Acton-Boxborough School Committee Meeting - February 26th, 2026

001Um, can I see a show of hands of anybody who would like to speak during public participation? Okay. Well, that's easy. Um, do we have any school committee candidates who might be in the audience who want to speak? Okay. All right. Um, we will start then with public participation for school committee policy. Beedh, members of the public are invited to speak for up to three minutes. Public participation will only take place at this time during our meeting. Speakers must be recognized by the chair before speaking and the committee does not typically respond to comments during public participation. Welcome. >> Good evening. I'm David Martin from uh on the Actton Select Board. Um to protest the decision on geographical enrollment, there's a proposal circulating that we vote down the school assessments at our town meetings. Some

002have listed budget items identifying what they think could be cut. As liaison to the school committee since 2019, I'm quite familiar with the district budget. Frankly, I don't see any of the proposed cuts that are workable and certainly not before this year's town meetings. After several years where the district has lost many tens of staff and had to make other cuts, I want to make sure folks realize that any further cuts moving forward will be even more painful. It takes a lot of work to manage the funding of our towns and schools each year. It's a balancing act. I've heard some say that restructuring only saves about a million dollars a year. I realize that our budget problems are bigger than a million dollars a year, but I'm very surprised to hear the word only.

003A million dollar hole is easy easily enough to cause a carefully set uh uh carefully balanced set of compromises to collapse. I'm more than a little concerned that we could head down a path that would provide less school funding. [snorts] If either town votes down or amends their school assessment, the school committee would have a one-time chance to resubmit a revised likely lower budget for subsequent special town meetings. If either assessment was voted down, if either second assessment was voted down or amended, there would be a joint town meeting with voters from both towns together to make a final decision. The whole process would likely result in lower funding for the district. And if we can't maintain school funding, my nightmare is more cuts to educators. It's also important to note that it's not in

004the purview of town meeting to change the AB4 decision. Basically, there is no upside for the effort to oppose the school assessments. I respect the school committee for doing what they felt was right. Um uh doing the right thing for the whole district, knowing that there was no outcome that would satisfy everyone. I'm honestly very sorry about the upset caused by restructuring, but I hope that we don't take any actions that cause further reductions to our excellent schools. Thank you. >> Thank you. Good evening. Um, for the folks watching at home, my name is Mike Ballescu. I'm an Actton resident R.J. Grey parent and president of our district's teachers union. There is currently a petition circulating online asking residents to vote no on the school budget at Actton and Boxboro town meetings this spring in

005order to persuade the school committee to delay its reorganization decision by one year. On behalf of our educators, the Abea asks the organizers to resend their petition and we ask all residents to support our teachers and our students by voting yes on the school budget at both town meetings in May. Our educators work hard enough already and we can't afford to risk any further cuts to staffing or resources. We understand that the recent AB Forward decision has generated strong feelings throughout Actton and Boxboro. Families are mourning the loss of beloved elementary school communities. Teachers are grieving, too. Many of our veteran staff have worked in the same schools for their entire careers. Nevertheless, attempting to force a delay or revision to AB forward by voting down the school budget will help neither our educators nor

006our students. If one or both towns rejects the proposed school budget, the resulting municipal process could drag on into the summer and put even more staff at risk. In the meantime, without guaranteed funding for many district positions, teachers in vulnerable roles will simply leave and take their talents elsewhere. Moreover, a delay in the reorganization process will not absolve the school committee of closing the coming fiscal year's budget gap. If the petitioners get what they want and push the planned AB forward reductions into a future budget, the district will then be forced to make additional unplanned cuts this spring, further eroding our already inadequate staffing levels. Over the past four years, our community has repeatedly asked teachers to do more with less. More fiscal uncertainty will only make our jobs harder when we all need to

007be focused on making the AB forward transition as effective as possible. Please support our students by supporting the school budget at Actton and Boxboro town meetings this spring. Thank you. >> Thank you, >> Peter. Superintendent Update. Oh. Oh, we got one more. Sorry. Didn't realize you were up. >> Sorry. Greg Jarbo, five Cherokee Road. Um, yes, I'm a member of the finance committee. Yes, I am speaking on my own behalf. Um, one of the things that um, seems to have triggered the petition that the previous two speakers uh, have talked about was surprise. You know, how did we get here? We can't we slow this down? Can't we do something different? And one of the observations I'd like to share with the larger community is that this wasn't a surprise. uh was one of the

008reasons why the finance committee sent not one but two leaons to attend these school committee meetings starting last May. We knew things were happening. We knew um this was going to be a crucial year for a set of decisions. But one of the things that I've learned over this past year is that we have a interesting communications challenge in Acton Boxboro. Not everybody watches all the meetings all the time. So, one of the things that I would like to offer as a suggestion going forward is that we benefit by having our leaison at your meeting, your leaison at our meeting, but I think one of the other things that um I would like to get everybody to think about is that um yeah, you may not want to invite a member of the finance committee

009to your next pso meeting because we're not the fun people that you want to come party with. But sometimes we bring hard truths to people's attention early enough so that they aren't surprised when tough decisions get made. Um so yeah, don't have any party hats. No, don't have any um good opening lines. But if there is a way to close the communication gap going forward, my guess is in the next year or two or three or four, uh we're not done. There will be more. And the more we can keep each other informed, um I think it's good for the whole community. >> Thank you. It's hiding. >> Wow. >> Peter, superintendent's update. >> All right. So, good evening everyone. Um, welcome back after break and snow days. Um, so I actually want to just

010start with some congratulations here because we haven't done traditional superintendent updates in a little while because of the length of meetings. Um, but I want to recognize first our high school, our high school staff and students. um they actually moved from um the advanced placement national honor role um silver status up to gold status um because of not only maintaining exceptionally high performance on AP scores but consistently over time increasing participation. So um huge congratulations to all of the staff who have been involved in that. I also want to congratulate our girls varsity basketball 2026 DCL champions. Um, congratulations to DCL player of the year, freshman Avery Terry, DCL All League sophomore Mora Cork, DCL Allstars, junior Nora Cataldo, sophomore Ashley Harrington, and sophomore Izzy Santiago. So, congratulations to everyone on that team. Um, I

011also want to congratulate um, which this is a new team for us, um, but the conquered Carile Actton Boxboro, it is in the wrong order, um, fencing team whose boys team actually won the state championship. So congratulations to them. That is absolutely fantastic. Um and also congratulations to Blanchard Memorial School uh music teacher Margie Callahan on being named the recipient of the Donna Nagel Award for Excellence in General Music at this year's MMEA conference coming up. So um I am excited to attend that and be able to see her receive that award. So congratulations to many people. Um last day of school is now Thursday, June 25th. It's still June. That's the good news. um due to four snow days. Um this is an early release day. I will say snow days are really challenging.

012This year has been an exceptional year for us. Um like we haven't seen in many many years here in New England. Um we've had two really significant sto snow snows storms that have impacted kind of everyone's ability to clean up after that. I just want to say thank you to all of the town staff um who do all the cleanup around town as well as all of our school staff who are doing the cleanup. Um all of the pathways, parking lots that you see around the town, uh excuse me, around this school department and all of our campuses are done by really three people. Um so that is a massive undertaking. They're up all night getting that done. That's happening all across town. It's challenging when we get this much snow, but certainly want to

013express my appreciation to everyone for doing that. Even though the last day of school is June 25th, um we are because of the snow and kind of uncertainty around who might have power or not have power. Um on Tuesday we po postponed the traditional bi-weekly AB forward update for families, we're doing a lunch update just this Friday, tomorrow, so that we don't miss kind of the twoe cycle. Um it's not the best time for some of our families who might work during the day. We tried to schedule it during the lunch hour so people might be able to jump on a quick Zoom call um come in, listen to some updates, ask a few questions. Um so we will be hosting that tomorrow at noon. Um we are also sending out information on a number

014of holidays that take place. One of the things we've found is our families value knowing some of the history behind the different holidays that come on the calendar each year. Um so we will be sending out information on Black History Month, which is all of February. Um we are sending information out on President's Day, um Lunar New Year as well as Ramadan. Um so lots going on. We will keep things moving. And um thank you >> Adam Peter. I have a question. So on our school calendar, it says the 26th of June would be the last of the five snow days that are planned. Should we have two more snow days aside from your job? what would happen to everybody else? How would we uh manage that into uh maybe the following week or what

015what happens with the the calendar if we have two more snow days? >> Yeah, schools can legally attend session up until June 30th or through June 30th. Uh you cannot go into the next fiscal year. So, we have a little bit of flexibility, but it's certainly getting tight. Um I think, you know, we're already hearing word, you know, I don't know if you've followed like Cape Cod right now. um they've been closed all week and there's little hope that they're going to be back in session at least this week. So, we're already hearing the state start to talk about potential need for waiverss and things like that. Um I do think they will hold a pretty high standard that has been historically where they stand on things um of trying to make sure everyone gets

016their 180 days, but I do think if for some reason we went beyond that um you know there could be a waiver if it happens before April vacation. I think Desi's expectation is that you would start to miss April vacation week. Um, you know, I did receive an email from a parent asking if we would pursue that right now. Um, I responded that's not really in the cards yet. Um, because it's simply operationally almost infeasible to to do unless it's a requirement by the state that we do it. Um, many of our staff, families already have things planned over April vacation. Um, and then try and get people to cancel it outside of a true emergency would be would be really challenging. >> Thank you. So, in addition to it's nice to have some good

017things to celebrate here, I also wanted to just express how much I appreciated the transportation note that came out about um buses on I think it was Wednesday would pick up any kid that they saw out there and get them to school whether or not it was on their regular bus route or not. I just thought that was a really nice way to deal with a really difficult situation as we work to get all the snow cleared. So, thank you for that. All right. Um, with that I believe we are ready to invite Nick Delatano to come up and join us and talk about some geographic boundaries and scenarios. Check. Check. There we go. And good evening, uh, school committee. It's a pleasure to be back. Um uh I am here as was detailed and

018part of the plan to uh submit uh the first set of scenarios. Um the I know a different number of uh committee or community members I should say have seen this presentation. Um so as we go through it for the first time I do want to sort of apologize there is a lot of information here. Uh I will endeavor to go through it in a very thorough manner. Um, but I would ask the school committee, there's a couple different points where I'll stop and try to get as much input from you all as possible as we move forward from this. Um, as we move through other uh meetings, I'll try to condense some of this information down so it's a little bit more accessible. Uh, but again, my apologies for sort of the length of

019this presentation, but we'll jump right into it. So, yep. >> Got it. Okay. And great. Okay. So, um, good evening. My name is Nick Stallano. I am the managing director of Dillinger Research and Applied Data. For those who didn't see me on my previous, uh, uh, encounters with the school committee or the parent webinar, uh, we're just a Connecticut based nonprofit that partners with school districts, um, nonprofits and school level entities around all things data. And really what we try to focus on is helping solve I would say thorny problems uh through the use of data uh in which to try to get the best uh solution possible. Uh we are here uh because we're partnered with Actton Boxboro Regional School District in designing uh what we hope to be sustainable elementary attendance boundaries uh

020that operationalize the vision of AB forward. Uh the presentation that we'll go through is uh I'll quickly detail the project to date. Uh we're going to go through the decision points uh aligned with uh what the community feedback uh was through the survey that was been administered over the past two weeks. Uh we'll then go into the design factors and that's really just a lot of information and context that's uh helpful in terms of understanding how the scenarios uh were designed and will continue to be iterated upon. And then finally we'll go through the initial scenarios. Um I will say this and I will say this again these are the initial scenarios that will be iterated on. This is a design process in which we are trying to um get to the best solution. Uh

021and so I do not even uh pretend that these are the best solutions because this is the initial set of scenarios that uh we're looking to get feedback around. So in terms of project to date, uh this is our second meeting with the school committee. Our first one was on February 9th. Uh we've hosted one parent webinar and we're set to do another one uh on the 10th of March. Um and we are regularly meeting with the district team um outside of the uh vacation that you all just had. But uh we've been in constant contact to try to boost both the analysis uh the development of the scenarios and uh this overall project forward. Uh we have uh been engaging with the public uh just today and I apologize this is slightly outdated. We

022received a couple of emails from parents. So we're probably up to about a handful of almost 10 emails which have had extremely good feedback and context in terms of uh both the presentation and their thoughts about the project. Uh we did have about 150 participants participate in the parent webinar and the survey that had gone out like I said prior to the vacation and through the vacation we've had an an extremely uh excellent response rate of over now 1,200 uh individuals uh providing input. A lot of that uh information will be displayed and reviewed here through the presentation. Uh throughout this time over the past two weeks, we've been doing uh a bunch of different demographic and enrollment analysis uh capacity and utilization analysis along with um understanding transportation routing and analysis which we haven't

023quite gotten to. We're waiting to get to a little bit more of refined scenarios. And like we had mentioned before, we have uh developed our first initial scenarios that we're looking to get feedback from you all and ultim subsequently the public uh starting tomorrow. All right. So, we're going to jump right into the decision points. Uh, if everybody remembers at the last, uh, school committee meeting, we had started to review a set of decision points um that I was framing as helping to understand both how to design scenarios, how to measure the efficacy of scenarios, and really to help um focus our attention in regards to not wasting time going in a direction that we don't need to to go into. Ideally, uh, again, from the input from the school committee, it will help provide

024transparency when we get to starting to make the tough decisions on which scenario we want to choose over the other because it really helps, I would say, illuminate the decision-m process that, uh, helps understand why we're either accepting certain trade-offs or why one scenario is better than the other. Um, you'll notice I put a very lot of word salad here on this slide. Um, and that was really meant for folks who maybe aren't pre uh engaged with the presentation right now, but just had to read it. And that was really uh to the community uh at large who had the opportunity to take the survey. Um, we did read through the now 364 uh open-ended responses at the end of the survey. Uh, a lot of great feedback, a lot of frustration and and in

025some instances a lot of anger in regards to I think what they felt was a very unfair survey in regards to asking the impossible. Um and so I did want to sort of flag the fact uh across a couple different points around the survey itself. First, the survey is meant to be high level. Um I had a wonderful conversation with a researcher uh in regards to the nuance of asking very detailed questions versus very high level questions. Uh I make no uh quips about the idea that we wanted a directional understanding and a general context and an understanding of priority from the community about what was important to them. Uh and so ultimately the questions were fairly broad and I know people want to get down into the details and I promise we will get

026down into the details on the second set of surveys but first and foremost we want to understand the general priorities. Second I think a lot of people were frustrated there was no data. Um, yes, cuz a lot of times parents will want to make a decision based on what is going to happen with their kid. And that was it was intentional to not include any of that because at the end of the day, the community, the school committee are basing sort of their direction where we want to go based on your value system. And so part of this is understanding what your role's value system is. And then finally, a lot of people were somewhat disgruntled over the fact that you're asking me to make the impossible decision of what is more important, X or

027Y. And I hate to admit it, that is a redistricting process. Um, there is no perfect solution. We will try to get to as close to a perfect solution as possible, but at the end of the day, I promise you, there are going to be trade-offs uh based on the scenario at play. And so, as frustrating and as impossible as it seems, part of this is asking those tough questions. Is walk zones more important uh than equity or is walk zones more important than Actton students going to uh Blanchard? All of these things. Um again, I am asking for input because at the end of the day, I'm not making the decision. I'm helping sort of facilitate the best solution as we get to that. And so really, this is just to emphasize and to

028thank the community. Um, I know it was tough to take uh that survey, but it really helps both inform how we're developing the scenarios and really provides, I think, rich feedback for you, the school committee, to help make that final decision when we think about what that uh what's the best scenario for act. So, jumping right into the decision points and I'm going to go through the decision points and then there's a particular slide after the decision points that I'll love to hear from the school committee. Um, but I'm going to go quickly through the decision points along with what was the information that we gathered from the survey. >> Yeah, please. >> Um, you said now there have been over over 1,200 uh responses and you have,00 here. I just want to know if

029the data we're about to go through has been skewed significantly in either direction based on on the additional I'm guessing no, but I just >> Yeah. No, I I made sure to look quickly look through it. I didn't want to change the presentation too much. Um but no uh what you're seeing here uh is and I have updated the survey twice over the weekend and then on Monday and the percentages do not change. So uh but I will update it and then when we post it we'll have uh the final set of numbers but no there's no uh no meaningful change. So in terms of the decision the first decision point was around walk zones and transportation. Um so the question that we had asked was just really should the district establish formal walk zones.

030Um, generally speaking, most of the questions were based on a liyker scale. That is a option choice between one and five. We always establish the fact that one usually was not important, five was very important. It could also be um strongly agree to strongly disagree. So in this case, uh, as you can see here, the distribution of choices range fairly significantly from one to five. What we identified in that callout box to the right was that 50% of the community members felt it was important or very important. That's number four and five. uh to have walk zones. So, generally speaking, when I show, you know, some information like this, is it definitive that walk zones are by its nature a mustave for this district? I would probably submit it's not a mustave, but it is

031certainly important to I think the folks who do live around the schools themselves as was identified from that researcher, which I really appreciated. Um, you know, she framed it as is it uh do does she want walk zones? Yes, she does. Is it safe to have walk zones? No, it is not. Um, and so there in lies I think some of the nuanced nature that we need to go forward with once we start to get another set of scenarios down is even though we might want walk zones, is this the town really set up for that? So that's a further on question that we're going to be looking for in terms of uh community feedback. >> Nick, can I pause you for a moment? Um, committee, I see that everybody's got questions. Can we hold

032them till we get to the slide where Nick's going to have conversation with us and then if we need to go back, we can do that, please. >> Thank you. All right. second uh so that that was the walk zones. Um second uh decision point was around flex zones. Um and again for those folks that um may not be aware, generally speaking, flex zones could be a layer a particular zone within the scenario that um does uh have default uh schools for residents, but it would allow the district if they uh needed to to have incoming students be reassigned to a different school. Um, and so what we did was ask uh what was not if they wanted flex zones, but how would they approach uh the idea of the flex zone? Would they want

033very large flex zones so that you're maximizing the flexibility that the district has? Would you want smaller zones in which then you're minimizing the flexibility or are you not sure? In this case, the maj majority or 465 uh individuals uh chose that they wanted to minimize the size of the flex zones. um if you combine both the operational balance and the neutrality of it all um you know you get close to 50% but I mean I think it's fair to say that more than half of uh the individuals specifically chose that they would want to minimize the flex zones in terms of feeder pattern alignment uh this was really just understanding if the lower schools uh should have the same boundaries as the upper schools um there was a lot of hatred for this question

034so I apologize uh but at the end of the day we don't want assume anything as we move through this. And so this was just merely to sort of get a level set around how important that was. And yes, it is very very important. Uh 92% of the community felt like obviously we want the same boundaries uh from the lower to the upper. The next uh decision point was around uh either understanding whether there was an appetite for satellite boundaries and again that is a um a specific usually a multif family housing unit that might be not connected to the main boundary of the elementary school as an option or are we endeavoring to try to do conting contiguous uh boundaries? Uh there are benefits to doing satellite excuse me there are uh benefits to

035doing satellite boundaries uh because it does help I would say strategically allocate um more or create more of a diverse uh enrollment within different schools uh without having to somehow uh gerrymander a complete uh contuous boundary. So we asked again from strongly agree to strongly disagree across the two options. the two options uh and they were in essence separate questions. One was every school zone should be a uh single uh unbroken shape or and then in a separate question uh it the uh the district should be allowed to utilize satellite boundaries. Um so if you look to the far right you can see the blue and the green are your strongly agree and uh agree. uh in both instances well I would just say for the contiguous zones there was over 50% that supported the

036idea that we should use uh one basic shape in terms of utilizing satellites it's more uh like 40% to 35 to 40% of uh the community supported the idea but I would say it wasn't exactly a hugely endorsed uh idea in terms of uh no school shall exceed 100% utilization I was mildly surprised by this. Um 68% of the community, which I do look to be a majority, uh did support the idea that we should not exceed 100%. Um and so for what it's worth, uh there were a few people that didn't seem to um either support that or potentially they misunderstood the question, but for now I can say we are really focused on not exceeding 100% just from an operational standpoint. In terms of uh boundaries must be designed to manage known development

037projects and or have that 5-year enrollment projection. Uh there was 54 54% of the community members that suggested that that should be an important piece uh as we think about designing for uh success in the future in terms of uh ut I'm sorry in terms of um the balance of utilization across the schools. Um, we had tried to enter entertain the idea that we could shoot for a complete even split. So, every single um, school should could be at, I'm making this up, 95%. Or based on the operational needs of certain schools, we could have some schools at 96 or 97% while other schools are slower at like 93 or 94%. Um, surprisingly, this was pretty much split down the middle. Um, and so again, this is more of a 50-50 split in regards to

038how the community wants to approach it in terms of thinking about balancing the socioeconomic status, multilingual learner populations, and special education needs across the total district. Um, 50% of the community members felt um the district should prioritize this uh to make sure that there's a district-wide balance um at and again the way the question was framed uh at the expense of neighborhood proximity. Um if the I and so the way I kind of read that too again three being neutral is that um a certain part of population would like to prioritize uh neighborhood uh keeping neighborhoods together over uh balancing uh student demographics across the district in terms of again keeping neighborhood integrity. Um this obviously is quite an important aspect to most districts but specifically Actton and Boxboro in regards to the idea that

03970% of community members uh felt it was important or very important to keep recognized neighborhoods together. Um I will say this for the record um for the first initial scenarios we are keeping it at a high level. When we go and initiate the second round of uh scenarios next week, we will be putting out interactive uh web apps in which you can zoom down to your specific house and know what part of the uh boundaries you will fall under. We felt that will be important and that will be an opportune time for people to identify what they feel are uh specific neighborhoods that need to stay together and that's where we're really going to be leveraging that tool to understand are we uh cutting up certain neighborhoods that we may be able to keep together.

040uh if possible. In terms of the uh Boxboro preference or thinking about the hometown priority, there uh was uh overwhelming support uh for ensuring that Boxboro residents uh are able to attend Blanchard Memorial School. Um and so this is going to be hint for the school committee a broader conversation in regards to when we think about hometown priority. Does that mean um you know based on the number of youth in Boxboro and the number of youth in Actton and the capacity of uh Blanchard uh generally speaking all of Boxboro needs to go to Blanchard and then some of Actton needs to go to Blanchard. So, um that is going to be a necessity unless um you know we we change that up. But for now, that's sort of the assumption that we're going with is

041that there is going to have to be a portion of Actton that does have to go to Blanchard. So, and this is where I'm going to ask for the school committee's uh input and feedback. But what I did was then take the decision points that I knew to exist at this time and took the community feedback and my own sort of expertise and try to uh do two things with them. Um first I tried to identify those specific decision points that are more binary than anything else and that need to happen and so from that perspective given what I sort of saw from the community and my understanding is cohort continuity is a must. Uh right so at the end of the day we are going to not pre provide you with any scenarios unless

042you tell me otherwise um around uh any uh scenario where the lower and the uppers do not have the same boundaries in terms of school capacity. um all schools will remain under 100% capacity. As you'll have noticed in terms of the scenarios, there is not an even balance so far. Um and so I sort of left that out at the moment. Uh but I would love to get your input on and I've already received feedback from a lot of parents that we should endeavor to try to make Blanchard and the two other campuses at equal capacity. And I can probably tell you unless you tell me otherwise that is what the next set of scenarios are going to do in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. And I'll explain why we presented uh the

043set of utilizations as we did when we get to the scenarios. And then in terms of the hometown priority, uh we are going to prioritize students to in town schools as much as possible. Um and I will interpret that as all of Boxboro will be going to Blanchard and we are trying to minimize to the best of our ability how many Actton students do get reassigned to Blanchard. However, that is in direct again thinking of trade-offs um that school capacity question. And so those two, I hate to say it, are somewhat at odds with one another. So those are things that we know are top priority. In terms of the remaining decision points, what we did was try to or I took them and balance them in order of priority. Um and again it doesn't

044mean you can't you know in different scenario choices prioritize walk zones or whatever the case may be but as we look to design and iterate on new scenarios I feel as if these are the uh decision points that again are most important to least important. First off was future enrollment trends. uh we do want to account for uh future growth and or declines and that is really directly tied to the idea that people don't really I think like the idea of flex zones and so if we can best manage um future enrollment trends then we will be able to hopefully minimize the use of flex zones. Then next comes recognized neighborhoods. Our intent is to not slice up um recognized neighborhoods. we've gotten uh input around the different pool communities and so we're taking those

045into account as we think about what this could potentially look like. Follow that by balanced student demographics. Uh this is to distribute student populations to foster diverse uh representative learning environments. And so really as we go through the scenarios and I'll detail out all the information that we provide for you all. Um that is an important piece as we think about how we are aligning all the the schools to the sort of district average contiguous zones. um this is up there right um we want to draw school attendance boundaries as continuous uh geographical areas doesn't mean we will but that is something I think first and foremost if we can pull it off I think we're aiming to do it without satellite boundaries and then finally walk zones um I would love to hear other

046people's comments school committee specifically but then um the the individuals who live around the schools um once I heard that uh safety could be potentially at play that sort of in my mind starts to shut down uh the importance of walk zone And so that was one of the reasons why I put it at the end. So that is where we are in terms of what I know to be true about the decision points and that will help guide our both our design and your all's sort of discussion points. Um and so I would love to hear your thoughts. >> Andrew, you had your hand up earlier. You want to start? >> Thanks and thanks Nick for doing this. Um, you know, I think it's uh great that you're able to put this together and

047I know that we need to get to the point of you having an answer and it be easy for us to say, "Hey, go with this." But we've got many meetings to go before we come to it. Um, I think it's also important for you to recognize that your words have weight both in this room and in the community and that what you show and how you communicate and the words you use are considered authority. So, please, um, keep an eye out for any intentional unintentional bias that may be showing up in any of your options. Some of that also comes through in the ambiguity that it pro that was shown in the survey. Um I appreciate the opportunity to show us what the community is thinking. Um we've not been given any outside data

048for what we should learn and the survey that was provided had areas in it that many people in the community didn't quite understand. Walk zones, flex zones, 100% capacity are just three areas. walk zones to many people in the state believe there's a statemandated desi rule of what a walk zone is supposed to be that's a certain amount of space believe that there's something there that ambiguity of not having it fully defined doesn't help to gather information about it because if people think it's already taken care of it's not something they're going to quite answer to flex zones are something that needs to be defined as well we are still looking to define it part of that definition is that the district will choose where the student will go, not that the parent is in

049an area where they can choose where they'll go. And having that distinction is important, even if it's 60% understood because the 40% that don't need to know that that's a piece of this. And the 100% capacity is not a fire code capacity, but I believe it's a capacity based on school policy or school committee policy for how many students that sit inside a room. That 100% capacity um is again an ambiguous piece of this. I think it's important as we go through this to clearly lay out the uh questions that are being asked to be able to gather better data from this. I know that at some points I know I got a lot of emails, I know we got emails, there's a lot of talk on Facebook about this of people who were upset

050because they didn't understand where the survey questions were coming from. And I think that that can create bad data which then creates bad decisions and none of us want to do that. So, um, my my request as you go through this, and I had a lot of other things that I was picking on, but I won't get to it. Um, is to be clearer when asking questions, provide more context to those whose questions will be who will be answering the questions, and provide us with some additional information beyond just what, you know, people feel in the community, but what some best practices can be to be able to understand how some of these points line up with what's best. Thanks, Thank you. Great feedback, >> Glenn. >> Thank you for this, Nick. And I'll just

051try and go down the list of my notes here. Um, walk zones. Yeah, I mean, safety is priority 1, two, and three for me. Um, regarding walk zones, if things like bike lanes and nature trails and sidewalks, if those three things are like, yes, there's a safe path, then that seems okay to me. Um, but if you're like walking through Route Two, yeah, no, that's that's a no-go. Um, so I think that that seems like a pretty If safety good, then go ahead. If safety not good, out the window. That's how it is in my mind. Um, flex zones. One thought that came to mind that I'm not sure could work, um, could the like I'm wondering about if flex zone if the scope of the flex zones could be adjusted over years if there's

052new housing units. I'm wonder I'm curious about the 5-year time frame regarding that. um that might be a bit too technically wonky. Um but that is a thought that popped into my head. So flex zones we'll need more discernment on. Um satellite boundaries I initially thought no. Um because I want a neighborhood contigu that fancy word with lots of syllables I can't say correctly. >> Contiguous. Thank you. I initially thought yeah that's a priority for me. Um, but I mean I do care more about socioeconomic and cultural and ling multilingual diversity than I do care about a contiguous block. Um, that's a priority for me. Um, I do. Yeah, I agree. No school should go over 100% utility. That's pretty basic in my mind. Um, cohort continuity is a must. Yeah, anything other than that

053seems kind of ridiculous to me. Um, prioritizing in town schools as much as possible. Yes. If you're in Blanchard, well, if you're in Boxboro, of course, I think you should have priority to go to Blanchard. Um, I think that those are that's my initial runback. So, um, >> so that's that's helpful. What I would also encourage to and I should have asked as well you know if you have any feedback in terms of the order uh that would be helpful. So in terms of what you said uh was helpful in terms of you know safety is a priority satellite zones core continuity all good. So in the context of if this is a good map that would super helpful as well but thank you >> hi thank you it's a nice nice presentation um regarding

054walk zones I think it's not about creating new walk zones there are lots of walk zones that are already established and kids have been walking those walk zones for decades right in some cases 50 years right long time these schools have been divided so it's not like a new thing but the point is there are a lot people who actually do walk to school. It reduces congestion. People, as you can see, think that it's a very important thing to continue. And to, you know, to Andrew's point, a lot of people feel that it's actually part of the the quote unquote law that you should be able to walk to your school uh if you want to. So, I I feel that should be moved higher up. It's hard to say because these are all sort

055of um you know, important. I'm interested about balancing student demographics because lower down on the slides, it looks like every kid in Boxro now necessarily will go to Blanchard. Um it seems we worked very hard many years ago to integrate box children in into the Actton district and vice versa. Now it seems we're just erasing that with a stroke of a pen and now all box kids necessarily will go to Blanchard with a few act children uh you know sprinkled in. Um so in terms of balancing student demographics I noticed in lower slides uh the percentage of white children at Blanchard will increase from 48% to 52% uh based on this. So that doesn't seem like bouncing demographics. It seems to be uh doing in fact the the opposite of that. I see that in

056other in other you know schools now their names that we don't know what they're going to be anymore. Um that that has has changed. But but I think that that's that's an important point. And I'm curious to know how you expect to uh to balance uh that I mean are you going to look at sort of the flex zones and like here are people who seem to be uh of this you know uh I don't know whatever and based on that we're going to now we'll we'll bust them over into this school district to sort of even out the numbers or how are you expecting to do that? >> Uh okay so a couple good things that are being popped up here that I kind of want to address. So, in terms of increasing, let's

057just start with the increasing the white population for a second. Part of it is looking at the absolute move from 48 to 52%. Uh, but then off the top of my head, I would want to know what's the average uh district percentage, right? Because I think that can help understand is that a significant move or not? So I frame that as yes and let's understand the context like we had sort of identified before to answer the question about um that though and the flex zones I will sort of tie this together that is kind of up to you guys right at the end of the day as was sort of uh indicated uh technically the flex zone definition has not been defined so um I defined it in the survey uh as a way to

058interpret it if you all disagree with that that is your prerogative And that is that is your job to tell me how we're thinking about what that flex zone could and should do. In the context of I think what you were indicating with Blanchard, sure, we could put flex zones, but now we're moving Boxboro kids out of Boxboro, which goes against what I understand to be the hometown priority. Um, again, if that is fine and you guys are all good with that, then I can actually operate on that. Totally fine. >> Is there any scenario where any box kids would go to either Blanchard or Parker Damon? I mean, sorry to the board. >> Is there any scenario? Sure. There there's always a scenario, but I need to know >> it. I mean, it does

059not outlined to any of the scenarios that we've presented. >> It is not for two reasons. One, the hometown priority. What I to be understanding that they have that hometown preference. Uh, but two, because the community basically said no, it's they want to support that. So, again, if you all tonight tell me no, no, run me a scenario that cuts Blanchard and I'm sorry, Boxboro in half, I can absolutely do that. But given what I know to be true, I'm just that is why I have not approached that. Yes, ma'am. >> Please don't mess with Boxboro because in addition to the feedback you got, we got plenty of feedback, too. You know, we got like we're going to secede from the union kind of feedback from members of Boxboro and I understand that's that's ex

060you. Yes, that's why there was no scenario presented that that's why I was not planning on doing that. But part of this is just listening to you all as a school committee in which I what I should and can do. >> I I I also in saying that I also want to say that there are roughly 80 students in Boxboro today who go to school in Actton. Exactly. >> And those parents are very upset about the fact that their kids will not be able to stay in the school that they've been at, as will many students possibly in the district. But I think that we we sort of have to weigh both of those. But it sure feels like the survey feedback and the online feedback that we've gotten has been pretty pretty straightforward around

061the the box situation. Do you mind if I just go into my >> Oh, wait. Can I I there is one other point though I just want to to finish though, which is about walk zones. And so, uh, as you had sort of pointed out which I think is right, right, a lot of people are still walking, which I think is fine. Part of maybe what I want to also instill and ask is um as you know in terms of some of the scenarios I did not take into account walk zones meaning you could have a child who is in walking distance of the Parker Damon campuses but is actually uh slated to go to the boardwalk campuses. So that precludes them from being able to walk. So at the end of the day, part

062of this is also no, the ability to walk to an elementary school is of top priority that because they live close enough. And so that's also a distinction though I didn't officially establish in the survey is one that I'm also sort of interested in understanding because at the end of the day that is also on the table given the tight proximity of uh both campuses. >> Adam, before you go with your comments, one other thing I want to note in the hometown priority. So that actually applies to both towns, right? Actton students have hometown priority. And one of our challenges that I think we've been saying, but I just want to make sure that it's clear is that there are not enough seats in the Actton schools for all the Actton students. And so that's

063where we're landing with this. And so if the hometown priority remains something that we consider important, we also have to look at it through the perspective of Actton students as well. Um we can have that conversation, but just understand it is a two-sided conversation. Adam's next and then I'm going to give other people who haven't had a chance to speak and then we'll come back around. Adam, >> I'll be I'll be quick on my feedback on the decision points. I think the the top three definitely make sense. Um I think where I struggle is the future enrollment trends and balancing. Um and I think that the balancing act between demographics today and what our future trends look like, I kind of want them to be together. Um, but then the recognized neighborhoods, I think that

064that's that's also important. But I think that that will probably sort of float out um after you look at future trends and you'll you'll be able to take neighborhoods and and like you said, Nick, there'll be that interactive um method for people to maybe sort of help you refine those neighborhoods a bit that that might give us some more color in that. But I I just I think the future enrollment trends is really important and balance for me is not just about demographics, but it's also about um enrollment size. So um you know, I think that we did get some feedback that it it feels a little uncomfortable that the Actton schools are in their 90s in terms of utilization and Blanchard is in the 80s. And so I think when we're looking at balance,

065we're I would like to see us balance capacity and demographics um with an eye towards the future. It's going to be really hard for the next year or two, but that's the next year or two. And I think what we're trying to do, or at least what I'm trying to do, is put together a districtricting plan that makes it so future committees don't have to go through what we're going through now. >> Excellent feedback. Thank you, >> Lisa. I have the same problem. >> Okay. Okay. I had the mic that didn't work. Sorry about that, Nick. Thanks. Um, so when we're thinking about what's important and we're kind of, you know, weighing stuff and our conversation and pointing out stuff, um, just to piggyback on, well, before I do my piggyback, I think it's interesting

066because when I initially looked at some of the ideas and some of the directions that we could possibly go, I had a gut reaction and I actually did take the survey just to see, you know, what it's like, the experience taking the survey to see if there'd be any pitfalls or questions. with the questions and um when I took the survey I definitely answered one way but then after thinking about it later and kind of questioning my reactions and thinking about well what would be the benefit of the thing that I have a gut reaction against I'm looking at these scenarios and it's interesting because these scenarios follow all the things I thought I wanted and followed a lot of the things that I think many of the survey takers wanted. Um, I think I

067had a lot of the same priorities I think as most people did is what I'm trying to say. But what's interesting is that with all of those priorities that I had that were considered and being the same as the people, um, I didn't get the results that I was hoping for. Um, it's it's funny how that happens sometimes. And so I just to piggyback finally off of what Adam was saying with the 86% capacity with Blanchard um versus you know the twin schools being you know full you know almost at capacity you know the 99% in some cases I just um I I would like to see a balancing of that but then when I was looking at how the lines could be done nice and neatly and pretty that doesn't look as possible as

068I had initially hoped for because then you start infringing upon West Actton and then I think there might be a lot of West Actton folks that would say, "Hey, wait a minute. No, no, no. We would really like to have our kids stay in Actton." And so I'm thinking about those people and I'm also thinking about that there are people in Actton who really really wanted to go to um one of their kids to go to Blanchard. And so I was looking at the map. Thank you for those maps showing the, you know, location of the different students for the different schools because I think that was incredibly helpful to seize, well, where are all those families and the ones um that live in Actton but send their kids to Blanchard were actually more separated.

069They were more evenly distributed that I thought there weren't as many, you know, condensed um areas. And so I think what I'm getting at is that I'd love to see balance with capacity and find a way to do that. But I guess what I'm getting at is maybe the lines might not be what I had initially hoped for. Maybe we could think about some scenarios that are less pretty and those satellite regions that I had once poo pooed in my head might be something worth considering just because what if that solves a lot of problems. Um, now I'm feeling curious. And then of course the other thing to piggyback off of is the obvious uh thing is demographics is just wanting an a well-rounded experience for students in terms of their peers and not just

070that but also thinking about the balance in the classrooms and in the schools in terms of student needs especially thinking about English language learners, economically disadvantaged students, all of those different areas. just making sure that distribution is as even as possible because scenario three seemed to be the best in that regard but still didn't get close enough to the mark in my mind. So just >> completely agree. >> Thank you Nick. Um I have my first question is that have you guys done a site visit of all the campuses in Actton and BoxPro? >> We have not. >> Okay. Um, so I know Boardwalk and Parker Damon are very close, but these two neighborhoods are actually very, very different. Um, Parker Damon as well as Blanchard, they're off 111. So the satellite of, you know,

071walking safe walking zone is going to be very different from uh, boardwalk campus, which is kind of situated in a densely populated neighborhood with a lot of sidewalks and etc. Although we live in New England and sidewalks are covered with snow right now, right? So I I personally um my suggestion if I may is that maybe visit a campus and take a look of what it actually looks like and then decide you know whether you want to prioritize walk walk zone over everything else or maybe that's something we don't we put it at the bottom of the list and but but with an explanation because everybody's going to be looking at their address and try to map out the walking zone which in Massachusetts it doesn't have a mandate walking zone. It's recommended one and

072a half miles for a regional school, but again, one and a half miles along the highway, one and a half miles in the neighborhood. That's different. Just my suggestion. >> Love that. Thank you. >> Just want to add one thing to the the idea of walk zones for us. Uh walk zones interpreted in most other communities are zones around a school in which students are required to walk to school and the district does not provide transportation. We actually do that a little bit differently where within walk zones as many people in our community understand them right now afford a family a higher priority in the lottery in during the open enrollment process. Um, but we still provide transportation to families who might want it even within that zone. It's just kind of giving people that

073neighborhood priority. Um, so I think that's the nuance to walk zones that maybe is different for Act and Boxboro than what most other communities would interpret. So the I I think that might be something just to I don't have an answer to what that means for how we play out the scenarios, but I just think it's a nuance we want to keep in mind that our definition of walk zones as our community understands it is very very different than a traditional exclusion to transportation. Um and I don't think we've had any conversations in here where our goal was to exclude transportation because it's 90% reimbursed by the state and so it's not really a financial gain. Glenn. Oh, >> sorry. I haven't got Ben's got not had a chance yet. Thank you. >> I just

074want to piggy back on to Peter's comment. Um, having been a parent of a Conan student who took advantage of the walk zone. My son hardly ever walked to school. He opted for the school bus because the school bus was a service that was provided as a result of us being able to exercise that higher um higher probability of getting into that particular school at the time. So yes, walk zones do not mean that they are going to walk to school in lie of bus transportation being provided. I think I said that right. Go ahead. >> Um I agree with the um priorities that you have sort of pulled from the survey. I do also want to acknowledge that based on the priorities that our community has set and that it feels like, you know,

075we sort of seem to be going with, you know, prioritizing the um walk zones. Um, I also do believe that we should prioritize the um, hometown priority and I think that we should probably look at maybe slightly bigger than we would initially want for flex zones to be able to like make room for these other priorities. Um, for example, like you know, I know that there's at least at the beginning going to need to be some act students assigned to Blanchard. Maybe that could be a flex zone so that in the future as enrollments change, maybe those students could be assigned to an act in school and have that priority. >> Excellent idea. >> Glenn, I'm actually going to jump in because I haven't taken a turn and some of what Liz said relates to

076what I want to say. Um, I was also noticing that, you know, our our community survey has asked for very small flex zones, no islands, um, and recognized neighborhoods. But I'm also thinking at a system level, um I'm also very interested in balanced student demographics and I recognize that is a tension with those other things. Um there probably needs to be some sort of give there. Uh we need to be able to create a number of schools that are that are well balanced and um aren't overt taxing staff in one building as compared to another. Creating a a a situation where we have to do sharing across buildings that starts um getting difficult. I mean, certainly we will make sure our students have what they need, but I I think it's really important to to

077take a look at um the needs of the students that we're putting in our buildings and making sure that we can meet those. Um and yep, I'll pause there, Glenn. So first [snorts] comment I think so we are hearing some uh difference in priorities but I think what I am distilling is that it's a pretty shared value that everyone cares deeply about prioriti about prioritizing balancing student demographics. I'm hearing that pretty loud and clear I think. Um, so that's one thing. And then for me, just taking a bit of a differential diagnosis kind of thing. Like the part about walk zones that I act that I care about is really the neighborhood priority part. And the part about hometown priority that I really care about is the neighborhood priority part. Um, I think that if

078you live physically close to the school, that should be weighted in the priority. That's really the And so that's really the block, mental block there in my mind, mental chunk. Um, so if I had to put them in a list of like top to bottom, like balancing student demographics for me is at the top. Recognize neighborhoods is is a close second. Um, walk zones with safety with the understanding that it's the neighborhood priority I care about. That's like three. future enrollment trends. Honestly, that's closer to the bomb for me because I'm just concerned about the the pretty short term. That part I would like some guidance on regarding like what does it really look like from a zoning difference to prioritize future enrollment trends versus not prioritizing that. I'd like to see that map. Um

079and then at the bottom is contiguous zones. I don't care how it looks. I want the kids to be well served. >> Andrew, thanks Dory. Um I I just wanted to get a chance before I was reacting to the survey. I wanted to be able to react to this. There just two areas here that I want to bring a little bit of more clarity on. And that is um the regional uh regional neighborhoods and rather the recognized neighborhoods. I wrote them down wrong. And future trends with recognized neighborhoods, you know, the core of these towns has been more psychographic than demographic. People come together not because they're necessarily next to each other, but because they love to do some of the same things. You mentioned the pool communities. Pool communities are a good example where

080if you live in a community, you can be part of the pool, but also people come in from other areas of town and they create a very tight bond. Um, we are a a town with a high density of populations of children in some areas and a lot of areas without children as well. And some of those are not evenly spread around our town. And I think the churn real estate in Actton is low, which means that the areas that at one point have dozens of kids now are full of empty nesters. and I live in that neighborhood now. Um, and it's just another it's another point of ambiguity in that if we are setting some of these things now based on where people are living now and based on what is recognized soft definition

081of a community now which is a neighborhood. Um, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot later and I think it's important to just recognize that uh distinction. The other part is around future trends. Can I sorry just to clarify then are you saying dep prioritize recognized neighborhoods? >> I'm not I'm saying clarify I am I am not prioritizing these things. I'm trying to get additional context. >> No totally. And so in that case I can't clarify it any more than geography. Right. And to your point the community's input on where they feel their localized neighborhood resides. And so beyond that, from a geographical boundary standpoint, I'm not going to be able to fix any of those. >> You mentioned the integrity of established communities and communities are kind of varied more so than just

082the geography piece and the ambiguity that sits in that is what I was talking to. >> No, totally. So, how would you recommend the account for that? >> Uh, this is why you're here. Um, I think truthfully, I think that you have to define that for me. I think I think that it's important for us to understand um the groups that exist and I think the heat maps that you showed earlier were a good way of being able to point that out. If you want to look at what communities and neighborhoods are, look at the heat maps that exist of the people who have chosen where to go now and you'll have a better understanding of what the neighborhoods are. That makes sense. And I I'm not getting into the the how the map is

083drawn or anything like that. I just saw that as a very interesting way of being able to talk to how people are choosing to be parts of the communities they're in. And I think that's an important part of who we are. >> That's helpful. Thank you. >> The other piece has to do Thanks. The other piece has to do with future trends. And during the last meeting, we had the chair of the Boxboro Select Board come up, who's also a realtor, who told us that one of the main drivers for people to move into this area were the schools and the idea of open open enrollment. And with that driver being taken away based on our choice to close these schools and to go with the geographic enrollment um the future trends from this point

084forward may be different than the future trends as laid out 6 weeks ago. With that in mind and also knowing the attrition that comes from changes like this and the way people move around, I would like to see how see what future trends we're actually building to and where we're looking beyond we know like what seven six multif family communities are being built right now. Beyond that, I think it'd be interesting to know what the future trends based on our current process should be and how we can balance to it. >> Got it. Thank you. I'm gonna work my way down this way. Adam, >> thanks. Um, two things came to mind, Nick. Um, the first I think is a a not easy one, but I think in the next iteration it would be really

085helpful to see in the scenarios what percentage of the kids are being displaced from their current school building. Um, I think >> I'll be able to talk about that today. >> Awesome. Thank you. Um, and then I think the other one is, um, you know, I recognize that everything that you're doing is in service of us making a decision. Um, but I'd also recognize that we are not the expert than experts in this and that we probably need some um, some more choices and guidance along the way. And the one that's coming to mind right now is the concept of flex zones. Um, I think we've agreed that that it's not well defined. um and that it's something that we need to define, but I also recognize I have no idea what best practice, what

086common practice, what options are for flex zones. So maybe something that can help us better define that for you is to give us some options in the future. What are what are different definitions of flex zones? What have you seen so that we can help narrow that down? As we start to draw them, we'll then understand what they mean. Yeah, I think and I'm just going to pause right here, just go to the next slide and but I'm not going too far away. Um, so part of it was really acknowledging uh the challenge that flex zones pose. Um, and so really in terms of thinking about keep flex zone areas geographically small and assign a specific default homechool to every address within the zone to provide predictability for families, right? That was feedback that we

087received via the survey. Uh and one that I truthfully respect and I would go for uh right because at the end of the day uh parents and community members don't like ambiguity. Um and so at least minimizing the ambiguity would be kind of key. To that point I feel like flex zone should not be an integral part of the scenario but merely layered on top of the scenario. So here you can see I made a note which basically says this should come after you make the scenario. I can layer any type of flex zone on top and we can talk about the nuance of it but in my mind the flex zone cannot be the integral component of making a scenario work because then by its definition it is not a good scenario because we

088are making it work in hopes that in the future it'll work itself out. So again that is my there you are that is my recommendation on how I would sort of handle this. Um but I would encourage you know the feedback from you all to say if you agree with us or not but I will try to provide more options as we start to talk about different scenarios in regards to how to handle that. to add on to what you were saying, Adam. I think we do need to define what it is and we think need to figure out a governance around it and we need to figure out how people get in, get out, manage, deal with, complain, appeal, work within that space. Because if we're in a position of being able to say

089that your home this year is one thing and two years from now is another thing, we have to have a way of being able to react to it. And we haven't gone through that process yet. When you say we well district >> okay we'll save that for one more right in policy okay working my way down this direction no okay >> um so you know I I have to say I'm really disappointed that now all Boxware students will just simply go to Blanchard and there doesn't seem to be a lot of you know a room uh for that um uh what was I going to today. Uh oh, regarding uh walk zones, a point I wanted to to mention here is that we're sort of nobody has actually talked about the the physical aspect of

090walk zones. Um we have every year been cutting back on recess for children. So they're getting less and less and less and less and less and less exercise. In fact, one of the reasons I joined the uh the school committee, I I represent Boxboro, by the way, was actually to fight on behalf of increasing recess because numerous studies have shown that more Reese is actually better for children in the long run. Um but so aside from that, I think one of the reasons to prioritize walk zones is to sort of increase the amount of exercise that children will get during the course of the day because generally they really don't get much at all. So, one last thought and then we'll let you continue because we're not done with the presentation yet. Um, in addition

091to how much change, which I'm looking forward to seeing that, um, my other curiosity about whatever scenarios you put forth are where are students coming from? So, what what are their existing schools as they move into these new campuses? Um, and kind of looking at, you know, what that grade level mix looks like. Um, you know, obviously not a tonight thing, but >> c can I talk to that real quick? Sure. >> I would not recommend doing that >> because and we'll get to the slides here in a minute. I can show you that and that's going to cause a lot of consternation and I literally have no agency in which to fix that problem. The distribution of students across the Actton and Boxboro area from all the schools, as we'll see in a minute,

092is fairly uniform. And so if you are endeavoring to say well the current mix of students existing students is slightly sway uh skewed in one direction over the other you then are going to basically say redraw the boundaries to try to encompass what you think is a density from that one particular school in this one particular year at this one particular time and that is I would say a Pandora's box we do not want to open. >> Okay. Not actually the problem I was trying to solve. Um I'm just curious if we have um situations in as so if we end up with a number of scenarios and maybe we're looking at a tiebreaker between two of them and we notice that one creates a group of better balanced cohorts um because one of the

093things that I'm hearing our administration wants to be able to do is help ensure that our students have got some familiar faces and if we have one that does that better than the other and so maybe this is a tiebreaker thing >> maybe okay that is something I would want to know I can I can get behind that so that's fine. Go ahead. >> So, I wanted to ask if now all the all the children are now in Boxboro going to go to Blanchard, how does it affect the the money that we were paying? Does that change that at all? Are we no longer going to be paying money or that that doesn't change per student cost? >> So, they're all still members of the Acton Boxboro Regional School District, right? I'm confused. What's the

094question? >> So, I I I don't know. I think I was under the misguided impression that if you were a Boxer resident sending a child to an active school then there would money that Boxer had to pay. No. So it's just the number of students who attend Blanchard necessary have to that's the out for the to pay overall to the it's the total number of students from Actton K through 12 and the total number of students from Boxboro K through PK through 12 including or not including I don't remember out of district students. It's the total number of students from both towns. is how that >> is is how we then calculate the assessments to the two towns and it's a rolling average over three years. >> So there's a per student if you ask

095students in boxer it's per >> regardless of the building that they're seated in. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Okay. Let's keep going Nick. >> All right. Excellent. Thank you. >> Did you make changes to the presentation since you sent it to me the other day? >> Uh I added a slide at the very end. >> You're looking at the PDF. >> Okay. It's not the biggest deal. It was just a timeline. All right, Lisa, go. >> Sorry. Really sorry. One last thing. So, I definitely understand what you're saying about the flex zones and not to harp on the same thing and I don't want to bring this up again, but it seems like there are some questions. Um, not that I would be a deciding factor for the scenarios, but I I do feel like

096it would be somewhat helpful to get a better idea of how they're formed or like what they could look like just to give an understanding, especially as people are asking, well, what does this mean? Or, you know, how big could it be or how small could it be for a given scenario? >> Flex zone. >> Huh? >> For the flex zones. >> Yes. >> Yeah. I just I think it's just helpful to get an idea of, you know, for a given scenario, would this flex zone need to be wider? Would it need to be smaller? Just I just I think those things would just be helpful. But I do respect and understand what you're saying and I appreciate the expertise. >> No, and I appreciate that. And I think like I I'll just say it

097one more time just to make sure it it's kind of clear. The scenario needs to stand on its own without a flex zone. And and so we can c certainly talk for a given scenario that we find let's say interesting or intriguing. We can say okay well maybe we layer on a flex zone over here to to the interesting point about uh the actin blancher that's a really unique aspect to understand how it could future affect um different scenarios but like I think I feel very passionately the scenarios themselves need to exist without a flex zone. >> Okay. I respect that passion. >> Thank you. All right. So, in terms of thinking about drafting the scenario objectives, right, in encompassing all of this, what we're trying to do is prior prioritize stability. We will be

098adding on the um percentage of students who have to move from a particular building. Uh we will start to emphasize that and I'll talk to that as we go through the scenarios today. Uh we want to create representative classrooms kind of what you all have indicated that is a very important piece of this puzzle. We want to keep cohesive communities. I think this gets to Andrew your point where it's maybe not necessarily geographical boundaries but this idea of what that community represents and looks like and then safe and accessible routes uh to schools. So to help um I would say provide context to the scenarios we uh created this factor uh set of slides which is really just information about actin and boxboro what we know to be true. So I'll quickly go through this

099in terms of just all of the various things that are sort of playing into how or what we can do when we're thinking about scenarios and uh thinking about trying to achieve these various decision points. So first and foremost your overall enrollment from K to 6 um has been declining over the past uh now 10 years. It's been about an 8% uh decrease. And so in many ways and I had mentioned this during the last school community meeting uh in a way this is good. um you know we are going to be at a fairly high utilization rate across the schools and so any breathing room and and this kind of gets to and maybe kind of going back to Lisa your point if you were in an increasing enrollment scenario and we foresaw that

100you are going to the very next year probably hit a max at one of your schools then flex zones probably would need to be an integral component as of right now given where we are I suspect we can live without them uh but ultimately that will be a particular sort of design aspect in terms of population changes. Uh Andrew again I think this gets to your point. What we know to be true at this moment in time is that here are the various areas across uh Actton and Boxboro that we have seen an increase in overall enrollment and where that growth is coming from and ultimately where the declines are uh also coming from. So, for those that can maybe on the screen can't really read it, the blues and the dark blues are where

101you're seeing a decrease in enrollment. And then the beige and the light colors are where you're seeing the increase in enrollment. So, this is going to play out, excuse me, when it comes to the scenarios, but you can imagine a world where we want to be very careful not grouping all of the growth sectors together and all of the declining sectors together unless again we take into account the flex zones, which again, that's just a bad design. And I think if we sort of do that in that respect terms of new developments, uh there are a set of new developments that are on uh the books in here under the table. You can see if it's basically under construction uh or if it's been approved or if the approval is in the pipeline. We did

102uh coordinate with NZDC uh that is the nonprofit organization that you all utilize in which to uh do your enrollment projections. they had done a lot of great work in terms of projecting out what uh the yield uh would be at these different uh facilities and you can see off on the right hand side their overall projection um is fairly minimal. Um, again, we don't have a lot of room to work with at a lot of these schools, but um, a total of about 30 to 40 kids, generally speaking, is is well within our ability to uh, manage as they start to grow and, uh, increase population. Students with disabilities, um, overall, again, this is just from a context standpoint, SWD enrollment has decreased over the past eight years, surprisingly, uh, at about about 13%.

103More importantly, it has seen that they are very consistent uh across the schools. And so again, as we look to answer the question around student demographics and what that looks like across the campuses, part of this is understanding what does the uh individual school percentage look like in comparison to the district, right? The overall average district is what's going to be our sort of benchmark in which to understand generally speaking are we within that like uh that limit of variation or do we want to essentially work harder to try to reduce uh that variation. Um we'll have a couple of these types of maps. This is a density map and it really just helps indicate where uh student populations of a particular type are around Actton and Boxboro. It's important to know we can't show

104you individual dots obviously because that's a little bit of a furer violation. So really what we're trying to show here is just generally speaking there in the northern side you're going to see that band is going to come into play a little bit. But overall generally speaking the SWB population as you would expect is pretty much uh distributed evenly across uh the Actton Boxboro area or at least even enough in terms of what we're trying to accomplish in terms of limited English proficiency. uh this is a significant uh changing population within your district. You are seeing um an increase of about 64% over the past 8 years and within each school a you see a fairly or rather a more significant variation across schools and you're seeing that there are schools are increasing in terms

105of the percentage of limited English proficiency. A couple points uh to note especially when we get to the scenarios and the statistics right generally speaking uh limited English proficiency has a couple different levels. uh it's called WEDA uh I believe and usually it's 1 to four. Um usually what we see is the higher percentage of LEP or limited English proficiency is at the lower grade levels cuz as they live here longer and as they get accustomed and and they get their required uh supports um they start to basically phase out of uh being uh limited English proficient and so the overall percentage drops as you move on in years. So when we start to look at the difference between the lower and the upper schools, you're going to see a fairly significant difference. And I

106don't want to say that's by design, but that's the natural sort of evolution of a child's sort of journey through this. And so that's something to uh take into account. Um it was also requested by one of the school committee members to sort of do an analysis on how what level of need uh will take place at lower and upper. Right now we only have a binary are they leap or not. We are getting further information around that WEDA level to be providing a little bit more clarity in regards to what that looks like. Low income um generally speaking on average you have 17% of your students who are low income. On the right hand side we uh had identified zoning areas and those are sort of zoning areas defined by the town planning and

107zoning department. And generally speaking you see the majority of your uh lowincome families living in multif family developments. um that's both from 50% of the individuals living in multif family developments uh are low-income and 50% of the lowincome population within the district is uh living in multif family developments. So um that's sort of just a helpful sort of idea on uh where folks live when we think about it in the context of that density map. here you're starting to see a more significant uh higher levels of density of both the LEP and the um low-income community uh along that sort of uh northwest to southeast corridor. Um again that's where a lot of the multif family housing units are. As I just mentioned you know 50% of the population sort of lives in those areas.

108This does uh create a geographical challenge um both in the context of making sure that that is evenly distributed across the schools and as was indicated by Andrew you know thinking about in the context of keeping some of those neighborhoods together. School proximity. This ties in with the walk zones. And so what we want to sort of provide is the black outlines around the schools are a onemile walk zone um that can uh be established uh to or at least helps folks understand where kids uh or families may feel that their community is or where their neighborhood is in relation to that closest school. So what we did was identify the walk zones for both the lower and the upper. Uh typically your upper grades have a little bit of a longer um uh they

109have a longer walk zone, but as I say that that's not the case here. It's because I believe boardwalk uh has two distinct um entrances uh the north and the south. And so that's where you're seeing the different uh layers depending on which door you're going to go into. That was some great feedback that we had gotten in the survey. Um the overlapping green is basically that zone where they could technically be in a walk zone to uh the boardwalk campus or the Parker Damon campus. Uh back to the student distribution question. Um so this is really helping understand where are your students um essentially currently residing based on their current school as of this year. And so obviously with Blanchard you can see the majority of your students are uh living in the Boxboro

110area. For the remaining schools um there is a fairly high density um or rather I should say an even density around uh the entire uh Actton area. And so that's where I just wanted to really emphasize being able to sort of I think adjust accordingly is going to be the trick because of the fact that we do see that kind of even distribution across the board. So that gets us to the scenario development. Um so a couple things preliminary data snapshot. Uh the scenarios are strictly modeled on the SY 2526 student residency. Um right now we haven't taken into account uh the individuals who um are special educa or students with disabilities who are currently going to the connections or the pathways program. It's about anywhere between 30 and 60 individuals. um we're strictly just

111looking geographically on okay where do uh students live as we move towards further uh iterations we will be pulling those kids explicitly to measure the capacity of our current year uh to see how that can kind of play out um I do want to really emphasize these are drafts these are not final decisions I think a lot of uh folks kind of latched themselves on to some of the initial scenarios and that is not the case especially given some of the feedback I've heard tonight um and so really this is meant to help test different trait trade-offs help make people uh like Lisa who's not here at the moment um really under you know appreciate some of the decisions that we're trying to make and really getting that iterative process going so that we can

112in incorporate and build upon a lot of our lessons learned. So jumping into it really quickly, I've tried to set up the slides so that um it gives you a quick sense. There's the quick snapshot of what you need to know. There's the deeper dive around the decision points and then there's some ancillary information um specifically around statistics and uh basically student populations. I do want to emphasize I apologize there's a lot of information on this. So I'm trying to put it in such a way that is either easily accessible, easily consumable. Um, and so I do try to minimize that, but at the end of the day, I think a lot of people do, you know, I respect the fact that you have a lot of engaged community members and so I know a

113lot of people want to get as much data as they can. So for scenario one, uh, we kind of again put the quick description up there. You can see the way I've been thinking about this. This is sort of uh, taking Acton and Divi uh, dividing it on an east west basis. So you have the south at uh, Boardwalk and then Parker Damon is basically encompassing the north. I do want to apologize. I did get feedback. I will going forward use all Parker Damon uh sort of notifications and not just Parker. Uh but for the time being, we only got that today, so we couldn't update uh the presentation, but Parker Damon it is. So considerations here on the lefth hand side, what I'm trying to do is quickly sum up for you um all

114of the wonderful information that follows. Um and so really zones uh entirety of Boxboro to Blanchard that is a common trend. uh Blanchard utilization at 86% whereas the other campuses are at 96 to 99 or 100% depending on how you round. Um does not this does not factor in the onem walk zone. So I do want to emphasize around Parker Damon you can see the whole southern portion of Parker Damon is basically uh allocated to boardwalk. Um leap [clears throat] population in actin is skewed more towards the Parker Damon uh campuses and the racial and ethnic distribution is better than baseline but not ideal. Um so that is sort of the quick this is sort of where we are. What I tried to do here is take uh verbatim the decision points that we had

115identified uh provide context and color code them for your enjoyment. So green means I we think we pretty much nailed it. Yellow is could be argued but we're moving in that direction and red is basically I don't think we did a great job. So in this case, uh cohort continuity, yes. School capacity, yes. Generally, um hometown guarantee, uh we achieved it for Boxboro. So you're going to see this hometown guarantee is yellow all the time because we're moving acting kids to uh Blanchard. Future enrollment trends, the high growth areas are all located in boardwalk. So this gets to my point of doing an east west sort of boundary split. I don't think accounts for or accounts for what we know to be true when it comes to the uh current enrollment changes. uh the recognized

116neighborhoods. You will notice I left this blank. Um I am not going to assume that the neighborhoods exist until we get feedback around specific scenarios, especially using the interactive map. Um for now, we are using our best ability. The way uh Katie, my colleague, does it is she will either use natural boundaries. It could be anything from uh parks or whatever the case may be to major thorough affairs or literally looking at a geographical map on the location of housing and students and trying to sort of say okay there seems to be a group of you know houses clustered here together and so in of itself that could be um a neighborhood in terms of uh the balanced student demographics. There is high variation across the low lower schools. Um, and so this is key,

117right? Uh, and one great piece of feedback that we got that we will incorporate going forward, we included Blanchard as a K6. And as you'll notice with the lowers and uppers, there's significant variation specifically with the LEP. Um, and so in many instances, I'm not necessarily looking at the lower versus the uppers. I'm looking at the lower compared to the other lower as the variation that we want. Um, so that is something that we're trying to take into account. The continuous zones, again, we did not use satellite boundaries. And then the walk zones were not maximized because we didn't actually use them on the right hand side. And I'm sorry uh I did this is one slight thing I did update but didn't get here is that um we I spelled out Parker Damon one

118but two um we also explicitly pointed out this was a good piece of feedback I had gotten from the community member. Um the cohort continuity the consistent boundaries I don't think did enough justice to establish the fact that the lowers and the uppers have the exact same boundary. So going forward we'll make sure that that is explicitly stated. So that's scenario one. Um again one of the things when we think about the actin uh group that needs to be moved to Blanchard. This is one of the reasons why one of the biggest complaints I had heard which I think was right was that Blanchard was at 86% utilization. I'm going to go back to here 86% utilization and the rest were at upper 96 to 99%. And that was again around this conversation of hometown

119guarantee. I think it's safe to say going forward um we are going to we try to minimize the amount of acting kids that could be moved and trying not to sort of I think rock the boat too much now that we're hearing that yes uh we'd I think prefer utilization over uh minimizing the number of Actton kids going to Blanchard uh we will redo a lot of the scenarios to sort of take that into account um that means we're going to have to either expand this region uh of Actton create another region or do a satellite boundary um that remains needs to be seen at this moment in time. The walk zones, as you can see, like I indicated, um most of the walk zones uh for boardwalk we accounted for, but we didn't in

120Parker. So, I just basically summed up that walk zones are not a priority. And I use walk zones as the proxy for uh do you live within the neighborhood closest to your school and are we sending you to that school? All right, I'm not going to belleaguer allow anybody to kind of go through this especially considering that we are going to be revamping these scenarios. But here we will always provide you with statistics around the capacity around your percentage of low-income leap and special education as well as the racial breakdown so you can get a sense of how it compares with the baseline versus each scenario. So you can see how it balances. Like I had indicated before your boardwalk lower for LEP is at 10%, your Parker lower is at 24%. Uh I do

121feel like that is uh unacceptable and so that um is something we're going to improve. Part of this I should have mentioned as well, right? I normally would not normally show this if it had that big of a variation, but this is a starter sort of scenario. So to get people understanding what we're trying to accomplish and I think it's also important sometimes to show you a scenario that I think people naturally would be inclined to sort of support and sort of indicate where we're running into some of the challenges. One of the other things uh that we also try to do is provide you with historical enrollment. This kind of gets you the idea of trends uh not only in the context of how enrollment has changed before but in the context of what

122would be. So what you're seeing here are trends in the enrollment based on what would have been if scenario one had been utilized. So again more context for you all. So that's it. A lot of information. I know I blew through that. I would encourage everybody to take some time to kind of look through it. Same thing with the community as well. Um but I'm happy to kind of go in to more detail but for the sake of time I'm just going to press to the second scenario. Second scenario was to sort of introduce the idea of okay let's say we wanted to try to increase that again community around Parker Damon and around boardwalk. Uh to do that but keep the east west running boundary we'd have to start to utilize satellite boundaries. There

123is benefits to this um in regards to the idea that you are now increasing the diversity because we knew there's a lot more diversity in that uh sort of band running northwest southeast. And so this allows you to selectively pick out and move a certain set of uh students to uh boardwalk. Oops. So in this case, I'll kind of always really hip on this. Uh the core continuity green. Yes. School capacity. We're at 100% uh for one uh for Boardwalk upper. [sighs] I wouldn't want to bet my life that it's okay for the uppers to be high because there's going to be smaller enrollment following suit. But again, I do not want to go into a scenario with at 100% or 99% if we can avoid it. Um again, future enrollment trends uh red uh

124recognized neighborhoods obviously um we didn't really want to touch at the moment. Balanced student demographics does a little bit better job. Continuous zones we didn't obviously because we did satellite boundaries. And then walk zones, we do have a onem walk zones that are generally accounted for. Again, your statistics if you're interested. Again, uh the historical enrollment. And so again here you can see how the walk zones are now better accounted for uh in both uh cases of boardwalk and um in regards to Parker Damon there is that sort of and as we move towards a better more finalized enrollment and one of the reasons why we didn't want to share uh the interactive web app now is people would want to zoom in along those boundaries. Those are rough cut boundaries. uh you can imagine

125a world where we will go in by hand and make sure that we are accounting for the walk zones. So it'll be a much more refined uh boundary as we move forward if we feel good about the scenario. Finally, scenario three, we want to switch it up. So instead of going east west, we want to run north south. Uh this actually does, I think, a better job of accounting for the distribution of students on that northwest southeast corridor. And so it splits up that corridor in regards to ensuring that there is a more diverse set of pop student population going to Parker Damon and in terms of boardwalk. So in this case uh Blanchard in all cases have been at 86%. We do see again that high utilization from 96 to 99. Um it does

126truncate some of Parker's walk zones. Um given some of the conversations I think there's some easy ways to alleviate that. The LAP and low-income population in Actton are more balanced. So this is really where I think we are leaning towards in terms of thinking critically about how we can again balance that student demographics and I'll just sort of reiterate you all sort of emphasize that as an important point that we're going to really try to lean in on a little bit. The racial ethnic distribution is better than the baseline which is what we're striving for. So here you can see there's not so much red as there is just a lot of yellows, right? And here's where the trade-offs really start to kick in where we're trying to uh make the best of all worlds

127in regards to accounting for uh the future enrollment trends. That was one of the things too where we are now dividing up where some of those uh highlevel enrollment areas or increasing enrollment areas were. So that was a plus. Um we balanced the student demographics better. Uh there were no satellite boundaries but we can still do that if we wanted to. Um and then the walk zones are generally accounted for. Again, the statistics you can kind of play around with. Um, there is a this in this case, the leap population is still not as good as we would want it to be. It's between 20 and 14%. Um, but we're sort of moving, I think, in a more positive direction. But I think if I'm not mistaken, the satellite uh scenario was the one that

128sort of achieved a better uh level in that regard. You have your historical enrollment and then uh sort of the walk zones that play out as well. So, uh, very fast and furious. I apologize, but again, these are iterative. Uh they I promise these will all change by the next time you see me in one week's time. And so, uh would love to just take a moment. I know we're we're pressing on in time. Um any sort of feedback around or things that took you like you either liked, didn't like, or would like to see more of. Uh I would love to hear that. >> All right, I'll start. We'll work around this way. >> Ah. Um so uh my my first question really is um we're talking about looking at high growth areas at

129the same time we're talking about declining enrollment. These two things things seem antithetical. Um I do like uh three and I think based on lower enrollment um you know I I don't know I I guess we'll have to get feedback from community on these but that that's really my comment. How do the how do you sort of you know we're looking at high growth areas but also declining enrollment. How do you how do you >> Yeah, your city's always in flux, right? So even though let me go back to so even though you have so certain areas are growing. It could be multif family housing. It could be as was mentioned before a turnover in various neighborhoods, right? Some neighborhoods age out, new families are moving in, whatever the case may be. So those areas

130are just showing an increase in uh enrollment whereas other areas people are moving out. Right? So it's in in net average you're decreasing but in certain areas you're increasing. Does >> that make sense? >> To summarize you're saying we're seeing growth in the areas in more families but you're saying a net decline overall over time. >> Correct. There's more blue than uh beige but the beige still is significant if you group them all together. >> Great. Thank you. Um, in looking at scenario 2, it gives me kind of thoughts of the METCO program in greater Boston where you have satellite communities being bust out of Boston into wealthier suburbs. I get kind of hints of that through this scenario here because as you can see uh under the boardwalk campus there you have a you

131know a subsection of individuals or or residents within our town within Actton that according to your heat map are part of the lowincome uh neighborhood. Could you go into more detail about that and um just more detail concerning how you came up with those particular areas especially whereas in some of the other community or in the other community Boxboro you also have some low-income housing and why they're not being represented uh either in the Parker Damon or the Boardwalk campus. >> Yeah, excellent question. Uh trade-offs trade-offs trade-offs. Um, so let's walk on the idea. So if we go from scenario one to scenario two, right, you'll notice that the walk zone around Parker Damon has increased. So by increasing the Parker Damon boundary, there has to be a population that gets redirected to uh Boardwalk.

132So to your point, we could either go west and grab it from Box uh Boxboro, but we've established that Boxboro students have priority to go to Blanchard. So that's one of the reasons why we ignore, you know, didn't didn't do that. Then in terms of thinking about um this may work. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of thinking about you know the boundary layer here we're kind of creating a boundary for a walk zone in terms of Parker. So that means from a contiguous standpoint we could expand up to here or we could expand up to this way. This could work uh expanding it up if we wanted to keep contiguous. But I guess to the point of your you're making in the Boston context, I would say yes, but the school the kids in the

133Boston uh situation are getting shipped out of their entire neighborhood to go to a school that's not even remotely close to where they are. You're literally sending kids 1.2 miles to the west to a school, right? So I mean, yes, technically, I mean, there's a world where you could make this whole north section boardwalk and the whole south section Parker. So if if that is the case where I could flip the colors and be like, "Yep, that you're just switching the boundaries." I'm less inclined to believe that you're disrupting a student's uh experience uh by just simply going to boardwalk. A and given the context that in the current situation you have kids all over the place going to these two schools. So um I respect that fact and I would be want cognizant of

134it, but I also think you're all a very different situation in which that could be the case. But it it is a valid point, right? I mean, that's why we do have to kind of get to the sense of like our satellites kind of where we are want to go. There could be there could be a world you could run this whole section up and could make it blue, green, blue, green, blue, green. I mean, I think that would get really complicated and confusing. I don't think you would want to do that. But, you know, if you wanted to sort of increase the idea that like no, we want to make sure that we aren't just picking on, you know, one group of people. One additional thing too, you might be asking like why just

135that random, you know, little square. Given the complexity of how tight we are on utilization, we have to find the right sized uh multif family housing unit. So you have a various levels of multif family housing units of all differing shapes and sizes. And so really it comes down to I need 45 people and that one has 46 people. Great. Uh and we can try that. And hey, it's even extra that the student demographics even balance out. So, does that all kind of make sense? And that's sort of the key piece here, right? You squeeze the balloon, it's going to increase in one direction, decrease in another direction. You got to kind of try to account for all those. >> Yes. >> Um I I think the the one thing I want to counterplay to

136Ben's comment on on netco is the goal here for us is to have three excellent schools that are all the same. So regardless of what school you go to, you're going to an excellent act in Boxboro school. Um, so that that's the comment there. Um, I think that um, seeing the seeing sort of the split in the heat maps and the demographics, I would be more inclined to have a larger non-ontiguous zone, not a flex zone, but a larger non-ontiguous contiguous area if it allows us to reach some of those other things that we're looking at, which is balance and future proof. Um, I I might I I I would love to. So to put it in a way, you wouldn't mind if Actton looked like a checkerboard. I I I don't think checkerboard, but

137I think, you know, if that green spot up there grew in some direction and the green spot at the bottom shrunk in some direction in service of future proofing and balance of demographics, >> and and in fact, I think it feels really weird for it to be a tiny little green pimple as opposed to a larger other piece of anatomy that I don't want to get into >> that works. Um, so I think the the other uh point of clarification that I a quick point of clarification is these scenarios did not take into account the future growth. Is that correct? You were looking at today's student counts. >> I'm I'm taking into today's student counts, but it really actually does start to take into account the future growth uh in in doing so in regards

138to like this scenario two. a lot of the future grow or the the increased growth areas is in uh boardwalk which is problematic. >> Uh and then my last question is just um sort of a point of clarification particularly as you move into the next set of scenarios if I think I understood you right today you're taking just all the students from where they live and you've not considered those students who are in specialized programs that are in specific buildings. So I would love um as you do that to get some clarification in the next round um that talks about um have you reduced the available space in a building that has a specialized program? So you know if you've got 60 kids in in connections and pathways at the boardwalk campus are you reducing

139that um for the balance of kids? Are you pulling basically the kids out of the calculation and the space that they use when you're calculating utilization? Um or because because they don't live in a geographic zone, right? They they don't have that choice. Um but and then secondly, when you go to your table of stats where you're sort of listing out the percent of students with special needs, um are you going to include those specialized programs in those buildings which may inadvertently raise say Boardwalk campuses um percentage of students with with disabilities because there's a specialized program there um that's housing now 60 kids. Whereas if you split them out evenly, you'd have an even distribution of special ed um students in in the buildings. Do you follow what I'm saying? >> Uh I'm I'm

140picking up what you're putting down. Um so yes, uh part of this is the balancing act of knowing when to start to move to that explicit uh analysis because at the end of the day, next year, the year after, those special education youth will age out eventually and then yeah, then it the kids could come from anywhere. So we kind of want to thread the needle. What you're getting at, which I think is right, is there is a suggestion that Boardwalk should probably if if there's anybody that's lower on utilization, it probably should be Boardwalk. Um maybe at the 93 or 2%age and then everybody's up at the 95. Now that we can start to leverage Blanchard a little bit more, I think that'll open it up. So, I don't think we'll be as tight

141and be concerned, but to your point, that is something we're going to account for in the next round. >> Excellent. Yeah. I just I I I think clarity in how that's presented in the stats for the next round would be really helpful. >> Super helpful. Thanks. Um, a thing on on capacity is as Adam was saying, Boardwalk also has different sized classrooms um in different parts of the building which will have different capacity areas. So, not only are you looking at the difference between the kids that are are in special programs as well, you have different um spaces that are available inside that sized bas. We took in that's how we calculated capacity was based on the sections identified by grade and the uh maximum you know the ideal uh really the maximum number of

142students that could realistically fit within that uh classroom. >> Each room is a different size >> by grade and so the way I would imagine the way the principles are organizing it is those classrooms are you know organized and utilized. >> Depends on how it's managed. If it's upper school physically upper and physically lower then there's half of each school that is made for younger kids and half of each school that's made for bigger kids. But that's not the point I wanted to talk to. When you showed the um overlays of the various various populations, um there was this path and I think it's great road. I'm not I'm not sure. That is where all of the and you had the little pocket there. This those leap and the low-income folks. And this is of

143course the first time because we're not going with a a choiced enrollment, but we're going with a locationbased. Um I had someone who is a social worker in town come talk to me. And this person uh who who also is part of a family that owns a bunch of property like one of the wealthiest families in town. This person's a social worker has a child in one of the schools. Their child is friends with someone who's also um is a student classmate with someone who's also one of the social workers clients unbeknownst to the kids. They don't know. They don't they don't care. They're in the same class together. They're friends together. and um because they don't recognize necessarily the difference in their situations doesn't matter to them. We're now in a position where we've

144identified a area of town that happens to be where the multi- family places are, happens to be where the rental places are. And on the one hand, I think it's number three, groups a lot of that together on on either side of of um of Route Two. Either side of Route Two, which is where a lot of the the places sit. Uh you'll see it. Yeah. Along along that area, you have a lot of the rental properties in town. Um with regard to my friend, and the reason she brought it up to me, I said, "Geez, sorry." um was that oftentimes the assistance that these people get from the state to be able to provide for their families to have their homes is not always as much as it needs to be for where they're

145renting. And when that changes, they have to find a new place to live. And when they have to find a new place to live, they have to move. In town, as up to now, it's been fine because if they move, they could stay where they are. But with what we're talking about, especially as you say there's a 45 person block you're trying to keep an eye on. if they move out of that because they literally can't afford to be there anymore, it's upheaval for their children and upheaval for their family and upheaval for everything. And it also mixes up what we're trying to do here with our uh our thing. So, I would be very wary of how you're looking to maximize diversity specifically around socioeconomic means because I think that there's a wider range

146and more nuance that this town has than others do because of the history of this town being open enrollment. I also think that if you look at the um the the slide that you had of the maps that showed where enrollment was dropping with the blue and the tan, the blue areas are where people have aged out of the schools. The houses are more expensive. And if there's churn in this, those blue areas will become the areas people will want to buy because people want to leave, which flips over what the assumption is for how we're looking at things now. And when I talk about the need for understanding future trends, I think this is a big piece of it because we can set something now with the utilization rates as they are and whatever,

147but as soon as people start moving and people start moving in, it's going to flip over and it's going to be dangerous for the decisions that we're making. >> Well, I'll even more complexity to your point. Uh, fertility rates are dropping in Massachusetts and so that may happen. Um, you also have, I would say, high priced areas of houses where young families are not going to move in. Um, so we have to take into account all of that. I I would agree. That's one of the reasons why I do kind of like the north south running boundaries because you can kind of see it tries to split it downwards and you have a little bit of both on either side and you can kind of account for it. You're bringing up some great points too

148because at the end of the day I think if overall enrollment's going down for usually and and we're seeing this across many states, right? um the incoming K12 3 classes are decreasing and so ultimately at the end of the day I think what we're trying to grapple with is overall lower enrollments but then taking into account how your because I've heard this conversation too before that there are going to be new families coming in and the cycle of uh sort of older folks moving out that will happen in the next 5 10 15 20 years um and so I'm not saying we have time, but if your overall enrollment is going down and the cycle is going to shift over, um that's not going to be an immediate, I would say, 5-year concern. I do

149agree in 10 years it could be a concern. And so thinking about that in the context of how we're cutting up the uh boundaries is going to be key. >> Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see if there's more churn and the cause for more churn in the real estate market here in town. Um, I know that, you know, as I mentioned earlier, a draw is the way that the schools are set up. We're creating boundaries that are going to define real estate boundaries. And one of the other issues that I'm concerned about is the reinforcement of um specific, you know, let's say socio economic diversity inside these two schools. >> Absolutely. I think that's one of the reasons why we need to sort of really be thoughtful in how we cut

150it up. I mean, I I hear a lot of concern about, well, people are just going to move out. they're moving out of the fire into the frying pan or a frying pan in the fire. Most other districts in Massachusetts are exactly like this and you all have actually the opportunity to set it right. Um given that you actually have many schools that are high performing and so um at the end of the day I hear you completely. Um I think done right you will be able to mitigate that risk. Here's hoping >> Glenn. couple of clarifying questions and then um I I do think we should start considering wrapping this portion of the agenda up. Um I what I think um if we were to use more satellite more satellite chunks um not just

151in Actton but in Boxboro too. Would that and Blanchard's utilization went up to like 90 95%. In that scenario, could that potentially give us a more advantageous posture for demographic balance and future proofing? >> Yes. Okay. I would like to see that map then. >> Recognizing what you just asked for is going to blow the hometown priority thing out of the water. I would like to see that. >> So I I will say this, let's see if I can thread the needle on both. If I can use satellite boundaries without using Boxboro and achieve a nice demographic uh demographic balance, is that good enough? Or by just definition, you would like to see the inclusion of uh Boxboro. >> I want to see Boxboro, too. >> Okay. Before we ask Nick to do that, can

152I just get a thumbs up from everybody else on the committee who shares that >> to see it? No. Okay. >> Okay. So, we're not going to do that. Thanks. >> All right. I didn't make a motion. I just said it. So, >> and we're not voting on this, but also recognizing that we need to stay focused on what's viable. And what you just saw from the committee is most of us are not interested in looking at that >> satellite campuses for just act and then additional ones. It's not campuses, excuse me, satellite chunks. >> No. So, you said including Boxboro. And now since now since people said not Boxboro bro like okay instead of just one chunk in Actton. >> Oh no no I I'm I'm gonna do as Adam had sort of indicated

153not the checkerboard but I I'm going to try to be creative in terms of how we can think about um satellites. So to give you a a teaser if you will or a trailer um we're going to expand uh the Blanchard region which I think is going to open up some opportunities to be creative in terms of how Boardwalk expands northward. Um, and that can look like I think both. I'll give you one contiguous and one satellite uh sort of uh scenario. >> Okay. Because yeah, I want to whatever sets up be sets up this district best for demographic balance and future proofing. I want to see that maximized. >> I got you. >> Okay. So, I know there were more questions on this end. Let me just note right now it's 8:48. This is

154our first agenda item. >> Okay. Cool. Um Liz, I know you had a last thought you wanted to share. >> Yes. If we're done sort of like talking about this piece. Um I did hear a lot of feedback from the webinar uh that was hosted that there were a lot of people who wanted to attend it and couldn't. My question was if we have future webinars, is there a way to increase the capacity that we can have for viewership? >> Oh, did we hit the next? >> That was the >> am I confusing the two? Yeah, that was the first webinar and right after that we increased our capacity to a thousand. >> Excellent. >> So, we have been nowhere near that since. >> Great. >> Nick, did you get what you need from us?

155>> This has been fun. I love it. Uh, [laughter] >> no, I said this has been this has been immensely helpful. I thank you all for taking the time. Um, I did the map I did have was just the uh timeline that we had hit up before. So, just for everybody's awareness, um, tomorrow a scenario, uh, a survey will be coming out. Um, and, uh, given some of the feedback that I got, I'm probably going to ask some clarifying questions to the community. Uh, and so that will be open in the in the same time we're because folks are really good at filling out surveys and getting us information, which I love, and they're emailing us. We're going to start to reiterate on the three scenarios and start building that out for next week. This

156time, same place, same time. Uh, we'll be doing three more scenarios. So, uh, folks will have the opportunity to get the scenarios. We'll be reviewing them next Thursday, and then we're going to have a parent webinar on the 10th in which we will probably review those scenarios and probably an additional one as we continue to iterate. >> And you're also going to tell us um percentages of students. I'm sorry. I can answer that really quickly right now. Generally speaking, scenarios one and scenarios two um had Conan, do you count Conan in the calculation? >> Yes. Okay. Uh then you're talking about I have this written down because it was something we calculated 68% for scenario one and in terms of scenario uh I'm sorry scenario one and two had 68% students will be moving their

157buildings. Uh scenario 3 64%. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Can we have a map with that in it that shows the scenarios of change based on what we have currently as a constant just to get a better feel for how the students are moving? It's just the same data. I just need to put like >> visualization. A map would be great. A heat map like you have. >> But uh or some visualization a map would be ideal. >> I'm just trying to understand what that would look like. So it would be like this map and kids who are in who are have aren't going and kids who are are going kind of thing. >> I think it'd be interesting to see the delta between what we're doing now and what we would be doing in each

158of the scenarios based on you know where I guess where kids are going. I guess it already inherent to this. Yeah, forget it because this is this is where people are going. It's just a matter of change. >> Yeah, that's the quotient of change that I'm interested in. And you said percentage. I was just curious if we could see a way of visualizing it. But >> that if you can figure Yeah, I'll play around with something that can be done. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> And just realize so that does seem shockingly a lot and I was looking at the numbers too. Um when you think about it in the context of like your middle school, every single middle school kid or how did it work? it it I'll show that we have another way

159to kind of like display it as well which kind of was like oh that kind of makes sense for some some in instances so >> I gotcha happily do so thank you all very much for the time and uh and the feedback >> thanks Nick >> all right Peter you're up next All right. So, um, first, thank you, Nick. Much appreciated. Uh, what I wanted to do tonight, just to to set the stage, I recognize we can't get to everything in every single meeting. Um, and so what I'm going to try and give you are some different snapshots over time of some of how we're thinking about things. And I wanted to just take a little bit of time tonight and talk about some of the feedback we've received as we've started shifting from planning

160for change to now having to implement change. One of the first things we did was launch a survey and we just kept questions very simple to people. What are you most worried about? Um and kind of what are your major questions that you think we need to answer for the community? Um, and then what what ideas do you have or suggestions that you'd like us to think about? And so we wanted to keep the questions simple because we wanted to keep it subjective and allow people to give us their feedback about what they were thinking. In terms of doing the analysis of this, I actually wanted to remove myself as a lens from that. And so I actually went out to thought exchange and asked their researcher to put together an analysis for us. And

161as we get into this, you'll see that the the title of this is insights into action because they also gave us some ideas based on the feedback that they were seeing in the the data about action steps that we could take in order to help mitigate some of the questions, concerns, and ideas that people had. I will also point out that there's p points of tension within that because some of the actions that we could possibly take are actually already off the table. um you know, so for example, the idea of phasing enrollment, that was something that came off the table from the school committee in that vote. And so even though that might have been what was expressed in the survey at this point, it doesn't mean it's available to us. And so there

162were a couple points of tension along the way that I'll highlight. I'm going to try and be sensitive to time knowing that we're already a half hour behind schedule. Um, we had overall pretty good participation and what I've done is I've actually put both the staff and family surveys into one presentation deck so that you could see um we had you know about almost 500 responses from families um and 130 responses from staff. I will say I'm not necessarily as concerned about completion rate here because we intentionally made questions optional for people. And so in order to have completed the survey, that means people had to literally have responded to every single question we asked as opposed to choosing those questions that they wanted to respond to. This is a little small. It was hard

163to fit on the screen based on the the formatting here, but we had good representation that we thought was fair across all of the schools. Um and similarly across grade levels as well. So um relatively well balanced. Same thing um for staff pretty good balance across schools. Um and you can see representative here in general of the overall kind of demographic of our our staff. I will say about 50% of the responses came from elementary classroom teachers. Um so that certainly uh came out as a voice. There's also a high level of participation from our unified arts teachers or what we know as specials in this district. So, want to just talk about we asked people to kind of rank top choices and again I apologize because I know the the lettering on this is

164small and it's hard to read. Um are there's pretty good alignment between staff and families in terms of what their top priorities are. Um that they're most concerned about in reorganization. For families, it was student learning and academic quality, student belonging and well-being um and staffing and teacher retention. And then for our staff, it was student belonging, well-being, staffing, and teacher retention, and school identity and community. So, there's good alignment there. There are some differences, um, which is okay. Um, I think that's actually just an important piece of data for us to be thinking about as we continue to do our planning. I'm not going to spend time on this. You could could see this just shows kind of how different school communities thought of some of the different things. You can look at it

165in the packet. Um I do want to highlight some of this. So our emergent themes from families um the top kind of themes that came back to us were the sense of student belonging and well-being and how do we make sure that we maintain that and that was a top worry for our parents. Um the quality of the academic learning was another top worry. staffing and teacher retention. I mentioned those three, but the others that came out um similar to our staff, the idea of school identity and community and communication and transparency um and making sure that people were kept up to date with what was happening through the process. In terms of staff, you can see how the overlap worked. Student well-being, staffing and teacher retention, school community and identity, communication and transparency, and

166then for staff, logistics and support for transition was huge as well. Um that was really important that our staff felt supported through the entire process. So the next question, what were the the biggest worries? Um for staff and families, disruption to friendships, um impact on special education services, feeling that there's a rush timeline to implement this, loss of school cultures and identities, um and increasing class sizes for all. So I'm not going to get into mitigation strategies yet. I just want to note kind of what those top areas of concern were from a staff perspective. Staff reorganization and stability and the idea of staff having to move around around the district was was top of their mind. Um impact on students, job security and professional concerns for our staff through all of this. Um communication

167and building and collaboration um and how do we build these new communities and what does collaboration look like if they're on new teacher teams. Um, and then again, communication and transparency and wanting to make sure that we're keeping them up to date with what's happening. Questions that people wanted answered for families. How are we determining the geographic zones? How will the district ensure continuity of care and education for all students, especially those with special needs? Um, what will new schools look like in terms of philosophies and teaching styles? How will the district uh communicate and implement timelines and changes? and how will the district address the emotional and social impacts on students during the reorganization for staff? Um questions were what types of supports are we providing for educators? Again, communic what does our communication

168pattern and timeline look like? Um when will what will staff placement look like for them? Um classroom setup and resources, how are they going about that and what does that look like and the type of support we're going to provide? And then student teacher well-being was the other big question that they they had in terms of themes. So qu suggestions and ideas um making sure that we're communicating transparently and telling people what we're doing. Um keeping them up to date regularly trying to work to minimize disruption and you saw that in Nick's slides that different scenarios even in a geographic enrollment pattern have different impacts on the community. um thinking about how we involve stakeholders when we can in the decision-m process. Um phased implementation was something that came out as a suggestion and trying

169to extend the timeline for how we implemented something. Um and then making sure that we have adequate social emotional supports is another big theme. Terms of staff, same thing. timely communication, um, transparent communication, uh, making sure that we're planning thoughtfully around how we're going to build community and make sure that relationships stay intact for them. Um, staff and student supports during transition and making sure that those are adequate. And then, um, making sure that we're involving our staff and getting feedback from them along the way about different decision points, particularly what we heard is when something's going to impact them, they want to be able to provide feedback on it. Um, and then really thinking about pausing new initiatives. and we've talked a lot about in that in here but um this is going to

170be a significant change for everyone and I think um our ability to manage new initiatives is going to be limited um when we go into this process. So now how do we actually do something with this? And again this was something where I asked the researchers at thought exchange to use some of their professional knowledge to give us some ideas about what we might do to manage these. Some of them were actually doing um others are really good ideas that we can pursue and others actually came out as points of tension and I will try and highlight some of those for you as we go through. Um but for families preserving social connections. So, some of the ideas, we're surveying parents to identify key friendships and aim to keep friends together in new classes. That's

171something that we do have planned already um that we'll be doing um as we get through this process. Organizing summer meetups and orientation events for students to build familiarity. Um implement buddy systems in classrooms to support new students. In terms of transparent communication, regularly update families on progress in the reorganization progress, providing detailed information about geographic zones and school assignments um as soon as possible, and then hosting Q&A sessions uh to address community concerns and provide clarity terms of support for students with disabilities, ensuring continuity of special education staff and services during transitions that we've already committed to. That's something that is a one of the highest priorities for us in all of this. developing individualized transition plans for students with IEPs. Um that does happen um during the annual meetings. Um as we go

172through the second half of this year, uh we will certainly be talking with our families of students with disabilities about what the transition looks like for them. Um providing additional resources and support for students with disabilities during that transition as well. And that is also in the plans for the the school district. uh maintaining educational quality, standardizing teaching philosophies across new schools to maintain consistency. We've actually talked at length about how there's a difference in what our community perceives as differences in teaching and learning and what the reality is where there's actually extraordinarily high degree of consistency in terms of curriculum and instruction in all of our classrooms. You saw that when you were in the classrooms where we saw six of the exact same math lesson across five schools um on the same day.

173Um, so want to just reassure families that there actually is a high degree of standardization right now even though teachers approach it differently and I would re reiterate teachers actually approach it differently already even within the same school. So that's that's important. Um, retaining high-quality teachers and providing professional development opportunities that's incredibly important that we continue to do that. Um, monitor class sizes to ensure that they remain um, manageable for effective learning. That is a huge caution for us as we go into the future because um unless we can fund the district at that level, that is going to be the point of tension is being able to maintain reasonable class sizes because there's just not a lot of places to give in our school budget at this point. Um community building, organizing community building

174events such as open houses, social gatherings, that's going to be incredibly important to start to build these communities. Um, it's also going to be important as we think about the end of this year and we think about how schools might choose to close. Um, and I know our principles are already working on PTO's. Um, Jen Faber from central office um, is working with Heather Stout and taking the lead um, in brainstorming with principles different ideas about how to celebrate communities and think about the closure process. Um, encouraging PTO's um, to collaborate and share best practices across schools. That was a point of discussion. Um it's been a point of discussion for the last several years, but it's also something that's ongoing now. Um and developing initiatives that highlight the strengths and values um of each

175of the school communities as we move forward. Then in terms of staff, um communicate early and transparently about staff placements. Uh we actually just shared um a very detailed uh memo from Andrew. We spent a lot of time as a leadership team talking about the philosophy behind how we needed to place staff and what that meant. um including how we were using staff voice and their own preferences to help guide that transition process. So, we sent that to our staff as well as a detailed timeline of when they're going to hear that is even down to the specifics of each role because each role might be impacted differently. For example, we can place probably about 85% of our staff by the end of March, but our learning centers and multilingual educators until we know where

176the students are going and what the needs are going to be, we can't finalize those placements. So, we put all of that on a timeline for staff and we have communicated that out to people. Um thinking about how existing teams of staff can stay intact where that's possible providing support for staff transitioning to new roles. Certainly um impact on student relationships allowing students to stay with familiar teachers where feasible. Uh we actually have started a screening process with all of our counselors in our schools for you know trauma and secondary forms of trauma that they have already identified in students and who which students in our district are going to need specialized support and attention during the transition that we're about to make. So we're thinking at that student level as well. Um facilitating meet

177and greet events before the school year starts. That's consistent with some of the family ideas um that we've talked about. Implementing buddy systems for students during the transition. um unified arts teachers assignments. I'll talk about this and I'll share it and then I'll talk about some of the tensions we're experiencing around that, but developing schedules that allow our UN UA teachers to focus on specific grade bands. Um providing collaboration time for UA teachers to align curricula. Um and involving UA teachers in decision-m processes regarding schedules. Um I think one of the things that you saw in the participation rate, and I know I didn't spend a lot of time on it, was there a very very high level of participation from UA teachers. we did not get that same high level from all of our

178other departments. And so one of the things that we just want to be cautious about is when we hear a lot of feedback from one stakeholder group, it doesn't mean that there aren't others that aren't being represented and thought about. One of the tensions that we're trying to balance now is how do we make sure that we use the school structure that we're moving into to ensure that our students are getting we're actually expanding the number of students who can receive the different types of support services that the district needs to provide. That was one of the top priorities that we have all talked about in here and was loud and clear um as a priority in this next kind of strategic plan. And so that's something we're trying to think about. Um we're also

179trying to think about how do we preserve the opportunity for common planning time for educators across grade levels. Um we're also trying to think about how we make sure that we're honoring the voices of our UA teachers. Not all of those may be possible in the schedule. And so we're trying to actively right now work through how to balance those communication and transparency. Regularly providing staff updates um with clear timelines and decisions. The cadence we've established is our communication other than having snowstorms is um every Tuesday we send out a staff communication. Every other Tuesday we send out um family communications about AB forward. Um we also then host a webinar um for staff every Tuesday after we've sent that communication for families every other Tuesday after the communication goes out. Um I'm working on

180a standardized form for what those slide deck might look like for that to make sure that it's just consistent and people know what to expect when we do that. We then take particularly our family updates, we post them to the website. We also post summaries of the the webinars to the website as well so people can stay informed. Um making sure we're using multiple channels, emails, meetings, newsletters. Um trying to keep people updated for communication. We are trying to use the website as the basis for that and then communicate out other forms of communication as well. Um and then in terms of support for special eds programs, um access and allocate necessary resources for special education needs, facilitate collaboration between special education and general education staff, provide training and support um for staff working with

181special education students. We actually just launched a series of professional learning um with Dr. Alex Hersburg. Um it is in kind of with a dual intention. Um, one part of that is to focus on kind of the new regulations around the use of timeout spaces that came from the Department of Education, but dually how do we increase um the strategies all of our educators have around working with um students who might be experiencing dysregulation. Um so that is some of the thinking that that we're doing now. So wanted to just share kind of some of the thinking around how we're hearing what's being shared with us, what the big themes are, and then also how we can take some action steps. Um, some of them we've taken and others where this has been great to

182be able to inform kind of how we continue to develop plans. >> Thanks, Peter. Um, questions, comments? So, let's see. Okay, I'm going to start on Glenn's side and we'll work around this way this time. Thank you for this. And I know that last last meeting I mentioned that I thought community building would be a good way to support mental health initiatives beyond just administering traditional mental health care. I'm wondering if something in my intuition is telling me that if we have more baseball games, everything gets better regarding community building, sense of identity, community belonging, community cohesion, a sense of we I I think we need to do more than just repeatedly say we are one. We need to demonstrate and articulate how we are one. And so my comment is that I think that

183the more districtwide community events like the sporting events, the fencing team just won something. That's fantastic. More of that I think is a good way to both build community support and probably mental health would improve too. Those are my thoughts. >> Andrew, >> baseball team does need a new field. Um, thank you for this Peter. I am curious about some of the negative things you've heard and a lot of this is very is great and I think when I when I do these types of research I love to hear the things that lead us towards the the bright spot but I always look for those that 10% that 2% of the things that go really dark. What were some of the negative responses that you saw in this or the fear or the uncertainty any

184of the things the doubt that came through? >> Yeah, sure. I mean I think you've seen the same emails that that I have where I think the things that stand out are there are it many people it doesn't mean many means a majority but there are many um who feel like process is rushed they would like to see it slowed down um some just disagree with the outcome right and they they are worried I think at the heart of a lot of it is there's a personal worry about their children um and that making sure their own child will be able to make the transition successfully I think is a huge worry on people's mind. I think in here I think you're right. It you know as I said I actually wanted to separate myself

185from the analysis of it to to check my own thinking. But in this it was phrased a lot of like what do you do to build those peer relationships? But the real underlying strong worry from parents is my kids going to be thrust into a setting that they don't know peers that they're isolated that they don't have kind of that social support mechanism. Um, I think that came out really really strongly in the the findings as well. And then there were just frustrations with process, procedure, how we got to the decision, what the decision is, you know, things like that. Um, but I I think in much of it, at the heart of it is a worry about is my child going to be able to be successful and get what they need. Vicram It

186always happens. I forget what I was going to ask. Hold on. Someone come back to me. Um, oh yes. Um, so given all these things, h are you are you starting to implement any of this stuff now and you're all of it or some of it or what what pieces already currently in the works and underway? >> Yeah. So, um, I talked about staff. So, we have we have multiple critical paths going right now. Um, one critical pathway is geographic zones because we can't provide any certainty to our families until we've determined what the geographic zones are. Um, and one thing that I've thought about because we we had toyed with trying to layer on some element potentially of choice on top of geographic zones and see if that was feasible. And I think one

187of the challenges will be if we do that, what we're actually doing is also extending the timeline for everyone by 6 to 8 weeks out after that. And so, you know, I think the placement process for students is a massive priority and that is probably the biggest red line critical pathway because it impacts everything we do and how we plan. The second one is staff placement. Um, and as I said, you know, I think the number one thing we heard from staff early right after the vote was we want to know how you're going to make decisions about where we're being placed. All of our staff would prefer to do exactly what they're doing right now. And I think no that's that's not meant facitiously. That's that's actually probably for 95% of our staff. It's

188just a true statement. And I understand why because these communities have developed over a long period of time. They have professional working relationships. They understand students, parents, things like that. And I think our staff want to feel successful and success to our staff means being having students that are successful, right? And so that's their primary concern. Um, so a lot of what we did as a leadership team was making sure that we had a shared philosophy about how we needed to make decisions. Um, and so we spent a lot of time talking that through. Andrew put together a really good detailed memo explaining what all the different thought processes were about how we're placing staff. Um, you know, we're trying not to I'm going down to schools now and talking with them and making sure

189that, you know, questions people have I'll try to answer to the best of my ability. And one of the first things I say is I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'd rather tell you very very squarely right now what's happening and let you be pleasantly surprised rather than try and sugarcoat something now and have you be super disappointed later. Um and so we're working with staff around the placement process, making sure we're clear about that. In terms of like transparency and communication, that's always going to be in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. And I recognize that that, you know, some people might think something is super transparent, other people will be frustrated by it. I get that. What we're trying to do is establish a consistent communication pattern where people know and

190can expect when they're going to hear from us, what they will be hearing, when they when they do hear from us. Um, and that it's not only kind of in written form because that's what some people prefer, but then they can also come to meetings, ask questions, things like that. So, we're trying to address the communication side of that and put kind of the face to it all. Um, one of the other things that's happening behind the scenes is Heather Stout, who's our coordinator for mental health, um, and social emotional learning, is actually been developing, um, kind of a mental health advisory task force. Um, and so we have the head of the Leslie Institute for Trauma Sensitivity is one of our core adviserss for that. We also have um one of the head clinicians

191at Cartwheel Care um is also going to be advising us and she happened to have formerly worked in the Boston public schools and was the head clinician assigned to all of the school closings that were taking place in Boston. So, she has a lot of experience around the specific type of trauma that this can cause for people. Um we have our school physician who's also a parent in the district um who is involved in that and then we have a lot of our mental health staff as well. So, we're trying to think about how we approach mental health from a holistic standpoint. Um, and then we have kind of a community wellness working group um that started with administration. Um, and that is something that, you know, Jen Faber's been involved with, Heather Stout, as

192well as some of our principles um and they're really trying to think about and Jen in particular is right now focused on how do we support um our principles and thinking about how we close schools? what are the ways that um different research has pointed to that can be effective in supporting communities through that process. Um so we're trying to think of some of those things as well. So um >> actually where where I actually wanted to go with this was um so one of the one of the a lot of research shows that actually keeping students with familiar teachers is is a is a good way to mitigate a lot of the the mental health needs going forward. Right. It sort of reduces that substantially. Um and I realized knowing where children are placed

193is sort of first step. The second step is you know keeping teachers with familiar faces and that seems to be a very complex part of this. How how is that how are you going to go about rolling sort of doing that piece of it? It seems really complicated. >> Yeah. So I want to be honest. I mean, I think what you heard from from what Nick shared, the statistic is if we are if 65%ish of our students are going to new locations, it's very unlikely that every student's going to have a familiar face. We know that we have our most vulnerable students in terms of need for familiar faces are typically sitting within our special education programs. Um, Compass, Pathways, Connections. Um, no, that that like just from a from a a >> student generally

194all students. I mean th those those particular group more so but overall >> um and in terms of all students we're going through a mental health screening process right now to understand layers of trauma where there are individual students in the district that need special consideration. Um but there's no way we're going to have the familiar teacher for all of our students. That's just not going to be realistic as an outcome to this. Um and I understand that that's a desire. I think what we are working to do is make sure that as we form cohorts, we're engaging families in providing suggestions around peer groups that might work for them um for students in that school that they're going to be in. Um, and then getting that information into the hands of our educators who

195also know our students and then our current year educators involved in the class placement process for students going into next year to be able to think about how can we best form peer groups that work in the new schools and that students feel like they have common peers as well. >> I I really appreciate the the idea that that you'll know your classroom beforehand and that those students can all meet together before next year. I think that's brilliant. Yeah, it's not it's not our idea. It's, you know, Yeah. But but it's I mean that's I think one of the things we heard from families that could mitigate this and trying to tell people what those classrooms look like before they go home for summer is really important given the the amount of transition that we

196have. >> Thank you, Peter. Appreciate the update. >> Sure. >> Okay. [sighs] I'm not going to admit to how far behind we are right now. Um, but we are now moving on to new business. Um, >> take a nap and then come back. No, [laughter] >> I actually want to go home and go to sleep tonight. So, no nap for you. Sorry. U, so first up is uh superintendent departure and next steps. So, as we know, um, Peter's accepted a new role leading the American Community School in Abu Dhabi starting in July of 2027. So, that's not next year, that's 18 months down the roll down the road. And so when you transition into that role, Peter, I believe you will have been our superintendent for nine years. Um, so just to put that into

197context, um, the first year that I was on the committee, of course, I pulled Bessie data to see how long the typical superintendent lasted. And I discovered that, um, most superintendents stay in their position about four years. That's the average. For regional districts, it's three. the median is three. So we have been incredibly lucky, incredibly fortunate to have the stability we have had through some really tough time. So thank you for that. [snorts] And as much as um I didn't enjoy receiving that announcement, um I will also say that we are also really fortunate that we are getting to make this transition deliberately. Um, if you read our superintendent contract, the notification time for if you're going to leave at the end of the year is actually October. So, that would be like an extra

1986 months effectively that we've got here to start thinking about what this looks like and to be really deliberate in how we plan it. Um, because honestly, if you haven't missed the first how many hours of this meeting, we have a lot going on right now. Um so what that looks like having talked this through with uh with council um our school committee council is going to come and meet with us on May 21st and we will have a workshop um so we can talk about what does this whole process look like um what are the next steps and we are going to put together our request for quotes for search firms um so we'll figure out you know what sort of firm we want and we will we will put that request out there

199which allows us to do interviews on June 4th and then we will have Colby back to meet with us um in executive session on June 12th and we will talk strategy and um really get things moving. So that's kind of what the timeline looks like for us. Um yeah, so we are looking at another big committee coming up because we get to figure out who the next superintendent is going to be. All right, let's go around and do some questions. Glenn, >> would the committee be in similar structure to AB forward? >> I don't think we can even answer that question yet. That's probably a workshop conversation of what we think that's going to look like. >> Yeah, Adam. >> Yeah. I I just want to provide a little bit of context in terms of

200timings on how these typically go. The hiring superintendent. So, most hiring happens obviously the year before that you're going to bring somebody in. Um, and you know, I think what what we've heard is if we can get our posting out to start collecting applicants in late October, we're going to be in a really good place. We're going to get applicants who already know that we're looking for a superintendent. Um, so, you know, you may hear of say a superintendent from Salem who's now the the secretary of education. Salem needs to find somebody for next year. They're most likely going to find an interim for a year and then they'll hire a full-time person the following year. Any superintendent who's interested in our district and and we're a catch by the way. Um >> they will

201they will know that we're going to come out next fall with an application. So the timing for us is actually really beneficial. We're not behind the eightball. We're right on time. We're going to start looking uh like I said, we'll start in October and there will be a great pool of candidates is my my guess for this. So, um, you know, the the goal will be and and we'll work with the consultant, whomever we hire, to sort of really put out this schedule, but we'll have a job posting out. We'll have a committee that evaluates all of the applicants and hopefully brings forward three amazing finalists who then go through the gauntlet of being interviewed by this community. If those of you any of you were involved in the last time when we found the

202the diamond in the rough, that was Peter. It's a it's a pretty extensive process. Um but oh he was a little rough in his first year. [laughter] It was my first year too. We were both a little rough. Um but but you know by by the time we get to after the holiday break um you know we're going to we're going to know pretty well in advance who our next superintendent will be. We'll have a really nice transition plan. So I just want to say that you know the the opportunity we have here is pretty amazing. Um, and I'm really excited about the fact that we're going to take AB forward and move that to operationaliz operationalizing from the district side and our goal for next year because remember one of the three main things

203that we do is hire and evaluate the superintendent. That's what we're going to put a lot of our effort towards next year. We are not behind the Aball by any shot. Um, I'm excited to have um our attorney come in and talk to us about this and we'll we'll move the process along. Um, the one last thing I will say is we're flipping our committee right at the end of of June is when the the new Boxboro folks will be seated. Um, so I think it'll be really important to have those new committee members be involved in the last evaluation of our consultant who will, you know, will then agree to sign the contract with them. So I think the timing is really well placed. >> All right. Yeah. Vicrim. Um, I just want to

204say that the fact that we're not behind the eightball with this is I think really and thanks to Peter letting us know exactly when he did, knowing exactly the timing of all these things, how things would unfold. You're trying to make it as seamless for us as possible. Um, and I just want to say, Peter, it's just been remarkable. I just think you're an amazing amazing person aside from the superintendent and I'm just so grateful that uh, you know, I told you from the day one just watching, I was just kind of in awe and that that's not changed. Thank you. Lisa, I know it's late, but I just wanted to say uh thank you and just um piggy back off of and echo what Tori said. um you could have left us a long

205time ago uh with the you know most superintendents staying a much shorter amount of time and we really appreciate I know I really appreciate speaking for myself having you here throughout everything throughout this entire process and to be with us the year after it really means a lot and I know personally one of the things that I really thought of is how you are such a wealth of knowledge and you've gone through so many experiences with us as a district I really hope at some point I can tap into that knowledge and ask you things as we're looking for um I don't know if anyone can ever fill your shoes, but um as we hope to try. So, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. I will mention that we have a good 18

206months to uh embarrass Peter so we don't have to do it all tonight, [laughter] but thank you all. Um if are we ready to move on to the the next thing? Okay, we're good on this. Andrew, I'm going to toss this over to you to get us started. Cool. Thank you. Um, so AB is a pretty great district and we've gone we're about to go through a lot of transition and uh from everything Peter showed us, from everything we've talked about, from everything we're all feeling, from everything we're hearing, there's a need to to really focus on what we're going to become. And I think it this is a good opportunity for us to be able to put together a group that can recognize who we are, recognize our legacy, celebrate what we've been, and

207help, pardon the pun, move AB forward. Um, in the sorry in in the agenda, you'll see um a laidout task force request. The idea is to pull together parents and teachers and students and members of the community to focus on how we transition our culture. And this is cultural. This is the group. This is the life of this. The the baseball games that Glenn was talking about. How do we identify the things that we've done inside the schools that are no more to be able to keep those traditions, those that flavor alive? My goal would be to create this task force to be able to have it run at one year and see if it it still needs to happen next year, but to enact it as soon as possible so we can start building

208some of these or rather managing, maintaining, curating some of these traditions as we move into this next phase of what we're going to be. So, um, again, I don't need to play PowerPoint karaoke here and read through this whole thing. Take a look at it, read it through. I'd love to be able to start this, pull together folks from this group, pull together folks from the outside, run it in a similar way that a PTO is run and that there's a board and the board has different groups of people that are in charge of different things. Have it kind of maybe led by us but focused on the community. And I think it would be a really great way for us to be able to bring our towns, bring our community, bring our district together

209and keep the life in AB that uh all of this talk seems to try to squaltch one. >> Yeah, I I I really like that idea, Andrew. Um I'd also like to say and maybe something that can be added to that is there are a number of school events that sort of went on that were particular to individual schools. Uh one is for example the Gates Cultural Showcase. We just had the last one but Gates has been a highly international school with kids coming from multitude countries around the world and there's a G Gates cultural showcase where kids would show up and perform things that were sort of relevant to their culture, how they dressed, their performance art and what have you. But I think there are lots of similar things across all of the

210schools that perhaps we could get those and and then try and implement those into the new schools that are coming up and maybe that could be part you know you know piggybacked on >> that is um a key example like Douglas is doing the festival of cultures and Miriam has their all their things. I know everything every school has their thing and it might be a sixth grade play in one place it might be a concert performance in another. It might be the tradition of dressing up as princesses like the Conan uh administration did on the day we came to visit. >> That was so awesome. I forgot about that. >> Uh he almost brought us TR tonight. It's important for us to be able to think about these things that are cultural and are

211more than just the books and the things that breathe life into the community. And that's what I hope for this this group to do. >> Lisa, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you Andrew um for really, you know, I can see how much you care about the community and how much you're thinking about the community and you've put a lot of time into this and I really appreciate that because it's just so clear that you're wanting to bring everyone together and I really loved that. And I had a couple things that I was wondering about when I was looking at all of this cuz it there's a lot of stuff that you're um hoping to accomplish and this looks amazing. Um, one of the things I was talking about when you're talking

212about, you know, traditions and community moments and kind of, you know, as we're reflecting on the district's evolving identity, um, I guess with, uh, knowing that a students will be assigned to different buildings based on geography to be determined and there's going to be that visioning process that's going to be happening where those families once they end up at those buildings will, you know, they'll get to kind of, you know, there'll be that constrained choice. Um, Gabby had laid out in a previous presentation about, you know, kind of that visioning process and constrained choice and menu of things that people can choose from and people are going to get together and decide. I don't know if the schools are going to have a new mascot or not. Personally, I'm team Arvarks. Just saying, just throwing

213it out there into the universe, but um I there there's a lot of stuff to think about. And so I guess what I was wanting to know is is some of the stuff that you're talking about for this task force, is that to kind of to do that ahead of time or is that kind of like to get the ball rolling so people are thinking about it when those things happen? I just wanted to know. >> I think Peter, you said the visioning process was going to take over a year. Is that right? To go through the whole process to get it out. I was trying to remember if it was an 18month or your one-year thing. >> Um, >> yeah. I think, you know, when I talked to principles about the the proposal, I

214think, you know, they were [clears throat] excited about especially getting help heading into summer >> and kind of into the very maybe like first event of the year. I think one of the things that they were curious about was how does this intersect with their ability to work with the PTO >> as it's formed and kind of work on developing those unique school cultures and things like that. Figuring out ways to catalog who we are now and identify what we want to be and how we can bring these things together is where this goes. And I'm not standing here and saying I've got an answer. I'm saying I want to create an environment where we can come up with the answer. Does it feed into the schools? Absolutely. Does it fit into the three schools?

215Absolutely. Adam said we are building three excellent schools here that all do the same level of things. So play to that idea in this. We have things each school has done and we have pockets of cultures inside each school. Um if if we can find a way to bring more of our group together, the schools themselves may matter less, the schools themselves uh may ultimately bring together a a wider community than just the families that are part of the schools. We always have a way that we always talk about the difficulty of being able to talk to people who don't have kids in this the district. And perhaps this is a way of being able to even get more into that. I'm not saying I have the answers to this, but I think this task

216force is interesting and that it can take a look at what we've been and identify where we think we want to go and then work with the groups that are going to be existent. I say inside this proposal, this is a one year and then look at it next year if we want to continue it because it's not necessary necessarily to have this. It's important for us to be able to start and as a school committee who's kind of thrust this transition onto our community. I think it's the onus is on us to try to make things as good as we can inside this inside where we live. >> Thank you so much. I want to give others a chance and I can always circle back. >> Adam, >> uh thanks Andrew. I really appreciate

217this. I um I have two thoughts and and one is sort of the you know what what I see is this doing and the other is sort of the procedural person part of my brain that that's thinking about this too. The first is you know I really like the idea of this group being the steward of sort of the the communities and the cultures as they transition to new things. I think, you know, we we recognized as we were talking with all the the PTO's and the JPTSO that, you know, that leadership doesn't know where they're going to be next year and so you don't know who's going to be the president of the next PTO and that the leader there. So, I really like the idea of this sort of being a group that

218helps to sort of keep that over uh keep that going and supporting sort of the the initiation of particularly that part because I think a lot of what you're doing here is the activities that we want our PTOs that they do today and that we want to be able to support very quickly as we move on. So, I think that part makes a lot of sense. The part that worries me is really how we structure this. Um, I don't think that we want to vote this as a task force of the school committee. And the reason I say that is if it becomes something that is chartered by the school committee. It has to then follow all of our rules and regulations. That means that you have to post meetings. You have to take minutes.

219You have to meet open meeting law. And our PTO's don't have to do that, right? They they still have bylaws that require them to post their minutes and meetings and all of that, but they're not under the same level of scrutiny that a subcommittee or a task force from the school committee is. And that's the part that worries me. I don't want to overburden this group that is stewarding our transition with the administrative load of being something that is formed by the school committee. That being said, there's lots that we can do as both individual school committee members and small groups of committee members who are working with a outside task force that might just happen to be initiated by Andrew Schwarz to help support this. But I want to be really careful that I

220don't want to burden that group with open meeting law with all of the overhead that comes with being something that is sort of a a subgroup of the school committee. I brought it to the committee because I think it is our responsibility to help this transition. It was a transition in community engagement when I started this. Having open meeting law is not a difficult thing. You have it. We we've seen in our own executive session. You turn on a Zoom and it creates minutes for us. Publish the minutes and you're done. Make sure that the meeting has been has an agenda to it. Every meeting needs one anyway. Make sure you've got invites set out. Make sure you have some way of managing this. It's not something that's going to be owning or any or

221moving any money around. It's not anything that's going to be beyond organizing. I don't think the onus of I don't rather think the barrier of organization is going to stop something like this from happening. And I think it's better for the committee to be behind this because of the change that we're initiating inside every other aspect. It's fine for an outside group to go ahead and put something together. I think it's fantastic. I think the PTO's are amazing. They're separate entities that do incredible work. I think that this is a little bit of our mess to clean up and I think that we have a really great opportunity to be able to build community through our work with the people in the community in a way that you know if it takes an extra 20

222minutes 40 minutes to put together an agenda and send it out you that's a burden I'm willing to take. >> Um I I'd like to interject here. I >> So hang on. >> Oh sorry [snorts] >> let's let these two finish and then I'll come to you. I I think my my concern is if it's something that is sponsored by the school committee, it's not just that committee that's responsible for it. We then put an additional burden on the administrative staff to post those agendas because it's now a school committee thing and to manage those minutes. And I just want to share that we do have subcommittees now that are very far behind in their minutes and that is an administrative burden for our staff to keep us compliant with that. So that that's my

223concern. It's it's not that there aren't people who are willing and able, but if it becomes one of ours, it means that we're then tasking our administration in the middle of a serious transition to have to manage another thing. Uh to that, I'll just say chair of health insurance trust. I send out the invites. I send out the uh communications to the t the towns to get it listed in the calendar and uh my my secretary Alyssa is fabulous with regard to sending the agenda or rather sending the minutes to where they need to go inside the town. It's not a burden of anyone inside the committee and anyone inside the district's administration to manage. It's the administration of this group to manage this work and to be able to stay in compliance. That's not

224anything different from any other committee we have. >> So, speaking as the um committee chair who tried to take charge of doing those things for the elementary budget task force and got her hand slapped and her um diligent permissions removed, we as a school committee use diligent. So I I it we would have to have a conversation about doing anything outside of that and one of us is not going to manage diligent. There's a reason that school committee members are not allowed to touch the edit button. Okay, Vicram's next. >> Um I just want to say I mean we've just blown up six individual schools with their culture. I think the very least we can do is to help rebuild some of that and that means to go out and talk and we're uniquely positioned

225a top all of the schools to gather that data in a central location and help facilitate we can bring data to PTO and Andrew's point it's not a big deal open meeting law I think and the overhead compared to what we've done to all of the schools and destroyed all their cultures the fact that we're using some administrative resources to help rebuild some of that is a very small Ask >> Glenn, >> how when was the last time all of the PTO's met all at once? >> The joint PTO's meet once a month. First Monday of the month. >> Once a month. Okay. First Monday of the month. Okay, good. And so I think Hi. Yeah, I think having the the joint PTO's being baked into this process, not totally sure how, but that seems

226critical. having members of the PTO's as a part of this is a part of this, but as we move forward, those PTOs are not necessarily going to be the same people that are involved in the new schools. So having >> having the organizations can't be a part of it, but that's just simply because the organizations may no longer exist. The task force would have members from anyone who is is interested in being part of it. >> Yeah. And Yeah. So having that structure there to absorb that to make sure that that input is baked into the transition going forward I think is wise. Um I'm interested in attending or helping out how I can. I would have to move some stuff around. Um I mean I'm on CPAC. I'm on policy. I'm on select board

227leaison. I'm on wellness. Like I have a full plate but maybe I can move something. Why are you giggling? >> Count me in Andrew. >> Appreciate it folks. I really wasn't planning on saying anything since it's already past 9:30, [panting] but I really do not accept the statement of that we've destroyed six schools. We did not. We We are truly >> Okay. So, let Yenshin finish, please. >> Well, I don't accept it. Okay. as a committee member or as a person. Um I I really love the idea, but I don't I don't like the um pretense of that we're going in as like atone for sins, which as if we if we say, "Oh, we destroyed the schools and then therefore we have to do it." It's not you. I know. Let me finish. Um

228I think it's a great idea. I think right now I think we're talking about whether it should be a grassroots initiative or a official school committee involvement. Correct. So I have like a technical question. If it is a school committee um initiative then wouldn't you be needing the space here in the schools? No. >> Do does he? >> So I mean we have we have subcommittees that meet virtually, right? Um so we have we have ways of doing that. Um I have a few thoughts but keep going. Um, have you spoken to the joint PTSO about this idea? >> I've brought this to the school committee first to first read now. >> Okay. Um, I I have a lot of thoughts and also I acknowledge that I will soon be departing the school committee. Um,

229so I'm thinking maybe it's something for after the turnover of the committee because I don't know. I said it's it's past 9:30. I won't show up. >> So, I guess I have some wonderings about also keeping us at the appropriate level, budget, policy, governance, superintendent, etc. And I'm I'm a little worried about how we ensure we stay inside the school committee's lane. I also think you're right, there needs to be something and I think there's an extremely critical period coming here through the summer when things are up in the air and they haven't settled yet. Um, so one of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading through your proposal were what are concrete examples of what this what this group might be accomplishing. Um, and a couple of things that were

230kind of jumping out at me. You know, I think we saw on Peter's original matrix um in January was the idea that over the summer there might be classroom level um activities that would allow people to make connections early, right? Well, how's that going to happen? That that's not something that the administration can make happen, right? Because they're doing the entire transition. Our our teachers are having their summer as they need to be having their summer. Um that feels like there is a gap there. um that it would be helpful especially not having any new PTOs stood up to help out with um you know it also feels like as we're standing up new PTO's whatever that that first event is that happens at the beginning of the year um even if it's just a

231here is your kit so that you can host it now that you have some newly elected officers and oh by the way you figured out your bylaws and all the rest of that stuff like all the admin stuff you have to do to get started when the thing you really want to do is bring everybody together that feels like a space that it makes sense. Um, it also feels like there might be community groups or people who are willing to help out with things that that might not, you know, as we as we wind things down, might not necessarily have connections with existing PTOs, but you know, it could be kind of like a clearing house for these are these are the points of contact and then could provide to PTO's, hey, all of these

232groups have volunteered. But I I also worry about this going into a place where it is usurping the role of these new PTOs and their principles. Um and so I wonder if we might do something that is kind of time bounded and maybe a shorter reeval period. Um you know maybe say the end of September but with a really heavy emphasis over summer when frankly the school committee is not meeting. We don't have teachers. We know we have things we need to do for families and connections and build things up. Um, so that's that's kind of the way I've been wondering about this. Um, and I guess one of one of the other questions I have is what decisions or actions do we see this group doing that that we couldn't do through the JPTso

233now? And maybe that's not a tonight question. That might be a >> The only thing about that is that the with the exception of Blanchard, the PTO's go away with the schools. So July 1st, the PTO's aren't there anymore. And even if the whatever we do, the students at those schools aren't going to those schools anymore. The parents of those students are not associated with those schools anymore. So you can't do a JTPSO because they don't exist. >> So I don't see why that couldn't be the place that interested parties come to do this. So this is an a transition and community engagement group specifically to help transition as we go from where we are to where we'll be. And it can be, you know, uh a guiding space for people who want to create

234the new K new groups inside of new schools. It can be a place for us to gather what we've done and build some kind of institutional memory about what this place has been. It can be a way of being able to do what, you know, Chris Whipck used to do at Nara Park for Douglas every year where he have his band go out and play. There's a whole host of things and I don't want to be too prescriptive right now with it other than say do things around building community, do things around easing the transition, do things around celebrating the legacy and created in a way that allows people to have the freedom to work with this. This isn't this is organized by a school committee, but it is not a school committee thing, if

235that kind of makes sense. Um, in the same way that a school would organized to have a PTO, but the PTO is a separate entity. My goal would not be to say Tori says we have to do this today, folks. It would be what is it that we're trying to accomplish? Return the authority, give the agency, allow people who are in the community to be able help build out the culture of what we're looking to do. And it is, as you say, an opportunity for people who had not necessarily been involved before to be able to get involved. It's a way of maybe being able to foster some interest in create and being part of the new PTO's. I just think that it's really important for us to kind of help lead the way to

236create this this new space we're going to be in. And I don't care if it's 6 months, 3 months, a year, whatever. I put a year because it was effectively one school year. Listen. >> Um, I agree with Andrew. I think that this is something I understand that it will be a burden and I understand that it is more that we're asking, but I do think it's important that we do lead this charge that we do have sort of the operational oversight to be able to communicate any updates that are happening, you know, through our AB forward process. I think that this is a kind of an integral part of it and I do think that it should be for at least a year. There was a slide that we saw earlier. I can't remember

237what it was, but it said, you know, it takes years to build a community. And I do think that it's on us to make sure a that the community building happens because while I can understand that a PTO would have more flexibility, there's still somebody that has to stand up and do it. And I think that this is really it is our responsibility to lead this and help facilitate this change for our communities. Got him. >> I think what would be helpful, Andrew, for for next steps is obviously this the first read is feedback from the PTO's on this because I think that that's going to be the group that we want to get um some understanding from. Um and I think the other thing I I just I'm still worried about the um unforeseen

238administrative burden that we put if it's something that is sponsored by the school committee. So I think um if we can get an assessment from the administration about what is the lowest touch requirement um and what would be the things that we would need this group to do to maintain compliance and what are the things that they can't do that the administration still has to do. Um I I I don't disagree with the idea with the concept at all. I'm really just worried about another sort of administrative burden on a team that is thin that has a lot to do next year. Um, I mean, just one other thing that came to mind is this is a public body and it means that there are public records and who's going to be the public records

239officer and who's going to hold all of that information. Um, I just that's the stuff that I'm worried about. I think that the work that you want to do is exactly what we need to do. I just worry about it being something that is officially sponsored by the school committee. Yen, >> would it be okay if the committee uh organized a one-time brainstorm session? >> I heard that. >> Say say more about what you think that looks like. Uh just I well what I was going to say is that would it be okay if um the committee initiate a like communitywide gathering sort of like kindergarten play but like bigger on a bigger scale where people who wish to join his task force can connect and then like so we kind of initiate it but

240we're hot. >> I think that would be the first meeting >> that like releases [gasps] >> that would that would kind of be the first meeting. Um, Adam, to your point, I'll find out the lowest level of involvement the I I don't need much involvement from the administration on this. Um, and I have a a docu share with the town of Actton we can stay hold our stuff on. So, I'm not I'm not concerned about it. Um, but we'll get this back and we'll go through it on our next our next call. Thank you for letting me have this moment, folks. >> Yeah, Peter. So, Adam, just to your point, I'm actually not as concerned about kind of just the management of posting meetings and minutes and and things like that. I I don't think

241that's going to be burdensome for us. I recognize the public records piece. You know, that's the world we live in. Um, but no matter what we do, anything we send is a public record. So, whether we do this committee or something else, it's still all a public record. So, I'm not as worried about that side. You know, the only thing, Andrew, I would maybe ask around is how are the principles involved in this? Because if we're planning culture of schools outside of what principles do, I'm concerned about how that interplays over time. And I think, you know, I recognize the need for kind of the interim period that you're proposing. I think my biggest concern in all of it is how do we have a rapid handoff for principles then to be able to work

242directly with the PTO's because right now it's not PTO's planning events that they go to the principal and say here's all the events that you're going to be doing this year. It's principles and PTO's working together to say how do we create this culture within our school. And I think, you know, as I talk to principles about this and as I think about kind of the need for principles to be able to establish those communities, not hearing the principal voice in that is just a concern that I have and how do we incorporate more of that so that the principles are really, you know, they by by definition they're the ones that operationalize everything in within their school, right? No one else. I don't operationalize schools. School committee can't operationalize anything in a school. Um,

243but how do the principles actually get empowered to do this work? >> And the intention as you saw in the the proposal is to have principles, staff, teachers, students, parents, everyone that can be involved involved. Specifically though, following that PTO model of here's a group that's trying to do something and working with the environment that they're working within. Um, and if the principles have points of view specific to it, that's that's they're they're the audience as much as the students and everyone else is. So, it's the idea of be able to pull it all together. >> No, but I I I just need to be explicit. It has to go deeper than that because in order to run an event at a school, the principal has to be the person doing it >> and and

244sponsoring it. So, it can't be an outside organization saying, "Here's the events for I just want to like make sure that there's I I'd rather have clarity now in how we proceed with it rather than have ambiguity now and then challenges to to how we have to go through it later. >> So it it's basically we would facilitate this stuff and then hand it off to the PTO and the principles but sort of the interim after all the cultures are gone and the PTO's are gone. We're still there holding the torch and torch in the interim and then facilitating this stuff >> close to that. Yeah. Okay. Do you have what you need? >> I think so. >> Okay. To give us some updates and we'll take a look at this. I think it's on

245next time. Is is a week enough time? >> Should be. >> Okay. And you're seeing JPTSO? >> We've got a meeting on the second. >> Okay. All right. If we need to bump it to if you need more time after the second, let me know. >> I've lost my agenda. Standby. Um, naming of schools. Peter, you're up. >> Yeah. So, you know, if you recall the original vote that you took um for AB forward, it said, you know, names to be determined in the future. And so, one of the things I want to put on your radar is we're going to have to figure out what school names look like um for that. I think, you know, it's up to you philosophically about how you want to approach that. Um, you know, I think there's

246a range of options that you could certainly select. I could probably think of three or four different avenues that that you could take. Um, what I tried to do in here is provide, you know, some context to how that can play out. I think, you know, there's nothing that precludes you from maintaining names of schools as they stand right now. Um, you know, I know that if you voted to close them, you doesn't mean you still can't keep a facility name or a school name or something like that to do it. You might also choose to go in a different direction um with that, but you have a policy that exists now about how to name facilities. Um I mean, interestingly, as I thought about it, you actually have facility names, Parker Damon building, Boardwalk.

247Um and you could choose to, you know, potentially go with those facility names and think of like upper and lower divisions of things or however you want to call that schools. Um, you could also choose to keep current school names. You know, you have Gates, you have Douglas, you have, you know, the obviously Conan would not exist in that mix potentially, but you have, you know, Miriam and McCarthy Town. I don't know how you feel about it, but I do know from being in the community, names carry a lot of meaning for people um and carry a lot of history with them. And so, I just wanted to put it on your radar to to be considering what that looks like. Um it has operational implications for how we go about work with Desi. Um

248not only in terms of how we report out to the state but also in terms of how we organize everything. You know even down to the minutia of you know chart of accounts for the district's accounting system. Um, you know, I think if we kept current school names, we actually would just go to Desi and we what we'd be doing is a grade reconfiguration of schools. Um, at the state level that would actually maintain, I think, a lot of the accountability data over time. Um, it would also maintain school names in terms of chart of accounts. There's an easier transition for a lot of that work. Um, it could have some implications in terms of PTO's um, and the work that they do. Um the and there might be a philosophy of if we're really

249making this change, we might want to actually come up with new school names and I want to recognize that too and give you the liberty to to pursue that as a committee. But I at least wanted to get it on your radar and thinking about it because it is something we're going to need to to act on. And you might do transitional names, too, where you say, "Look, we need something for right now, but we recognize it's a longer study and we need to put that off for a period of time." >> All right, I'll start here and work my way around. Vic >> um it was it was brought to my attention that um in renaming the schools there's actually there's a substantial cost associated with that because there's all the stationary actually names

250on the buildings have to be changed and that that's a fairly hefty cost. So I think if we could keep the names where we can I think that's probably a wise thing to do financially not to mention the historical names of so on and so forth and the ease that Peter just mentioned. >> Adam, >> thanks Peter. you mentioned something that I hadn't considered and I'm wondering if maybe you or Gabby can speak to the consistency around accountability data. Um, you know, we thought a lot about uh if you keep the names then the great school information and the niche ratings all of those at least stay the same and will evolve as the schools evolve. But I'm curious what is the accountability data look like from Desi when you have a grade configuration. So

251you've got the same school name but now instead of it being a K6 it's a K3 or 46. How how does that make a difference? I guess if you change the name or just change the grade configuration when you're comparing >> Gabby, do you have a definitive answer on that? Otherwise, I would say I'd actually like to research it with Desi and come back. >> Okay. I think I I I think that that's a really interesting piece, but in general, I'm leaning more towards keeping the names as they are for a lot of the reasons. There's the cost reason, there ratings reasons, there's um you know, we're going through a big transition. It might be nice to keep those and give those new communities as they form the opportunity to decide as a group, do

252we want new names? And then we have the opportunity to keep the larger facility name which exists or go through the prescribed naming process that is in our policy which will take some time. >> Lisa, I just want to share that I've had a lot of conflicting thoughts about this actually. um I could see multiple sides of this at the same time which makes it really difficult. So I think in a perfect world if you know cost was no object then um I was hoping as we were rebuilding something new the idea was that the name would reflect that and it could have been you know Parker Damon you know upper lower and boardwalk campus upper and lower but just something to indicate that you know there's the building of something new and while I

253um recognize that there's a you know for some that there is some attachment to some of the other names and there's a lot of benefit to keeping the other names from a cost perspective, especially facing the realities of all the cost and all the um all that the change would bring. I just want to point out uh that Conan would not be getting to keep their name. And I'm just bringing that up because just to bring that into the discussion. We might have all thought it, but I just wanted to say that piece out loud because I know while many students may feel or families u may feel overjoyed that, oh, we get to keep, you know, names X, Y, and Z, even though we may not physically be there anymore if a child's moved

254on to the upper, you know, grades and they're not in that school name got the lower or they went to a different building, whatever ends up being the case. Um, you know, there might be some feelings of, well, we're happy that that school was name was kept or there might be feelings of, oh, I'm sad because I had to go to another building for geographic placement and I no longer get to be at a school with that name. And then also recognizing the feelings of the students who will never get to see the name. So just want to name all the different things that I think that people could be feeling or thinking and saying, you know, being a practical person, I do understand how it could make things a lot easier for the PTO's

255and um you know, to not have to implement as much change. So I recognize all of those things. >> Andrew, >> I didn't realize we were going to vote for so for number four. This is great. We spent weeks going over Adam, you tried to get rid of this option of keeping the old schools. you were trying early on. We've spent weeks going over the idea that we had to get to that vote on the 22nd. That vote that said we're closing four schools. That vote that came after I told everyone here that there are costs involved with it, that there are accountabilities involved with it, that there are problems of dealing with the PTO's involved with it. And it didn't matter because we had some other idea. It's difficult to do this change. It's

256what we voted on. I didn't like it. I still don't like it. But it, as Tori, you know, the email you sent out to us, we vote on this thing, we agree to this thing, we move forward with this thing. If we keep the old names, great. That's wonderful. However, it's not what we said. And if we're going to go through this process of reopening these, you know, not even reopening the schools because we said they're closed, there's a longer conversation that needs to be had. If you're going to go for expedience, you should have thought about this back when you said you didn't want to do this before. because you're you're taking this whole community around again. We have kids that go to sleep crying because their their schools are gone and we're going

257to say to them, you know what, you're not going to be able to go where you were and it's not going to be what it was, but we're going to keep this thing open because it's going to be easier for us. That's wrong. We made a decision. Might not have liked it. Other people might not have liked it, but we made a decision. If we want to go back on it, it's got to be more than just a you know, we're it's going to be cheaper for us to do this. I've rarely been this upset in one of these meetings and I'm going to calm myself down, but this is patently ridiculous to have to say after all we've gone through, after all of AB Ford, after seeing all these different options, well, we voted

258on this thing and we're going through it, but really all we wanted to do was get rid of open enrollment and we wanted to move some kids around and close Conan so we could save some money. And it's just it's it's wrong to do this. Thanks, Hold on a sec, Glenn. So, I want to read what our motion said um to make sure that everybody's clear on what we're talking about because the name of a school is not the same as a form of a school. And our motion talked about the form reorganization motion a option 5v2 boardwalk and Parker Damon buildings become K through three and four through schools each. Blanchard remains K through six. Move to approve the following school reorganization plan. Close the Actton elementary schools and and Andrew, you had to

259spell them out and Peter, you got them in alphabetical order. Well done. Close the Actton elementary schools. Conan, Douglas, Gates, McCarthy Town, and Miriam. Effective June 30th, 2026. Move the students from the Actton elementary schools into four new yet unnamed, so not named any way, right? We did not declare the name of those. We declared the form. Actton 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. So, you know, acknowledging what Lisa Hang on a second, my turn. My turn. Okay. >> Acknowledging what Lisa said, there's a lot of meaning in names. Acknowledging what you said, talking about what's in our vote. I want to be really clear here. The vote was about the form of the

260schools and the organization. What we are talking about right now is the name. No, that no that that is what this says. Naming of schools and reorganization. That's not what Peter said. And there are two words that are important in that. Close and new. Close the schools, open new ones. Peter and Gabby are specifically asking about the ability to maintain the operations with Desi under those names. Were we to keep those names? He was spo speaking with Gabby about the idea of how can we hold our accountability that goes back historically which is not closing and not new. We said close these schools listed them. We said new to be named later but new and named later does not allow you to be able to go back and say we're going to maintain our accountability

261from before. It does not mean we can keep the same uh bank accounts as before. It's now and new. Close rather it's close and new. Close means to send Desi the note, this school is closed. New is to say we have a new school. We need this. It can be the same name, but it is not the same school. And if we're going to go back and say it's the same school, then we're going back to doing what we said we were going to do with four, but with geographic enrollment, and it's not what we voted on. So, this is not this is not returning us to option four. This is I believe Peter you said it would be changing what the grades are with DESIE. So that is >> not closing the schools. >>

262No, it's a bureaucratic change. So here's my question for you. If if we are trying to make things as smooth as possible, why are we stuck on this? >> If we're trying to make things as smooth as possible, there are other decisions we would have made before. We've made a decision. If it doesn't matter what we vote and we can just change things later, why do we bother voting? If we if we aren't going to maintain what we said we were going to do, why did we go through everything we went through? >> So, we are still going to gradebanded schools. Andrew, >> I know that we're going to we're going to gradeband the schools. We're going to have an upper and lower in each of the buildings, but now we're talking about maintaining the

263names of these schools so that we can maintain the business relationships that these schools have had with Desi and and banks and whatever. That's not what we said we were going to do. >> So, I don't I don't think we voted on what we were going to do with Desessie. >> We voted that we were going to close. And there's one way to close the school, which is to recognize with Desi by sending in a form and saying that our registration's over. And the one way to open a school, which is to say to Desi, "We're opening a school. We need a new registration number." That's how you do it. You can talk to Sherry about it. It's the obligation that we have as a district. We are saying that we were going to close

264these schools, but now you're saying because it's hard, we're going to keep the schools open and just change the name of them or just change the the grades inside them. That's not what we voted on. >> Okay. So, I I hear what you're thinking and I hear that there are people who have different perspectives. We're going to move on. Glenn, >> I would like to make sure that we find a home for the Conan polar bears. Second that. >> Okay. So, I think the impact of what we're looking at here, um, >> somebody's pointing. >> I did, >> Liz. Go. >> I agree with Andrew and I think that the school names as we have them are too emotionally wrapped up in the communities. And I think that it the the emotions are still too

265raw. I don't think that we should keep the old names and I think that we should move. I understand that it is a financial you know um there is potential financial impact for it and I think that would be an example of you know the END that we are taking to be able to you do this transition. I see it as part of the transition that we would be doing where we do rename the schools. >> So let me ask this group this question. What's the timeline this has to happen on? Um, is this something that has to happen immediately or is it something we let go for a year knowing that our revisioning is going to take a year anyway? Um, >> yeah, go ahead, Victor. >> Um, I would say there's not any

266great immediiacy. I mean, we want to find out what Jessie is going to say about this. Um, I I think we want to tread carefully here. like a rose by any other name would still smell as sweetly right so if we keep the name we don't I mean it seems clear that there might be substantial benefits to actually keeping the names not just in terms of financial and signage but in terms of how our our school standings across the state and and there are various entities like that we need to still explore um uh Andrew I I largely agree with you most of the time here I I have to disagree I think this is just a name I think all the structural changes are going through arose by end of their name. All those

267things are happening. We're just really only talking about the name here. There is some emotional frauess with things, but it cuts both ways, right? People also really are tied to these names. I think perhaps we want to think about asking the public what what they think, right? And not make this decision unilaterally. Um >> well, luckily we don't have a vote on the agenda tonight. Yenjin, >> um I just have a procedural question. So on July 1st, these schools are closed and yet to be named. So what are they in like what would they be on Desi's records? Like what would they be named? >> I mean ultimately the only concern I have at this point is that you tell me what the names are so that I can put names on the piece of

268paper that we have to send to Desi that says here's what the school name is going to be. Um because until we do that, we can't get the other stuff done that needs to be done. It impacts how PTO's work. It impacts how we do accounting. It impacts how we're doing websites, school names, you know, all those types of things as we we move forward opening schools. And if transitionally the school committee says, "Look, what all we want is Parker Damon upper and lower, and we want Boardwalk upper and lower, that's fine. We need to know it. And if it's keep the same names, we just need to know that. And if it's a series of new names, we just need to know what they are. Um, but it will be one of the things

269that in order for us to send in the form, we just can't send it in blank because that won't >> so we don't do anything. >> We don't have a year. >> When do you need this, Peter? >> I would hope as soon as possible. >> I mean, I think we need to get moving with Desi on it at this point. I mean, we're, you know, we only voted this six weeks ago, right? We have to keep that in mind that this is still a pretty young vote. Um, and there's going to be things that we have to work out along the way and that's going to happen. Um, you can't make a change of this magnitude and think that you're not going to have to go backwards, forwards, sideways, and things like that. It

270just it's not realistic. So, I think the the piece is and this is why I just put it on with future only. I didn't schedule a vote for next time. I didn't schedule a vote for any other time, but it's only timesensitive to the degree that we need to take some action with Desi. So, you can say, I want an interim action and we're just going to pick a name for right now and that's the start. Um, you can say we're going to stick with what was because it's easy or we're going to do something different like that. Anything is okay with me as long as but nothing isn't if that makes sense. >> So, in other words, can you loop back with the desi since we and can we give you more feedback on

271this next week then? Yep. >> Since we are back here next week, VCR >> and and not just the desi part, but also is it I mean I don't know if it's too short of a time frame to get financial members on what the actual cost of changing the names for all the stationary and the buildings and the signage and if we get a the cost analysis for that. I know that may be a big ask. >> That will likely take longer only because it will require someone going into the buildings and looking at all the physical signage and things like that. Um my guess is that's probably about a month I could come back to you with that. >> Is that covered in our contingency that you had already put forward in the transition?

272>> Not right now, but we could we I think before I comment on that, I want to just get a handle on what the the actual scope of that looks like. You know, it's things like I mean letterhead at this point, we don't have letterhead, right? Like letterhead sits digitally. It's just having someone change the name on top of the letterhead. Um, so I'm not worried about things like that. It's more and and actually I think what's interesting I don't think there's a lot of physical signage at Miriam and McCarthy Town. I it does exist at the Boardwalk campus much more prevalently. So I think that's the piece that I just want to inventory and I want I I want to give you a good answer as opposed to a guess. >> All right. So

273we'll come back to that then so everybody can ponder that a little bit. All right. >> Nothing good happens after 10 o'clock. >> I was going to say it's 10:15. Let's do the budget update. [laughter] Sorry, the link is not opening. Um, this is not a there's not a lot of significant budget update to this. Um, I think I just wanted to bring, you know, a couple things to your attention. One, the budget number overall has not changed um since the the budget workshop. So, we're still carrying the same budget numbers, same assessments to the two towns. Um, health insurance has come down. Um, you know, we got our final rates from Maya as we shared at the the budget workshop. They were still giving us the high end of the estimate, but they had

274not actually set our rates. Um, so they have now lowered what we thought might have been 14.4. or what they told us to carry is now 12.11 um that's about $200,000 um of a swing on health insurance. Um and in the same period of time we had existing employee so also decided to come onto the health insurance. So every time we have an employee who comes on that's a $30,000 shift potentially if they're taking a family plan. So u $200,000 can get eaten up pretty quickly that way. Um so we we had that shift. um superintendent search costs. Um right now I've put 30 $40,000 into the superintendent, excuse me, school committee contracted services line. That would get you pretty much your choice of search organizations to work with. Um each of the organizations has

275different fee structures. MASC tends to be the least expensive, but their reach is typically just within Massachusetts. Um NASDAQ tends to be more New England reach. um although they will advertise in broader organizations and then there are also sometimes national search firms that want to go wide more widely where you haven't had the opportunity to have that discussion what I wanted to do was budget toward the top end of that um so that you had flexibility later to to pick how you wanted to proceed so that is set aside um and then hearing a lot of the concern out of the select boards or some members of the select board and some members of finance committee at the budget workshop we wanted to clarify how the FTE counts were going over time and I think

276the overall net might be not as large as some of the the members of the public would have expected after reorganization. Um but what we wanted to really portray is there's a stark shift away from professional staff into support staff um in all of this work. Um and you know largely again as it it has been in recent years it's mostly driven in special education um and changes in needs um in terms of service delivery. So that is really a non-negotiable that those things have to be in place to make sure we're meeting kids needs. Um and then the real only positive additions are in that that support staff realm. So, I just wanted to clarify that and make sure people understood that how the FTS were shifting that even though it's only a reduction

277of um >> 3.3. >> Yeah. 3.3 staff, it's it's almost $800,000 in savings um from the the net reduction. So, just wanted the information out there, make sure people knew it transparently and what's happening with staffing. So, that was it. >> Great. Thanks, Andrew. I'm assuming you have nothing you want to tell us about personal update. Excellent. Um, I'm assuming that nobody's got anything they want to talk about in subcommittee or member reports. Love that. Let's move on 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 on item for discussion in a separate vote. I will read each item and if member would like it held, please say hold. Members do not have to have attended a

278meeting to vote on the minutes. Item A, approval of ABRSC meeting minutes 12226. Item B, approval of ABRSC meetings 2926. Item C, recommendation to approve budget transfer per policy DJB. Item D, approval of warrants as presented in the packet 22626. Given that no items were held, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as that would be Adam seconded by Vicram? All in favor? >> Any opposed? Any abstensions? Ben. Thank you. and move to that would be seconded by Andrew. All [laughter] in favor? >> Any opposed? Any abstensions? Thank you all. Good night. >> Have a good night. >> Yeah, I have a busy uh >> Okay. Do you have time after the webinar? I might have by then. >> Okay.