um we're also proposing
241adding a special ed teacher um three educational assistants um and we're also proposing to add two counseling staff to the elementary level. Um so what this will do is at the Parker Damon building instead of having um two counselors one kind of currently allocated at McTee one currently allocated at Miriam that building will end up with three counselors in order to help offset the increase in the student population. The same thing will happen at the Boardwalk um campus where um we're going to go from two counselors at that campus to three counselors at that campus and then at um Blanchard we're actually proposing a 0.5 increase in counseling services. So that will round out um the the overall position for that. We also um are looking to convert what the nursing reduction um from the
242AB forward process um from the the Conant building into two LPNs um that would be at both Boardwalk and Parker Damon to help with enrollment increases that those buildings are seeing. Um we believe you know that that's just necessary um based on on the the additional staff numbers. I think we talked about this and we heard a lot of feedback from the community on it around um needing to make sure that we're providing support services for students um as we're thinking about this type of a transition and so the addition of the counseling nursing services um were certainly something that we were thinking about um moving into the new model. That gets us to the Acton and Boxborough assessments. So the Acton assessment is just short of 83 million dollars. The Boxborough assessment is just
243shy of 18 million dollars. Both of these fall within the targets that we received from both communities. Um right now we're at 3.75 increase to Acton and a 5.57 uh percent increase to Boxborough. So um just one final note that those two numbers are based on the proportion of enrollment um over the the past three-year rolling history. So we put that that in there as well so that the finance committees and select boards can can make sure that we're doing that transparently for them. So this is the preliminary budget. Um tonight we are coming back um on budget Monday which is February 19th. We needed a little bit extra time to try and prepare some materials for that um and we're looking forward to going in-depth to a lot of the different aspects of the
244budget proposal with you that evening. We have our budget hearing coming up on March 5th school committee vote on March 19th um and then Acton and Boxborough town meeting votes on May 4th and May 19th respectively. Happy to take any initial questions. Vikram I I think this might be more a question for Adam. Um actually sorry for Boxborough but they they said that regardless of the choice we made they they they were looking good as far as Boxborough override and stuff like that. Correct? I don't know if looking good would be how I describe it. I I would say >> the way it should be described. >> we're eking by this year um and there won't be a need for an override um but I think now that we've got some official numbers the finance
245committee and select board will need to go back and make sure and we're within the margin of contingency is probably what I would say. Liz maybe you were at Yeah I was just going to say I was actually at the um finance committee uh virtually on Tuesday and I did provide them with the number from this packet. So um they are aware and they feel that that is still that they still won't need an override this year. I believe that's what she had said. I think last meeting I just wanted to make sure that was the case. Thank you. Yenshin Um I I understand this is just preliminary. Um I think what I was anticipating was that we would I would I would see some um increase or shuffle number of instructional coaches because when
246we but then I know you didn't know because you didn't know how we're going to vote. Um I I guess my question is that I see the social emotional support but I am worried about academic support for all the students. Can you Yeah um so we have chosen not to make additional reductions um in reading and math assistants. So even though we're going down a building we're actually maintaining the reading specialist and math specialist positions that we do have um and those will move with with kids based on student need. So it's not you know I think the the challenge we hit was you know we had a running list of all the things we wish we could have added. Um you know and and quite honestly we at one point really would have liked
247to have added like an elementary special to the mix and give kids more learning opportunities as part of this whole process but financially we just couldn't work that into the budget um and prioritized the SEL. Um are the reading and math specialists unionized or they're not? Yes they are. Andrew What's the end shift of FTEs from this year to next year? Can I get that for you for next time when I can do the math in my head? >> we're losing like 11 from closing Conant. I know we have some other attrition that we already know of and I know that um Yeah I'd it averages out to something. I was just curious what that average is. It's probably my gut is it's somewhere around nine or 10 Sherry. I heard it was like eight
248to nine. I heard like eight and a half. I just didn't know if you had >> like that. Yeah. Glenn I just wanted to say I'm I'm very glad SEL and mental health is a priority in this budget um and I think that's a prerequisite for academic success and um the focus on literacy is good too. So thumbs up for me. I actually didn't add we added a multilingual educator as well. I did that's Right. Yeah. Yes we did and that is through a revolving account so it doesn't affect the operating budget. So so you will we'll also talk about the addition of a multilingual educator um and just to be clear again it because it's a revolving account it's not in this base budget but we will talk about that um come budget Monday.
24922 Um just to go back to something I said um in our earlier discussion when we presented the one-time costs that we're anticipating um from the reorganization part of the work that um we're proposing to use excess and deficiency funds from that in order to use excess and deficiency funds the budget that we presented tonight will have need to go up by that total amount the 1.2 million um that we're proposing 1.1 million. However the excess and deficiency use will also go up by the exact amount which means the town assessments will stay the same um but you will see a higher budget the use of excess and deficiency but the assessments remain unchanged. >> [snorts] >> Adam Uh I I I have just a quick question on the assumption of revenues. Um what was
250the per pupil um addition? The per pupil um additional chapter 70 revenue. What did we assume it at 75? We did assume it 75 >> 75. Okay. So there's there's maybe an opportunity for us to do a similar thing that we did last year which is see where we're headed towards with the the state budget um and maybe plan for a little additional funding through chapter 70 funding if we hear what the governor's budget is and supports more. Hey Tory a quick point. Just also want to clarify for the committee and I I know you know this but just as a placeholder and also to remind those who watching um this budget is also based on some assumptions and placeholders that we're currently making for contract negotiations. So we're currently engaged with uh the ABA
251but also our other two uh unions AFSCME and OOS those are ongoing and so um for just budgeting purposes we we we've set certain placeholders based on previous years assumptions. It's no indication of where we're going to land but um that's where it is. So depending on uh some of the progress of that we may have shifting one way or another. So I just want to be clear that those are assumptions and health insurance we're currently placing at 18% just simply based on what uh Maya said might be just a healthy safe range. They're supposed to vote on the actual rates uh next week. Uh the rates that we eventually land with will be both based on or influenced by kind of more institutional decisions that make around like GLP-1s and things like that but
252then also what they calculate to be um Acton Boxborough's um sort of usage and coverage so far and I think I previewed for all of you the reason why we're a little concerned is that they have said that so far in the past two years um our usage has outpaced the revenue that they've collected from us. So I think that there probably will be a course correction of some kind. So right now 18% fingers crossed. If it goes below 18% I think for every percent that we go lower it's about 100,000 dollars to the good. And then if it goes a if it goes higher it's about 100,000 dollars um to the not good uh above 18%. All right. Thank you. Anybody else have All right. Um in that case, we are moving on to
253our second read of the school calendar and we need to uh wrap this thing up and vote on it tonight. Move to approve the school calendar for 2026-2027. >> It's moved by Adam [laughter] and seconded by Vikram. Liz, yes. Because I just want I know we didn't like do a discussion on it and I don't think that there needs to be. I did just want to point out that the new calendar is um assuming the same elementary start time and end times as um they were this year. It took out the um updated school times. Yeah, just just to be really clear. Um we initially had a proposal to move the elementary start times by 10 minutes. Given the amount of change going on, this was just not worth something to to continue to pursue
254and cause just something else that people had to think about. Um so we have withdrawn that and we're going to make maintain the current elementary start times into next year. Great. Thanks for highlighting that. Yenshin. Um I'm glad you said that. So do do the students get like a free pass for the first week of school next year if they're late? If they're on the bus. >> [laughter] >> It >> [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean elementary is a little different than high school. Uh you know, so yeah, high school there they're still very very accountable and we need kids there on time, but um you know, I elementary kids we really try to work with. The pregnant pause before he was trying to get the Okay. I think we probably ought to vote. All in
255favor. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Great. Oh, we have an abstention from Lakshmi. Thank you. That passes. Andrew, do you want to tell us about the uh monthly personnel report? It's not a lot of changes, so no. Awesome. Does anybody have any subcommittee or member reports that they are really feeling compelled to share right now? Yenshin. Um so finance committee and the select board of Acton um just went through their two-day nine-and-a-half-hour-long budget workshops. Um I uh I got a text from the Acton FinCom chair asked me to relay to the committee that just so that we're all aware of the financial um crisis on the horizon that he wants us to know that Framingham and Boston public school, which we already mentioned, are facing massive budget cuts. All right. Thank you. Okay. Folks,
256that brings us to the consent agenda. Items on the consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion in a separate vote. I will read each item and if a member would like it held, please say hold. Members do not have to have attended a meeting to vote on the minutes. >> [gasps] >> Item A, approval of Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee meeting minutes from January 8th, 2026. Item B, acceptance of DOER Green Communities Grant. Item C, recommendation to approve budget transfers per policy DJB. Item D, approval of warrants as presented in the packet, January 22nd, 2026. All right. Given that no items were held, is there a motion to approve the consent >> Second. Adam and Lila. >> [laughter] >>
257Vikram's fast on the on the button today. Um >> [sighs and gasps] >> All in favor. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? That would be Ben. Thank you. All right. That is approved. So before we hit anybody making further motions, I just want to highlight in the FYI that we have the calendars for both Acton and Boxborough's elections. And um after this awesome evening of really great teamwork here among the school committee, there are five positions that are open for nominations. And if you would like to be in this seat and experience all the awesomeness that is the school committee. If you are from Acton, you can get nomination papers until March 7th. You need to submit them by March 23rd. If you're from Boxborough, you have until April 10th to pull papers and they
258have to be submitted by April 14th. Um of any of us who are up for re-election, does anybody wish to express their intentions? You don't have to, but if you want to share them, you're welcome to. Vikram. Uh I I believe I I it's very likely I will. Okay, so very likely you will run again. Run again. Okay. >> [laughter] >> Anyone else want to share? Yenshin. It is very likely that I will not run again. Okay. I I'm noticing some caveats with very likely. >> [laughter] >> Anybody else want to share? Lakshmi. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm not running. >> [laughter] >> That sounded a little more definite. >> [gasps] >> Anybody else want to share? Um so I am one of the five. Um I will run again. I have pulled papers. Okay.
259With that >> [sighs] >> Move to adjourn. Second. That was moved by Lila, seconded by Vikram. All in favor. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Thank you everybody. >> Thank you.