Acton-Boxborough Rgional School Committee Meeting 10/01/2020

001all right welcome everyone to our the public part of our meeting this evening um i'll note that public participation is possible for the open meeting via the zoom link or call-in phone number our school committee meetings are also live streamed on acton tv's youtube channel although public participation is not possible with that option the links and phone number are found on the posted agenda on theabschools.org calendar this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on actin tv's website at actontv.org just to follow up since most people weren't logged on prior to our executive session the following members are currently participating via zoom cara wilson cook well amy mitch neves amy mishnivez amy christian murthy sorry i'm really tired amy grisham murthy who hasn't signed back on i don't think but i believe she'll

002be joining us in yemen wang and in the auditorium with me are evelyn abaya issa adam klein jenny kremer john peterson angie so and we are expecting diane them what nora's not coming back all right she's left the building all right for our remote policy all votes will be done by roll call i'll call each member's name and they'll state how they vote thank you for joining us all right good evening everyone this has been quite a week i want to begin by thanking the 200 plus individuals who have taken the time to share their opinions regarding the petition to remove the mascot i've spent the time since we first requested feedback in nearly constant reflection this issue is not new to me as the students first presented to me and the superintendent back in

003june we're not going to discuss the mascot tonight as a committee although i imagine there are a few people who are here to use the public comment period to share their thoughts as a school committee we have committed to examining the issues of diversity equity and inclusion within our district our workshop this summer focused on learning skills in order to be able to better listen to each other to better understand each other's lenses and to commit to doing the hard work around systemic racism that is all around us i did not attend the last meeting but i watched at home and was struck by how different it was from sitting in the room i wanted to take a moment to remind people that these are difficult conversations and the people who sit around this table

004were elected to have those conversations there are a few of us that have served together for a few years but there are many others who are new to this process this is not easy and it's made even more difficult by the fact that our faces and expressions are hidden behind masks we have members who are participating remotely and i can assure you that while i'm thankful that we have this technological advancement it's not the same as being in the room it's easy to misinterpret tone or intent when we aren't altogether part of the hard work is really listening and in this environment that is hard examining issues that are uncomfortable requires understanding and recognizing intent versus impact in a remote environment is challenging i want to remind listeners at home that these are just some

005of the additional hurdles we face as we listen to each other into our constituents i also want to implore the residents of acton and boxborough the students and faculty members the alumni and others who have taken an interest in this issue to take the time to listen the hardest part of this work is listening with an open mind to the differing opinions of others in our current political environment we are quick to respond and are easily entrenched in the views we believe to be right what this discussion has exposed more than anything is that as a community we have a long way to go in doing the work to better understand each other and our unique experiences we can have both firm beliefs and the ability to listen and understand someone else's viewpoint one should

006not preclude the other this moment in time provides an incredible opportunity for learning if we are mindful about what we are being asked we will take up this issue again at our meeting on october 15th but in the time in between i would encourage everyone to have a conversation with someone who doesn't share your opinion listen to their reasoning open your mind to the lens through which they see the issues there is an abundance of passion in our two towns and what is apparent above all else is that we care deeply about our community and its members i hope that we can find some common ground and some understanding thank you all right so that's probably the most i'm going to talk all night so i do want to just also note that we are

007we will take up the mascot discussion at the october 15 school committee meeting and that our october 29 school committee meeting which is already on the agenda will now be a workshop and a new school committee meeting will be added on november 5th we had like a three-week gap in between because of timing and the number of thursdays and the month and everything else so i just wanted everyone to note that the october 29th meeting is already on your calendar so please add november 5th okay this is the part of our meeting where we invite public participation please use the hand raise feature to participate and not the chat according to our policy bedh members of the public may speak for up to three minutes on items not included on this agenda comments regarding items

008that are on the agenda should be made during that part of the meeting typically the committee and administration will not respond to comments during public participation so if there's anyone that would like to participate feel free to raise your hand and we can call on you see anyone nope i do not see anyone all right then i'll pass it over to you peter i should turn my mic on and not off when i need to talk um so good evening everyone welcome back i just want to you know thank you all for your continued to support we've had a few good weeks now um they certainly haven't been without incident with regard to covid um you know we've seen a couple of notifications of positive cases go out one at the high school and one

009at miriam um but we're following our process um you know we're learning each time as we manage these cases um i think you know what we want to impress upon people as we've come back is that the re-entry we call it a re-entry process for a reason because we need to continue to learn and test how our processes work uh when they're under stress um and so you know for example one change that we made just after the incident the other day we had been sending out the notice to all families originally and then following up with closed contacts we've decided to flip that and send notification to any possible close contacts first and then to the general community second so that when we send the note to the general community we can bring closure

010and tell them that all closed contacts have already been contacted because we received some feedback that it felt like that left some things unresolved for a couple of families so you know we're working through each of the cases as they come up i have to say our nurses have been absolutely amazing in doing that don has been absolutely amazing doing really the brunt of of work with our nurses and board of health and the different health department agents it's a lot of work and i think i sent you a note a couple weeks ago where even some of our most veteran administrators have commented that things that they felt like normally in a given year would take five minutes are now taking 45 minutes to an hour so you know things are slow um but

011i will say i've been out to schools a couple of times now and overwhelmingly when i talk to people the kids i see are happy and whether we talk to some remote kids and they're talking about being happy connecting with teachers and connecting with peers the same is true for our in-person kids where they're happy to be able to get back in and see people and engage so that's that's been a real positive um the first big item i just wanted to send out a thank you uh to the it's an acton celebrates carol spinney group um some of you have seen yard signs around town it's the big bird sign uh that says be kind but that group actually donated um about 18 signs to us so that we could have two for every

012school in town so we sent those around to our schools and they're going up but it's just a really nice way and i think in all of the climate that we're in um whether it's you know at the national level with the pandemic and election season or whether it's at the local level even discussing the colonials what a great timely message be kind it's simple and even if we differ in our opinions on different issues before us we can certainly rally behind that one simple message of be kind so thank you to that group i also wanted to share a note with everyone and i'm sending this out to the school community tomorrow it's a note that our guidance or not our guidance our counseling staff at the high school and our administration wrote to

013students and i just want to read that to you because this is also in response to some of the discussion of the colonials mascot but i thought they did a really nice job capturing some important points for everyone to think about so this is their note as you may be aware the school committee is currently accepting comments regarding whether as a district we should keep or discontinue our use of the colonials as the abrhs mascot as expected this conversation is also being carried out by way of social media people have strong feelings in support of keeping the mascot and in support of discontinuing its use many posts that were made over the weekend on instagram and facebook were hurtful disrespectful and degrading we would like to remind you that when commenting on social media and

014probably commenting anywhere one listen to what is being said there are both historical facts and town traditions that are being spoken about we need to listen to one another two be open-minded be willing to hear one another and adjust your opinion based on what you learn three remember there is a real person on the other end of your comment four show gratitude and support for your peers five consider the impact of your statements which may be very different from your intent and then you know they just said remember that no comments were made that are being made on social media are considered by the school committee any comments then they provided the email address so that students could make public comment as well which you will receive in the school committee email and then the

015counseling staff what i really like is they ended up setting up an open session for any students who felt they were impacted by some of the dialogue on social media and wanted to be able to process that with each other and with counselors so they set up a time online discussion for students to be able to do that so thank you to the counseling staff in the high school administration for really thinking about you know setting an appropriate tone with our students around what a good discussion can look like i also am sending out a reminder to families tomorrow around the schedule for the next couple of weeks we know that you know trying to maximize the number of in-person days for our hybrid students means that the schedules get flipped whenever we have either

016a holiday or a professional development day um in the course of a week so you know we sent the text message out at six o'clock the night before uh on two on tuesday night saying hey by the way remember tomorrow's a different day but we're trying to stay ahead of it and make sure we give families kind of a two-week look ahead as well so they can make those plans um our digital literacy team is also in the process of creating a video tutorial webinars for families to view at their convenience we thought about scheduling them in person but with the number of back to school nights happening over the course of the next month there were almost no nights where we could schedule it so we actually thought it might be more convenient if

017they were pre-recorded and that also allows us the ability to translate them before it actually takes place for our families so they are in the process of creating those webinars for tech support for families and they're soliciting family feedback so we're sending out a questionnaire to families so that our digital um literacy team can actually understand the questions people want answered before they create the webinars and then they'll be creating those and getting them out to families so there's a link in the newsletter that will go out tomorrow um i also wanted to provide a little update on social emotional learning um for students and staff and don not to put you on the spot but i don't know if you want to talk to this a little because in all honesty i copied and

018pasted from what dawn sent me um no all right i get to go ahead all right so um you know we've been talking that we want to prioritize social emotional learning so you know don and i didn't want to let an opportunity to go by to then actually tell you what we're doing rather than just saying we prioritized it but from a student perspective counselors school psychologists and social workers who are the members of our mental health team have been supporting students and their families as they transition back to school and navigate the new landscape of our academic and social environment whether enrolled in our hybrid or remote learning program even more so than in a typical school year opening our mental health health staff have been in constant contact with students and families who

019are experiencing high levels of anxiety and stress right now in the classroom mental health team members are working closely with teachers and staff to identify appropriate supports for students who are struggling academically and or emotionally and this includes suggesting lessons or activities to infuse social emotional skills into morning meeting routines conferring with building staff about evidence-based strategies to use with students who need additional support and participating in grade or building level problem-solving teams they are also providing direct service to students around self-advocacy time management and organizational skills to help them be successful as well as helping them structure asynchronous days find a quiet workspace at home manage assignments and understand zoom etiquette so important for our kids finally our mental health team members continue to play a critical role as a partner with outside referral

020agencies to support families with food insecurity technology needs and mental health resources from a staff perspective it's all grounded in the knowledge that we can't help others if we're not okay i always liken it to the airline routine before you take off when they say you know in the event of a cabin pressure failure the oxygen masks are going to come down and adults you need to put them on yourselves first because if you don't get oxygen you're no use to the child that you're trying to help either so we need to think of taking care of our adults and our students so we kicked off our professional learning day with staff sessions on practical strategies for self and collective care during those first 11 days before students joined us building principles work to establish

021new routines and rituals for staff connection under the new constraints of distancing and state guidelines prohibiting large gatherings for example the high school and junior high staff will likely never be able to meet in one place this year um building-based mental health health staff also shared the staff system of supports that we had developed and our new peer-to-peer program where we have about 120 staff already signed up this peer-to-peer program is for staff members to have supportive colleague who can provide emotional support and create a social connection finally in the next few weeks we hope to begin educator drop-in sessions where educators connect with each other in a supportive environment in dialogue around the experiences they've had transitioning back to school we think that having a safe space to talk about critical events in its

022aftermath can be incredibly therapeutic in and of itself as it helps participants process their emotions and come to terms with their trauma last week our two school psychology department leaders heather stouk and susan root provided our pre-k through 12 mental health team members with support on the educator drop-in model so that they are ready to support groups of educators who sign up for that so we're excited to be rolling that out as well i came to you a couple of weeks ago and i provided you a really exciting update on our food services program and i think i shared that in two weeks ago we had 350 individuals come for food and that resulted in 3 500 individual meals being sent home in a two-hour time span so since that time we've grown again last

023week we had 450 individuals and 4 500 meals go out and last night we had 5 690 meals that went out from our food services staff to members of our community so that is 569 people from our community in addition to that the fda has been sending kind of farm to families boxes that contain all sorts of uh goods and so we distributed two pallets of those boxes in addition to the 590 families that we served so that is really exciting the program has grown so quickly that we actually outgrew the little pop-up tent that we were having and the wheel out refrigerators like to serve ice cream to kids um so we ended up having to rent a trailer that is a large trailer i put a picture of it in the note that

024you you received but that has heat so we can operate in the winter but it also has ample refrigeration inside to be able to keep food fresh so we're excited by that um it's one area you know we all wish we didn't have the need uh but we're so happy that we could grow to continue to support all of the needs of the community um i also put in some pictures and they're in your memo and it will go out to families but if you had been in here earlier today you would have seen deb bookers and all of her curriculum team and val gransowitz and her staff putting together hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bags of supplies to go out to our remote families that is round two of supply distribution one thing

025that's happened in the pandemic as all supply chains worldwide um i don't know how else to say it they're a little bit messed up because of the pandemic so supplies don't always come in when you expect them to but we had round two we have two days of distribution happening um after school hours so between four and six pm tonight and then we have it again tomorrow night for our remote families we have a drive-through style distribution for all these materials and um it went absolutely fantastic we had a huge number of our remote staff actually volunteer to come in after hours to be able to do that for our families so i just want to make sure i send the shout out to them and thank you for all the work they're doing so

026congratulations and that was fantastic very very well organized and done dip so that is it for me but if you have any questions i'm happy to answer anything john it's been very exciting to see activity in the schools again um and i know that everybody in part feels that there's at least a tiny bit of normalcy in what has been a really abnormal time and i just wanted to remind everybody that unfortunately if you've been watching around massachusetts we've seen communities tick up and so places that don't necessarily come to mind as places where you'd expect to have problems like north andover you know have significant coveted cases so this is just you know my public service announcement that says that you know we keep ourselves safe by keeping each other safe and that everybody

027should be going out and trying to do their daily things as best they can but very carefully i i'll just actually echo that and it's a good opportunity to just say we did publish our updated health metrics uh today on our website we have been doing that every thursday pretty dutifully um and we have tracking charts that you can actually see the data over time but then we have a weekly report that you can read um acton's numbers we went back into the green um this week we're at 1.5 uh cases um average daily cases per 100 000 residents so we're averaging about 1.5 cases a day over the 14-day span per 100 000 residents so it's def definitely smaller in act and that's important to know um and then in boxborough they are on

028a record streak of zero cases for what feels like an eternity so congratulations to boxborough uh we're affectionately calling that the boxborough bubble um internally but that's fantastic you know acton's still doing really really well but i will say if you look at the state charts you know there's a number of communities very close to us that are creeping in and so you know i would actually really encourage families to think about you know where they're interacting with people and who they're interacting with because we do not operate in a bubble uh we are dependent on not only our community but the area and region and all of our interactions so we just want everyone to continue to be thoughtful but john i appreciate that comment but all of that data is on our website

029it's up to date as of this morning i don't see any other questions so we'll move on to the next agenda item tonight we are fortunate to have the cpac leadership presenting to us amanda bailey carrie weaver and abe gutierrez are here to let us know what they've been up to all right good evening everyone everyone's here i see abe there's carrie so amanda are you really going to share my screen whenever you tell me to and if you just say next slide i'll go to the next slide i'll cover that guys is it right all right carrie you wanna go ahead uh sure um hi everybody i'm carrie weaver um i am one of the three chairs uh co-chairs for the acton-boxborough special education parent advisory council i have two children in the district

030i have a third grader at blanchard and a sixth grader who is in a district placement at cotting school and we have some good stuff to share tonight i guess you could say considering everything that's going on um but we do want to um thank superintendent light interim special ed director debbie dixon uh school committee chair tessa mckinley um our liaison diane baum and all members of the av acton-boxborough school committee for inviting us to present tonight and for your continued support and dedication to all our children and families in our community um hello uh my name is david gutierrez i am a parent recently um we recently moved i would say within the last two years to the acme box fort school district uh i have a first grader at blanchard and a preschooler

031at the cal humera early education my name is amanda bailey i have helped chair the cpac since 2014. carrie is going to talk a little bit tonight about our mission for the new members of the committee and then we're going to go from there so thank you for your patience um so our mission um as a our special ed parent advisory council um to ensure understanding respect support and appropriate education of all children in our community um our mission statement um under state law well under state laws is advising the district on matters that pertain to the education and safety of students with disabilities and meeting regularly with school officials to participate in the planning development and evaluation of the school district's special education program we do do this collaboratively with the school district and

032our community advance please so basically the cpac is an independently run advisory committee to the school committee under mgl the program feedback that we gather from families and provide to the district has a direct impact on that column on the right the policies procedures and of course the budget under your purview as a committee abe is going to talk about and introduce the priorities we're going to highlight this evening advance hello so for uh our actual goals and priorities for the 2020-2021 year we are aiming to monitor state guidance of families excuse me state guidance and families experiences regarding the reopening of schools as we know these are experiences that affect both parents and children alike we plan to conduct parent guardian surveys and have at least two this year we also need to address

033and remove barriers to cpac participation and cpac leadership for eipoc parents and guardians of children with disabilities this is more to encourage participation and make support known to these particular families you also want to participate in the search processes for the new special education director something that we are very happy to be participating in as well and in community education on basic rights and other topics as we all know information is only useful when it is known in advance please one way we've monitored families experiences through the pandemic thus far was to publish a feedback form starting back in march we revised this over the summer to incorporate considerations for the fall to date we have over 130 responses from caregivers of students with ieps or 504s including from their new remote academy we shared

034these responses with the district on an ongoing basis one critical takeaway for our organization is that a number of people did not know the c facts rule and how we represent and support them we're going to talk more about outreach toward the end tonight but we're at a critical juncture for families and we need all the help we can get to spread the word that we're here uh including re-adding the cpac as a family resource on the district website advance please other trends picked up on the need for one-to-one or individualized support for many students to successfully access the remote learning environment the districts made a priority of drawing down the number of paraprofessionals in favor of hiring certified staff which is a move that we favor but we're in a circumstance that's requiring more

035individualized support than ever regression is another key component that we're looking at as the district will be establishing the need for compensatory services on an individual basis in the coming months as to what helped there's an asterisk here on consistent staffing and we always see turnover as students transition from building to building or in and out of programs this year teams were blown apart as the district crafted the remote academy and they necessarily hired numerous new staff members the staff are under incredible demands as they address the backlog of evaluations run required team meetings manage progress reporting and iep development participate in planning and educate kids we're also going to throw compensatory services on top of that so as we look ahead to the budget and the needs there we just want to sort of

036flag that for folks with all this change communication becomes critical the more transparent collaborative proactive communication we have the more trust we have the more trust we have the fewer issues we see snowball into concerns and problems using what we've learned we're developing a survey to be published later this month and abe is going to introduce those objectives advance please all right and now within the survey objectives we uh first of all is to solicit information from the entire parent garden community to facilitate participation and ensure all children with disabilities are represented through our efforts we just want to make sure that no family feels like they are on their own for our second goal in monitoring family experiences with specialization in programming to provide feedback and guidance to the district really to facilitate the

037interaction and communication between families and the district and make especially the families feel that they are the district is there to help we just better facilitate that interaction our third goal is to follow up on the actual issues uh previously identified through the survey feedback forms and google reporting uh and just to make sure that our efforts aren't seen as empty gestures for these signings advance please so on the right you'll see a key finding from our feedback form as of july over 40 of those who responded didn't know who to contact with questions or input about their child's return to school in the fall so the survey is going to look at communication and engagement making sure that we've writed that number service delivery making sure that full services are being delivered even if

038that delivery looks a little bit flexible remote learning experiences how organization can help and we'll be adding some demographic questions about race and ethnicity to go beyond our usual questions about school and disability type advance please abe mentioned earlier one of our ongoing priorities is to address and remove barriers to cpac leadership and participation for bipolar parent or guardians children with disabilities our leadership has been solely white for a very long time and our meeting participation does not reflect our community with regard to race in order to address this we've identified the following starting points these are all steps we're actively taking or preparing to act upon with all meetings and workshops moving online this affords a great opportunity to reach more families and also possibly a new barrier to participation with regard to tech

039access abe's going to speak a little bit about outreach um and actually expanding the uh outreach for uh these families it's just gonna be a a way for us to really encourage this participation um so that they do feel that there is make these particular families feel that they are still they're not that much further um isolated but actually brought into the same fold as all the other families facing the same challenges with their children with establishing a a listening session um or an online feedback form um where he would like to encourage that much more not just feedback but maybe uh new views and concerns possibly that nobody may have known before that are faced by these families whether it be particular challenges such as a language barrier or anything along those lines as

040well we're going to continue to promote events with no cost for those with scholarships including pro bono advocacy training and assistance uh the federation for children of special needs has been great about having culturally sensitive and diverse outreach as well as linguistic support language support rather previously we've emphasized diversity of disability we need to widen that lens and bring in speakers and provide resources about the intersection of race and disability and how that impacts families and students in education i'm going to add to this that we also need to continue to tackle disability stigma and ableism on a large scale advance please carrie's going to speak about outreach and family support a bit more and then close us out so with outreach and family support um we are busy pack is a member of the

041joint pto roundtable that means was meeting once a month i believe um and that's a good way to get us into the community um with other parents um and it's a good way to collaborate with all schools and ideas share and just make sure our kids are hurt as well which they are it's a good group um we were invited last year to present to two different elementary schools um about the continuing amount of support and basic rights um we hope to have this opportunity again this year we weren't able to do that last year because of school closure but we are hoping to do it again we also reached out this beginning of this year to all special ed coordinators to reintroduce our organization and extend partnership opportunities we have heard back from two

042of them um and you know where it's an ongoing partnership and conversation um we do have we do communicate with surrounding cpacs regarding workshops whether it be basic rights um or any workshop that's relevant um mostly locally packs we've been working with our maynard concord carlisle littleton lincoln sudbury and pretty much whoever else wants to talk with us with the pandemic and the school closure um it was necessary to reinstitute our monthly caregiver drop in support hours that is done virtually um but it's last month we had i guess one person participate but one is better than none and um it's it's needed um because everybody is you know stressed out um share resources and make information via our newsletter and facebook page we will share anything that is related to disability special education if

043you think it's important um we'll review it and most likely put it in our newsletter or send it out um we're pretty good about trying to um on facebook trying to get things out there that's positive and there there's a ton of resources out there especially now um virtually that it can get kind of overwhelming so we try to keep it all in one place which i think is somewhat helpful to people um and it's easier to find when it's all in one place um and don has sent us things peter sent us thanks debbie i mean anybody can send us stuff and we can look at it and share it as needed so that's we can i guess move forward on that um you can move the slide i don't know what else to

044say um these are our meeting dates um for the next for over the next year they are typically the night before a school committee meeting um which is um which is good um this is all the information um june 9th is our annual meeting and officer elections anybody their open meetings and um subject open meeting law so we are there um everybody is welcome to participate to come um now that they're all virtual um it is it is good because we can get we get a little bit more participation which is nice and you can advance the slide um so we want to thank you for um having us tonight and sharing um we especially thank you to um our interim special ed director debbie dixon um just being constantly open and talking with us

045and um and superintendent people peter light for the same reason i mean everybody has been great in the acton box ball regional school committee for your ongoing collaboration support during this time it's it's been a rough year and we hope that it is 2021 is a better year for everybody for school so thank you thanks guys um i will open it up for questions ginny uh thank you thank you so much for being here um at some point do you anticipate giving us more substantive information regarding family experiences uh you know yes okay do you have any idea when that will be so we're going to be publishing our survey at the end of this month so to get the initial glimpse of how did the re-entry go what's still missing where can we still

046shore up practices and we're going to get that out october november so by the end of this term we're going to have the initial glimpse and then in the spring we want to follow up about the conversations around compensatory um so i would say by december early december we would have that be you in a more formal report that we'll submit to you we're happy to come and present that at any point but we'll be able to get you that information december ahead of the budget being finalized great thank you john earlier you know peter mentioned how much longer everything takes in the coveted environment and i've been particularly concerned about the additional demands on parents so any information that you could have that you know talks about the change in you know parental hours

047that are required to you know help address school issues you know in in the comparison of the normal environment to you know our current world that would be i think helpful in appreciating you know what's happening in the entirety of the system absolutely we've been encouraging people to document how much support they are providing their children at home um it's incredible in some circumstances and even with parents giving up jobs frankly to stay home and support their kids they're still not able to access the online learning so we're absolutely keeping tabs on that we're keeping information flowing to families about how to document that and use that with their special education teams to get what their kids need so that's absolutely on our radar so given that it's the first day of dyslexia awareness month

048i'd be remiss if i didn't ask where you stand with some of the recommendations that you presented to the district last year i know obviously things have you know had to take a little bit of a back seat given whatever anything else is going on but you want to it's also down syndrome adhd depression disability employment spina bifida and ret syndrome awareness month i'll just toss that out there um this came up in our september meeting and it got tacked back in as a priority um debbie has provided us with an update on the district's work so i would throw it to her to talk about where the district is with this or deb um i will say the cpac is concerned uh that families whose children are to receive tier two or tier three

049intervention with reading or other specialists are not necessarily going to be notified that their kids are getting additional help this was one of our recommendations um and this year it's more critical than ever that families have that information it's also hard to to scrutinize right now frankly because there have been heroic efforts to get people back into building safely there are going to be inevitable curriculum gaps this year but there are also questions right now about whether the hybrid elementary students are getting all of the tier one foundations the phonics-based reading instruction as written by the wilson company for prevention um that's before we get to those who are flagged for additional help so it's not overtly stated in our presentation but it's definitely ongoing thanks anyone else have further questions thank you so much

050for taking the time to join us tonight and we will look forward to further information thank you for having us thank you thank you for having us thank you thank you all right next on the agenda is the very exciting approval of meeting minutes from the september 17th meeting i know that um i had two little teeny tiny um things even though i wasn't here but as i said to beth watching it on tv actually it's a lot easier to pay attention sometimes to all the things that are said um on page two i just had a question it said it says in the middle a one month public comment period was suggested followed by discussion at the school committee meeting that followed that period and it lists september 17th but did you mean for

051that to be october 15th like the meeting that fought i just the wording of it made it sound like oh sorry in the middle of page 2 in 5.1.2 it just sounded to me like like the date would be the meeting the next meeting we have or no am i reading it wrong it just was confusing okay okay that's fine that was one comment and then on page four in the middle it was talking about um review this memo and let the districts focus on improving efforts to incorporate anti-bias and anti-racism practices one from the educators group another from the students group he and tessa mckinley felt changing the mascot but i thought we were talking about the calendar change there and not the mascot part of it right in the middle of it where

052it says after considering the two petitions one from the educators group and another from the students group he and tessa mckinley felt changing the mascot was something that the school committee should ask the public about but then it says a first step could be to change the name from column they just didn't seem like they were related yeah so i think i think what what happened was because both of those topics came to us in the same evening yeah um we were discussing how to address the mascot situation versus how to address the calendar renaming situation yes and that we felt that or that you and peter felt that bringing up the mascot situation but not actually having a vote talking about a future discussion on that would be a different situation than how we

053were handling the conversation around the calendar change oh okay it makes sense it just it was just confusing that it said a first step could be because it a first step of changing the calendar isn't a first step of the mascot like guess what the discussion was that at least one small step we could take that night was to change um the calendar change columbus day into indigenous people's day so the first step was about incorporating anti-bias and anti-racism past aspects into our curriculum not a first step like it just okay i understand i just wanted to clarify it's fine we don't have to talk about it longer i just when i was reading it i was like wait what that doesn't make sense that's fine go ahead so oh and there was one more

054thing that you told me i thought that you said that was in the other minutes no that's this minutes it was something having yes you gave me and the building committee update um john added in the middle of 6.2.6 which is on page seven in the middle of that paragraph after this will be taken care of and cost will come out of the contingency fund he added it was noted that for building on new sites the large variances occur in the site prep phase with low expectation of significant variance in the building construction phase and that was part of the discussion says beth so move to approve as amended second we will do a roll call vote john yes adam evelyn diane yes ginny yes angie yes kira yes yeah ben yes amy yes and

055me yes all right that passes unanimously and now i moved all my papers around so i don't know where anything is okay uh so next we have our budget update so is dave starting or peter why don't i start and then you can jump in so um you know couple things in terms of budget update um you know one we had a good discussion i don't want to steal budget sub thunder here but we had a good discussion of budget sub and then alg um subsequently where we talked about concern around the timeline for developing the school budget because you know normally we're actually already soliciting budget requests from principals right now and you know like kids have been in the building for five days um and it just doesn't seem appropriate and in all

056honesty as we look ahead to fy22 we really are so still right in the middle of this pandemic we do not know what school will look like next september and we certainly don't know whether we have to provide hybrid learning in person learning are we still continuing a remote learning program we just don't know the status of everything and so there was talk that there's advantage to delaying the process and so we brought that to alg and the town is right now actively pursuing delaying the actontown meeting to put it somewhere around or just after the boxborough town meeting so mid to late may so the budget timeline because of that we're not providing you a calendar tonight to take a look at um we're waiting to hear a little more i actually think the

057board of selectmen may be moving on something like that within the next week or two but i do anticipate soon we'll get a town meeting date for the spring but it will be significantly later than april 1st so that's great that means we'll probably delay our budget process until at least december internally to give us more of a sense of what's coming ahead that also means that we'll have an opportunity to see what the governor's budget looks like well before we have to do any kind of a budget saturday workshop because in a traditional year we're getting the governor's budget you know really about three days before budget saturday um but it's been pretty stable for a few years so it wasn't a big deal but i think this year we need to need to

058get a handle on that so budget timeline that's going to be delayed uh what we did want to do talk tonight though we started talking with budget subcommittee about some possible guidelines for us to use as we develop this budget because it is going to be you know a challenging budget year i think on a number of levels but it would be helpful to really have a sense from the committee around what the priorities you have for us as we develop kind of our initial round of budget so we have some time it's not you know critically urgent tonight but we wanted to present them to you i will put them up on the screen and just kind of read them so you can kind of read and think dave do you have anything to

059add before i put them up not yet i can do the big picture stuff anything that has any level of skill requires dave all right i'm confident no one can see that so we'll see what we can do and that didn't do anything here we go so this is only a draft it's been to budget subcommittee once for a little bit of feedback but we wanted to bring it to the full committee for feedback before we went too far with anyone so the first one was develop a flexible budget that is responsive to uncertainty caused by the pandemic and allows for a variety of educational models in other words plan for the uncertain that's ahead of us the second one was assume more uncertainty with regard to state and federal funding for schools adequately fund

060education programs designed to expedite recovery from the pandemic and ensure effective services and supports are in place for all students social emotional and academic needs so when we're thinking about what's most important to us we need to be thinking about how are we helping students recover from the pandemic educationally socially and emotionally and make sure we're putting our priorities there the next one was evaluate opportunities to use existing resources to align services and supports across the district in a fiscally sustainable manner that balances students needs with the economic interests of the community so if there's you know challenges around resources we need to really think carefully about how we can align the resources that we have in a way that best supports students considering funding directly allocated to programs that support students with ieps english

061learners students whose families may be income insecure students of color or other groups who may have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and school closures so we need to really think about who was most impacted by these closures and make sure that we're allocating resources directly to programs that support those students prioritize our anti-bias anti-racist strategic initiatives evaluate kindergarten enrollment projections carefully in light of fluctuations in kindergarten enrollment due to the pandemic we know statewide kindergarten enrollment has seen huge fluctuations this year and almost universally a significant drop in all districts with regard to kindergarten enrollment we don't know what that means for next year we don't know whether that means some people chose to homeschool in kindergarten may choose to skip kindergarten because it's actually not required and just enroll right in grade one

062or whether they're hoping to delay kindergarten by a year and we may have a huge income in kindergarten class there's just a lot of uncertainty that we need to wrap our heads around in the budget projections um evaluate all-day kindergarten tuition in light of assumed resumption of all-day kindergarten during fy 22. so you know if we had to make an assumption today we would assume we're going back to all day k remember we're half day k universally this year because of the pandemic but we would assume we're going back to an all day k model we need to decide what we're doing with kindergarten tuition in that we want to maximize opportunities to leverage alternative revenue sources including but not limited to state and federal grants so what state federal grants other grants can we

063look for as a district to try and offset some of our costs monitor strategic use of reserves in light of economic uncertainty um you know we want to think carefully about where we have reserves built up we still have very healthy reserves even though e and d balance has dipped slightly this year uh below the target but if we have uncertain economic times we need to think strategically about what we're doing evaluate strategies to replenish revolving accounts that have been negatively impacted by the pandemic related costs and reduced revenues so we've talked to you about the all day k account we've talked to you about the athletic account we've talked about food services accounts these accounts all have had significant reductions in the last year and they're going to need some thought to start to

064rebuild those as we move forward and then finally resume funding of the capital improvement plan in order to fully implement planned improvements so we've been thinking about this for a while and we need to think about what that looks like as we move forward because we did pause some projects this year so that's what we came up with it's kind of a long list but you know we wanted to try and capture the the general idea of what we thought we might be planning for so i'm happy to take any comments now or if there's another process sending them to beth then we can bring them to budget sub and i just want to provide a little additional color and thanks to some of the members of the subcommittee who when we originally reviewed this

065provided some good feedback the first is the the lat the third to last and second to last bullet around reserves and revolving accounts we um at the suggestion of john we actually separated those two they were originally one bullet point and i think it was important um because it identifies the fact that we're seeing that um the revolving accounts do need to be actively replenished versus the fact that our reserve accounts are something that are here for this very purpose so i just wanted to provide some additional sort of color around that that maybe the the reserves are something that we'll have to look at this year and we may um we may be coming back underneath some of our policy targets um for the reserve accounts and then the second thing i wanted to

066mention was in the fifth bullet down um you know we're we're fairly specific in the um the programs and the groups of students who were looking to make sure that we fund directly uh to those programs and um so i would say that while we're you know we were we were making wanted to make sure that every every program had adequate funding there were definitely specific subgroups of students who we wanted to call out specifically in these guidelines to make sure that they were considered for that funding just to comment on that last one you know it's interesting because we we had that discussion in budget sub about whether you just list like students who may have been disproportionately impacted but don and i and deb had done some work with the mid-atlantic equity consortium

067last year around kind of our district strategy and looking for feedback from them and one very strong piece of feedback they gave us was if you're really looking to impact people spell out who you want to impact and make sure it's really clear otherwise you probably won't do it so we're open to feedback on that and we'd like to hear more but that was the intent of it does that say that yevin's raising his hand at the very top there yes yes yes thank you attesha so just i'll have a curiosity what is uh what does the this mean prioritize antibiotic bias enter racist strategic initiative uh what what does this mean and over what so one thing that we had um done we had a draft strategy that we had sent to the remember

068last year with the school committee eben i don't think you were on quite yet but we had our strategy in draft format we were looking to have the school committee adopt that in the spring um and then you know we have a tag line now just cause covid um meaning you know we shut down and and things took a bit of a turn but we want to come back to that district strategy and one of the really overarching objectives was around anti-bias and anti-racist work in the district um in our in our big picture strategy and we feel like we've made some inroads in that and we're starting some work there this year but we need to make sure we continue to prioritize that work moving forward and if it's over what i don't think

069it's a question of over what i think it's saying make sure you keep this front and center and don't lose track of it okay thank you evelyn oh jenny headers up first sorry i didn't i only saw i don't care which one of you goes first you pick okay thank you i'm going back to the one before i'm sorry if this is a stupid question but what does can funding directly well meaning if we have programs like we need to really think about um our special education programs we need to think carefully about our english learners and what are those students needs going to be as we return um similarly students who might be income insecure what programs do we have in our district that might need additional funding to make sure that they're supporting

070the populations of students they're serving okay so it may not be maybe there's a different wording for it but the intent is make sure we're really thinking carefully about groups that might be disproportionately impacted and then think of programming programming that they may need whether it exists or not and then fund it okay so back to that comment about the line about prioritized anti-bias initiatives and racist strategic initiatives similarly should we be listing out what we want to prioritize so that we don't overlook them yeah so i think that's a great point one of the things that we will do as we get a little bit more into the year is bring that draft strategy to you and we want to actually discuss it with you and we actually want to finalize that because we

071need to move it forward formally we have been moving items within it forward regardless of whether or not it was voted formally because we had already done a significant amount of work to gain consensus around it so we want to bring that for one last round of feedback and then move it forward but until we do that i don't know if i would quite list them yet all right so to clarify though for people who weren't on the committee like you last year this was supposed to be brought forward like i mean this was part of peter's goals last year and was an overarching district strategy needed to be written and so all of this some of this is coming out of that which some people here may not have seen yet right i'll send

072you know what i'll send the draft out to everyone so you see it and have the it'll give you more it'll give you a version it'll give you more context i think for what he was talking about sorry i mean evelyn did you have another question i didn't mean to cut you off i had a question for adam or andor dave about replenishing the um the revolving accounts are there are there benchmarks for that or is how do how do you think about replenishing not how but like what like what's an appropriate is that is there are other models for that or is it just whatever you can do i think i think it varies from district to district and and program to program and and community eds a different animal from the lunch program

073etc i think the benchmark is where were we so so we can as a matter of fact i looked today at a had a tear came to my eye and looked at the revolving fund balances as of the end of february and things were looking things were looking good we lost upwards of a half a million dollars each in community ed and to the tuition revolving fund and the school lunch fund that restoring to that level is not going to happen in one year i talked to kirsten today about her program she's doing fantastic as as peter said earlier the numbers are probably indicative of not losing any further ground this year but we're not going to make up half a million dollars we've established i think a new benchmark in that we've bottomed out

074and unless some things happen and and i do want to to get one minute to just talk about that um we're where we are and the trend line will will has has made a quantum shift yeah i want to respond to dave's comment about the the reference point of where we were historically because i don't think the reference point was necessarily established through a deliberate process of looking at the volatility that was associated with the particular operation and then making a conscious decision about where the reserve should be in order to provide the right level of buffer and there's always a tension because on the one hand each operating entity loves having a big reserve on the other hand that reserve only exists by moving money from taxpayers into that reserve and so the goal

075of course is to have a reserve so that there isn't volatility that leads to bad operational decision making but not to have so much money that we've excessively taxed the community and and that's always a hard thing to figure out what the right level is and it depends a lot on the volatility in your operations and of course right now david said they're saying we have maximum volatility we just don't know what's going on so it's it's it's a really complicated discussion but i just you know wouldn't accept the idea that the reference point should be where we used to be can i just add a couple of so i think john's my answer was the technical one and john's was the more the political one um you saw the in the in the the

076goal the recommendations the guidelines the major theme is uncertainty and even though that word isn't listed the one about leveraging alternative revenue sources including but not limited to grants two things number one this is hot off the press i got it today i don't know if anybody else got it yesterday the memo was dated september 30th but the state has announced round two of the cares act relief fund program which essentially means that acton and boxborough will be able to apply for the remaining amount of their allocation i think the first the first round was more or less about half of of their allocation they'll be able to apply for the remainder and the second piece is just the coming attractions notice my team is working on a comprehensive report of the grant stat of

077all the grants and their status as the applications have been in our and continue to be submitted we did receive today uh our first revenue from fema it's quite surprising they usually take significantly longer to to liquidate grant we request but we we received 55 000 today which was a reimbursement of fy 20 costs which are gone but not forgotten so this will be a this will be a revenue for fy21 thank you are there yep yep thank you tessa so uh so just uh for learning purpose right what is a major goal of our budget is it say to survive through the hard time or is it to run to maintain zero deficit or just to get us it need a based budget policy i mean what what is the main the key strategy

078of of our budget for the next year so i think that's actually the committee's decision in terms of giving us i i would say you know i don't think there's any one strategy that we can adopt that's going to be successful i mean i think if we're only planning for uncertainty then we're leaving out a forward-looking lens to think about what our students need as they come back um you know you know i was an educator first and i was a teacher first i i would hope to think that our highest priority is going to be the needs of our students but we're doing it in a uncertain fiscal environment that we need to be mindful of i guess that's how i would maybe summarize it's actually that's a great question but but that would

079be my goal thank you anyone else okay diane go ahead this is not going to be a popular thing to say but i'm looking at i think it's bullets three and five and these are these are of course things that we should do but you know fy 22 i guess the word uncertainty is is paramount here because to say we're gonna you know fund programs suggest to me that we have the money to do so and it does say evaluate and consider you know and those are fine and these are populations that can't they can't be ignored and not and it's it's that's a really poor choice of words but you know their needs are significant in a covid environment i just don't want to propose budget guidelines that are that are unreal are unrealistic

080really maybe if you collapse those one of those or both of those with the one in the middle that says you know you really use existing resources to align services and supports i just would like to kind of consider injecting realism into this given that we're in fy 22 and looking at a potential tax increase anyway just because of the the building debt so i'm just going to throw that out there to me this says that we prioritize that above other educational programming that that's like the top of our list like for instance if we're looking at a you know tiered list of things that need to go if we need to reduce by 500 000 or whatever it said this says to me these are our top priorities that we wouldn't touch rather than

081being unrealistic but that's just my two cents adam yeah uh i i hear where you're coming from diane and i think we definitely want to um continue to be sensitive to the the the challenges that the towns are uh up against um to i think though that it's important for us to be as explicit as possible just like peter mentioned you know when we talked about um the those funding those directly funding those programs if we don't call out what are the most important things where we want to put our effort first then we don't have a lot of direction and we're not giving a lot of direction to the administration in terms of how to build that budget so i think i think for me the first two points really speak to what you're

082talking about which is it's going to be an uncertain time we have to be flexible but even in our flexibility these are the things that are most important and beyond that you know i think even in some of the conversations that i've had i don't necessarily want to see us abandon every other initiative that we're looking at but we want to be able to maybe build a budget that considers that we don't know what we're going to have available to us for funding and these things have to be at the top of the list but we would expect there to be a fairly comprehensive list of all of the initiatives that want to be funded and as we get more clarity um in what the the financial picture looks like for next year we can

083then sort of add and replace those items maybe we have to plan for um the uh the the cost of or another remote learning program for next year and we may not find out until later on in the year that we don't need that so i think it's important that we say these are the things regardless of what our rest of our financial picture looks like that we need to have in place and then beyond that we want to make sure that there are items that are lined up should the picture improve or in some cases you know not improve so to me that's where i see the the comment around flexibility and uncertainty at the beginning of the guidelines and then calling out very specifically what is important to address first yeah so in

084terms of process are we still going to have a budget saturday when do you think that might be is the process going to look the same as just delayed or is it just really you don't know yet so i guess you know that's something we're hoping to hear from town of acton relatively soon about like the end date and then we obviously have some big things we need to build backwards from that um our intent was still to go forward with some format of a budget saturday you know it will probably look different because it probably won't be all in one place uh we have to think about what that looks like because a six and a half hour zoom meeting might be excessive um i don't know if you believe me on that but

085um you know so we got to think about the format but yeah we'll do some kind of budget workshop um you know i think we're going to need a little bit more time up front with the administrative team in really thinking through all the nuances of this and what we're seeing currently and thinking forward so you know i would hope we're not targeting you know december again for kind of a first look at the budget like we typically do my hope would that would be somewhere like mid-january um so it's really more of a shift of the overall timeline than anything but do you have any more thoughts on that no but just as an overall comment and this may go back to diane's previous question the first four words out of the box are

086develop a flexible budget so if you keep that in mind everything else kind of flows from that and the the what it's going to look like as peter said before we need some time to to hope to get a handle on just getting some clarification on what it might look like jenny i i just wanted to add very quickly that um with respect to bullets three and five i think from a budgetary standpoint we need to understand that delaying meeting those needs is likely to increase the expense of meeting those needs down the road so it really is fiscally prudent to to deal with them as soon as we can as soon as we know about them i wanted to say a couple things about the schedule as a practical matter one of the things

087that's always been problematic for the school committee is the fact that the actontown meeting the first week of april drives the schedule for the budget and it just backs up from that and that's not helpful relative to the state process so from the longer term perspective of the school committee it would be my view that we should advocate that act and consider on a permanent basis moving town meeting to be more aligned with boxer because one town is going to be first and one time is going to be second whichever one is first is going to drive our budget process um and then the second thing i wanted to say is for people who are trying to figure out what the calendar looks like to move from the first week of april to midish of

088may um means that we would move everything by about six weeks which would take that you know beginning of december thing move that cleanly into january after the governor's budget and then everything else would flow out from that so that's a very doable calendar and then i guess the last thing is in looking at the meeting one of the considerations on the board of selectmen side was being able to you know have the indoor outdoor kind of venue again um that's you know the farther they push it the more compatible with reality that becomes so you know i wouldn't actually be surprised if in the end actontown meeting winds up after boxborough and even into early june i'll just add based on what jenny said i mean after listening to amanda's report just by the

089necessity of not having enough days to educate kids we could be facing an enormous gap in knowledge next year not just with the kids who already have identified learning needs but others who aren't getting the foundational support that they would have needed this year not because we're not trying to do everything that we can but you know they're only in school two days a week so um and that's and the kids who are you know remote or we all know not it's it's not the ideal format so that's how i think about some of that stuff all right are we done with budget yes for the moment for the moment okay right so that brings us to subcommittee and member reports policy policy so diane yeah so policymet and we're bringing forward two policies to

090you the first one is file bde subcommittees of the school committee this is a first read tonight i we took this right off of the national school board association the nepn index and just you know bringing forward for your consideration i had two questions come to me already one was um from adam what is the intention of the clause in number two the committee chairperson subject to the approval by the committee will appoint the subcommittee's chairperson and its members so what does that clause mean subject to approval by the committee is this a vote what specific actions might we take and then john emailed and asked about maybe producing some procedures around timing and you know how we solicit the interests of the group rather than leaving this to oral tradition so i'll just tell

091you just uh briefly that the the reason for bringing this forward is just to codify practices we already have and not really necessarily to introduce something new where there's just nothing on the books about how how subcommittees are formed so it's just kind of i thought it was would be a good idea to to have something in our policy manual that reflects what we actually do um i'm looking for feedback on this clause in number two and trying to get a consensus of the committee about if you want to leave that in or not or clarify it or not and and how you feel about adding procedures that are more specific than this into the policy or having a separate procedure so i'm happy to take any comments now or you can also email me

092we are meeting on wednesday so you can email me if you could email me before that time that would be wonderful i was confused by the wording in number two too because the my understanding just of how we do it now if that's what we were doing was codifying what we do now is that it's the chairperson at the discretion of the chairperson certainly the chairperson asks for you know intention and feedback and you know interest but basically it's at the it's at the discretion of the chairperson and not subject to approval by the committee so i was just i don't know if that was just a wording choice or changing something so when i made the suggestion that i thought maybe this would be helpful if we had a procedure associated with it i

093was thinking about all the work that amy did um on the school committee reorganization meeting where there's lots of sort of tweaky little details that if you look at the procedure then you can go back to the policy and say oh yeah this procedure is compatible that now i understand what you really mean and that's why i think a procedure would be helpful and help in looking at stuff like this and saying oh yeah if this is the procedure that exemplifies the policy then either yeah we're good for that or we need to change something i feel like i'm going to channel john here and say why would we need more description of what we need to do when we've not had any in the past and we could probably very clearly inside the policy

094just state how it works are you saying let it be noted that john wants excessive rules [Laughter] yes i will go on record as saying that as far as putting in dates and timelines and everything john i certainly am glad that we did not have those this year because i think it is something that um complicates flexibility when you don't know what's in front of you i was entirely grateful that we didn't have something like that i mean i think that you know when diane and i transferred power from her to me initially we had that discussion of changing it to not like the meeting after we decide which was incredibly helpful i mean in lots of ways so you know having that as a date of moving forward but i think that i don't

095know codifying some other timeline really sort of i don't know makes it very difficult for the person whose chair to prioritize doing some of those things so i think i i would be against putting something specific in like that or adding procedures i don't know if that's what you were trying to say to adam but like i don't i don't know that it it it's very it's very hard there are so many procedures around everything and and making decisions about who should serve on a on a committee or subcommittee or whatever i think defining what a subcommittee is is like the most important part of it and what what isn't a subcommittee what needs a chairperson and what doesn't to me those seem like the most important parts of what should be there for future

096subcommittee for future committees yeah so since i'll happily argue both sides of any question you know i'll i'll join myself on the side of adam and say that um you know if we can make sure that the policy is clear um so that whoever the chair is will feel comfortable you know even if they have to pick it up without a lot of history and say oh yeah i understand what is within the scope of what i can do and now i as tessa just said can flexibly implement it that's fine with me i um i don't wanna to um i don't wanna beat this one to death there i just have two more comments um the first is you know my questions around um item number two were really a question for the committee

097as a whole um what how i read this policy is sort of different than we've been operating in the past and so i think it would be important for you know committee members to sort of chime in about how they feel the process of um uh assignments on on subcommittee's works um and and personally what i will say is that i believe that the the method we've been using up to this date seems to work really well because i think there's a lot of collaboration that happens between the chair and the administration that probably informs those decisions that probably is not something that we need to hash out here in a in an open session in front of the whole committee and then the second thing that i just thought of that would be helpful

098as we actually get to my next section on on the budget subcommittee is maybe some language in here talking about um a we we talked a little bit about the the subcommittee was provided with a list of functions and duties and i think um putting a little bit more uh color into that area to talk about what is it that you know how how often do we review those are those guidelines something that are voted on and approved by the committee as a whole i think that there's probably a little bit more guidance that we can give to ourselves when we establish and review our subcommittees great thank you we'll bring that back to the committee the second policy we're asking for your consideration to suspend file ikb which is our homework policy and you'll

099see in um in the in the in the form that we use to preface um the substantive items in the packet just to let us know if what action is required of us there's actual wording around what the the language would be for ikb what it would look like if we suspend this policy the reason why this has been proposed is because we the long weekend for k through 12 section states that we that homework will not be assigned over long weekends including those due to religious holidays and those marked by district red closing when there is no school on monday in class assessments will not be scheduled earlier than the following wednesday and this in an environment with where we're remote and hybrid this creates a period of five or six days um one

100of them coming up in nov in october where there will be a prohibition against any kind of assignments of the homework and it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense because it reduces continuity and and and time on learning for students unnecessarily who already have disruptions in their schedule i don't know deb if you want to speak um more to this policy and why we're asking for a suspension yep so just for some more specifics around it so for example if a student was in the cohort where they only met with their teachers on monday and thursday right now i think this week in particular we didn't have school on monday so wednesday then became an instructional day and we have that for the next couple of weeks and so there would be many weeks

101in a row where a student would not be with a teacher from thursday to the following wednesday and so that creates a long period of time and so for a teacher not to be able to assign some kind of work for that continuity would really prevent sort of what we feel that flow of work and learning happening so we're asking for this to be suspended so that our teachers can use their best professional judgment while of course keeping in mind the intent of our homework policy to begin with and that is to make sure that we're keeping our students social emotional and well-being at the forefront of the work that we do with them um it seems clear that this reads very badly in the current environment so i have no concerns about suspending the

102policy but obviously you know both from the perspective of a school committee member a parent and a student understanding homework expectations you know is still very important so if this goes away how will we recalibrate everybody students families and the school committee as to what homework expectations should be there are two parts to our policy and one was the quality and what was the quantity when we talked to the subcommittee one of the things we did discuss asynchronous assignments and homework you know there's a bit of a blurring between the two right now and truly an asynchronous assignment in the end you know our hope is that the homework that is assigned to students later will become much more like an asynchronous assignment with all those different kinds of components so it's much more engaging

103for students and and so the quality is something that we hope to again in this type of environment continue to improve upon the quantity piece i think is again we just need to be very mindful that our students again all the different things that we talked about beginning of the year the trauma the stress that our students are under families or under and just being very mindful about that especially if students are participating in a family event or over the holiday or if it's a religious holiday that they're celebrating so for both of those pieces that's the intent of the homework was policy was to balance those two things and that's what we'll have to be mindful of going forward okay um i think kyra raised her hand first and then angie so given what

104we just said about you know the the that we're trying to keep this trauma um sensitive that we're still trying to keep the social uh emotional learning um at the forefront is there a way to um instead of just straight up suspending this um either a bake those things in or b um you know just put in a temporary new policy that you know that says all of those things i you know i just there's there's something about this that doesn't feel right that we're saying you know we're um we understand that this is a different space and yet for some reason we we're going to add homework to long weekends though we understand we're enduring through the trauma um so i i don't know how these rules work with policy but i just wonder

105if it would be better to to add something new or to bake something in rather than completely take this off so kira that's a very good that's a very good question and and it's one that we talked about in the subcommittee and that is why in the summary of topic section in the packet is a statement that goes on record and it wouldn't be policy but it would be a statement that goes on record that says given the nature of this school year and the different learning modes it is recommended that we suspend the policy with various schedules work to be completed at home may be assigned over long weekends or holiday weekends assessments may be assigned after long weekends and then the next next paragraph and i think i'm just going to read it

106just so that it's you know public um in in the best way that it can be um the intent is to preserve the continuity of student learning while being mindful of the need for social emotional wellness and balance for our students lives educators and building leaders welcome student voice and family feedback as we continue to strive for a healthy balance this suspension would be in effect until the district returns to a full in-person mode of teaching so that's that's what we were recommending and and thank you to deb for crafting that statement which really does capture the essence of what the intention is as we are we are learning in in asynchronous ways on a regular basis so i mean that i mean that that really doesn't form the frequency piece we thought of the

107of the policy it's really just left to teacher discretion at this point but the principles guiding that are embedded in this statement that's in the summary of topic diane if i can just add to that a little bit um kiera we had started diane and i actually started a conversation with this probably a couple weeks ago um and we started with the idea of maybe do we want to modify it or do we want to just remove certain language but keep other language um but one thing we came back to was the homework policy at ab has historically been a challenge and we have lots and lots of diverse views on what homework should be and so you know i think it was like a year a year and a half to develop the first

108homework policy and since we developed it we've been talking about what modifications might we want to do with it for the last two years my fear is if we try and moder change or add some language we would probably be through a lot of this school year by the time we agreed on what the language should be um and i and i actually don't say that lightly i'm saying you know a little bit in jest but in with an air of seriousness too i think um you know i was at the high school today and i was talking with with some of our counselors and their feedback was the kids have been really positive about the amount of homework they've been receiving this year that it felt appropriate to them it wasn't that there was

109no homework it wasn't that they were getting you know overwhelming amounts but it felt appropriate to the times and i think um i actually think our teachers have really recognized the social emotional needs of students and i i i think at this point i really trust their professional judgment on this one especially with some guidance from us as administration that says look the policy is being suspended because we know that the the strict guidelines in it just don't work in the pandemic because you're gonna have there were too many in this scenario with cohort gold or cohort blue or you know the remote learning program couldn't log on in a day or something like that that there's just too many unknowns but i think if we can give them we want the intent of it

110there but we need to provide you with a level of flexibility to be able to keep the academic work going as well i do think our educators have really embraced the idea that the social emotional needs of kids are first um and i think our administrators would love to be able to kind of empower teachers to work within that but then have conversations if it somehow goes awry angie yeah thank you for peter for the clarification so i understand the um the reason why we're looking at to suspend my concern is the because we're in this pandemic situation so if we suspend then what does that mean that's do we do they have no homework or what policy should the teachers or the staff be following so no essentially what we're saying is the policy

111has really rigid guidelines about when you can and cannot assign homework so you can't you can't give an assessment within two days after a long weekend teachers can't you know if we hold to that right now under the current policy you know teachers aren't going to be able to give those assessments and we need to be able to allow them to to give the assessments when they need to so it's actually providing the teacher more flexibility to just have continuity of instruction as opposed to it doesn't remove homework or it doesn't add homework by nature it just pauses it for a year so okay so that's kind of confused because the way i look at homework is a homework is a way actually especially in this pandemic situation earlier tesla mentioned about that we're concerned

112about the gap after the pandemic that the situation is you know for the next year among the students and the way i look at the homework is that the homework is actually training the student to work independently be able to take responsibility and they can do their they can learn their time management and there's a lot of positive thing and without a policy in place i kind of feel that it's there is no guidelines for a lot for the staff and you know the the sumner still some of the teachers gonna do a lot and some of the teachers may not i mean it doesn't have a guideline to us so it will create inconsistency um among the student depends on which class they're going to and the teacher they get so that's the kind

113of the outcome i'm really concerned about and if we suspend this and the other thing kind of suspend is kind of sending a message that we're you know we don't expect you to do a home or something like that it's like so how do we manage be able to kind of create a consistent we are we're looking we're we're expecting you to do homework and we want we want to look at the homework as a positive thing in your learning process and how do we be able to keep that gap minimum for the next year without with this sure i think that's a good question i think the challenge is the reason we want to suspend this is the current homework policy is keeping teachers from assigning homework and because there's long weekends and there's

114holidays and things like that and they they just can't even assign the homework right now um and they can't assess their students because there's too many days in between cohorts and holidays and things like that so if we keep the policy we're actually restricting significantly the amount of homework teachers can give we're actually trying to give them more freedom to have more consistency of homework we're gonna there's other people that have questions we're going to keep moving adam you've had your hand up for a while yeah thank you um i first want to respond to what angie said you know we have a very unique opportunity now in that we don't need to assign homework because every other day our students are actually responsible for learning remotely in their asynchronous time and i think that

115that's probably a very clear example of how they can manage their time and continue to learn without the direct instruction of the teachers and i would say from my own experience that that act actually proven to be more beneficial in some cases for for at least some you know my students my kids um to have to to learn to to learn on their own in a nice increment asynchronous method so that's my first comment my second comment is had this been two years ago i would have been a little concerned about um suspending this policy it was a fairly um controversial topic back in 2017 when it was voted in um but i think that where we are today with what um i just think that this this idea of how homework is handled in

116the district is far more internalized by our staff um that i have no concerns about removing it i think that it's the the right thing to do um i think that the paragraph that that leads into the justification really speaks to why um it's important to do this now i had originally thought well why don't we just remove the one clause why don't we suspend the one clause around long weekends but i don't think that you know to peter's point i think that gives the the the teachers the leverage and the administration and each individual class the sort of the freedom they need to do to to create um sort of new new programs and new methods in this unique time and my last comment is really a question when we look at the the

117policy on suspending policies it states we have to review this at the next scheduled meeting and my question is if we state in our motion to suspend this policy a specific date or time does that then negate the need to discuss this again in our next meeting it seems like it would be silly to discuss it at our next meeting because we would only be suspending it for like two weeks right john that one is asked and answered because i asked that and jenny responded to that previously so i think on that basis i will make a motion that we suspend homework policy ikb until school fully reopens second and can i just say that this does require a two-thirds vote tonight a two-thirds weighted vote right okay is it all right so we will

118do a roll call vote unless sorry you have another question oh oh oh sorry amanda has before we vote um amanda um in the audience has a question apologize for interrupting your vote uh so i just want to point out that this is not just quality and quantity this is also individuality there is a line in the homework policy about students with ieps and disabilities and taking those individual needs into account if we are suspending this policy those students do not necessarily have accommodations and appropriate objectives nor supports in place to support an additional workload and they're already struggling so just i would put employ the district to include in their guidance to all educators not just gen ed or special ed but everyone to take those into consideration to have those conversations as teams

119and adjust accordingly thank you i just wanted to respond to something that adams stated um so yes on the asynchronous days students have those asynchronous assignments but students may also receive a homework assignment on a day when they're in person so if you're in school monday and thursday you may also have a homework assignment that evening so you can practice what you did learn in class um there may be times when that does get blurred because it may also then lead into a project or something that you might be doing on an asynchronous day but there may also be some very specific standalone homework assignments on those days when you're our students are in school okay are we ready to vote john yes adam yes diane yes jenny yes angie no uh kyra yes yevin

120yes oh did i skip evelyn i'm so sorry evelyn i'm sorry yes i'm so tired uh amy amy yes and me yes all right and did i call on yavin yes i did okay thank you evelyn i'm so sorry okay so beth i think that that's yeses and angie who voted against all right thank you um to the policy subcommittee for all of your hard work on um both of those policies i appreciate it we all appreciate it um okay adam uh so our budget subcommittee met on monday september september 21st i think we've covered most of what um the the substantive work of the the the subcommittee on that day though the other thing that we did review was the charge of the subcommittee which was um updated and voted by this committee uh

121last year uh the subcommittee reviewed the charge and felt that uh the the charge still stood there was there was no uh changes that we felt needed to be made to that um and other than that we discussed the budget calendar we discussed our budget guidelines which we've discussed this evening as well thanks all right um alj which one of you is doing that you the acton leadership group met last week minor changes were made to the charter the alg will continue to work to consensus the multi-year alg model which is in the school committee packet currently assumes that acton will tax to the levy limit in fy 22 there will be little increase in state funding and e d use will be one million dollars the actin portion of the abrsd assessment is assumed

122to increase 3.9 while the minuteman assessment is assumed to increase 31 the difference between revenues and expenses is an overall deficit of 1.2 million dollars through the alg discussions and adjustments to the budget of the operating entities the fy 22 deficit must be reduced to zero as we go through the year the town of acton plans to bond the north acton fire station in march 2021 no significant change in local revenues have occurred the level of state and federal support for towns and schools for fy22 is highly uncertain as we've discussed earlier in the meeting in considering the budget process alg agreed the town would be better served by a later town meeting john benson will be working to set a new date with the act and select board the act and finance committee is

123thinking that town and schools should strive to achieve no tax increase for act in an fy 22 and that in part this should be achieved through the use of reserves the fincom would also like to see a new iteration of the cost production committee both entities the town and the school district thought that the additional burden on personnel would be unwise and for people who want to see more minutes and the alg charter are available on the town of acton docushare and since we do have some new people on the committee if anybody wants to ask about alg or how it works i'm happy to answer questions or you can call john and do it offline [Laughter] um and uh tessa called me this week so you know people like to call me jenny would

124you like to give us a legislative update can you turn your mic on please i'm sorry thank you this week i spoke with a an aide to laurie trahan and to both tammy gouveia and to our new state rep dan cena and you know basically i this is not going to come as news to anyone there's still nothing forthcoming from either our state or federal government in terms of any um any funding or knowledge on you know where those numbers might come in so everything is on hold in fact our state legislature has has not been in session since the end of either june or july and they don't go back to formal session until january so there's only a few things that they might that they might meet on so we don't know anything

125about funding rep cena did indicate an interest in assisting in my quest to try to find some funding to bridge the gap between uh tuition kindergarten to full all-day kindergarten once you know this pandemic subsides and things get back to normal so he's he's out he was actually really interested in looking for some state money to help us with that so so that's good news and um i also wanted to let you know for the people who aren't aware that there there are a couple of state bills in the legislature because i also talked to all of them about the need to suspend the mcas requirement for this year so there are bills in the state legislature and there have been letters written to desi and i just want to read the uh one paragraph

126from this letter that's from state represent james hawkins that i think both our state reps signed on to and so ten days to pray prepare curriculum and adequate delivery in ways that our educators have little to no experiences beyond a tasking challenge to add the logistics that accompany high stakes tests that last up to eight hours in duration several days consecutively numerous times throughout the year makes that task a nearly impossible achievement adding the burden of teaching to the tests as all educators know to be necessary for success and the stresses that haunt teachers and students alike is unconscionable the legislature has committed to level funding for the fiscal year that will give some stability to school districts but it does not provide for the low income requirements of the student opportunity act in the

127governor's budget that portion of the student opportunity act meaning the low income requirements was underfunded by 74 million dollars yet over 33 million dollars was still dedicated to mcas we have seen low-income communities and communities of colors disproportionately devastated by covid for this reason alone is it is unprincipled to continue with mcas serving as nothing but a burdensome tribulation so there is a lot of action um in a lot of opposition and i i i think probably most if not all districts will support that so it's it's an issue that we should all be advocating as to remove that burden from our educators and from our children frankly to this year so i will continue to to keep up with uh information on the student opportunity act and and also um the the hopeful suspension

128or moratorium of um mcas one of the bills in the legislature seeks a three-year moratorium so um so we'll see where that goes and i know that there is an masc resolution i don't know if that's what you were going to say diane go ahead yeah so at the the delicate assembly the first resolution that will be debated is a moratorium on mcas yeah that was one suggestion that um sorry if we could you know pass that resolution and many communities do that that would you know up the pressure hopefully and diane i don't know if you want to just speak to that very quickly we won't vote on it tonight but just on one of our you want to know what might what will be coming up on one of our future agenda items

129so people can start to think about it so november is typically the time when we make the pilgrimage to hyannis it's a m-a-s-e and m-a-s-s both have their combined annual conference and it's extremely well attended and it's a really incredible couple of days they're not doing that this year for obvious reasons they masc is pulling together programming to have a zoom version a very abbreviated zoom version of this event but their bylaws state that they do that we they have to have a delegate assembly and that's going to bring together representatives from all 351 districts in an annual business meeting at which time they part of the meeting they debate resolutions that have been put forward over the course of the previous year and the first one is on the moratorium on mcas and there

130are nine others um these are published on the mase website and i have forwarded this information to tessa we will need to designate a delegate um and i am currently on the board of masc so it can't be me and this delegate will attend a zoom delegate assembly that is planned for the first saturday in november that's the 7th it'll be an afternoon business meeting so i again have forwarded all this information to tessa and so you can expect to see it show up in a packet i think we have to fill out the paperwork by i think october 30th yeah i hope i'm recollecting that correctly well that's what you had said to me so at one of the next two meetings either the 15th or when we have our workshop on the 29th

131um so start thinking about it now because i can tell you right now it won't be me either because i'm not taking on something else like that so um the other nine of you can discuss and think about think amongst yourselves who would like to be that delegate um and uh diane will give more information about what would be expected of that delegate when we have it on the agenda peter you want to give a building committee update i give a pretty extensive update last time just about value management process so the building committee did meet and concluded value management we had some good news going in that a couple of the potential change orders had come in under what they could have by i'm going to say about 500 000 which is a very

132significant number so through that and some recommendations to shift some of the can the design contingency out back into the budget because the design is nearing 100 completion stage we actually were able to really do the valid value management process without losing any significant anything significant in the building that was educational so we i think we overall we were pleased with the process we feel confident that even though we had to value manage some items we still preserved all of our energy work we preserved you know our water resources we preserved our educational program so um it was an effective process we are working on bid documents right now with the contractors to finalize all the bidding processes and subcontractors for the project those will be going out over the next month or so and

133we should have the guaranteed maximum price for the building sometime in early december from consigli you know throughout that time period we'll be seeing foundations started and i think around december we'll start to actually see steel going up so that'll be an exciting moment so one thing we did talk about um you know with regard to the building project was you know traditionally you have kind of a groundbreaking ceremony that's a big deal in the community and you know in the era of covid that really proved to be too much of a challenge but one option that we might want to be thinking about as we move forward they do something called a topping off ceremony where you can do a ceremony it's the last piece of steel that goes onto the building and traditionally

134what they'll do is they'll actually put that piece of steel out they paint it and then they'll put it out at the existing school for a week or two before it goes up and then all the kids can come out they can actually sign the beam you know the community can come in and sign the beam and then the beam gets hoisted and put in place you never see it again because it's part of the structure of the building but everyone knows that they got to contribute to it so that might be something that we can think about as a nice public thing as we we go through but um i think we're tentative to try and plan too much because we don't know the course of the pandemic and what's going to be possible

135and i i've never run a virtual topping off ceremony in my life so the naming piece yeah yeah so the other piece that we want to be thinking about um you know the similar to mccarthy town of miriam they're co-located buildings but the building itself has a name in the parker damon building we have the douglas elementary school we have the gates elementary school but it's probably time to start thinking about the idea of a name for the new building so that we can you know have signage and things like that in place when it opens so tessa and i talked about that school committee probably wants to think about forming a naming subcommittee there is a policy around naming you know i have asked from a staff standpoint to have marie work on that

136you can see her name on multiple plaques already around the district having done a lot of building projects she knows the community well she do a great job being a staff liaison to that group but that is something we want to be thinking about over the course of this year so um you all can start thinking about if you'd like to be a part of a naming subcommittee because that would be something that once we have a police committee policy in place we could think about creating that subcommittee yes john i just wanted to comment although this policy is about naming facilities some of the ideas and philosophy in this are germane to naming things generally so people who are interested in the colonial name probably should take a look at this as well and

137i'll just say that there's not a joint ptso update but uh kyra and i are working together to put together an initial calendar that we will run by peter um and we'll get back to those who are involved in that roundtable all right number seven recommendation to accept a very generous donation from danny's place youth services do you want so we're just putting that forward we have a very generous donation of four thousand dollars from danny's place youth services that we're seeking approval for move to approve with gratitude john yes adam yes evelyn yes diane yes jenny yes angie yes kyra yes with gratitude evan yes amy i sit on the board of danny's place so i'm going to say abstain great and me yes with gratitude thank you very much okay statement of warrants

138you did oh go for it john sorry you guys never want to do it so i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrants as follows number p2107 dated 924 2020 in the amount of two million six hundred forty thousand three hundred sixty three dollars and seventy eight cents payroll deduction warrants as follows number 21-007 pr dated 924 2020 in the amount of one million seventy four thousand five hundred five dollars and fifty two cents bender warrants as follows number twenty one dash zero zero six dated nine seventeen twenty twenty in the amount of one million two hundred eighty six thousand seven hundred eleven dollars and ninety cents student activity reimbursement warrants as follows number twenty one zero zero six h s dated nine seventeen twenty twenty in the amount of thirty two

139thousand two hundred forty nine dollars and forty one cents second with amazement in the lung capacity do we have to do a roll call yes for that john yes adam yes evelyn yes diane yes jenny yes angie yes kyra yes yevan yes amy yes me yes all right that passes unanimously um as far as the fyi i am reticent to say this but public comment is still open for the mascot naming so if you would like to weigh in with your thoughts you can send us an email and i will read it and i'll note that the district calendars have been changed to reflect the in change to indigenous peoples day on october 12th um and is there anything else you want to add you already mentioned the signs we already got to the big

140bird signs that we're very thankful for all right excellent i will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second yes angie i just want to say happy mid autumn festival to all the east asian community today is the mid mid autumn festival is the second largest festival in east asia thank you angie thank you john yes adam yes evelyn yes diane yes jenny yes angie yes kyra yes yeah ben yes oops amy yes and me yes i will see everyone on october 15th