AB School Committee Meeting 9/19/19

001noting the time and the presence of a quorum I call the Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee to order welcome everyone thank you to act in TV for taping this meeting and providing it on their website act in TV org okay superintendent light who's gonna make a few so I just wanted to quickly read a statement before we actually begin the meeting because I think it's important to make sure everyone has the right information you know unfortunately today one of our school buses was carrying one of our junior high school athletic teams and that yeah it's on and that bus was involved in a motor vehicle accident in Westford along with a motorcyclist while all of our students and staff were safe the accident did result in a tragic fatality to the motorcyclist the accident is

002currently under investigation by the Massachusetts State Police and the Western for police as well as the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office we do not have any additional details about the incident at this time per our procedure we've placed the driver on leave while the situation's being investigated the school has been in communication with all of the families of students on the bus at the time of the accident we will be making counseling and support services available to students and staff we're deeply deeply saddened by this news and our hearts go out to not only the family of the motor cyclist but the entire Westford community so I just wanted to make sure that everyone had that information and is aware of that situation because it developed late this afternoon so you know we're really really

003deeply troubled it's impacted a lot of people and we're very sad about that so thank you alright this is the part of the meeting per policy be EDH when members of the public may speak for up to two minutes on items not included on this agenda comments regarding items on the agenda should be made during that part of the meeting typically the committee administration will not respond to comments during public participation is there anyone that wishes to speak all right I'd like to invite our high school student representatives up to give their update okay hi I'm Caroline browning I'm a senior at Acton Boxborough High School do you guys want to introduce yourself sure hi everyone so this is gonna be a little bit of a longer update but so first it has now been

004officially 14 day cycle in the school with the new schedule and I've heard a lot of people are really starting to like it I personally really like it I think definitely people have adjusted to the change and people really appreciate the drop one and meeting classes at different times of the day it's just I think it's overall really beneficial to everyone despite the controversy it like created in the high school when I was first presented um second I'm talking about the powderpuff game that student council is running I'm actually the official video agra fur for it so that's fun but it seems like it's gonna be a really big success right now Student Council we're trying to get people to be more excited to actually go watch instead of participate in it but we're selling

005tickets next week and practices start this weekend for the teams and I think everyone's getting really excited for that and it's gonna be a good fundraising event for student council yeah I'm going to talk to all of you guys about the activities Paris so we had the activities fair last Thursday and Friday in East Commons during all lunch blocks and I was there on Friday and from what I saw it was a very large success there was hallways were bustling with activity kids were just signing up for all kinds of clubs personally I run I ran the table for the Science Olympiad club and we are a pretty large Club we had around 50 members to begin with and we increased our participation by around 30% after this this meeting so that was really interesting

006and nice to see yeah that's about it I think that the activities here is a pretty big success this year and that most clubs are having their first meetings around this week or the next week so participation is going up so I just like to note that between this meeting and the last one you have now seen all five of your represent student student reps from the high school and I think they did a great job for the first time and so going into the past two weeks just on Tuesday we had parent night for college application admission etc and this week councilors met with seniors during English class periods to go over the expectations for that process and lastly I'd also like to mention that there seems to be I might I didn't know

007about this before today but there seems to be a lot of students are interested in the climate strike that's happening tomorrow in Boston it I'm not completely certain but I believe this is a nationwide coordinated and that actually got me thinking that it's interesting to me that we don't have a specific student protest policy and we allude to it in policy and ji we promote free inquiry and expression but maybe if this committee might be interested in looking into a subchapter specifically outlining student protest music obviously some issues with be a safety or protect preserving the rights of those who do not wish to participate and I don't think that would apply to tomorrow specifically because honestly you're just the school marks the Matteson to that would be that but for example with the March

008for our lives thing that was I believe my sophomore year so a year and a half ago I think something like that it might actually be really beneficial to have a policy at the district level that lays out for secondary students what the expectations are and how what the procedures are for preserving student safety and preserving the rights of the students to learn in a positive environment and also that is in accordance with Mass General Laws chapter 71 section 82 around preserving student freedom of expression thank you Thanks so let me just first of all me briefly comment that you know it's fantastic when this student feedback comes with specific requests and proposals you know that of course we can either decide are great or maybe need some improvement so that's good and I should

009have said the same thing last time when Charlie spoke so kudos to everybody for coming not only with a concern but with some action to be taken and then this is a little bit more open-ended question so feel free to take a cut at it now or if you'd like to come back and take a cut of it that's fine so I've heard that we are not at a loss for creating clubs that we have a creative student body we could create literally millions of clubs and so from the perspective of the students and you were just through the fair you know are we doing a good job of trying to you know make the things that we do I like to offer high-quality enough or are we maybe having too many activities and that's

010sort of diluting the effort that people have the option of participating in is like perfect and also I know people are well aware that if there's nothing that really appeals son they can create something themselves I one of my friends last year created the scooter club and they just scooter and I think it's like a good amount of clubs and nothing overwhelming nothing too limiting at the same time I guess off the cuff I guess I would point out that there is a process for producing this clubs require an educational or like mission that would support the learning of students and that mostly if if a club doesn't have a lot of members it usually dies out by a year maybe two if they're really persistent so I guess it's sort of self-regulating a sense

011and by the end of the day I think you do have a variety of clubs that people are interested in yeah I'm also an ingredient like I'm also agreeing with the current policy because while we have this we have this nice balance right now between students being able to like run up and come up with their own idea about clubs but you're also going through the process of creating a club you also need to find like a teacher as an advisor so you'd actually need to convince them that this is like a worthwhile Club to have and that just makes sure that regulates that we don't have just clubs popping out of nowhere and it maintains the higher quality of our clubs at school thank you that was great all right so now Peters gonna

012give his update all right so I have a few different updates for you and this is on your table and then as usual this will be sent out to our entire school community tomorrow first I'm pleased to announce that Tessa and I will be hosting our first coffees with the community the purpose of the coffees is to give the two of us a chance to hear from our families and community members about their perceptions of our schools answer questions that are on their minds and provide a venue for two-way communication with our stakeholders the first two events of the year are going to be held Friday October 11th from 8 o'clock to 9:30 a.m. and again on November 15th which is a Friday from 8 o'clock to 9:30 a.m. the events right now are being

013held in the administration building look in the auditorium there which will be newly finished for those coffees so we're excited about that I think going into this year I thought what one of the really important things we can do is find ways to continue to connect with stakeholders and make sure that we provide a venue for feedback so that we hear what's on people's minds answer questions and make sure people know what's happening across the district so this is really the beginning of that effort second update we are also excited to announce dr. Bentley and I are actually co-leading a Family and Community Advisory Group on the district work around diversity equity and inclusion we're currently seeking members of our family network and broader community who represent the diversity of our district to serve in

014this important group we will be sending out more information in the coming days with information about getting involved in the opportunity we scheduled our first meeting for Thursday October 24th from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. we're looking forward to hearing more from our families and community as we expand our work around inclusive schools I also want to let you know that Don and I are also talking and we're in the process of forming similar focus groups for students throughout the year so that students have an opportunity to talk directly to Don and I at the district level about their perceptions around diversity equity and kind of inclusive cultures in our schools so more to come on that is the year goes on I'm excited to report back to you as we get going I also included

015a link in this there was a really nice article in The Boston Globe it was last week regarding the opening a girls swim team meet during the season opener the team honored coach Jeff Johnson who as you know had passed away very suddenly last year he had had a tremendous impact on countless young athletes throughout his long and dedicated career so I wanted to put that link in so that you could see the article and also families if they didn't get to see it in the globe could also take a look at that kind of continuing with some professional learning for leaders around our district I wanted to give you a little information but on October 24th we are sending a team of our district leaders to a conference sponsored it actually should say deci

016not deci with a W on and it is on leading with access and equity it's good they call it a convening but the purpose of the conference is to bring together leaders to focus on issues and a sampling of the issues that they'll be talking about are creating a pipeline of diverse educators developing multi-tiered systems of support ensuring equitable access to high quality curriculum implementing bilingual education ensuring racial and cultural equity engaging families addressing student mobility addressing students mental health needs and integrating social and emotional and academic learning you might have heard of one of those two things before but it was really interesting to see the deci was offering a conference so closely aligned with the work that we're doing we're clearly not the only district doing this work and it'll be great to

017be able to get together with others and share best practices and then I wanted to put in one final plug that barring any unforeseen circumstances at this point this is our last School Committee meeting at the RJ grade junior high I was talking with Maria earlier and Beth and Marie said this was year 20 of her being in you know this space for school committee meetings believe it or not she started coming when she was 7 years old and has been coming consistently ever since [Laughter] really it is kind of a momentous thing I was in the auditorium at the admin building just today it's coming along very very well I think you're gonna be excited about the opportunities that provides as a meeting space not only for how the committee can function but actually

018for our ability to connect with the community we don't have to have community members you know 40 feet down a long set of tables from us but also the quality of our broadcasts is going to be so much increased you will later in the meeting see a Memorandum of Understanding from act and TV that is directly related to this project Acton TV is actually fully funding that so I just want to make sure I also provide the thank you to act and TV at this point and we will do that later but the MOU is just to update kind of our agreement with act in TV as we move into the new space and they invest in that equipment for us so next time we will be in the new space I talked to Beth

019we will do some coffee and refreshments for anybody who in the community who wants to come to a school committee meeting and join us some new space and enjoy that so thank you very much that's it for tonight all right well I'm actually gonna get the microphone right back to you because I believe next up as 3.1 our district strategy update no I think you might have the Twitter oh it's behind so what I wanted to do tonight is come to you and just provide kind of an interim update regarding where we're at in developing the district strategy moving forward and provide some context to it I will say this is not complete at this point we're not even in kind of a final draft form this is still a very early preview of our

020thinking around this but I wanted to share some of that with you so I did this graphic and if you remember those of you who are on the committee just after I got hired I came in June prior to me starting as the superintendent and I provided kind of an overview and an entry plan and in that I provided a graphic of kind of what are the various stages of an entry process for a superintendent and how will that play out as I joined the district and I apologize this is so small that I can barely see it on the screen in front of us but this is the last chance for that so the first thing that a superintendent needs to do coming into district is really learn as much as possible quickly about

021what happens across the district and kind of form some initial perceptions about strengths and challenges that the district faces and also the educational opportunities ahead so as I entered basically from July of my last year until November that was the chance to get out listen to stakeholder groups look at the data around district performance opportunities gaps things like that and then from I came back to you and kind of shared the process along the way regularly and then during the second phase of my entry process that was really about me confirming some of my initial hypotheses with our leadership team and then reporting them out to you and to the community and be able to hear feedback on that process that resulted in my report of entry findings which I believe I presented last January

022to the School Committee and then we had an opportunity to come back and engage in workshop around that to solicit feedback about priorities in that the third phase of improvement there is really from last Feb we threw this summer and it's continuing on into the fall and that is taking all of the feedback that was received because developing a strategy is about collecting feedback and hearing what can be improved but taking that feedback which happened through the entry process and being able to now transform that into something that is designed to guide the district's work moving forward and so that's the final phase where we're at and I just wanted to recall that to make sure everyone was familiar with what the entry process entailed and why we're talking about that district strategy out of

023the entry findings and this is not new information this was in January there were six major themes that I talked about in my entry report one was around the culture cultural diversity of the district the second was around district teaching and learning third around the kind of what is the appropriate balance between coherence and individualism and that is very relevant to this community inclusive environments in our schools the social-emotional needs of our students and then having high-performing leadership teams so there was if you recall there were sub-themes within each of those key areas and what we actually did and you're not going to be able to read this and that's okay it wasn't intended to be read but more of an illustration with the School Committee and then with our senior leadership team across the

024district and also some of our assistant principals and other leaders around the district we actually engaged in an activity and everyone did the same activity where we did a workshop around the entry findings and everyone was able to essentially tell me what the priorities that they had as an individual were and it allowed themes and patterns to emerge from that data to identify kind of key ideas and I think maybe one of the most illustrative points there if you look at the slide here I had gone back and actually color-coded the data to look for patterns and essentially the more read a piece of data came out the more important that one theme was to a stakeholder group I then worked with our administrative team during retreat over the summer to look at how all

025of the various leadership teams including school committee had looked at this information and then we synthesized it and we looked for what are the common themes that all of our groups have on the top of their mind and how does that impact what we do then we also look for if it's not Universal across all three groups what are the things that are held very in higher high importance by more than one group so two groups had it ranked high or maybe two groups had it ranked high and a third had it ranked moderate and what we boiled it down to where there was some primary themes that had emerged from that and I'm gonna I'm pulling it up on my computer screen so I can read it as well but one of the key

026themes that emerged the way and these are all of the ones where all three of our leadership teams so school committee senior leadership and some of the assistant principals across the district all had this as of the highest priority and these were the five areas that came out what's driving to the discrepancies and open enrollment with respect to race and how can the schools and district effectively respond to this in order to ensure racial equity which is really racial balance it's not racial equity racial balance within the open enrollment program in moving forward how can the district leverage professional learning and educator supervision and evaluation in order to increase instructional coherence and outcomes for all students what strategies might the district utilize in order to ensure that all students have equitable outcomes in literacy and

027mathematics instruction how might the district establish and communicate a clear vision and necessary supports for inclusive practice and ensure that beliefs around inclusive practice permeate both regular and special education settings how can the district implement a system of social and emotional supports that provides continuity and coherence for students as they progress through the grades in between schools so those were the five primary themes some of the key language I highlighted in orange just to make it a little little easier to get to the point in some somewhat longer sentences which John could be put probably through a readability calculator there were also some themes excuse me that more than one group also held in common and some of those were how can the district work with stakeholders to come to consensus on what an expanded

028notion of success might look like and how can this be measured over time what might the district do to ensure that there are effective data collection and analysis systems in place to support teachers and using assessment data to inform instruction and how might district how might the district evaluate whether the current service delivery model is the most appropriate for providing services and ensuring equitable access to content instruction from highly qualified licensed teachers so those were really the major themes that emerged it doesn't mean that we're not going to work on a lot of what was in the entry report we certainly will but we also have to figure out what are the most key themes that we have the capacity to start with so with that said we worked with the leadership team to really

029hone this and develop four major areas of focus for the district one is around engaged learning and other is around inclusive practices another is around social emotional well-being and then the fourth is equitable opportunities and outcomes you will see a lot of formality familiar arrack familiarity sorry it's been a long day you will see a lot of familiar things to our former long-range strategic plan that is very intentional this district has made a lot of headway in the last few years and has reached the point where some of the work of the last few years is really starting to have a deep impact across the district we don't want to stop that work what we want to do instead is have a strategy that can help us go for the next five years in a

030flexible way that's responsive to the progress that we make each year and we feel that these four areas are really going to help us get there I'll just say briefly engaged learning was really about putting the academic life in the intellectual life of the school district front and center as an area that we want to continue to grow we want to make sure that as schools we know that our primary function is to help students learn and learn at high levels knowing that we're already an incredibly high performing district and our students do exceedingly well what we're really hoping to do with this is deepen our students engagement and not and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a couple minutes but it's really engagement is the strategy to increase our students learning

031inclusive practices was somewhat of an outgrowth of our previous goal around equity but we wanted to separate it off from equity because we want to focus on school climate and culture and expand our definition of inclusion not only to just be around equitable outcomes but around how students experience our schools and how students feel comfortable in our schools social emotional well-being that really has not changed and I'll talk maybe a little bit more of the details we're trying to take a very proactive stance around social-emotional learning and this iteration of the strategy and then equitable opportunities and outcomes if you recall the prior language in the strategy it was about equitable access to curricula and programs we wanted to expand that definition that it's not just about students being able to access our programs in

032curriculum it's actually about the outcomes for those students as well so I just wanted to clarify a couple of things on the big overarching and the somewhat different I'm gonna change terminology on you a little bit rather than just calling them goals these are overarching strategic objectives and I'm using that term very intentionally with the difference being a goal can often be confused with the SMART goal which is what are you doing this year within a very finite amount of time and it's very locked that there's a very targeted specific outcome to it the idea of having strategic objectives is the strategy over a five-year period needs to be fluid and flexible because we know that there's times when you exceed a goal during a year there's times when you haven't met a goal during

033the year and you have to be able to adjust on the fly and so the idea of having objectives and overarching objectives is really the the thought process behind that that we want to just have our thinking be rigid and fixed over this period of time so just to clarify some of my own terminology in terms of engaged learning and for each of these four objectives we then broke these down into some strategic initiatives and the difference between an objective and an initiative an objective is the overarching target area that you're trying to improve the initiatives are the actual things you're undertaking in order to achieve that initiative this is a pre first draft version the next steps I'm going to preface this so that we're not confusing it the next steps will be to

034very at a more granular level actually define what each of these is and to put a sense of what's happening at the various levels of the district because what happens at the high school will look slightly different from the junior high will look slightly different from the elementary school and we actually in this next strategic plan want to have some clarity around what you would expect to see at the various levels additionally what you will see is kind of a working an initial target of how this might play itself out over three to five years rather than just say alright this is our goal for five years but let's work on year 1 what we need to say is this is our goal for 5 years here's an initial thought process about how the map

035could look and now here's what year 1 of that needs to be so it's kind of a 5 year plan for the district for engaged learning there were about five main ideas that came out we want to expand our definition of success and one of the programs that Deb bukas and I have been looking at really since last year it's called portrait of a graduate it's really a wonderful program that is designed to bring your entire community together it gets your students involved it has your families involved it has community members involved it has educators involved in really clearly defining what the outcomes you want for your students are that you want kids that have highly skilled content knowledge but you also want kids with social emotion skills and I think we have an opportunity

036as a community to come together and actually work to define what that graduate should look like of our district and that also helps us backward plan starting at the elementary school how do we need to approach student learning over the course of our years to be able to get to that portrait of a graduate we want to and this is how we're really defining kind of that engagement idea we engagement isn't just kids involvement in the life of schools it has a really specific definition there's a cognitive level of engagement there's an emotional level of engagement and there's also a behavioral level of engagement and I don't mean behavioral in terms of like student behavior at school but what are the behaviors students are exhibiting during learning and are they behaviorally engaged so we're going

037to be working toward really making sure that all of our educators know the strategies that they can use to expand all three areas we want to increase hands-on learning opportunities for all students at all levels and we want to be able to appropriately increase the level of student voice and choice in the learning that they're engaging in we know that students have changed over the last decade and what is interesting students today is not what interested students 10 and 15 years ago and one of the largest pieces of interest that you'll hear students across the state say is students need to be agents of their own instruction and they need to have a voice in the types of things that they are able to pursue and they want it highly personalized in that way so

038I think that's another strategy that we want to focus on over the next five years is increasing that we have a real initiative going around steam learning science technology engineering art and math that's one big idea for us it's really a type of thinking that we want our students to be able to engage in in that design process and I think the next meeting Deb is actually going to be doing an extended presentation on steam so I'm not going to give away the farm yeah and then the last one is really around educator growth and development and what kept coming back on all four of our major overarching objectives is that at the heart of this our work is only as good as what happens in classrooms everyday for every student and the primary leveraged

039for that is our educators and we are so fortunate in this community to have the absolute most talented group of educators in the world so we want to make sure that we continue to provide our educators with opportunities to learn and grow and kind of stretch themselves so that is a key point of leverage is really around educator growth and development and that actually gets expanded a bit into recruitment too even in our next iteration inclusive practice the heart of inclusive practice is always going to be the relationship between the student and the adult in a school and if the relationships aren't good nothing else you do will ever foster a more inclusive environment and help kids feel more connected to school we also want to prioritize anti-bias education for all of our stakeholders our

040students our educators and our community we want to talk about aligning our service delivery and this is something that Don is so much more qualified to speak to than I am but I'll try and summarize that in a nutshell in a less than high-performing environment the various services that are used to support students often happen in isolation and aren't coordinated with each other at a high enough level and if we want to increase how we're supporting students we have to focus on the alignment of all of those various supports and resources for kids so that there's a real continuum of service available for all students because what we know now is that every student in our schools need something just a little bit different than other students and we need to have the right continuum

041of services Don was that a fair enough quick explanation decile ization got it put that one through a readability calculator the next one stakeholder engagement and I talked a little bit about this earlier you know Tessa and I are doing some community coffees just on general feedback about the schools but Don and I are focusing on kind of really the idea of inclusive environments and how can we make sure all of our stakeholders have feedback into that did I skip something oh you know what because I'm trying to see it too I have it on my computer I have a clicker yeah yeah so thank you and then again what came up shockingly is at the heart of everything we want to do if we really wanted to impact students it has to be about

042how we're helping our educators grow and develop and how we recruit educators I'm not gonna get into the details of this quite quite now because that'll come well actually I'll talk just very briefly because there are a couple things here Universal Design for Learning there's a lot of research that's emerged in the last 20 years around how to we now know students come to us with a variety of needs and what we know is there's certain things that can be done when teachers plan that will universally make that environment accessible to a variety of needs if we know there are small changes to how we setup our learning environments and how we provide instruction for students and we make those changes up front then they're actually automatically available to all students rather than being coming

043an add-on service for students after the fact so Universal Design is about making all of our learning environments and all of our instruction accessible at a baseline level for as many students as possible that's something that actually all of our elementary educators are taking is the first professional learning workshop of this fall so all elementary educators have that baseline after this fall the talking about instructional practices and approaches making sure they're responsive to various cultures in our community the student-centered coaching model we wanted to put in here it's not something that's starting new but it's something that you've supported already but it certainly is really about inclusive practice and then again we come back to educator growth development and that evaluation process making sure it's effective oops do my second click equitable opportunities and outcomes

044again we're focusing on not only access but now outcomes as well what we are hoping to do with actually some of your input as we go through this process is come up with some really key we're calling the opportunity and Decatur's which are equity indicators that we can come back to year after year after year after year to measure how we're making progress in providing equitable access for opportunities for our students I'll give you just one example there's a School District Cambridge actually targeted some really key indicators based on a lot of the research that's emerged so they had third grade literacy as one of their key indicators they had eighth grade mathematics proficiency is another indicator but they also had an indicator for school climate and culture they had another indicator for educator diversity

045and they had about six or eight of these indicators and they actually benchmarked themselves year after year and they made a commitment to show in progress that's something that we've started some initial thinking about but we hope to evolve as we get into this strategic plan we want to make sure that we have robust data systems this is an area that we can certainly improve as a district and that also means some consistency about how we collect data and how we use data and our educators are able to use data in classrooms around how their students are progressing that really flows into ensuring that we have good literacy and mathematics outcomes we know third grade literacy level is the Gateway to basically all education but similarly we also know that eighth grade mathematics proficiency is

046a gateway to upper level coursework for our students so just making sure that those two key indicators are really sound for our district and not just for all because we say the word all students I actually think it sometimes minimizes it because in our district sometimes when we say all that means the average and our average is extremely high but improvement for our district is not about improving the average our improvement for our district is making sure that every student is having the same experience that we intend them to have and so really looking much more at the individual student level around progress and then we still want to continue to examine our big picture systems we've talked about open enrollment and making sure that there's some balance across our schools looking at leveling and

047tracking of students particularly as they go throughout our level coursework we want to talk about our human resources policies and procedures and that goes to the higher process making sure we're continuing to expand educated diversity and then finally it shockingly comes still back to educator growth and development because equity lies in the classroom right and that that's got to be the primary place and then finally social emotional well-being we want to expand this a little bit to think about school climate and culture oops there we go I'll get up by the last slide we want a school climate and culture we talked about rate relationships being a foundation of inclusive cultures school climate and cultures of the foundation of social emotional well-being and PBIS stands for positive behavior interventions and supports and that is really

048about making sure that as students work in a school there's it doesn't mean every teacher does exactly the same thing but there is a consistent set of behavioral expectations within the school and across the teachers so that as students pass from teacher to teacher over time students aren't left guessing as to what the expectations in a school should be that's particularly at the elementary level it does also have some implications for secondary level but it's really a primary level focus we want to be more proactive in our approach to social emotional learning and that has to start with figuring out what the skills kids need to have our there's a great Alice in Wonderland quote that says something to the effect of if you don't really know where you're going you're likely not to get

049there and in education just like in math and in English language arts if you don't know what your curriculum is and the skills you want kids to learn it's highly unlikely that they're going to learn exactly what you intended them to learn so we want to better define what those skills are and curriculum and the supports that take place pre-k through 12 we want to expand opportunities for screening and assessment particularly at younger grades for social-emotional learning so that we're not reacting to students needs but we're being proactive in identifying them in support finally if we're going to assess and get a better sense of who needs support we have to make sure that the systems of support are adequate we've already entered in to a program evaluation that's taking place it's actually going to

050start very soon of our entire kind of social emotional support program and we should have that information back round about December just in time for budget season to be able to inform some of our decisions there no not December January now okay maybe it'll help inform budget season this year but that's the time I guess that got updated in the last day that's okay and then finally educator growth and development and that goes to social-emotional skills can't be something that's taught external to the curriculum but we need to help our educators think about ways that social-emotional learning can be integrated appropriately into the curriculum so for example when we're doing group work in schools which is highly appropriate in every business in the world is telling us that's what they want kids to be able

051to function in groups there's an academic learning component that has to be clear but if you're doing group work and an effective level you also have to identify the social-emotional learning opportunities that you want students to have out of that because the two go hand in hand it's not just about the concrete skills it's about the soft skills as well so that's really what that approach is and that's again about educator growth and development see I got it this time what was interesting is we started talking about this we started trying to back up to some of these slides and figure out what our buckets looked like for lack of a better word inclusive practices a bucket and then these initiatives kind of fall into that bucket but we started saying wait a minute student

052and adult relationships that's not voting just about inclusive practice it's also about engaged learning cuz kids can't be engaged in their learning if they don't have great relationships with the adults it's also about equity and then it's also about school climate and culture and social emotional well-being and what we started to think of was it wasn't about living in buckets or silos anymore and I talked about that a little bit before if we want services that work together for students we can't silo them so similarly if we want a plan that works together for students we can't silo our initiatives either and so we did a little exercise and we realized that a lot of our initiatives that we want to undertake have multiple points of intersection within our four big priorities and strategic objectives

053and so we started mapping those out and playing around a little bit with that and what we came to was actually pretty interesting and it's really hard to see on this projector but there were some really key through lines in all of our work that we kept coming back to that really formed a focus of the efforts we need to make and really at the core of all of it were the student adult relationships the school climate and culture our educators recruitment growth and development this idea of Universal Design for Learning in making sure our you are learning environments are it's already accessible to all and then this idea of tiered systems of supports and making sure we have the right supports in place whether it's in math whether it's in literacy or whether it's

054in social emotional well-being and then we also looked at kind of this idea of responsive instructional practices and materials in making sure that all of our materials that we're using in our schools and our practices are responsive not only in a cultural level but to the individual learning needs of students and then also this idea of expanding our notion of success because if we want to do this we have to make sure that we can all agree on what does it look like when students leave us and what do we want to have happen at that end so those were the through lines and then we also looked at how other Big Ideas intersected across those and it was really interesting because I was looking at this in my office one day and what I

055came to was the first thing that I talked to our educators about when started at acton-boxborough that I had for experiences that I wanted our students to have while they were in our schools I wanted each student to feel loved unconditionally I wanted them to feel valued as an individual and for who they were as a person I wanted them to be challenged intellectually physically and emotionally while they were with us in school and then I wanted to make sure that we supported each child the way that that student needed support and we hadn't looked at this connection but as soon as I got the Venn diagram and I put the compass next to it I said wow this is it's really kind of cool that these speak to each other and so I just

056wanted to draw your attention to that because I'm hoping that you feel that this is a reflection of what you've heard about through the entry process and the feedback that I presented to you from our community and our discussions over the last year but this is really kind of an initial framework for where I'd like to take our district over the next five years with really the outcomes being what do we want students to experience in school which are these kind of four compass points so I will just give you a couple quick ideas on next steps because I think that's important so we are continuing internally to solicit some feedback and refining our strategic objectives and initiatives we and that's part of my presentation to you tonight to hear some of your thoughts about

057that we are defining our multi-year path through the objectives you know and I put the quote I don't know if I read this or made it up but it seems like a nice quote but rome wasn't built in the day but it also didn't happen by accident and then we want to define and map each initiative over the life of the plan and then we will be bringing that to you at that point for school committee adoption I expect that to happen in November of this year and then after that we need to make sure that we're working with all of our schools to deeply understand the plan and we've been talking to principals that the next iteration of school improvement plans should have a high degree of alignment with this overarching plan as a

058district and it's kind of that saying that you know crew team works better if everyone's rowing in same direction and I've always said the start of that is making sure your boats are in the same river so your boats are in the same river you know and then the high-performing team is all rowing in the same direction so that's that's really kind of the overview for you but I'm welcome to answer any questions take some comments and feedback I'm Peter thanks for for this print it's good overall what I heard well I read I want to make a comment on their race balance I'm sorry their greece balance misho balance whatever so instead of in order to balance balance i would like to say you know the school leaders could you know also the teachers

059could look into understand each risk you know the culture of them and then their focus and their strengths their answer and what they're looking for and then come back to school and then to do maybe to do some improvement or some work in order to attract the students I don't I don't want to say you know there's the school mutation to use power to balance yeah Michael actually I very much appreciate that comment I agree with you wholeheartedly on that I the more I've thought about kind of the where we're not balanced racially I don't think that that's a solution I actually think that's a symptom of something else that there are certain things that attract families toughest one school or another and I think that we want to take off take a look at

060that so I appreciate that feedback as I looked over the plan at home and hearing it again today I feel like how could one not rally behind this it's it's a it's seems so thorough so student-centered it seems like a tremendous amount of training and work for administrators as they look at teachers and try to implement this and it seems it seems daunting like teachers will have to do a lot to love the whole child and deliver non siloed you know services an education that is personalized to each student and I think I urge us to think even further and dig deeper into our class sizes I think that this is a lot of work to do with twenty four kids and I think that many of those kids have language learning social emotional issues

061and it's it's it seems almost difficult to me the other thing that I would say in tandem with that is that specialists who see five hundred twenty kids can't deliver any of these values in a great way in a meaningful way and how do we we must also fold that into the formula a librarian or a PE teacher that is literally spending September October November getting to know five hundred twenty kids at McCarthy town camp engage with students in this way at the model is is weird and so I don't not weird but maybe maybe works maybe doesn't it's just that it seems so personalized and I love that aspect of it so I think it is ill-fitting and with with specialists or we'd have to think more about that or you would though in

062one last comment is that somehow for me like this feels like we could you could really work this into the fabric of an elementary schools this this is great for elementary school and I sort of I hope that we have real buy-in for the upper grades with this I hope that we it feels like yes this is I could see smaller kids really flourishing here and those teachers really finding ways to do this how do you do that in the high school much like the specialists when you have you know I don't know how many kids in a day and the learning is different and more intensive and the rigor is just know the Converse I don't know it seems um I just would love to picture that better at the upper level and I

063can't right now and maybe that's okay I just love the content so much and it's gonna be great just can't wait to see what you do just make eye contact with both of you first go back behind the podium uh you know in in reading this and then and and then receiving the presentation from you Peter I'm struck by those TED Talks that sort of start with some coincidental story and then meander around and then all of a sudden at the end boom it all comes together and for me that was the the alignment of your compass which to me was sort of the synthesis of your early onboarding conversations just talking to people and then to then see how that through a really purposeful investigation actually resulted in sort of the same result but

064really detailed so I really appreciate that and I would you know echo what my Oh echo what Maya said and that I think you've presented to us a beautiful forest and I'm really looking forward to seeing what those trees are like because you know between the objectives and the initiatives there's a lot of good overview there and you know alkie and I'm one of the things that you said which was to make progress on our objectives we need those initiatives and to make progress on those initiatives we need to lay them out more than just one year at a time so you know I'm looking forward to that level of detail what I see so far makes a lot of sense I'm really excited about if the questions about what does this look like across

065all of our different service delivery models what does this look like across all of our different school programs and end levels I think that's the the detailed work that will be a fun challenge for you and your team coming forward but from what I see so far I'm really excited just so you know we wanted to come with the initial idea first before we did all the detail work because if we're really off target it's better to know now yeah same here this is like I describe you like that this is like GPS for driving for the next five years and I just want to kind of saying because there's a lot of details we don't know the weather tree looks like and every school has different focus so in terms of how we can

066establish the communication channel so each different school and at different phase at different time frame can get the feedback and we establish the process so we can make this outcome you know better for each age each school said will be great thank you I have to say this is incredibly exciting reading through this I'm just so I'm so happy to see everything kind of coming together I would especially excited about increasing engagement so I would kind of echo what Maya was saying and while I think a lot happens in the elementary schools where it's it's very easy it's more conducive to creating environments like this I think it's I think it's much harder once you get into the high school classes and I would really like to see a real focus there too to get

067kids because I've seen with my kids and other kids the the drop-off of engagement as they go proceed up through the grades and I you know I'm excited to see what you're gonna do with all of this and also a question about it maybe I'm jumping the gun here on the steam week that we I'm hoping or participating in and what that looks like or maybe you let us know afterwards I don't know give you a little little sure some steam weeks so we're going to expand well the state has one week for stem their long at stem we're going expand it for two weeks for steam and it's going to back right up and to this the PIP stem fest so there'll be a continuation right into the community gathering so a little bit

068more to come next week you know I think it's a just to comment on Amy's point in my my is because it was about kind of how do we chunk this and actually have the impact that we want there is great deep learning happening in all our classrooms across the district and I think what we want to do is continue to identify those areas that cause the highest levels of student engagement and then really just celebrate that type of work that's because that's the type of work we want students to be engaging in I think you look nationally at trends you can I there's a lot of data around student engagement and how it changes over time and everywhere there's a precipitous decline in student engagement as they go from elementary school to middle school

069into high school and that's kind of a natural occurrence I just don't know why that has to be acceptable and I think that there's a lot we can do to really reverse that trend and I'll be honest I see high levels of engagement and a lot of the places I go in I was just in whole series of classrooms today junior high Blanchard high levels of engagement happening everywhere again I think it's helping people identify what are the types of things that students do that cause that high level of engagement and then how do we incrementally continue to increase and stay with it so I want to go back to the boats in the river and that the question of coherence I was at dinner of the board for the Arizona State University Biodesign Institute

070and was talking to a professor of molecular biology about his students and what they did and those students in a lot of cases you think well molecular biology you know you've got well-defined tract and therefore you're gonna be a molecular biologist and of course the reality is that only a third of them you know are really actively molecular biologists and but most of students coming in or think you know I'm gonna be a molecular biologist and what we have there is what I would consider to be a failure of imagination so that while we as an educational community might want to behave in a completely coherent way what we really are striving to do is to open up a very large universe of possibilities so that all the students flee the river and go in

071different directions and I think that that's something that frequently gets lost and so I would hope that on the one hand you know as we have that discussion around coherence and individuality we would remember that from a student perspective you know we should hope to see people going in lots of different directions the other thing that I wanted to comment on is that you know a lot of people talk about having children and I frequently said in response to that nobody should want to have children you should want to have adults now everybody who sent their kids off to school you know I think will find it's like I miss my I miss my kids I sent them off to school that's when they were getting good and I think you know as I listen

072to some of the discussion around what we would hope to provide you know as an educational experience we never lose sight of the fact that what we actually want to create is independent learning so that the best education is the one that creates no additional need for education and I think part of that you know is the answer to the fact that we don't have incident sources because once people can learn all by themselves we don't need more resources so I hope we would never lose sight of that and the last point I wanted to make was the Jenny commented the other day that the school can only go so far in helping a student have a good day if a student you know has a bad day at home and then a good day

073at school that still might make it difficult to be a good day and likewise if the student has a good day at home and a terrible day at school they still are going to struggle to have a good day so that as we look at this question of social emotional well-being first of all let's be honest that that relates to those family experiences the school experiences and everything else people go through for a day only a piece of which we control so that as we look at what we can do the piece that we want to do is make sure that we control you know as best we can the interface you know that there's some stuff that exists between the two and we want to have a positive impact but we also want to

074be honest about the fact that we don't control everything and that has implications for what we can and cannot do and of course that last piece that we can't control is in the hands of the community and so everybody as they participate in communal activities and you know in my view the reason that Acton and vice world have been successful is the fact that when people are out wherever they are doing you know youth soccer or Boy Scouts or whatever they're doing they're encountering people who are engaged we're excited about what they're doing more enthusiastic you know are wanting to help other people and that if our students are really going to have a deep sense of being loved and you know a deep sense of feeling well that will be a product not only

075of what we do here in the schools but of what we also do in the community at large just comment you know I just want to add one nuance to that idea that you know kid we know students bring the outside world with them when they come into our schools but one nuance I always come back to and it's interesting John Hattie I don't know if you know his work at all but he's essentially an educational researcher and what he studies is the effect that various educational stimulus have on kids and the number-one effect size that is the quality of the teacher that a student has in the quality of instruction that a student has way way way down the list is what happens in the house in terms of educational outcomes for students so

076it's a really interesting and he's just done meta-analysis of this so I always come back to that and I think it's we there is a finite point that schools can only control what they can control but what we continue continue can continue to do is add tools to our toolboxes to expand the influence that we have and I think that's really the goal of the work that we do is continue to add our tools and make sure our toolbox is more robust so for example when you talk about social emotional learning you know we know that kids bring all sorts of experiences but one of the most effective Universal designs for classrooms and social-emotional learning that makes it accessible for all students is to have trauma-informed classrooms and if educators understand concepts of trauma-informed care

077and they use those to design learning environments then even students who are coming to those learning environments with trauma from outside the school still have an ability to access that environment more effectively so you're right there's no one person who can fix the world and I I do believe that but I think that there's an awful lot of tools we can add to make it a lot better I guess first of all I want to echo what you said John said that you know we should offer you know that it's been the runge of the directions that students can go with us and also the opportunities the second thing that you know regarding to this self learning so I would say that in school we should focus on you know the teachers you know try

078to use the resources teachers is but especially and then maybe after school we should you know encourage the students to you know to learn how to sell fur all right thank you Thanks um I just think it's a really excellent strategic plan really was felt really very inspired when I read it and I read it a few times because there's so much here I just didn't feel like there was anything missing when you think about what is happening now sort of an educational theory and what people are trying to do whether through charter public or private schools as so much of that is here in your plan and I just was thrilled to see it and know that it's a part of a B and that that's the direction that things will be going I

079guess my my concern if it's a concern is how inclusive and great of a planet is just because it seems like a lot to take on and so many different areas of it feel so huge to do it all at once when I know it's over a matter of years but sort of a where to start and what will this look like the classroom at the student level you know how will it really play out I loved the way that you balanced so many things throughout it I felt like there were a lot of tensions that you're sort of balancing both sides of sort of throughout it and I thought that that was that's really a skill that you have that is one of the reasons why I was interested to come on board School

080Committee and be a part of it is just because looking at even you know in every aspect of it I was sort of focusing on data collection and that that came up as equitable opportunities and outcomes and just thinking about the balance between how do we gather data that can be useful without turning children into data points and how do we sort of balance that and looking at a whole child and a person in a relationship and feeling loved and at the same time having some real data that we can use to inform what we're doing so I thought that that was here and then I'll be also interested to see how that how that becomes concrete and how that turns into what does the data look like how is it shared with teachers and

081how is it shared with parents will it look like a different report card will it look like a different a way that student teacher conferences are held in data that's shared in those meetings and just sort of the concrete I'm excited to see where it goes and it's a lot it's a lot and it's it's good the direction I will say what we're actually trying to do you know we've gone through several iterations and we keep trying to look for areas that we can hone and really prioritize and that that's why I think you know it's interesting cuz everyone's strategic plan is presented in buckets like here's one objective here's what we're doing here's another excuse what we're doing I actually think I might just stay with the Venn diagram and maybe make it more

082of an interactive one that you can dig into the diagram by clicking I don't know how that will work yet someone will figure it out but I don't want to lose the idea that there are the closer things are to the center the more time we should be spending and that's really about how we can find some ways to prioritize our work so like looking even just looking at the data culture we're working on educator evaluation this year with our administrative team to hone our own skills around that and some of the early work we're doing to help create that data culture is around student learning goals and working with our educators across the district to think about how to stretch ourselves in terms of our student learning goals and think more at that student

083level and I I think taking small steps like that is actually how you create a culture that then can take the bigger steps without a lot of need for direction so it's that balance and it goes back to what John said you have to be loose enough that people bring their creativity to it because you want that outcome for students but you have to be tight about the big areas that you want to have cohesion on and there is a yin-yang kind of balance to that where you know the idea that we want our students to be more deeply engaged and that means cognitive behavioral emotional engagement that's something how people can get there needs to be highly personalized well I love a good graphic I would encourage you to stick with this and not

084do buckets for sure it's harder to get through but it's more authentic I think I'm trying to really understand this graphic deeply but from the perspective of what is a teacher thinking about when they sit down to design lessons or pull out a lesson and adapt it for the class that's coming in or the new group of students what's driving instructional design and when I the way that I understand this is is the group in the middle that that's the group of that's straight down the middle that the core right in the middle is educator recruitment learning and growth and then if you move out school culture and climate student adult relationships the coaching and then down Universal Design multi-tier that's the the way I'm reading this is that you're setting the infrastructure to support

085the strategic objectives that you want teachers to be thinking about as they sit down to design instruction so I'm hoping I kind of got that right and then the stuff that's kind of sprinkled all around or the the the day-to-day stuff that's gonna help move that forward okay so just some cautionary things that came to my mind was and Nora you mentioned this and so have others that scaling something often results in reduction in quality of something because it just becomes less and less possible to meet the individual needs when you're trying to give you an you have a class of 25 or you know whatever it's it's that's just kind of like a thing and I I just want to throw out a cautionary note about that that that we want to have high

086quality that's hard to do when you scale something it's easier to do when you're just dealing with kind of smaller systems and then the data systems I don't want to become a slave to data there's some there's there there must be a an in between point a sweet spot between everything being subjective and beings like data crazy so hopefully we'll find that and then the last thing is I was wondering how I think it would be important to educate school councils on this graphic because they're the ones driving the school improvement plans so I just wanted to throw that out there as well great this I love it that's a great great graphic and a great job on this thank you no thank you I think one thing we're really trying to push this year

087especially as we talk about student learning goals is data doesn't mean numbers there's quantitative data but there's also an awful lot of qualitative data and it's really we're actually maybe backing away from the use of the word data and instead thinking about its evidence of learning and evidence of improvement because you can't boil everything in a kid down to a number and it doesn't work that way but even things like student surveys about their feelings of school climate culture things like that that can be great data to talk about thank you Peter that was fantastic and I really look forward to what this will bring so next up we have a presentation from Murray on a preliminary presentation and discussion of all-day kindergarten good evening everybody can you hear me thank you okay you might

088remember in the spring um we made a presentation about all-day kindergarten at that time we learned that about 80% of our families had requested all day for this year that number has steadily gone up over time and we started to talk about the fact that we think we should start thinking about all-day kindergarten universally so we're back with a bunch more information and things for you to think about possible funding ways we can start to think and so I'm going to go over the details there's a lot of it in your packet and then we will come back again so this won't be sort of the end of it but this will hopefully help further our thinking in your discussions so first of all we have preliminary enrollment numbers the official enrollment numbers are October

0891st I'd actually like to introduce Sally Cunningham back there Sally is our registrar and she does all of our enrollment and state reporting work and so a lot of this information is stuff that Sally's pulled together over time for us so whenever I can't answer she should be able to we did have some drop in enrollment this year and you know we had projected quite a bit of drop in enrollment and in 2015-2016 the housing market really had a boom and it didn't we didn't have as much of a drop as we thought we were gonna have and this year we sort of got back to dropping enrollment and we knew this year through the next couple years we're going to be what we call the trough kind of the lowest enrollment we send this

090all off after October 1st when we have final official numbers to the demographers who will then look at all of it and come back and give us new projections but this year's projections in particular we're down 152 kids K to 12 and 85 dropped at elementary 26 at junior high and last year we had dropped 40 at the junior high so you're starting to see some material improvement in class size there we knew we had sort of a two year jump at the junior high and so now we're kind of back where we thought we would be and then the high school really a small drop 26 students out of about 1,800 for a total of 152 it was actually 21 I'm sorry I was looking in the wrong column we're down 64 at the

091junior high forty the year before so a hundred and four at the junior high and we're down 21 at the high school I was comparing it to the projection so they're kind of similar but so we're down 67 Elementary 64 junior high 21 high school total of 152 three percent across the board okay you'll hear more about that we'll come back the beginning of November with the projections and kind of a better analysis of it kindergarten so I reported this to you in April we came in 40 40 students just want to make sure I'm looking at the right because they're close 40 students lower than the projection at kindergarten and it was 45 fewer in actin and five more in Boxborough complete opposite of last year which was the opposite of the year before

092so I can't figure it out so we ended up with 306 students we thought we were gonna have 346 and across the board our class sizes are improving so we still had classes over where we'd like them to be were the guidelines so this has helped a lot particularly at the junior high team sizes were quite tight we had teams between 120 and 130 and now we've got them down between 105 and a hundred and 15 where we'd like them to be so that's good now half day so we had the fewest number students in half day this year that we've ever had 66 total students in half day distributed across six schools 16 of those are at Blanchard and so we do have a dedicated half-day class at Blanchard but the other five schools

093we've gone hybrid so there are classrooms in the other five schools that have half day and all day kids mixed into the same classroom and then the half day kids go home in the middle of the day there are pros and cons to that I have a slide about that but for this slide 78% of our kids are in all day and 22% are in half-day everybody got what they wanted if they wanted all day they're in all day they wanted half day they're in half day the Crosstown data is interesting and increasing over time so we have 103 actin students attending Blanchard so of the 473 students at Blanchard 22% of them are from actin there are 68 Foxborough students attending schools in Acton now it sounds like a lot of Acton students are

094going to Blanchard and they are but it's 4% of Acton students are attending school in Boxborough 16% of Boxborough students are attending school in Acton so the way we look at that is that it's really been successful in that families can specify their choice and can go to school where it makes the most sense for them we did a survey all the survey results are in your packet we surveyed three ADEs of students parents guardians so last year's kindergarten first grade and then the incoming kindergarten which is now this year's kindergarten okay and we got about 95 responses from each class about 1/3 of each class responded so it's a fairly good response rate 289 total responses we asked about why people selected their schools why they selected half-day why they selected all day we

095also asked for some feedback on the kindergarten prot process I have the detailed survey responses in the packet but I took out some highlights the first is why do people pick an elementary school we've asked this question over time and the responses tend to be fairly consistent the biggest reason is the school philosophy followed by teachers conversations with friends neighbors family the tour the principal the facility and so on but by far the biggest reason is school philosophy next now these two charts are a little different than what was in your original packet they are in the updated packet so the question is rate the degree to which each of the factors below influence your preference for all day k and then the next slide is half-day K these slides I filtered out so the

096only people on the all-day slide are people who picked all day and the people in the half-day slide are the people that picked half-day so it's more accurate what was originally in your packet was all people who responded so you had half-day people on the all-day slide so of the people who chose all day the number one reason was my child's academic development in it's the number two reason close behind parents work schedule the third is my child social-emotional development needs followed by my child's physical development needs and so on so they picked all day K for academic followed by work schedule followed by social emotional and physical the people who picked half-day so that was 206 answers there 72 people responded who had picked half-day over the 3-year period of time number one reason

097why they picked half-day they wanted their child to have more time in the afternoon for play secondly wanted their child to have more time in the afternoon with family third social-emotional development and forth all day K was too expensive we theorized that expensive would be up at the top and it wasn't next to what degree was the entire process clear and easy to understand it was fairly positive a lot of medium a lot of high we wanted to get some feedback about the process because we do tours in every school and we do night meetings in every school and sometimes we hear from parents that it's kind of overwhelming so we're kind of looking at whether we want to do all of that all the time all right now in acton-boxborough I sort of explained

098this at the beginning but we are we have hybrids right now and [Music] Blanchard has a half-day all the other schools have the hybrid the half days students go home in the middle of the day the bottom bullet is kind of important when to think about even though 70% of our students are in all day we are delivering a half-day curriculum because we have half-day students we're teaching to all students the half-day students go home there's some enrichment there's some further time on learning in the afternoon but the core curriculum all of our specials are all taking place in the morning so by having a mixture of half and all day and particularly a mixture in the same classroom we're really cramming all of the instruction into the morning and so it's not we're not

099teaching a full all-day curriculum so the benefits and the challenges that's part of what I was just talking about so you can kind of read through that the scheduling kind of pushing it all into the morning the school community in the classroom when some kids are leaving in the middle of the day and but people everybody can get what they want for all day and half day and there's clearly a strong need for all day and there are about 20% of our families really prefer half-day so the next few slides come from information I got from a report done by strategies for children and it talks about all day K across Massachusetts the average tuition is 3,500 we're at 4,500 there is a range like a wide range as of 2017 18 so two school

100years ago 277 districts in Massachusetts offered district-wide all-day kindergarten 87% only 38 had partial all-day K like we do and to only had half day so basically 40 districts or 13% didn't have universal all-day kindergarten without tuition the expansion is graphed on this chart this is the number of kids in Massachusetts in all day and it's up to 96% of students are in all day in Massachusetts the next two charts graph sort of with color where those districts are so the two white districts no full-day K offered that's Concord in Needham they both offer it now Concord offers like a modified version Needham implemented full all day K this year the light blue says 10 to 64 percent of students are in all day we are in the light blue we've kind of past that

10164% marked by now a lot of the light blue is in eastern Massachusetts the medium blue says 65 to 89 percent of students are in all day and then the dark blue is ninety to a hundred percent and then the next slide talks about tuition and the range of tuition so the lighter the color the lower the tuition we're in the dark orange which is what a lot of them are which is thirty five hundred to five thousand and then this is a list of the districts that moved over a two-year period 2017-18 there were I think ten to twelve districts 2018-19 there were another ten to twelve districts and I don't have a lot of information about who went there this year other than I know Needham did all right so now back to

102acton-boxborough so this is our all-day Kay budget we have roughly 1.1 million dollars in revenue from tuition for all-day students this year we have 240 students last couple years we had more like 220 so 1 million 80,000 in revenue and the expenses so actually the total revenue ended up being nine ninety one after scholarships and the expenses were 1 million 80 thousand so roughly 1.1 million in expenses this includes we now have all-day staffing everywhere except for one classroom so the only expense left to add is one more classroom so in order to implement all day we're talking about 1.2 million we gave you that estimate last year a hundred and twenty thousand of it is what we would call additional expense beyond what we're spending right now so we have to fill the gap

103of the tuition which is 1 million 80,000 plus 120 K all right moving to all-day would cost 1.2 million we could consider possible phasing in of funding two possible methods we could either reduce tuition over time and or we could supplement the budget with an D so I have a few models there to talk through so the first model is reduced tuition over time so this year is $4,500 we have hybrid kindergartens next year we could go to 3,500 that would give us a two hundred and forty thousand dollar gap because the tuition would be reduced plus if we made every classroom all day we have an additional 120 thousand in expenses we could fund that with a hundred and fifty thousand in the budget and two hundred and ten thousand out of the reserve

104we right now have about 260 in the all-day K reserve the following year we could go down another thousand charge twenty five hundred again 240 reduction in revenue put 190 in the budget take 50 out of the all-day K fund and we'd take two 10 out of e and D and it keeps going this way all right the next year we could go to 1,500 the left and then in FY 24 it could be free so from now that's a four year phase-in to get to free tuition what's good about it is the budget increases gradual the use of E and D is less than the other models it's a total of 1.2 million over four years the downside is we would continue with either half-day or hybrids for four years for three more years

105and that means limiting the curriculum really to the half-day curriculum model too is kind of a middle ground in which next year we'd go down to 2,500 and the following year would be free the budgetary increase is similar 150 the first year 200 each of the next four years 250 the last year the use of E and E is higher so 300 next year 740 the next year 650 for 50 to 50 so you see how the levers are working here we've got the budget we've got tuition and we've got Andy the third is to say you're going to go to all-day came next year the difference here is mostly you use moriendi so we phase in the budget 200 thousand over six years that gets us to the 1.2 million we use 800 Andy

106the first year 740 the second year six hundred four hundred two hundred till we get there the last model is very similar only instead of putting 200 in each year we put three hundred in in three of the years so we go to free next year 200 in the budget then 300 300 300 100 and we use e and E not quite as much as the previous model so they're kind of similar but wanted to give you a range of possibilities why consider universal all-day kindergarten 78% of our parents are requesting it even with tuition equity equity is the big reason that we really started looking at this while some families apply for scholarships many do not families who cannot afford all-day might attend half-day because of the cost last year 25 percent of the

107students in half-day or on free and reduced lunch this year it's 15% those are preliminary numbers so it's not quite as bad this year we did a lot in between to reach out to families to really make sure they have help with the paperwork multiple languages inviting them in we're continuing to do that so we've identified 15% of our families in half-day our on free and reduced lunch and we're reaching out to them to see if we can assist them they may not want all day but if they do we want to make sure we help curriculum so if we went to Universal all day K the curriculum can be redeveloped to make use of the whole day more instruction more play more social-emotional learning more opportunities to develop strong classroom community 87% of Massachusetts

108school districts are already doing it so those are kind of the reasons we did not get into performance we have done some studies and will come back at another meeting with that but let's just say that's not the driving force here okay all right are there any cost savings because of the busing the fact that we wouldn't have to do the mid-day busing a little bit I hadn't thought of that well look at that I mean it's better environmentally but checking to see and I will put in my two cents on the funding models I have to say I think if we went with something I kind of feel like if we do anything except just take the leap all in one year I mean I would be a little upset if I had to

109pay twenty five hundred dollars for all day K in the next year knowing the next from then on it would be free I don't know I just think once we make the decision then we should make the decision so my two cents thanks Marie I think you know when I first reviewed this and started to think about it while the the budget is is clearly proposed here I think the part that I'd love to see more information on in future presentations are what might the difference in outcomes be for all of our kindergartners if we develop a a full-day curriculum and what might the change in outcomes be for those students who might be receiving services today on an IEP that only qualifies them for a half-day and how might putting them in an equitable

110situation with all of their peers for a full-day program how that might affect their outcomes you know I think we would we would probably see and and I I could comment on this from my own experience that the the more interventions and services that you can get earlier on in in someone's you know educational progress the the better the payoff will be later on in the future so you know well I think the the the budget information is important to have I think what I would really want to balance that against is what's the what's the benefit of that cost and I think that being able to see some information reports on that that it that benefit is a it would be a really helpful component and then I think the other part of this

111that I would love to hear some feedback on is how our Director of Finance feels about these commitments in terms of E and D sort of knowing how tightly we we not tightly prudently I believe is your term David prudently we budget and you know seeing some some fairly large numbers and you know encumbering that out of E and D knowing that we we we are well funded in that right now but not you know not knowing what the future might hold I think that would be another good piece of information to bring to the committee so that you know as we make a decision we want to see both the the what the output would be what the benefits would be for our students but then also what some of those risks may be

112on the budgetary side if we're going to commit to a long term use of some of our ENT over a number of years thank you I have a question about page five so graph it on the top oh sorry it's the rate the degree to which each of the factors blow influence your preference for half-day kindergarten yeah I think that one yes so this one's really important to me to understand why parents are choosing half-day kindergarten when they are and I was had a couple questions just about the graph could parents make more than one choice so they could choose more than one option in this survey okay and you have high medium low or none there I don't on mine I'm sorry maybe I have a different graph with numbers at the bottom and

113I was wondering what the numbers meant but that you've okay that makes a lot more sense so they okay so for each item they could reign it high medium or low or not exactly exactly okay and then I was wondering also if you were planning on finding out what parent preference would have been if the cost had been taken out of their decision yeah we didn't ask that question as a weighted I don't know if there's a way to find that out worried for you would they choose it I think is my main question that I have of parents because I know from my own experience it was different for each of my kids but I think that you know when I don't want to wax on about the pace of society and little kids

114growing up so quickly and and the push toward heavy academics in the younger years some kids really do benefit from the lighter academic schedule and coming home for half the day and so I just don't know if we have enough interest in that if it were free to maintain still at least one half-day kindergarten and then I also always have wondered if there could be an option to do half-day kindergarten for half of the year and move into a whole day I don't know if those sort of models have been considered so now that we have hi when you're in a hybrid classroom you can move anytime right but the hybrids have their own as you sort of drive to issues that are really different a lot of their own challenges in terms of the

115community in the classroom the teachers trying to teach everything in the first part of the day that doesn't happen I don't know if that might take away some of the a lot of what you were speaking to I really understood the benefits and challenges at hybrid K's maybe I don't factor into half day versus whole day if it's a purely half-day kindergarten classroom I don't know if there would be enough the 20% seems like a lot but if it were free would they know that's really good feedback in questions we'll think about whether we can get more information like that we have talked more about if we had half-day separate from all day could we have a half-day in one location but not every location kind of mixed kids from schools if we did can

116we live with all day classes going further in curriculum or not those are kind of tough questions that we've been talking about I'll come on someone else it's like I have a quick follow-up question to what nor asked so are the two kindergartens at full-day kindergarten that Blanchard still operating on this sort of half-day curriculum or are they not all the kindergartens are operating on a half-day curriculum I want a little more leeway in that they can put some things in the afternoon because all their kids but the whole district is operating on a half-day curriculum well there just seems to be a discrepancy between the idea that the curriculum is the same whether you go to half-day or full-day yet the number one reason parents chose full-day was the academic needs so do you

117think that they're just that badly want the enrichment or that they really do all parents really understand that the programs are academically identical and is that is there a feeling out there that that can't be true cuz I think that's sort of the murmurs that I remember hearing like well how can that be there surely doing more so we certainly tell them through throughout the process yes I think people perceive that there's more and all day one thing we've sort of said is everything in kindergarten is learning right so you may not have another literacy block or another math block but you have more time with kids you have more recess time you have more socialization Deb do you want to so I guess what's hard to understand is um so I'm packing what academic

118needs are right so is that just more time to explore and to integrate sort of what you're learning that very well could be the definition for some folks and maybe that's why they chose you know the full day not necessarily the breadth of the curriculum that's going to be quote taught or covered so I think it's just hard to get underneath a little bit of what somebody might have meant by that exactly I would like to see a data from you that because the nostril says right now I had two hundred eighty seven school districts right you know Alfred okay so I want to know after they offer the outtake hey what are what were the you know the enrollment change over the years after they offer this also you know compared to before they

119offer so that's one that's one thing and then I'm not sure if you could have you know do some research and then provide this data show this data to us the second thing is that I know I do notice that you have you you mentioned that in your slide mention that you know the Massachusetts most Massachusetts School District start offering this all day Kay after the recession recovery so the recession are you talking about the economy recession or what what what what was that recession I mean it's like I don't I don't know that I didn't say that so something one slide I slide that has two years worth of ten to twelve districts each year added it in that was twenty four districts out of two hundred and eighty seven I don't know the

120years the rest of them implemented it it might have been there somewhere but I don't think I saw that so there was a period of time when the Department of Education was offering grants to implement all day K across the state if your district signed on to implement during that period the state would actually offset large chunks of the cost of transitioning it did come with a whole lot this is gonna be shocking the state had a lot of requirements that went with it that many districts found not to be in the best interest of some kids and so there were a number of districts across the state that didn't take that all day k grant when the opportunity was offered but you can see it's actually a fairly linear line up from about 2000

121on on that that chart of who's enrolled in all day K that I believe I may be Dave you'd be able to answer it but I think 2000 was about the year that the all-day K grant came in at the state somewhere around that time period maybe that's my best guess and Michael just your other point I do have history of how many kids were enrolled in all day in acton-boxborough over the years so I we can send that out in the next time did you say no rustling I'm not talking about it the acting boss were I'm talking about those already offer the odk who they K those school districts that you know what are their enrollment numbers before they offer this what are the what were the enrollment numbers after they offer the

122for the guy oh they K so over the years for example like let's say if there's a school district called X they offered the okay maybe say 213 right so I want to say the number enrollment the number of enrollment that you know was before 2013 and after 2013 over the years - today after today yeah thank you I think you're trying to get to see if the oh they K will improve the enrollment are you trying to gather understanding if we offer oh they K will improve the enrollment number well I I want to say that you know the enrollment you know change because you know all they came instead you know there's an acute fray right so I want to say you know how it was how was it attractive to the you

123know thinking Rome and so this is this might be just you know just small potatoes here but is there a small offset from the foundation budget do we get like the minimum aid if we have additional three hundred and six kids like nine thousand one hundred and forty eight which is I said yeah a factor in you know so we're in minimum aid we get thirty dollars per student right now that means we get fifteen dollars for every kindergarten student because they're officially half-day students because the rest is tuition so we would get another fifteen dollars times three hundred kids okay and then the expectation for scholarship need there that you said twenty two students in one of your slides for a total about 88,000 dollars you are you projecting that that will go up

124likely or you just take that year by year if we went to free tuition no I mean that wouldn't be a thing at that point but like well okay point taken yeah okay so I'll withdraw that I was just thinking about no it's good - yeah it's good to think through it cuz that's not yeah spending that money is not factored into our numbers okay I'll try to be sort of like um would you agree with the statement that Massachusetts has a lot of educational regulations I plead the fifth does Massachusetts require all-day kindergarten no just made shoes require kindergarten attendance now okay I leave that as a thought problem with respect to the budget I'm just practicing in case those skills should ever be useful the the other comment that well I want to

125make two other comments one is that when we're looking at sock values and what are things worth you know I want to highlight the point that has already been made that the top two reasons children are in half-day is because I want to have the afternoon so my child can play and I want to have the afternoon so my child can be with family so as we weigh what we're doing I certainly would want us to play some value on that time with family and that time at play and then the last point is you know with respect to the presentation and the use of the end game my view is that you know we could use E&D to offset anything in the budget million dollars worth of special educators or pick anything else and

126so that the decision about whether or not we want to use India's revenue source in any budget year is discussion with respect to the budget as a whole not with respect to any individual activity so I don't think we should include that you know in this sort of analysis that it should be presented as you know we're looking at forgoing a million dollars worth of revenue and we could do that all at once or over some number of years and it's not more complicated than that and of course if we had a million dollars of expense to our budget our budget will increase by a little bit more than one percent that's thank you all right so the next item on our agenda is the beginning of our new business recommendation to approve the Memorandum

127of Understanding between a VRS D and acting community access television we are asking for a vote and Peter's gonna talk to you a little bit about any of the changes or things so essentially I believe this memorandum was last updated in 2011 so it's about time for that to be done we worked with acting TV we're very grateful for their offer to fund the new equipment for the broadcast of the school committee meetings which is taking place we reviewed this we actually sent it off to our attorney our attorney reviewed it provided some comments back to act in TV acting TV accepted all of the comments from our attorney and so we're proposing this to you for is there a motion to approve the Memorandum of Understanding between AV RSD and acting community access television

128news to improve the Memorandum of Understanding move to approve the Memorandum of Understanding between a b r st and Acton TV as proposed and authorized the ABR SC chairperson to sign the documents second all those in favor any opposed any abstentions all right the motion passes unanimously all right item 5.1 is approval of our minutes from meetings on nine five 19 and nine nine nineteen is there a motion to approve the minutes of those two meetings is there a second any discussion all those in favor any opposed any abstentions alright the minutes are approved there are a couple of FY eyes oh no wait sorry FY 19 I'm sorry the year and I'm reading it wrong and I'm like wait a minute there's nothing for me to say here sorry I didn't 5.2 is our

129fiscal year 19 year-end financial report thank you Dave coming up I almost gave you a free pass thank you so I gave a preliminary report on the end of the fiscal year back in August you have a memo with your materials I'm not intending to walk through that memo but I can feel questions on it certainly tonight the presentation is intended to give highlights for fiscal 19 if I can I know you like the posted aspect I'm not going to talk about when I was 17 but I will give some data to show for acton-boxborough in FY 19 financially it was a good year this is this pie chart shows sources of variance in revenues so the difference between the budget and the actual you won't see the assessment up there because we collect everything

130that that is assessed to the two towns which makes up 81 percent of the revenue chapter 70 chapter 70 and transportation is about eighteen and a half percent and you can see that that we had some significant variances in those categories the rest investment income Medicaid is what mostly comprises other that's owned that's less than a half of a percent of the total revenue budget but it was over half of the positive variance to to the budget at the end of the year so on about 88 million dollars of budgeted revenue we had a positive variance of seven hundred and seventy two thousand or just under one percent we conservatively budget I meant to say about other revenue we continue to conservatively budget those amounts in FY 20 collectively from 250,000 to 400,000 I call

131it chasing those those figures we're getting closer the good news is if we use them to set the budget it's a it becomes a source and it makes funding the budget easier the offsetting news if you will is if we budget conservatively we end up having a variance at the end of the year which can go into E and D charts didn't work because of the scope of the variances so here are the major variances by category these are explained in more depth than the memo so I won't go into them here just let you take a quick peek at them overall the year ended within a 1/2 of 1% of the total budget it sounds like an okay result but remember as I said in page 1 as I said in the first paragraph

132of the conclusion of the memo the last page the variance of 473 thousand all I get to use this the variance of 473 thousand half of percent is after we put a million dollars into capital stabilization its net of two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars of prepaying the early retirement liability and its net of four hundred and eighty one thousand dollars worth of circuit-breaker reserve that was budgeted in FY 19 but not used so we had a significant amount of what's called turn backs in the on the expense side and FY 19 and it continued a trend I don't have this you have this in the memo but it continues a trend of increasing turn backs on the expense side since full regionalization so I mentioned circuit breaker of a few seconds ago this graph

133I believe you got this on August 6th it shows how we've increased circuit breaker reserve we're nearly to the max once once the yellow bar yellow section of the bar disappears that's it we can't keep anything more than one year's worth of circuit breaker on hand you have to spend it within one year in my view the optimum strategy would be to hold all of the circuit breaker received in the in that year and use that in its entirety to fund the following year's budget it provides a high degree of certainty in in budgeting the use of what otherwise could be a volatile source of funds you saw this one in August as well we've shown this we've shown this consistently during budget presentations note that this and this is in D growth you see

134the dollar levels are shown vertically and then I put the percentages in and you see we've we've come close to the cap of five percent we've not exceeded it we have we appear to be the asterisk means it's not certified yet but we appear to be within the target set by the by the new policy there was a question at the budget subcommittee does does this trend comport with how things were before full regionalization so I added a slide that's not in your material and went back as far as 2010 and you can see the trough there and Marie was saying well well it's down because the denominator increased greatly and that happened in this year but the trend was established for a couple of years a downward trend in the districts in d as

135a percentage there's no dollars in this chart it's just percentages and so we're back now in the territory of where I can't speak to before 2010 just looking at the data here we're back into territory about where we were in that period of time and we didn't rehearse this Murray I don't know if there's anything you wanted to add to that about from a historical basis historically we would have been between four four and a half percent which is the school committee's target policy now so before 2010 I'm saying we would have consistently stayed around four percent four and a half okay and last slide again you saw this in August as I said in the conclusion to my memo a future budget strategy is likely to anticipate annual turn backs as we get close

136to the ceiling the 5% ceiling we may anticipate the fact of annual turn tax and build them if they're over 5% build them into subsequent budgets there's there the alternative would be to try and estimate the the amount of actual spending so precisely that you run the risk of of not sufficiently budgeting that year's operations I may have I may have been a little bit confusing and all that but whoops haven't gotten used to the pointer yet the the the increase is clear for the last couple of years in how much Indy Reserve has been used and not suggesting that the amount is going to go like this but certainly if we continue to have a million dollar or so turn backs and expenses which is roughly 1% it's not far-fetched to think that that's

137a good a good ending place for the for the year's expenses we may have to plan on utilizing what otherwise would be in excess of the cap for the following year's budget purposes and there's a year lag it's not like the anything over 5% needs that we need to send a check back that year it needs to be returned in the following years budget so with that if there are any questions here at West 9 pages sorry I'm prepared to do that quality that I gave Dave a little bit of a hard time about how science is sometimes projected I'm a little sensitive to that subject you know so well anytime weird science appears we have to make sure that it's appropriately contextualized exactly so this this presentation is a brief update about the capital

138improvement project the CIP C funding not the projects not how the projects are coming along but the funding of it because things have things have changed bondus interest rates are at historic lows we've got evidence presented to us recently that a neighboring town issued a 10-year bond at just over a percent and a half we had in our models that that put together the the CIP plan we assumed that the bonds would be sold at 3.75 percent and we'd have short-term borrowing for the first couple of years at two and a quarter percent now what we're thinking especially based on information that's that's very recent that we could do this for about 2% if we could do the bonds at 2% it changes things drastically we met with our financial advisor earlier this week and

139they suggested that should should the new school project pass and bonds B and we're going to get to that later bonds be issued for that project that these bonds be incorporated to save on bar the issue cost they're legal and and other costs associated with the issuance of bonds that could that could save us some money the upshot is that if we issue them in calendar 2020 so February to March 2020 the first principle payment would begin in next fiscal year so earlier than the original plan we'd be taking lower interest rates and bonding it sooner coincident with the new school and so repayment would would have to start one year sooner so what does that mean I rear in the spreadsheet and assumed that the bond would be issued the second half of this

140fiscal year or the beginning of calendar year 2020 and the interest rate at two percent not three and three-quarters percent and there's some significant differences it's not it's not in the millions but for about the same amount of project so from twenty to five 20 to five and twenty to five it's basically roundings that results in this difference the district would save almost half a million dollars in appropriation to get that same amount of capital projects what's the difference the difference is five hundred twenty-five thousand dollars in interest saved by doing it should we tape should we just go with the same plan and short-term borrow and the short-term rate is is typically the same or less than the bond rate the risk is that because the rates are at such a historical low that

141if we wait as long as two years out they could significantly change we've we've seen what a model with a three and three-quarter percent interest rate looks like it's a half a million dollars more interest than this so the so the the recommendation of the financial advisors is to is to pursue this more quickly and more more to come on that more to come on that because the we're not we're not ready to do it now this was just an FYI a heads up if you will that that we've we've got some new information about the funding thank you diff and just you know there's one implication of that moving the bonding up early on the capital funding if you remember when we presented that plan to you in the early years of the plan

142we were only paying interest on short-term notes so there was more cash available for projects if we move the bonding up we're going to be paying the larger amounts of interest in the earlier years of the plan so what there's two options I think that we Dave and I have talked about that are both viable options either shift a few priorities in the plan out one year or we actually now have a capital Stabilization Fund that's funded we could actually offset what we wouldn't have been able to use in the early years of the project with money from the capital Stabilization Fund because the bottom line is over the life of this plan will actually end up a half a million dollars to the good by going out early so you know regardless of whether

143or not we shift a project out a year or we fund out a capital stabilization we're still end up saving half a million dollars which is either half a million dollars more projects or we're getting out ahead of this earlier that's correct and using the capital Stabilization versus pushing a project out would just be a cash flow issue we'd we'd still be spending the same amount unless we made a material change in the plan and I'm glad you remembered to make that point thank you item 5.4 is a school building committee update Adam so the school building committee hasn't met since your presentation two weeks ago from Larry from arrow Street I would just point out that in your packet there is a revised flyer talking about the status of our project and some upcoming

144events Monday November 4th there'll be a tour of Douglas at 6:30 followed by a forum Thursday November 14th there'll be a forum in Boxborough with the location to be determined Monday December 6th another tour of Douglas if anyone on this committee or any member of the community has not had the opportunity to see the the state of that facility it's a it's a real it's a real great way to sort of give you a kick in the pants to to see what the what's happening there and then also a reminder that December 10th special town meetings in both acting in Boxborough for the vote on the funding of the school building project all right item five point five point one is that strategy dawn so we had a meeting of the debt strategy subcommittee to

145finalize parameters for the purpose of presenting the expected costs of bonding the new school earlier this week and in the packet dave has written an excellent memorandum which summarizes that discussion there are a few numbers that everybody should be aware of one is you know and this relates to the discussion that they've just presented with respect to bonding the current projects is that interest rates are low and relative to some of the historical values that were used in estimating what the impact would be on single-family properties what the debt subcommittee decided is that we should recommend that we should protect the cost of the bond based on a three percent interest rate that's actually a little bit higher than things are right now but we wanted something that had more upside risk and less downside

146risk in it so that's why the three percent number was selected the the other thing again aligned with what Dave said is that there's no appetite for short-term borrowing if interest rates are good you should borrow right away and so that's what we're going to do there was a discussion of level principle versus level payments a level payment is what most people have on their mortgage and because that you know gives an equal payment over time it was decided that that was the best way to present this to the community so we have a level payment the last parameter that needs to be discussed is what should the length of the debt be and so we considered terms from 20 to 30 years because of the low interest rates essentially if interest rates were this

147is an easy decision you just go for the longest term so the closer you are to zero the farther out you go and at the end of that discussion we said well maybe we could do 25 but again for the purpose of the what is the base case it's the 30-year debt and so for people who are looking for those impact on single-family homes in Acton if the assessed value was five hundred and ninety thousand dollars then on a 30-year bond the payment would be four hundred and forty two dollars per year on a 25-year bond that would be four hundred and ninety eight dollars per year again based on the assumptions about how the bond is divided between actin and Boxborough Boxborough with an average assessed value of six hundred ten thousand dollars that

148home would be see a tax bill increase of three hundred and seven dollars if we should be dead for thirty years or three hundred and forty six dollars if the debt was issued for 25 years so those are the numbers that we should be sharing with people about how to think about this also explained very nicely in Dave's memo is the fact that the bond issuance is actually controlled the treasurer of the district so she obviously Margit has participated in all these discussions and understands the logic which drove us to make the decisions that we have made here and I think it's just like what David just presented you know if we came to that point you know in at the beginning of the year and everything will different we would revisit what our plan

149was in light of actual conditions but for the moment this is what we're going to do and if anything should change you know we would come back and and look at what the situation would be are there any questions I will with and without repeating John I just want to call attention to a couple of slides on this now and I just checked with that the entire presentation which was about eight slides will be in the packet and you can look at it these were the were the assumptions that the committee that the subcommittee went by and again it's in the memo I just wanted to point out that in the memo I talked about these things being outside the control of the district John suggested to me not in time my doing to make

150a change in the memo to should have been outside the purview of the subcommittee the cost of the building for example is within the scope of the building committee in the in the design phase etc so these are the these are the assumptions that we used in arriving at the recommendation which is here and this is this is a pretty good visual so I didn't I didn't want to interrupt John as he was saying the numbers presumably for the first time for a lot of people but here is the graphic that shows the the range to the typical acton-boxborough taxpayer incrementally from the addition of this new debt the yellow bands would be on a 25 year bond the blue light blue bands if the bonds were 30 years and also the committee the subcommittee

151asked me to make sure that we explained what happens if the rate changes because the as you saw from my previous presentation the interest rate makes it makes a difference if the interest change is a quarter of a percent the difference is fourteen dollars and ten dollars respectively per year it's it adds up to a lot of money Adam asked me what would the interest cost be in the aggregate of not short-term borrowing and in percentage rate and it's about ten million dollars over the course of a long-term bond issuance but to an individual taxpayer it's $14 and ten dollars for every quarter percent variance um I just want to add one things that if we're talking about you know the difference between 25-year about and through a year about so we show the you

152know the the per family I mean that based on the average you know my ratio that the single-family house I will suggest that we also show you know 25 years if we choose 25 years then how much we are saving versus 30 years bond so I mean in the total I mean not not a per family but in the total the total the grand total to be financed by the district how much interest interest we are saving we're going to save between 25 years versus 30 years oh yeah that's what I'm suggesting to add that as well thank you understand that that number Michael today doesn't mean what it will be 25 years from now the the cost of paying back this debt 25 years from now or 28 29 30 years from now will

153be easier will be easier born at that time because of the time value of money then it would be now so if you look at it you say hey even even the number I just gave 10 million dollars that's real money if the interest rate changes but if the debtor if the term of the debt changes you're not paying any different over the life of those bonds in today's dollars by definition that's what the present that the present value of those future cash flows is what you're committing to today how long you pay it back that's what you can pay more money you could if you if you were legally allowed to do it over 50 years you would pay more interest and in today's looking at it today you say well there's a lot

154more interest but in but in 50 years from now that little of interest wouldn't mean as much as it does today but we can still find out the Institute question you know I'd like to thank the subcommittee for their effort in presenting this information it's really helpful and I would looking at this slide encourage you then to also look at what we put for our estimates and I notice that they've used estimates many times in this presentation but our estimates in terms of the tax impact for both active and Boxborough families for the new school building these are very much on the low side of what our estimates were so you know I think that you know while there has been some concern around our reimbursement rate and our costs for the building we do

155have this opportunity here to take advantage of some of the debt strategy to help alleviate maybe that lower than desired reimbursement rate so I think that this is a great opportunity to sort of balance those two out so we had an ALJ meeting earlier today and someone actually asked us a question about why are the estimates so much lower than what was originally projected and I really opposed down to two key driving factors Dave's giving me a three so I'll let him say the third but I think it's really two factors one the interest rates are a lot lower now than they were when we started this process to the actual cost of the building is two and a half million dollars below the lowest threshold of the range that we had estimated so we

156had estimated between 120 and 130 million dollars so the high end of those estimates were built out to that number and then in all honesty and some of the financial models and this may be the third we were estimating as little as 20 years on the repayment process of the debt so the cost of taxpayers goes up the shorter you are and initially when we came up with the first set of models we built in that we would pay an equal amount of principal every year and and the payments would decline over the life of the bond what the subcommittee as John said opted for to recommend was level payments and that slices off the top of the top peak of the repayment schedule and that was another significant factor and it's I think what

157happened is it's one of those things that early in the building project when we had hired our project manager they kept saying to us and I remember the building committee meetings it's too early we can't give you cost estimates right now it's just too early things have to play out it takes time and I remember the discussion and some building committee members saying we have to present our community cost estimates so you know when we did cost us anything we clearly took a conservative path to that because we wanted to make sure we didn't underestimate the impact and so now that we have real numbers we're seeing those come down thank him for his kind words for the debt subcommittee and I wanted to make the point that I also made with respect to the

158building subcommittee that the work of the debt subcommittee you know as a function of Finance Committee members from acting Finance Committee's from Boxborough school committee members from both towns as well as bond advisors so it is actually a diversified group trying to come to an answer the question and then I think the second thing you know that's important that comes out of this is that whenever you do anything like this you have to make assumptions and as long as those assumptions are clearly stated then you'll be able to do what Peter just did which is said originally we made the following assumptions for these reasons and then as we went through we learned what better assumptions would look like and we change them and that's the consequence that's the height of transparency that is what

159we should always feel looking to do because there's no problem with things change things will change but they need to change for a reason and in this case they have Daniel update us on budget yep so this school committee meeting made my job really easy tonight the budgets have met Tuesday this past Tuesday we discussed an update to the charge of the committee the subcommittee came into being right after regionalization and its first charge voted by the school committee wasn't until 2000 I believe was like 2017 or something so we've updated it and we're gonna bring it to the full full school committee in October for a vote and we also discussed a proposed schedule for the FY 21 budget process that's under development right now and we will also be bringing that to you

160in October to look at and to vote on I'm having said that we've already kind of begun deliberating this evening on all-day kindergarten which will be a component of that budget so it's you know we've already started that process even without a proposed schedule Dave also previewed his FY 2019 memo which was in your packet tonight so I won't give any details about that and we got a budget update for FY 21 a speak to the yeah what's going on with Fr 20 you know FY 2008 is really where we're very much according to plan the one area where we have seen and we updated budget sub the other day is we had a number of students move in particularly at Miriam McCarthy town who had services through AI individual education plans that both in

161terms of the number of students who moved in and the services that they required caused a couple of our programs in those buildings to have more students than we should be running in that type of a program so we've been evaluating the staffing levels and when I say students moving in I think we added like eight or nine students at those schools who had some significant needs so we've been evaluating staffing levels we know that we're actually operating under budget in the personnel budget so far based on hiring you know the full staff that we proposed so we are going to need to make sure that we add special education staff at those schools in those programs it's just it's a critical need we know that we based on the projections we have we actually

162will still end up to the good on our personnel budget for the year even adding those positions because we were under budget for our original staffing projections in the very worst case scenario if something happened that's in a very appropriate use of circuit maker funds to be able to to look at so just wanted to give you that one update and make sure that you knew what we were doing with that Angie did you have an update about Minute Man tech all right the ALG update so LG met this morning and we discussed pretty much everything that we discussed here tonight so again this is very easy so FY 2008 FY 21 revenue projections school building update the only other piece that we didn't talk about today was the we discussed at the meeting the

163North Acton fire station and there on on point to have that to present that at the special Town Meeting in December the we did take a look we did get to see the draft of the warrant articles going out just a very preliminary draft and the school building committee as both school building project will be first on the warrant list which I was very happy to see that's that was pretty much it other than what we all heard tonight thanks all right bo f met for the first time this year on September 10th and much of what was some of what was discussed tonight was was really it was this Maria was able to give Maria and Gary were able to give a pretty extensive update on what the school building committee has been doing

164and to kind of fill other members in on on what all of that was about because there there was a little bit of just just confusion about how funding works and how we fund the students in Boxborough and just understanding school budgets and how those impact individual taxpayers so I believe our next meeting is not until October so mid October but the warrant closes on 10 21 and there's nothing major in Boxborough either did I get everything Gary there are three warrants on the agenda now being circulated vendor warrants 20 def zero zero six and twenty dash zero zero six PR in the total amount of 1 million six hundred one thousand six hundred seventeen dollars and 89 cents and payroll warrant p200 six in the total amount of two million five hundred fifty nine

165thousand three hundred seventy-five dollars and six cents there are some FY eyes in your packet all right is there a motion to adjourn oh yeah I have one fYI that came in today from our state or part of Acton state representative Tammy Gouveia and she wanted me to make sure everyone is aware that the ED reform bill is out and she I can send you a link I think she may have sent it to the committee but I'll send you a link if you don't if she didn't and would love to have your thoughts on it just feedback okay thank you is there a motion to adjourn all those in favor any opposed