AB School Committee Meeting 11-22-19

001all right welcome and good evening everybody and thank you to act on TV for broadcasting and taping this evenings meeting item number 3.1 on our meeting is chair Parsons remarks and I'll be standing in his chair person for this evening as Miss McKinley is unavailable item 3.2 public participation this is the part of the meeting per policy be EDH when members of the public may speak for up to two minutes on items not included on this agenda comments regarded items on the agenda should be made during the pot that part of the meeting typically the committee and administration will not respond to comments during public participation is there anybody who'd like to speak this evening okay item number three high school student representative update everyone hear me now I has there so I'm sure everyone's

002really happy with Thanksgiving break coming up soon and I feel like this is kind of the vibe that we feel at school as well we just have to push through this final stretch before everything is going to be good again and so we're kind of in a period of transition at the high school and the junior high right now since the junior high trimester is ending next week and the high school's term already ended two weeks ago and as you guys probably know on December 2nd we're having a shift in the lunch schedule at the high school where we since we have three lunches they'll all be shifting down one and I think it will be a period of change but people will try to adapt quickly and now there's just a couple of important

003events that are happening at the high school in the next week and the first one is that the 25th annual cabaret night is actually this Friday and this Saturday that's where a wide variety of musical groups get together in the auditorium and perform for the public and also senior dress-up day is on next Wednesday and this is just a fun time for seniors after right before break where they can have fun and dress up I guess and so they're also there's also a lot of charity work going around at the high school and the junior high and currently there is a food drive that's going on for opentable which is a local food pantry this is going on between November 15th in November 22nd and there's also a Toys for Tots Drive held by the

004sophomore class that's going on until the December 13th and so any donations can be dropped off at the Counseling Center and also the Spanish department is currently running a project called a pulse era project in which artists in Nicaragua make bracelets and they're being sold around at schools around America and you can buy them for $5 and all the proceedings will go to the Nicaraguan families to try to help improve their conditions and yeah so if you guys have any you guys want to go donate you should go to the Counseling Center and then try to help out thank you very much thanks very much Justin item 3.4 superintendent's update yes please Cabernet Cabernet night is awesome Kappa Kappa Kappa discuss so good evening everyone I'm giving my update over here because I actually want

005to during the update just show you a couple new features on our website and anyone who's at home watching but if you recall last year when we launched our capital project we had a number of requests from different people to have the district find a way of transparently reporting on the status of the capital work as we do this and as we continue to plan projects for the future we wanted to do something a little different rather than just have a static report that came out once a year around the status of the projects but we wanted to really allow users to get onto our website and look at where we had projects planned and the various schools and also to look at how the plan looked over the course of the life of the

006plan so it's really about a thirteen year plan so we worked with our web vendor and it took some time about six months but we were able to come up with something that allows really an interactive look at the capital plan but what you're looking at is a way that you can actually see the original capital projects and up top you can sort by location so if I just wanted to see what work is being planned at Blanchard it takes a minute to refresh if the web is working correctly and apparently the web up pick a date range it is I think the it's actually the website itself that struggle not the website I think our internet connection is struggling a bit but you can actually sort on all of the different functions whether it's

007by school or by year and we will make sure that they were talking with our web vendor tomorrow if it's actually the website the other piece I wanted to show you though is if you look at our website and people are looking for information on the school building project we've actually been revising the building project website as over the last few weeks to make sure that the information on it is current and up-to-date if anyone is looking for an existing conditions tour at the Douglas or Gate schools that video is now right on the building project page and if anyone goes to public forums and they're looking for information on public forums the videos of really the last four presentations that we've done that have all been televised are now in one location for the

008community to be able to access peter if anybody reviews the website and decides they really liked it and wanted to send thank you or perhaps if they reviewed the website didn't had any difficulties who should they report those difficulties to they can send the email my way and I will forward that on to the appropriate people all right I will end with one just funded but I ended up being able to go to lunch today with our three captains from our football team our football coach and we went to the annual rotary lunch held in conjunction with the Westford football team it was a great event I just want to say thank you to our rotations for putting that on it's a great way for both of the teams captains to be able to get

009together celebrate a little friendly competition before Thanksgiving so with that said I will turn it back over to Adam thank you and moving on to item 4.1 this is the all-day kindergarten follow-up discussion with grief so while we're trading positions in Maria's setting up I just want to thank Marie and Deb bukas and Don for all of the work that went into helping to prepare the materials for tonight I just to also frame the discussion you know we are not looking to make it to Scott a decision on what we're doing with all-day kindergarten tonight what we wanted to do instead was plan a series of meetings over the course of the fall to provide you with increasingly more information as you request it so that you feel like you're in a position to make

010a decision I think there is a critical point though which is coming up on December 5th when we present our superintendents budget which provides the context for the actual budget impact of doing all-day K and how that fits into the big picture of the real budget moving forward that's also a very critical element of making this decision so I just want to make sure I'm framing that that this is not a decision point tonight this is just another step in a series of meetings thank you Peter thank you everybody there's a lot of information in the packet I want to thank Deb and Dawn for their work on that we also have several of our elementary principals with us tonight and some of our elementary kindergarten teachers so a lot of thought and input has

011gone into what you have in front of you as you know we've been talking about this for almost a year we started on January 10th and then on March 21st you might remember that 80% of our families chose all-day k4 this year and that really pushed us to a point where we thought we really need to seriously consider transitionally moving to tuition free all-day kindergarten at some point in the future and then we pulled some more things together made a presentation on September 19th that included some of the information from across the state including that 87 percent of Massachusetts districts have tuition free all-day kindergarten and I presented several possible funding models tonight we have more information including data and research regarding all-day kindergarten feedback from teachers and parents we asked some questions of all

012of our kindergarten and first grade teachers and we have the parent survey info that you saw last time we have a little bit more information about that and we're prepared to talk a little bit more about funding options December 5th you'll receive the superintendent's budget with a recommendation around all-day kindergarten and on December 19th we would look for you to give us guidance for at least FY 21 because on January 7th we welcome our next year's class of kindergarten parents information night so that's kind of our timeline of where we need to be able to tell parents for next year what the options are so in the packet there were several sections you can see on the list what's there I know you had a chance to read through it I'm going to do a

013brief summary of some of the sections and the majority of tonight is more about if you have questions or feedback for us so we have continued to work with as you know one of the concerns we shared a year ago was that the percentage of students in half-day kindergarten who qualify for free and reduced lunch last year was 25% of the students in half-day kindergarten so we wanted to make sure that for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch that the tuition was not the barrier that if they were in half-day kids because they wanted to be not because of the cost so we last year in this year worked we need their permission to actually reach out to them and and offer them free tuition so the free and reduced lunch status is

014held by food services and can only be shared for purposes of tuition and fees it with parental permission so we've worked hard on that we had food services reach out to people we have a checkbox on PowerSchool now so they don't have to fill out a separate form those kinds of things so we have systematically been moving families into all day who qualify for scholarships and so even since the beginning of school we've moved five families from half data all day who wanted to be in all day but the tuition was a barrier so in April about 20% of families requested all day you know as you know we set up a system this year where everybody who wanted half-day got half-day I'm sorry I meant thank you 20% one at half day 80% wanted

015all day so we went with hybrid kindergartens we have one half-day kindergarten classroom it's at Blanchard that was because we had enough families at Blanchard who wanted half day to fill a half-day classroom and then we went hybrids at the rest of the school so every single family who wanted half-day got half-day every single family who wanted all day got all day and again some have moved during the year so we have a total of three hundred and eight students in kindergarten 247 or in all day 61 or in half day there's research and links to articles in your packet Deb did a nice memo about it the bottom line is that the research is mixed particularly around academic performance related to all day and half day kindergarten there was sort of one quote from

016each of the studies on this slide so the meta-analysis shows that the positive effects of kindergarten on academic outcomes disappears by third grade that's from the Cooper Allen Patal and dent study there's another study by Pelletier in quarter in 2019 that shows that all decay has benefits in self-regulation reading writing number knowledge and vocabulary there's a study by gottfried sublet and Kirksey 2019 that talks about students with disabilities in all decay having higher reading and math scores at the end of kindergarten but they disappear by the end of first grade and then the last one is about English learners and English learners and all they can the garden where 5% less likely to be retained in kindergarten so there is not a lot of clear evidence one way or the other that half-day or all

017day K has a lasting effect on academic outcomes there's some about social emotional dysregulation etc we did our own study with kindergarten literacy and the data is here there was data in your packet but basically at the end of the year in the literacy assessments the performance was comparable between 89 and 91 percent of students were on target but half-day case students it was just totally inconclusive because in one year half-day case students started 8% higher than all day K in the next year half day case students started 10% lower than all day K but in the end of the year they were very comparable and then the point about the income gap last year we don't have it this year because most of our students on free and reduced lunch have gone to all

018day or started in all day all right you saw in your packet the feedback from kindergarten teachers we asked some qualitative questions we gave you all the feedback in the packet we asked them what advantages they saw with all day what advantages they saw with half-day you can see there the advantages that they see with all day and we asked kindergarten teachers what their preference was for what we do going forward eight of them said they would prefer to go to all day K as soon as possible to said keep all day K and half take K options in every school and three said they prefer to keep hybrid classrooms so that's some the comments were really worth reading if you haven't and similarly with the first grade teachers again we had some qualitative data

019some of them said that students coming from all day have more stamina they're more prepared for the full day of first grade have more social skills and some kids are identified student needs are identified more so with kids who came from all day than half day seven of the first grade teachers think we should go to all day K as soon as possible and three of them said they'd prefer to keep the options for all day and half day this was a request from the committee from the last meeting which was a very good question that we did not ask in the survey we did in June so we reached back out to all of the current half-day parents there are 61 of them 46 of them responded to us which we were thrilled with

020of those 46 21 prefer so the question was if all decay were free would you prefer all decay or half-day K and 21 said they prefer half-day K and twenty-five said they would prefer all day K so roughly half and half of the families who are in half-day K now would still prefer half-day even if it were free yep so there are 306 kindergarten families in the district yes and of those 306 200 280 one preferred all-day K is what you're saying 92% of our kindergarten yes because okay because yes because when you drive that 21 still prefer half-day and that's 8 percent of the total all right so to an 81 prefer at 21 for for half-day yep thank you the next two slides were in your packet in September I just wanted to

021remind you of the reasons why people who pick all day say they pick all day and people who pick half-day say they pick half-day so for all day the number one reason is academic and developmental needs and the number two reason is parent work schedule closely followed by social emotional developmental needs okay so those are the main reasons why people pick all day the main reason why people pick half-day is the top reason is wanted their child to have more time in the afternoon for play the second reason is wanting their child to have more time in the afternoon with family the third reason is social emotional developmental needs and the fourth reason is that all day K was too expensive this data was also in your packet in September about 300 districts have tuition

022free all-day kindergarten in Massachusetts that's 87 percent about 45 districts have all day K with tuition 13% and 96% of Massachusetts students are attending all-day kindergarten the next page is the budget and the bottom line is if we were to move fully to tuition free all-day kindergarten it would cost about a million dollars last year and earlier this year we were saying 1.2 million we've now moved to hybrids in five out of six schools so we've already gone a chunk of the way there in terms of paying salaries and the like somebody brought up the transportation in the middle of the day at the last meeting so we looked into that so with all those sort of variables it's roughly a million dollars to move to full all-day K without tuition so we've considered lots

023of different phasing of in of the funding basically a combination of using a and D or budget money if we were to go to all-day K costing a million dollars that's roughly a 1% increase on our budget because our budget is in the little over 90 million dollar range so just to keep that in mind now 1% might not sound like a lot but if our budgets going up three and a half or four percent if we were to do all-day kindergarten even if we were to pay for it out of Indy the budget goes up another percent so four and a half or five percent whatever's used a D&D does not add to the assessment the tax bill to the two towns but it's a temporary solution as well right so the budget would

024go up but the assessment wouldn't necessarily go up so whatever combination of E and D and budget money is going to affect the budget and/or the assessment so the piece that's new to us that is really to be determined is the impact that the student opportunity Act is going to have and we know that it's moving its way through the process but we don't know what the implementation timeline is going to be Dave will go into more information about this through the budget process but to give you just a short possibility is our chapter 78 we have been in what's called hold harmless for several years so no matter what happens with the formula we get thirty dollars a student because we're in hold harmless we don't get any additional money even with the student

025Opportunity Act until we come out of hold harmless when we do and that might be three four five six seven years from now we don't know enough to know but let's say five or six years from now at that time it would bump up us going to all-day kindergarten would bump up our aid by we believe more than it's gonna cost us to do it did I I'm gonna turn to Dave and Peter was that that was okay so the point is there's no money to help us now at the time at which the student Opportunity Act is implemented far enough along that we come out of hold harmless there could be enough money in that to actually pay for all-day kindergarten or certainly a large piece of it so it puts us in an

026interesting dilemma we have this momentum we have a lot of feedback that a large percentage of our community would like to start to move in this direction but it's a big add to our budget and if the state's going to help it's going to be four to six years from now likely the one thing I'd say is it's November 21st now two months from now the governor's budget will come out between now and then there should be some kind of guidance as to how this will be implemented over seven years and so we might have some more information but right now it's exactly as Murray said it's a guess so with that we've been working with our leadership team and we've come up with what we think is a good recommendation so the tuition for

027the last four or five years has been $4,500 so we're thinking about gradually reducing the tuition over the next couple of years until we have much more clarity around the student Opportunity Act and where our budget stands and what our available resources are so that in a year or two we can have a more definitive plan about sort of year three four or five and when we can afford to go fully there so working with the leadership team our recommendation is to go from $4,500 tuition to three thousand seven hundred fifty dollar tuition so come down seven hundred and fifty dollars for next year and then once we have more guidance about the student Opportunity Act and as we work our way through the budget for FY 21 and start to think about the next

028year we consider going down another 750 and then coming up with what's the right year to fully fund tuition free all-day kindergarten if we come down 750 so the models you saw last time we had come down a thousand come down 500 come down halfway this would cost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars which we think will be comfortable recommending using E and D for until we know more about the student Opportunity Act so I'm gonna stop for sec Peter any anything else you want to say about that you know so you know Marie said it and I alluded to it at the beginning too but I think one of the the things you know I think our staff would love to see us go to all-day K and as an administrative team that was

029of high interest to us I think that one of the drivers in thinking cautiously about this and it's a little bit of a preview to the budget presentation in two weeks but we have all of our fixed cost drivers are escalating at a rate that is higher than we've had in recent years and so it's a much tighter budget than we've seen probably in several years so I think you know while we think this is important and we want to make the progress we also want to exercise caution in how we go about that and make sure that we can do it at a sustainable level and that was the really the plan that we had talked about as an admin team to propose so there's one more piece before I turn it over for

030questions and discussion oh this is just a picture of the funding model so again 4500 this year with hybrids next year we'd go to 3750 we'd use 180 out of Indy the following year if we went to 3,000 now we've got a three hundred and sixty thousand dollar issue so that could be Andy it could be part budget we probably wouldn't want to do it all out of Andy because it just compounds over time and then we'd have to have a real plan for full implementation over the next year or two or three after that so that's the funding proposal yep just one note on this slide I think my feeling on this you know Marie and I had talked after the packet was done but I think my recommendation would be if we were

031going to do this too if we want to use one year worth of access and efficiency to fund it that that amount should be absorbed into the following year's budget because what I don't want to do is create a cliff that's multiple years out that we then can't control for so I think it's you know whatever you see if we're saying we're using E and D and year one then year to that amount gets absorbed into the budget and then we add the additional hundred and eighty four E and D and that's the way we step it down over time so you would see you know for example in the budget increase column FY 21 would be 0 FY 22 would be a hundred and eighty FY 23 would be 360 etc so it's gradually

032shifting the resources from excess and deficiency into the operating budget okay and the last piece is around the curriculum for all day and half-day kindergarten so what I presented last time one of the big concerns we have is by having some hafta and some all-day students we are teaching to a half-day program and when we went to hybrids in every school we said all art music and PE and library has to be scheduled in the morning so all students are attending as well as the academic blocks and some of the feedback you heard from teachers is that that has been very difficult and it makes the morning somewhat stressful so if we continue with some half-day and some all day we're going to loosen that up a little bit and say that it is okay

033to schedule some things in the afternoon and we'll keep literacy in math in the morning in all schools but some of the specials may have to be in the afternoons and we're going to work our way through that so that we're not totally limiting to the morning and then will reduce tuition over time and will continue to try to move people on scholarships for families in need so that's the information we provided for tonight we would ask for any feedback questions or discussion now and then Peter will present the budget and on December 5th and then on December 19th we would look for a decision for next year so that we can communicate it to parents at kindergarten night on January 7th okay thanks Marie and thank you also to Deb for helping collect some

034misinformation I also want to send thank you out to the kindergarten and first grade teachers who filled out those surveys personally I found a lot of those comments to be very helpful and thinking about this so as we've mentioned a couple times we're not making a final decision today we want to continue to discuss this ask questions a lot of the budget implications will be discussed at our next meeting so at this point anybody have any questions Nora in our last meeting when we talked about the concern about equity and the number of students in half-day kindergarten was 25% of those students would have qualified for reduced lunch and so in terms of thinking about that with equity as the main concern now my understanding is that they would be able to have a scholarship

035for all-day kindergarten if they wanted to is that right they've always been able to have a scholarship but they weren't necessarily applying we couldn't necessarily reach out to them so this year we did much better we really emphasized the scholarship we started the year with nine students who qualify for free and reduced lunch in half-day K and now we're down to four or five or six something like that thank you one thing there's there's probably you know there's no way necessarily we could collect this data but there's some really clear qualification guidelines for how we waive tuition for for a free all-day que for you know free and reduced price lunch but there's also an income bracket that may not qualify for free and reduced-price lunch where our tuitions may be prohibitive and that so

036that that's a consideration there's no way to capture that data though so I've been thinking about this since reading the packet so if we are making a decision as a committee that and as a district that we value and we believe that all day K is the right thing for our students then we need we need to figure out a way to do it sooner rather than later in my opinion I if there's a if there's that's not the consensus that that we really should have both programs and I'm fine with it I just don't think that we should make a decision and say okay we're gonna go to all-day K we know this is important this is what 92% of our parents are asking for but for the next few years we're just gonna

037we're gonna you know we'll just cut down the cost for a little while and then at some point it'll be free I'm not comfortable with that and I'm a little I'm a little wary of the idea that we'll be moving our curriculum to an all-day curriculum instead of a half-day curriculum again students will be it feels to me like there will be a lot of stress and and a lot of intensive time for the kids in the morning to get everything done and then that some of the things that the kids will miss out on our music pe doesn't feel okay with me so those are just my thoughts out there Angie so when yeah when we was reading the package and it's about 80% and I'm confused season 92% of the student or is

03880% of the student that requested the food day 80% of families requested all day in March when we had registration but when we then further pulled the half-day families and Menai new purse nth of them say they would prefer all day so with the $4,500 tuition 80% of them chose all day and if it were free 92% of them are saying they would choose all day so forth the 8% of student who family who decided to choose to have they and parent there are some reasons for that and what are the options for the families they would like to have there's you know families kids to stay home for a play and what options we we can provide to the family so we've been as a leadership team we've been brainstorming that and talking through

039that certainly parents could pick their kids up early if they wanted to and gradually change that throughout the year if that worked for them if we had sort of a group of students we could potentially offer 1/2 day in one location and kindergarteners whose families really wanted them to have half-day we could offer 1/2 day we'd have to work out what that means sort of for the next year for distributing kids out you know could we still do hybrid if we had tuition free all day maybe but kind of those issues around what gets scheduled in the morning what gets scheduled in the afternoon are kind of still there so I don't think we intend to be black-and-white about it but we're open to considering possibilities as we get there I have a couple questions

040and comments my first comment is if outcomes are not so clear why have 300 districts moved to all-day K that's just a question in my mind it's not necessarily for you to answer unless you know the answer my second question I'm I'm thinking about this in two different on two different lenses one is and of course and we've made a commitment to equity in this district and right now it seems like we're disincentivizing kindergarten all-day kindergarten for the kids who needed the most and Peter to your point if we if we take if we identify the kids on free and reduced lunch with parental permission and we know that we're we're addressing the needs of special education kids who who need that there's this big group that doesn't maybe meet the requirements for free and

041reduced lunch who also are struggling and would would choose all-day K but don't so the equity issues are important especially because it's a major commitment we've made as a district the other the other piece of this is is a is a budgetary piece all-day K is to say it's free is not really really accurate it's really in my mind a cost shift too because we're going to have to and kind of absorb it into the budget and then distribute that among the the taxpaying citizens of our two towns so that's something to consider as we continue to discuss this I'm wondering if I hear the urgency in your voice but why not wait for the student opportunity act to kind of play itself out so that we have clear data on what on how this

042could potentially offset our costs so that's I guess something to consider too I think that I think that was it that's a that's a lot to consider I think I'm done no so anyone else want to add anything that would be great oh so I apologize for missing the last meeting and I so I haven't come up to speed with what we discussed but as I go through the data and not just this data but data that has been provided to the committee from members of the public last year and I'm a little disappointed that it's not more of a clear educational benefit and you know I have to step back and and think you know we've been providing education in Massachusetts for 350 and Counting years and we're only talking about all-day kindergarten in

043the most recent decade or two and to me this issue is not an educational one it's an economic one and and so the the the data doesn't compel me to support this on an educational basis but you know if if we have to acknowledge the economic situation where we no longer have you know a family structure that supports a home provide a caregiver and a breadwinner then circumstances have changed but it's not not not we're not responding to an educational need where we're responding to an economic one first I want to say I think it's important to read through if you haven't already all the comments of the teachers which are very compelling I think that what we see in the memo is a very limited amount of the outcome measurements and almost all of

044them are based on just academics and to say the you know that a benefit is gets absorbed by third grade mean set for you know kindergarten first grade second grade and third grade that kid is feeling behind their peers which is a really big deal so I think that we have to think about it I'm not convinced by the by the information that we have here I think that there is a lot of information on the importance of high quality early childhood education and the more we learn the more important it seems to be so I think we need to cast a wider net before you come to a conclusion that it's not compelling and that's one and the second thing is that I think you know a lot of the teacher comments such as

045the the rise of anxiety and other issues for children and coupling that with jamming them through you know a school day in a very compressed period of time without the longer breaks for recess play and rest it seems like a lot of the teachers have identified you know that poses that it actually increases anxiety so having read all the comments and thought a lot about this I mean I I think that it's I think there is a reason that you know we are an outlier in school districts at this point not providing universal all-day kindergarten I would be concerned that we have an opt-out provision for those families who don't want it in some way to accommodate them especially in a transition period but I think that we're we're ten years late to the party

046in my opinion first I'd like to thank the all of the staff because there was actually quite a lot of work that was done in response to various school committee comments and I think internal discussions so it was very impressive incremental effort to try and explain what's going on let me make one comment about why it's obvious that some of these things are going to be inherently difficult to gauge and that is that we don't know what happens when the students spend the other half day and depending on who that half day has spent with and what it's spent doing it could be far far more valuable or far far less valuable than all day K and so I think the point that Jenny just made that regardless of what we do allowing an opt-out

047provision and perpetuity has a lot of merit to it but I I do think that you know there's an economics to this this is not you know a discussion of you know but things can we think of that would add value the question is within some constraints that exist in the system which of those things represent the best educational value for actin and Boxborough and it was commented earlier by mr. Wyatt that the budget this year might go up three and a half to four percent and if inflation were five percent I would say that's a tremendous accomplishment but where inflation is 2% and the idea that we would spend 1 percent of our budget on this that math doesn't look very attractive to me and if you're looking at the totality of the community

048and the impact on everyone in the community the projection for next year is that fixed income will go up 2% so if your budget goes up three or three and a half percent or 4 percent and that has that impact on taxes those people who are seeing their income go up 2 percent you know clearly will have some things to deal with you know and the protection is that that will be true the year after as well so I think that again you know as Diane just mentioned part of this is about if we want to do this you know there's question about you know how should we pay for it and we do have obviously in the system examples of services where specific families you know receive services like football and we charge athletic

049fees related to football and that's important to making the economics work inside our community so I think there is reason to think that you know tuition you know has merits where the the fees are collected from the people who are the beneficiaries of a given service and then the last comment that I wanted to make you know respect to the general budget question that comes up to us relates to the issue of en D and as we've stated our school budget is primarily supported by local property taxes in acton-boxborough to the extent that our assessment exceeds our spending the excess flows to E and D thus there is no inherent reason to distinguish the use of en D from the assessment for recurring expenses in any given budget year I is perfectly acceptable to use

050money from E and E to reduce the assessments of the member towns however my belief is that this you should be tied to the general budget request not to any specific program there's no sensible reason to earmark it thank you thanks all right Murray oh go ahead I guess when I was reading through the teachers comments and again like like everybody else I really appreciated how thorough they were and how it really gave a good picture of what kindergarten and first grade teachers think about this issue a lot of the concerns and stressors that came from sort of supporting all-day kindergarten felt a little bit to me like they were relevant only for hybrid kindergarten classrooms and maybe didn't necessarily apply so much to the idea of having at one half day only kindergarten classroom

051that doesn't have the same pressures of the hybrid model of some students leaving in some students staying so I was wondering about that and you know if close to ten percent of the parents would still want a half-day option for their children because they feel that's developmentally appropriate then I think we have to really take that seriously in terms of both equity and you know most importantly wellness and I think about the whole all-day kindergarten and sort of also from the lens of this sort of pace of Education and that we're talking about five-year-olds and launching them into this sort of we can feel like a little bit of a race to nowhere if we're talking about you know curriculum packing for kindergarteners and so I just want to bring that point up to that

052I'm feeling protective of the option of a half-day kindergarten class for those children who that's developmentally appropriate for them can it just uh just a couple comments on it I'm gonna ask Deb maybe to chime in on the second piece of that around kind of how we look at the academic work and curriculum for kindergarten I think too the first piece we actually have looked at that the idea of preserving a half-day classroom and if you look you know in Marie's slide with the way the numbers played out we originally this year who you know the the previous practice we had as a district was we were providing a half-day kindergarten classroom at every school and what that resulted in was us actually turning away families who wanted all-day K because there were more requests

053for all-day K than we could accommodate in our classrooms the the back up if we wanted to preserve one classroom or two classrooms the number would probably be that we would designate certain schools for that and so what essentially we would be doing is limiting families options around choice of elementary school to be able to accommodate that by debt that certainly was an option that we've discussed so I I appreciate that but I just want to provide that context to it as well sure and maybe Deb you can talk to kind of the sense of curriculum and the notion of kind of jumping kids in to the stress of an all-day educational program things like that and just our general approach to curriculum at the all-day program so the expectations are the same whether it's

054half day or full day because we really look at a half day programming in terms of academic outcomes even when the new Common Core Standards came out we took a look at them through a half-day lens to think about what was appropriate for a half-day kindergarten program and if we were to think about a full-day kindergarten program you might some of you who are here five six years ago might recall we did a lot of work around play and thinking about making sure that our kindergarten stayed is play based as possible while making sure that we had you know the pre-literacy skills and some counting and mathematic skills and building some numbers number sense as well but if we were to go to a full-day kindergarten programming it would allow us an opportunity to rethink

055a full-day program and what that would look like for our children and there are some wonderful models out there Boston Public Schools just recently developed and it's called k2 curriculum and it's all a play based curriculum based on projects it does include some literacy of course literacy work and math work but it's all play based needham just adopted the exact same kindergarten program for their full-day kindergarten program so there are some nice models out there that we would certainly take a look at just to see how we can maintain that play based model in a full-day program that makes sense for our students I'm sorry I just I'm gonna I'm gonna respectfully disagree with you John about one thing that you said that if we believe as a as a district that this is educationally

056sound and important then it is not something that we should be charging for it's not an extracurricular that you get to do or in athletics or any of or anything else it's it should be a part of our if we decide differently then that's fine but I think we need to think about if if this is what we want to do and we want to do it because it's the best thing for our students for our kindergarteners then we shouldn't be charging for it so first of all I want to echo what Diane said mercury inputs so this the second thing is that I want to remind everyone that you know maybe some some some people probably say you know we're behind on the kindergarten okay we're behind the mostess school history in the state

057but i want to remind everyone that you know the mental house issuing our school district probably are ahead of them a lot of you know school districts so I would like you know rather just say that there's a 1 million dollars you know put into the mental health to address the mental health issue instead of kizuite we have two top priority of the party ties all the things so yep I'm not sure if how they K is the top priority of our school district you know compared to the mental house okay thank you we're gonna move forward again we're gonna come back to this topic and talk specifically about some of those budget drivers at the next meeting so thank you very much Marie item 4.2 the Charter Road planning update presented by JD head

058and Carolyn radish of GPI thank you all very much for having us I want to introduce Carolyn radish she is from greenman-pederson incorporated groom and Peterson is a civil engineering company Carolyn's department specifically looks at traffic patterns and design engineering and GPI has been working with us for about a year-and-a-half now on developing some some design concepts around try to route improvements if you recall part of our capital improvement plan a large portion of that is infrastructure road safety improvements in and around campus and with that I'm going to turn it over to Carolyn and save time for for questions at the end thank you and good evening it's a pleasure to be here before the school committee so as JD noted we started to look at kind of circulation patterns and areas where we

059can improve particular pedestrian and bicyclist safety on the campus and we put together the bubble diagram that was in your packet as a way to just start the discussion about that and some of the things that we have noted in there as sort of our toolbox are things like race intersections and you know this is a photograph where the the it sort of the intersection slows the traffic down because it's raised a little bit it makes the pedestrian more the priority in a subtle way for crossing the street it may be a raised intercrossing that also does sort of have that traffic calming speed table effect there's also other issues with respect to a DA like detectable warnings and slopes and wheelchair ramps and all those kind of good things that are also a consideration

060with the sidewalk design in the area and then also looking at for bicyclists particularly with a campus we would like to have the bicyclists have what we call a high comfort route to go in there which is out of traffic and so this is a shared use path which is something that we've looked at for a long charter road and you know 10-foot wide asphalt path that goes through separated from traffic this in the the Kelly's corner design which I personally am NOT working on that project but my company is we have made the intersection at Charter Road and Mass Ave have a shared use path that comes in there now um so that would connect up to it and another idea that was actually suggested when we met with with some of the staff

061leadership team is sort of social gathering areas where people can be outside this is a good pedestrian amenities and it's you know just a general nice campus feeling place where people the students can hang out outside and you know it could be something much more simple than this benches a place to sit in the in the shade and sort of be outside get some fresh air between classes or you know after class so so I'm going to go through some of the concepts generally the green areas are pedestrian oriented the thicker green lines are shared use paths the thinner green lines are sidewalks the crosswalk start sort of doted in there so we would like to have you know a shared use path along one side of charter Road and also coming along the entry

062road from Mass Ave so that the the walkers and bicyclists can go through and bike to school more comfortably going to the elementary school I would say that I did observe we took drone videos of the arrival and dismissal period so I could see last March so I was looking at the traffic patterns in in the campus when we were looking at this another issue that you know we noticed is along the Junior High Drive there's not sidewalks and the whole kind of configuration of the the parking area at the junior high particularly doing during drop-off and and dismissal periods you know pose some challenges that we thought could perhaps be organized better so a couple of photos here so this is showing the cars queuing up as you probably all know coming into the

063parking area while the buses are there before the students are dismissed so they're coming in and they're parking along actually where it's striped out to say no parking at the foot of the stairways and also in the in the traffic aisles and then the students are dismissed and they sort of fan out across the hillside again there's that that staircase that goes down from the bus Drive but there's there's no sidewalks that connect to it either along the upper bus Drive or down below and so there then you know they come to and from parking drive so some additional sidewalks in that area would be good and you know the students come through the parking area and catch their rise they go across the lawn they sort of just cross the roads without crosswalks so

064it's a it's a whole mix there and then this is sort of after the buses have moved out and it's much quieter so one of the the concepts that you know we threw out was reconfiguring that lower parking area to you know part of it is making a space for a shared use path but also taking out the row of parking perhaps on the at the foot of the slope there and that could be a drop-off area pickup area for cars in the morning and so you would lose some parking there but it would accommodate clearly there's a demand for drop-off and pickup at that location adding sidewalks adding crosswalks and then the Blue Square looks at an area where some parking could be added by the tennis courts and that may be of benefit

065for events that you have on that field out there or any of the sports events so some of that parking could be relocated to that location so that was sort of one idea that we looked at there definitely that main intersection at charter road were the at the bus road to the elementary school a raised intersection there to to calm traffic and make it safer for pedestrians to cross is is an idea that is good and and then beyond that you know thinking about some social gathering areas and you know we just preliminary ly based on our conversations internally looked at a few places and those are shown in the in the pink dot we'd also you know to encourage biking have covered weather protected bike parking areas near the entries of the schools and

066so those are shown with a green asterisk on the diagram so I think that that shows pretty much you know the idea of being able to make it comfortable for students to walk and bike to to all the schools on the campus cross the road safely and then you know connecting the shared use paths on Charter Road up to the high school you know we're not we don't know exactly the right way to cross over to get to the main part there's a couple of options that we can go through there that's you know sort of still up for discussion to to connect the shared use path through again some safety improvements some walkways and raised crossings in the parking areas just to make it a little more you know take the pedestrians out of

067the travel aisles and make it a little bit safer to cross those aisles going to the main entries of the schools we did also investigate a separated bus road that's shown in yellow but we have that decided not to go through with that particular improvement so but that was what we looked at at the time so those are initially the concepts that we're looking at for improving bicycle and pedestrian particularly safety along the roadway and we'd be interested in any comments that you would have or thoughts from just to kind of lay out from this point forward we certainly want feedback from from committee this will you know be put in front of the capital planning committee as well for additional feedback and input and then there's also a group of the senior leadership team

068specifically folks that work and spend their time on campus that'll be contributing to this and really trying to dial in a lot of the fine details so this will be coming back thanks very much as JT knows I'm super excited to see us you know working at the fundamental flow issues around the campus because it impacts many many people every day so you know both from a safety perspective as well as a beautification perspective I think this is great work to do the thing that I was struck by if we can go back a slide is that you know when I was looking at this there really two adjacent parking lots that we happen to have run a roadway through and I was wondering if there had been any consideration of taking you know that

069the vehicle traffic from Charter Road and running it up along the edge and basically bringing the two parking lots together you know I understand there's some great complexity and maybe other things there but just to let you know that my creative juices are still flowing I wanted to offer that thank you that the stretch of road that goes from RJ gray down to pass Leary failed toward the high school there's a couple of speed bumps there with those stay I'm asking because I just that little stretch it's not so little but it would be great to see maybe one or two more raised walks those a really effective I was overseas last summer and they do they are traffic calming especially in a multi-use environment they're better than the speed bumps Carolina we were just

070talking on our walk over here this evening definitely wanted to maintain those traffic calming measures and enhance them if anything you'll see that area minimally we would like to have a sidewalk on the maintenance side shed you know currently you cross try to wrote a couple different times if you're going down to the high school when you're accessing anywhere around the softball field so we at least want to have a lease a pedestrian footpath that's on that side as well the mixed-use path for bicycles and pedestrians on the other side the whole area would widen and absolutely maintain those traffic measures but also maybe include some kind of led type flashing beacons that are learning towards speed or anything like that that you might see like on Taylor Road near town hall you know those

071kind of measures I also want to say I love that that the picture of the landscaping outside of the high school yeah that that's really quite something so from the Larry field to the high school whenever I Drive there there's always kids going down the back the little back row there and I know there's the parking lot there is no like a speed bounder with that because the case is always going from there and cross the parking lot go to the school so the speed in the parking lot may be also a concern that's one and I just want to say thank you for the traffic pattern change again but you know how many parents have talked to me that is day and night so really appreciate that so because of that change I guess

072it's because that change we take the road out in the yellow roll out so I really applaud that that's super thank Larry is the high school schedule that really drove a lot of that that's great could you turn to the slide that shows the other tennis courts I think it's a head yep so I would be sad to see blue square take out all those trees that's a sweet little area of mostly pine growth and shame on us if we take out more trees around our campus we ought to be able to figure something else out I think taking out the row of red cars there is is smart but I think we have to find spots it was interesting that you showed the drone for the junior high drop-off but you didn't show drone

073images from the McCarthy town Merriam drop-off which is a whole other rat's nest of activity with much younger kids with much less sense you know an hour later so it really we do have to take care of that for a number of schools I'd hate to see the trees go out I also think if you're gonna have a social gathering area and you were to keep blue rectangle you ought to flip the pink area because often you have parents and families playing tennis and little kids hanging out and now you could have like a little observation or play area so that your kids could sort of hang out or your tennis friends could make fun of you which may or may not happen to me but don't take out those trees I mean we have

074so few on campus and those are not deciduous they look good all year round like it would really be sad and I have to say something for the trees so please don't do that but I really like the high school social gathering area I hope we do something like that the hill cut where the stairs are is a major hangout area for elementary school kids and junior high kids and it would behoove us to think about a pink dot or two sprawling in that area in some way because that is that you always see kids there as you know and dogs and parents waiting and it's like a lovely little area we also think it might be an to piggyback on that just towards the high school at the top of the screen you know

075the entrance into Leary field is another nice green space that's kind of underutilized right now that might be a good opportunity to improve oh well yeah we have that there but another nice area to improve where a lot of people tend to gather and hang out my I'll just add in JD's defense he did survey the trees about their preference and they didn't respond and so I think he just went on the assumption they had no particular preference thank you no great feedback thank you one thing I just wanted to mention just quickly on the in thinking about this junior high parking area is at least on the days that we drone video did it was less than fifty percent used so that you know there was like and not it seems like at least

076at that time of day that you know you could lose some parking spaces there to fudge things at any event in the evening for both the school the elementary schools to junior high and high school like back-to-school night I mean the parking issues are tremendous for the district right also love to hear your feedback about this but one of the things that attracts me to adding parking in that area is in the evenings I feel that Blanchard Drive right there is just a very unsafe area people mainly utilizing and queuing and picking up and waiting for kids coming out of the gym or for whatever reason at the junior high school people just kind of live Park and block that area I was you know and one of my hosts was you know possibly that's

077an area where they can queue and wait and we can be more forceful about you know prohibiting people from being in that area so I I was also thinking about the trees but didn't wasn't gonna voice that concern so thank you Maya for doing that for me but what I'm wondering is I see an open space between route 111 in the and the and the tennis courts and I'm just wondering if there's a way to maybe move that Blue Square to a place where there we don't have to risk taking down trees you know Paul that actually so one important thing to keep in mind is from the intersection the red box towards the high school where you see the two crosswalks that area towards 111 is actually part of the Kelly's corner project area

078and so they're actually gonna straighten Kelly's corner a little bit kind of moving it towards the the Green Arrow right am I worried about that yeah yeah charter roads gonna be realigned to be perpendicular to Mass Ave so it's gonna go a little bit a stoplight will go there as well towards the so Kai takes that out of play a little bit basically I have a portion then might be you know the suggestions that you know the speed of bumper on the Charter Road actually if I remember correctly you know there are a couple of speed bump her after if we just go through this chapter William this way to the high school and then the bumpers are after the meaning area right so we passed the Nemean building we'll see the first two bumper

079so my question is that why you know we didn't have bumpers you know from the the entrance of the Charter Road all the way to the to the high school because because as soon as you enter the cherry row and then you and basically you enter the campus right because it junior high is sitting there right and also our Muraki theta is setting on the right so my question is that why didn't we do that I mean add a bumper any Pacifica reasons or can we can we add more bumpers from from here from the entries that you control the speed because there are a lot of cars you know you see if you see the big parking loss there right so it means that there's a lot of traffic giving this area before before

080we reach the admin building so so quick one another traffic pattern is from the you know cloud of kids parking at the the skateboard on the Hayward and they walk through the tennis core then go to the side way the side door so I was concerned about that pass to the safety of that because this kids always there okay so the other is kind of lost never mind this is a little bit off of this but you there used to be speed bumps in the parking lot at the high school and they're not there anymore you know you're gonna be putting those back in I think that would be a good idea thanks okay since Maya was channeling the Lorax earlier she can speak at trees or whomever else she would like to speak for

081all right so on the right hand side of charter road and into the long stretch at McCarthy town parking lot the lower lot where kids have to walk behind I don't know 50 cars have we thought about putting a walking path at the bottom of that hill it's alright I yes that I know you're talking about it you know it's a long stretch for families yep and to walk in the morning with a lot so yeah yeah yep [Music] that's a good suggestion also okay thank you very much JD and Carolyn and as we're switching over and getting ready for Peter's presentation on his yes it's visiting from New Zealand this week and I went over a speed bump and they said oh that's a judder bar of course they said it in New Zealand

082excellent which I really didn't understand but just so you know there's lots of terminologies for those speed bumps jeddah bar while Peters setting up may I recite a short poem oh look Peters all set so we're gonna move on to item 4.3 which will be the districts of superintendent FY 20 goals alright so hello everyone I wanted to present this as a first read of my goals for the year which as you know as part of the evaluation process it also is a little bit of a guide to the district work that we want to undertake over the course of this year if you recall a few weeks ago I came to you with this diagram and it was essentially the rough outline of what we wanted to do for a strategy and we had

083four overarching strategic objectives that we were looking to to work toward one is engaged learning we also had a focus on equitable opportunities and outcomes focus on social emotional well-being of our students and inclusive practices and we also shared how the actual initiatives that we plan to undertake aligned with each of these various strategic objectives we at the time had talked that this is not one year's worth of work this is actually probably likely to be five years worth of work to be able to achieve a lot of this it's also some work that won't be necessarily linear there is not any one perfect starting point for this and in all honesty there's multiple entry points some of which have been happening for several years some of which are new that will be undertaking and

084some have been happening and will continue to happen whether or not they end up being a priority in any given year so for example in the center of this we have educated recruitment learning and growth what I can tell you is we have significant efforts going into recruiting a more diverse educator workforce because those aren't necessarily a goal of this year that doesn't mean work won't continue in fact that work will continue to be a priority for us through the recruitment process however we know we can't have very focused goals in every single area of work that we do and so what I'm hoping to do is propose a set of goals that focus on how we want to improve as a district not just on all of the work that we already do so

085with that said we recognize that what you're seeing here is incomplete and in my ideal world in a building project less world we would be coming to you or I'd be coming to you tonight with this completely done with you know a real clear alignment of how these all fit together definitions of every strategy and initiative that we plan to undertake as well as projected outcomes for what we want to see into the future and that's something that you will see over the course of this year however it just was not feasible over the course of this fall I just want to recognize that and so what I wanted to do was just quickly show you how we're working toward this strategy really on a more transitional basis this year while we're finishing the actual

086strategy itself and so if you look up to the top left corner you will see that I have the word draft circled because by the end of this year one of the goals is to complete this and have this formally adopted by you as really a five-year strategy and I'll talk more specifically to about how that plays itself out in a couple slides I also would like to focus a lot on stakeholder engagement and this idea of two-way communication that we have in continuing to solicit feedback from our stakeholders we have at the heart of all of our work educator growth recruitment learning and growth and I'll show you one of that I said around that systems of support for social-emotional learning and literacy and mathematics outcomes and our actually entry point into this work

087is going to be around our early literacy outcomes I also tied to this idea of a draft we would like to develop a set of key equity indicators with you it's something that Don and I have talked on and off about over the course of the fall where we actually commit to a set of data as a district that we want to look at annually in a very transparent way with our community to measure our progress toward what equity will look like so that's something that I actually think would be wonderful work for our senior staff maybe some principals and the school committee to undertake together potentially in a workshop style format and really dig deeply into what do we want to commit ourselves to we can't necessarily think about trying to communicate on every

088data element on this strategy every year however what we can agree to is having some real outcomes that we all want to work toward as a district that we can measure and the notion being that if we commit to this strategy we agreed that we should see a set of outcomes and that's really what I would like to work toward over the course of the year so to start this off for a student learning goal we are really looking at our early literacy program pre-k through six which and we're focusing on the reading element of that literacy is a huge undertaking and it encompasses many many skills in addition to just reading but we want to focus very closely on our reading program in pre-k through six so our goal is that by June 2020

089we will develop a pre-k through six reading literacy vision or literacy reading vision an implementation plan that will provide equitable access to evidence-based instructional and assessment practices that improve literacy outcomes for all students we don't currently have all of the measures that we want to in place and we know this is work that's likely to spend multiple years the first step in achieving this is to create a vision and so we have formed a team of stakeholders across our district to look hard at the research around how students learn to read to look at our current practices and what we would like to do is come back to you and draft excuse me come back to you with a completed vision as we progress through this year so some of the steps and this is

090all apologies it's a little amorphous in terms of timelines and I'll explain why so the first one is to form a district-wide literacy team comprised of educators from a variety of roles to provide leadership to the work that is already in progress and the team is up and running at this point these include literacy specialists psychologists educators administrators from across the district in a variety of roles the reason why these next steps which include defining the roles and responsibilities of the educators identifying our screening and assessments investigating evidence-based instructional resources professional learning and training key family engagement strategies and opportunities and implementation plan and timeline there's nothing in here that's linear that says if we start here this is step one this is step two and this is step three in fact all of this

091work as that happen concurrently and there's a lot of back-and-forth that goes with this work and I understand if I'm a committee member looking at this saying okay step one is in September step two through infinity is coming back in May there's a level of trepidation that's that's likely to happen about that I respect that and if I could tell you that there's a linear path through it I would have put that on the timeline and you'll see that in some other slides but that's the reasoning behind leaving this a little bit more open but what you'll so these are not only action steps these are also the outcomes that are associated so at the end of this you will see clearly a document with clearly defined roles and responsibilities of a variety of our

092educators you'll see a document citing our screening tools and assessments so just to give you a sense it's action steps but it's really outcomes listed here as well professional practice goal I wanted to be our own stakeholder engagement and this is something I actually started over the past summer with our team but in order to foster stakeholder support for the schools and solicit feedback about how we can continue to improve by June 2020 we will engage in a variety of strategies to increase stakeholder engagement by and here are some examples producing an annual report was certainly a strategy that we started and want to continue to keep members of our accident Boxborough communities informed about our work holding a series of coffees with the superintendent and school committee chair to increase two-way communication with families

093forming a district-wide family advisory group to increase two-way communication and inform the district's work around diversity equity and inclusion and forming a district-wide student focus group for students in grades 7 through 12 in order to inform our work around diversity equity and inclusion so this is a little bit more linear to give you a sense of this so we did develop our annual report but we wanted to commit that we would be doing that again we also want to publish kind of almost on the trimesters in between the annual report to additional newsletters to keep our stakeholders informed of the work of the district on a more interim basis that's something where we have our next newsletter item already in process we would like to increase our two-way communication and feedback with the superintendent chair

094coffees Tessa and I if you you'll note from all of the updates that I regularly give we're conducting those on a monthly basis to be able to listen to families we've had wonderful engagement so far we've had two morning sessions we're going to be planning a series of evening sessions as well so that all families can can hopefully access it in some form we also want have started to develop and implement a district Parent Advisory Group around diversity equity inclusion which is broadly representative of our schools and community we have meeting we had a meeting in October we will hold them again in January February and again in April and May so we're working on that and then also developing and implement district-wide Dei Student Advisory as a strategy to engage in two-way communication that

095is something we needed to get the parent group up and running in first there's some logistics to that but the next step is to have our student group up and running as well with a series of meetings and professional practice goal an additional one is to complete the district strategy and so that we are intentional and transparent about our improvement efforts by June 2 2020 20 we will complete a district strategy for school committee adoption which articulates underlying beliefs that need to drive our work our overarching strategic objectives initiatives that support the strategic objectives action plans for each of our initiatives outcomes and key equity indicators that provide benchmarks against which to measure our progress and then we I wanted to highlight this next one because I think this is equally important to us developing

096a strategy is we will work with schools to align school improvement plans to the district strategy it is important that we understand we are one institution and we have some common goals it may play out differently in each school and as I said before all work is not necessarily linear and there are different approaches and strategies that work but the idea is by forming a comprehensive strategy it provides a framework for how we want to continue to improve our schools various action steps as you can see this is now more linear with some actionable items and these are also outcomes that you should expect to see along this general timeline where we are developing and articulating our beliefs we've been working on that as an administrative team beginning at our retreat and we'll continue to

097do so we are just about at the final stages of that and we will bring these to you so you can see what the beliefs are of our administrative team that drive our work we are looking at defining and clarifying the overarching strategic objectives and also the various initiatives and I'm hoping to come back to you one of our January meetings with that information in March you will hopefully see action plans and well you know I say hopefully and then I catch myself because my saying in life is hope is not a strategy but you should see action plans for each of our strategic initiatives and then I think it's a little longer term so I'm saying by the end of the year I'd like to work with you to talk about outcomes and measures

098of implementation of each of our strategic initiatives as well as develop a set of key equity indicators that we can measure our progress by social-emotional supports for students so that we can continue to improve our support services for students by June 2 2020 we will conduct an independent evaluation of the social-emotional learning supports that will allow us to and these are goals right from our program of Alken ducting develop an understanding of our current practices related to social emotional behavioral and counseling supports explore alignment of current practices with best practice research in order to identify which supports could be expanded and strengthened and identify opportunities to align staff practices with best practices and effectively manage staffing in order to further support students social emotional behavioral and mental health needs creating sustained change in our schools

099and classrooms and those are the goals of our program eval so again a more linear approach to this that we know we're currently engaging an outside consultant we will have information back from that consultant after they finished their research this January we will be able to present that to you at that point we will be working with our leadership team in the district to work with the consultant to actually do some strategic planning around how we can continue to evolve our current practices and what that looks like over a period of time and then we will also work with our staff to look at opportunities to align those practices and then finally develop an action plan for a long term implementation and then finally educator growth and development and we this is something we've been

100working on since the beginning of this year and even into the summer but in order to improve our focus on educator growth and development by June we will be working with our school and district leaders and educators too and these are four bullets that we've been transparent with all of our staff about but maintain and grow a strong culture of professional dialogue and collaboration around teaching and learning and educator evaluation refine the evaluation system so that student learning and teacher impact are at the center of the process strengthen the partnership between evaluators and educators through a common focus on learning for all students and develop and support consistent common evaluation practices among all administrators that are meaningful and manageable we have been working since this summer we actually formed a district-wide leadership team comprised of

101evaluators who have different roles I'm working with the group Deb works with the group we also have some of our department leaders involved some principals some assistant principals and it's really looking at the evaluation processes and practices of our leadership team and how can we refine those so we've been working on that we have a professional learning session that's approximately three hours long every month throughout the course of the year devoted solely to this during the process I can also tell you that we will be soliciting feedback not only from our evaluators about the impact that we have but also the educators to make sure that the intended impact we have is what's actually happening and it's important to solicit our teachers to make sure they're seeing the positive intent that we have through this

102process and I'm happy to take questions okay thank you Peter I'm gonna turn just quickly to Diane because she last dealt with this but this information that we're being presented with now makes the basis of what our superintendent evaluation will be at the end of this year is that correct yes so now is our opportunity where we're seeing our first presentation of this now we'll have a second presentation of this at our next meeting so now is our opportunity to give feedback to Peter as it relates to what we'll be providing for him as feedback on his evaluation at the end of this year so questions comments I like I like the goals that that we've got here I think there was concern about literacy in the fourth grade I think that was more on

103writing than reading but I I think that there may be some symbiosis with that for the stakeholder engagement if we go back to that slide professional practice goal 1 I guess it was in the time line you have a number of meetings and there's the April / May is that to meetings or is that one meeting somewhere in that timeframe two meetings okay yeah so that's five meetings instead of three okay all right no these these look good oh excuse me yes no it's one I'm sorry it is one the first year where we're working with the group because it's just getting up and running so I apologize and this year it's actually a series of three meetings but it's really planning for subsequent years overall these look really good I wanted to bring up

104the professional practice goal number two completing the district strategy and I would just like to encourage you as much as possible to bring us along that process so our hat let allow us to have input on that process whether we have to do an extra workshop meeting or I think it's really important that that that it's a collaborative process not just with staff members but also with the school committee I'm sure it will shock you to know that I'm comfortable with a nonlinear process let me also you know comment that there can only be one number one priority and I think a mark of good management is identifying that priority and then adhering to that and I want to compliment you for wisely applying resource to the building project it clearly is the biggest activity

105this year I know there's other things you're interested in other things are getting done but there can only be number one number one priority and so I'm also perfectly comfortable with that that we're not going to do everything this year then the last time I want to make is with respect to you know ultimately this is about you know being able to look at our students and see that you know our students are in some dimension that we have agreed on more successful let me begin by saying that I see that ultimately this is an impossible question to answer because as I've said to people many times what we want is to make sure that our students today lead good lives and we won't know about that until they lead those lives having said that

106I would caution that on the one hand absolutely I want to see measurables on the other hand if you tell me that our students read well but they don't love to read and they can write well but they don't love to write I won't be really satisfied with that that those intangible elements of you know a deep appreciation for things are very important and somehow that has to remain a part of the mix and then the last thing that I'll do is you know I do want to make some sexist remarks it's come to my attention that boys develop more slowly than girls eventually they catch up but you know according to my personal experience and in many cases they do not but I want to use this example to address the question of subgroup

107analysis and if you attempt to pool all the students into junior high school which include girls and boys and yet we believe that those two groups are not actually developing in the same way I would say that that's not a simple sensible aggregation of data I think that there are other dimensions in which it will be tempting to aggregate data but if there's a thoughtful analysis it will be concluded that as painful as it is to look at subgroups the way to make progress and to identify things that we can do that will actually be important to students is going to turn out to be much more subgroup related than it is aggregate Angie yeah thank you for this overall I really like all this and as I said the ohm I have a little

108project management background so when I'm reading this I have a wire mindset and for example one that really identifies screening tours and assessment and a lot of question pops up what is the process used to identify the screening tours what process we take to decide what values we should put on the assessment or what outcomes we will achieve by implementing this new tours and assessment and how we measure the outcomes against agos and what if the outcome is not as expected what can we do so a lot of questions like this I understand this is a work in progress and I'm hoping that we can see more transparency in terms of process that we can because the good part of the process is if what about if something later in the year then something is

109not the goal is not met then we can always go back to the process and look at the outcome and identify where we were in the process that went wrong that we can make improve from along so this is are something that I'm providing my general feedback then when I'm looking at these are the questions that pops up when I was reading it thank you I had a few different places at a few different places where I wanted to comment overall I'm just really so happy with the whole vision and seeing how parts of it are being made concrete is really exciting to see and I'm just really thrilled with the direction that the district is going under your leadership under social emotional learning it makes me think back to when we were reading the

110school improvement plans last year and I really like the way that you're trying to bring some more of a coherent feel to the social-emotional learning I think that's really going to benefit the students especially when they move into middle school in high school where they really need so much of the social-emotional learning that they gain at the elementary school level just feels like it'll be easier for the middle school and the high school to build upon the social-emotional learning that happens at the elementary school level when it's all brought together so I'm really happy to see that emphasis on making it coherent and then I'm also really happy to see that literacy is taking such a position of focus and I think that there's so much new information coming out in the field of literacy

111right now and I'm proud to be part of the district that's really taking a look at the research and being very thoughtful about how to approach that the final question that I had was around evaluations and because I was sort of wondering if there was a reason that teacher evaluation or that professional evaluations was sort of a primary focus under educator growth and development and how the teachers are going to be helped to be a part of the process sort of from the beginning not just at the end that's something I was wondering when I was reading through it sort of putting myself in the position of the person who will be evaluated ultimately how much are they a part of articulating their own growth and development goals sure that that's a good question I

112can talk to you know we actually had a couple focuses over the course of this year we're not trying to look at the whole evaluation system one area of focus was on really thinking more deeply about student learning goals and the potential impact that a well-written student learning goal can have but also the conversations that happen between evaluators and educators a strength of our system has always been the focus on the conversation that takes place and dialogue between an educator and evaluator and we don't want to lose that as I came through the district last year one of the you know initial things I did is I probably read about 400 different observations that had taken place between administrators and teachers and spent a lot of time looking at evaluations and things like that and

113I think there was an opportunity to increase our consistency with which how we approached that system and I think that's important from a personnel standpoint too but I think the other thing that stood out is we had an opportunity to really think about changing a dynamic from one of simply looking at what a teacher does to making a clear link between the impact we're having in students and how that relates to what a teacher did and because it's it's it's that dynamic between what we did and the impact we had that real growth can occur and that that's what we wanted to focus on in this shift of the evaluation system so two things were stood out to me you know one the student learning goals and then to that dynamic around how do we

114increase our focus on the impact we're having and I thought those would be really good positive shifts as I said we're doing other things but this is such significant work for our leadership team that it really to me rose to the level of being a goal and it's important work for us and in all honesty in a large district having a level of consistency among our evaluators is very very important for how we impact teachers I have a lot of trust and in you and in your vision of what that impact would be but when we're talking about assessment guess I would just encourage us to continuously look at not just test scores and numbers but engagement and sort of love of learning and relationships between teachers and students is sort of primary targets for

115data collection actually let me clarify we're not using any assessment data in this right now this is actually all around looking at okay what's happening in classrooms and the interaction between teacher and kids that so you know assessment data has a place in our society and it needs that but where we really have an opportunity to impact practice is to look at what happens in classrooms and then be able to work in that coaching role so yes thank you and thank you for the opportunity to clarify about what we're really trying to do just to follow up on evaluation and some of my thoughts about your general approach to changes or implementation of teaching learning and social-emotional supports in the district I just would be curious to hear a little bit about the differentiation between

116the lower grades and the upper grades because I struggle I can envision a lot of the things that you talk about and what I might look for in certain grades but it would just be interesting as you take us along and we understand more of what the work that's being done around this to differentiate the approaches to the older students versus younger and you're talking social-emotional or not this is not valid for all of it I mean because I think so much of the work that you your approach comes from right relationships and engagement and social emotional well-being and then how that then translates to better learning in the classroom and you know thanks to a stronger connection in part but also obviously teaching practices and so I would just be interested in learning a

117little bit about how'd that approach among evaluators and within the district is differentiated because I would imagine I don't know though I mean I'm really I'm really am ignorant if that that it it's different amongst the elementary and upper schools you know and this is something it was interesting Deb and I happen to be just talking today and I said wouldn't it be interesting if we had the time with school committee to really just focus in on goals and how our goals played out and really think about the strategy we're trying to implement and continually come back to the various strategies and talk about what's happening where we at what's going well what did we have to work on the challenge is what do you take off the plate to be able to make that

118time in space you know to be able to do it but that's something I would love to come back in and I anticipate doing this in coming back in with maybe some of our evaluators and educators to talk about what have we done and how how does that look I think that would be a great activity my comment quickly Peter I appreciate the the work I'm really excited to see this sort of come through the the area around completing the district strategy and particularly around a lot aligning the school improvement plans is of interest to me because I find it really interesting to see how each of the schools are putting together their improvement plans but I also find it really challenging to see how those line up with the strategy of the district as

119a whole understanding that each school has a different way that they want to implement that we obviously want them to be lined up with our strategy so you know the one thing that I noticed as part of this was that in the the action / outcomes I didn't necessarily see where that that part of the alignment of the school improvement plans comes in if that's in this years or if it's gonna follow but I think it's something that's important particularly that we communicate both so we can make sure that we're seeing it but also as as school councils are developing their plans that are aware of it yeah I think you know this year you will see a much greater degree of alignment with the district strategy I will say you know because the district

120strategy and some of our outcomes are going to be an evolving process through the year you'll see that big step forward this year but then it will also continue to evolve along those lines I also don't want to ever give an impression that because we want alignment with the district strategy that means that all schools are doing the exact same things at the same times that's not the intent of this process what it really is about is saying we have a general direction we're headed as a district and we have some key initiatives that need to take place when the key initiative is something that impacts your school clearly that's something that that you're working on but there are also areas that schools can really personalize what this work looks like yeah go ahead to

121him I have never seen goals like this they're not measurable in the in the classic sense and when I first read them I said to myself how am I ever going to evaluate you and then I and then I I looked back at your graphic and I don't think that I don't think that smart that acronym SMART goals should be driving your goals I think that what the district needs should be driving your goals and what the district needs is infrastructure and I think this really speaks well to the foundational aspects of building the infrastructure that we need to move forward and the type of high level goal-setting and relationship building and culture changing that needs to happen so I ended up really liking it but it's uncomfortable not to have specific met I mean

122there are some but many of them they don't they don't have it I'm wondering I have a couple of questions one is on the educator growth and development piece last year you had identified in the teacher evaluation rubric standard 2 as your target for that and so I'm like none of that specific language found its way in here and I'm wondering if that was purposeful you know actually standard two continues to be our focus as I said I standard two is our overall focus as a team but what I didn't want to do was get so granular with the goal that I you know I have different feelings about the idea of SMART goals at times I think there's a place for things like that but then there's also a place that I've worked with

123a lot of educators around this where we get so focused on creating a SMART goal and following a structure to a goal that the actual value of it is lost it's a it's a weird thing that I see happen more often than not and one of the things we've talked with our leadership team about too is we're working with educators is make sure that what we're helping teachers work toward is something of real value that's going to be impactful and if there's an element we don't actually even use the word smart in the district we have evidence you know we have criteria for successful goal writing but it's not based on smart not because it's good or bad but just because we wanted to make sure people didn't feel like it was formulaic and that

124it was just about following a formula it's more about what impact you hope to have on your students and so I guess that was the overall approach I tried to take was really thinking about what can we focus our work on that can really deeply impact our practice that will have value for kids and that so yeah I would say they didn't really all come out in smart golf format I would I would agree but it's kind of an evolving piece of my own thinking as well I'm - really just one really quick question and then another just kind of high-level question why did you call it literacy outcomes this seems to be more about setting the stage for students to have equity of access not an actual reading out cup reading outcome you're building

125infrastructure that will set the stage for measurable outcomes for literacy but we won't see student impact this year anyway we will see teacher impact that's how I read it right yeah I think you are correct in that that this is fundamentally the whole process is about outcomes for kids and I didn't want to lose that in setting this goal because I don't want to as we put this out publicly and we put this out with our district team and leaders and teachers I want to make sure that we keep the focus on the outcomes for students the process outcome is obviously for faculty but you know I think I wrote it knowing that this is probably a three to five year process too you know but step one is developing that first vision for what

126we need to do in looking at the alignment of services this is where I struggled because I think overall if we had had the whole district strategy done and a working plan for each of our strategic initiatives this would have looked very clear as to okay this is the first step in a longer strategic initiative where as standalone as a goal I think it does leave some confusion and I would acknowledge that okay my last quick question is the strategic initiatives what's their relationship to the goals so we really thought about entry points the strategic initiatives what we wanted to do with an initiative is pick key areas that were entry points or points of focus for us during a given year so we already are working towards student centered coaching and that's come before

127the committee many times we've talked about our work in steam that we're trying to move forward we've really talked about looking at our you know instructional materials in our classes from an inclusive lens but what we wanted to focus on again in any given year is what are we really keyed in on improving our practice on and you know you as I said you can't tackle everything equally but you have to pick some key areas so we tried to pick some areas across multiple domains or the overarching objectives of engaged learning equitable opportunities and outcomes inclusive practice and social emotional well-being so we're continuing to make progress in every area but we're picking something we're focused on that we think can make the most impact right now does that answer that yeah and I would

128just say that they're there I think those connections it might be helpful to make them more explicit because there are you know there's a lot of interplay between say building strengthening partnerships between evaluators and educators the role of coaches and that the frequency maybe of evaluations how often they happen and what happens in between that time to strengthen those partnerships and how that impacts like the literacy in the math and even the complete district strategy and just trying to make those kind of connect the dots for us so in terms of what you were thinking about and that's again in my ideal world that would have been tonight but instead that'll be the as we go through the year and that's really the work we have to do moving forward so yeah okay we're gonna

129move on at this point if people continue to have some feedback for Peter please feel free to contact him with that and like I said we are gonna see this again at our next meeting too sorry thank you Peter moving on to item five ongoing business 5.1 so in our packets we have meetings from three minutes that we need to approve we'll go through each of these one at a time so the first is the minutes from the meeting of October 17th is there a motion to approve all in favor any opposed any abstentions okay thank you second one is the minutes of the meeting from November 5th is our motion and all in favor and any posed any abstentions nor is abstaining thank you all right the third one is the try board meeting

130and I would just note that there was an amendment to that submitted by a member of the acting Board of Selectmen that is noted in the packet that we have now in red it is on the second page page 3 so feel free to take a quick look at that and then I'll entertain a motion for that on favor I posed abstentions okay passes unanimously moving on to item 5.2 the school calendar so this is a second read of the school calendar for FY 21 and I will entertain a motion to approve that any discussion couple notes from Murray thank you we received a couple questions over the last week so we're adding Chinese New Year as a no homework day on the no homework calendar so we've added Diwali we're adding Chinese New Year

131along with the list that we had before we're gonna go back to the Policy Committee and talk about a little bit of the language and titles in the policy regarding religious holidays calling it religious and cultural holidays but other than that I don't think we have received any feedback about the calendar thanks Marie Michael first of all I really appreciate that adding the Chinese senior Chinese New Year and Diwali into the nose no school assignments holiday least so I think you know this is a good and also I appreciate that working to discuss you know the rest of things in the policy is in the policy meeting so move forward all right thank you okay so I believe we have a seconded motion on the floor so all in favor any posts any abstentions that

132passes unanimously as well so Adam just so we will send out the calendar now to all families and all staff so people can begin their planning for next year thank you for your vote thanks Marie I'll be scheduling my vacations now thank you moving on to item 5.3 the receipt of the FY 19 financial audits dave is stepping up to the plate I have no more baseball metaphor sorry all right it's not the season the fiscal 19 financial audit was conducted in the summer and the fall in the fall this past few months ago concluded on October 11th and reports sent to us on October 29th I believe everybody got electronically all of the reports done by an independent audit firm there are three reports all as required under government auditing standards the first the

133audit of the district's financial statements that consists of numerous financial statements like balance sheet etc required supplementary information such as budgetary analysis retirement and open disclosure information and footnotes explaining some of the numbers on the on the main financial statements in addition and there are is an auditor's report in which they express their opinion that's what we pay them for and the the opinion basically says that the statements and disclosures fairly present that's auditories for a clean opinion there are well while quite scintillating I'm not going to walk through 59 pages including two that read this page intentionally left blank but if anybody seriously if anybody reads them and either doesn't understand or has any questions please feel free to ask me it's just the main the main financial report the independent review provided a

134clean opinion and this report will be used by among others the ratings agency when when we in advance of selling bonds so that's why it's important I'll ask for questions at the end because because I'm in the homestretch already changed to a horse racing metaphor sorry the reporter on federal awards programs is not a financial statement it's a schedule of award expenses with footnotes the auditors reports there are two of them on these one relates to internal controls over federal program spending and one relates to compliance with laws and regulations both are additionally clean reports and additionally there is typically a summary of findings and there were no findings found by the auditors lastly there is a management letter this is not a required report but it's typically issued as part of any audit engagement

135there are six comments that the auditors brought forward relative to prior year observations and some for several years one of them was relative to our need to do a risk assessment one of them was for our need to document our internal controls over grant programs we've engaged the consultant the consultant was recommended by the auditors and that should be undertaken this year so we'll hope to hopefully get those comments not issued going forward another one from prior years was that the district needs to adopt a cash and investment policy we have one it just needs to be formally communicated to the auditors and that one again should go away in the next year's audit and then there are three other ones one about implementing open reporting and unfortunately there's a typo in that one a

136minor typo accounting for capital assets and implementing a capital Stabilization Fund the auditor noted that in all three cases those were implemented this year this one new comment and that's regarding employee reimbursements they do say that that's that the wreaths at the implementation of that is in progress it is and I'm happy to report some evidence of that I had my team run a report on employee reimbursements year-to-date FY 24 year and we are running at about 4% of last year's total employee reimbursements as of November whatever the date of the report is November 15th so we put in some procedures to alleviate the need for employee reimbursements which the auditors thought was not a best practice and the procedures seem to be working very well so if there any questions here the offer still

137remains to take offline questions if they're if they're lengthy if they're detailed if they're if they're really confusing about the number of pages and and accounting ease that that are presented one comment about the report for people who might look at it with respect to the assets and liabilities position so unlike a conventional corporation where the assets and liabilities would have more similar a character and both of those things could change you know in substantial ways over time the assets of the district capital assets of the district are primarily buildings which we will never sell so they're not really available to us in a balance sheet kind of way likewise the major liability of the district is open which is liability we've talked about a lot so people just need to although the net number

138you know doesn't look too bad it's it the construction of it is a bit odd so people should pay attention to that and then I will send you a couple of twiki comments in the management discussion there are a couple of things that year-over-year change you have significant changes like a couple million dollars so from my view it's nice when things change for the management letter to have something to say about why that was you know because a lot of times it's not interesting but if there's no comment there and something was six million and now it's four million the obvious question is well why did that happen you mean in the management's discussion analysis versus the management letter right yeah right yeah got it yeah but also knew the specifics you know and if

139there's anything interesting you can share them and if not you can say why are you wasting my time anybody else okay thanks Dave I'd like to say that was a slam dunk just to move the metaphor one more time item 5.4 a school building committee update at this point Peter's going to share with us verbatim the forum a discussion that he's had for the past seven nights in a row or something like that yes I'm going to repeat it over and over again for you so buckle up no we have been providing lots of forums for our community members over the last few weeks we're trying to just be as visible as possible within the community and make sure that we you know answer any questions that our community community members have about our project

140I will say we had some positive news our Acton Finance Committee and Acting Board of Selectmen both voted to support this project the Finance Committee vote was a unanimous vote with I think almost no discussion of the topic literally no discussion of the topic but a unanimous vote to support our Board of Selectmen also voted unanimously to support but with one abstention but it was a four oh and one vote for that so we're very excited about the level of support we've had from boards for the project we are continuing tomorrow too with our presentation tour we are over at Blanchard for the community coffee there and then we have multiple additional forums planned over the next several weeks we are also trying to find a way to leverage some technology and look at doing

141a Facebook live forum at in conjunction with our early December forum that we have on this so families who may be or community members we can't get to a presentation could actually watch from home and even submit questions from home that we could answer so we're working on the technology to support that that is not my area of expertise on Facebook I'm kind of bill belichick II and in in that regard with snap face or whatever it is but but we're gonna we're going to try it out and see what we can do yes so with that said you know any questions on the building project I'm happy to entertain that as the pin company's on there was lots and lots and lots and lots of discussion about the building project over time so and

142I think that was because we came in early with a lot of really good information and presented it in a in a really in a really smart way so I just want to thank you Peter personally for for just really just taking this and running with it and just doing such a phenomenal job getting the word out in lots of different venues to lots of different people and I think that the result of that was a unanimous vote well thank you you know I will say really you know we say it all the time but I just want to read her it it is absolutely a team effort because you know we've had a lot of feedback on presentations about what people need to hear Murray has lifted you know so much of this project

143from its inception to get to this point I just want to make sure she gets credit for that as well I may be the person presenting but there's a lot of work that goes into all these details Mary Brolin has been exceptional in being such a force in the community and making sure that we're out in front of people and talking about the project and then just really the whole support of the building committee and trying to move forward so thank you I appreciate it but I will accept that on behalf of all of the work that's been done by everyone super quick I just want to say thank you to your family and Marie's family and Mary Berlin's family because I know that you have all been out multiple nights in a row and

144days and put so much into so thank you very much thank you all right moving on to item 5.5 subcommittee business we'll start with Amy and policy so the policy committee met earlier this week think that was that with this I think it's been a long week so the policy that we brought to you at the last meet last meeting was tutoring for pay that policy has gone out to teachers and it's gone out to the community we've gotten a little bit of feedback we've asked parents to the deadline for feedback was supposed to be tomorrow so we not weird there's no plan to vote on the on the policy tonight and in fact I would like to if anyone is paying attention you we were gonna extend it to Monday just so you have

145the weekend if there are any more comments that the community would like to send in around this tutoring for pay policy we'll take another look at it on the December 5th meeting and then hopefully ask for a vote on the December 19th meeting I'll just add one quick note on that and just as a reminder to everyone you know we know this is a large shift in our practices of our district one thing we want to be responsive to in terms of our families is making sure we're providing opportunities for support for students that are free of charge so we're actually working with our junior high and high school administrators to develop we don't know what we're calling them yet we you know we don't want to call them academic support centers because there's some

146confusion about special education to that but some type of free support centers for students that are staffed by our faculty that any student can go to for free but we will be funding that rather than families having to pay for that so that's that's kind of a we're trying to solve you know put multiple solutions to a problem all right Diane budget subcommittee a much of this you've already heard tonight I'm the budget subcommittee met I did not bring my notes so I don't have the date but we we talked about the audit we talked about projected budget variances going forward we talked about the capital improvements spreadsheet that was not yet out but then became live about a week or two later we talked about a peb and the use of E&D with respect

147to all-day kindergarten so you know we brought a lot of those discussions forth to the full committee but that's you know that's generally what we talked about thank you all right item five dots six was liaison reports the one that's on here right now is the conference recap from the MAS CMAs s conference Tessa was supposed to be responsible for giving us a lovely recap of that what I will say is someone who did have the opportunity to attend for a couple days it was great to spend some time with some of my fellow committee members really thinking about what we can do to help move our district forward and going to some really amazing sessions about the current state in the future state of I think of education in in our state and I

148also have to say that there were a number of sessions where I went to people recognized us as you know a district that we're already participating in a number of the topics that they were speaking on so anybody else who was in attendance want to share I attended two and a half days of the MAS C meeting participating in various workshop sessions and presentations I think Diane balm for her leadership role she's playing in the mas C as well as in connecting this School Committee to the MAS C like you I'd like to thank my fellow school committee members for making significant time investments to participate in the conference one of my important learnings from the meeting is the MSB a perspective on the square-foot reimbursement for new buildings the MSBA is well aware that

149their top reimbursement rate is significantly below current construction rates however the MSBA also understands that the number of projects they are able to support is inversely proportional to that reimbursement rate thus the square foot reimbursement rates are set to strike a balance the rates should be high enough to make projects affordable for communities but will not be increased to equal construction rates with the consequence that the number of projects funded will be decreased so that is sort of an exemplification of the kind of detailed and useful perspective you can get out of the meetings I could provide one for every session that I went to I just want to thank everybody who went we had a record number people nine I believe went this year that's phenomenal it's a chance for everyone to place what

150we do in a larger context and an interface with other other committees and it's it's it's really this is our advocacy organization and this is this is a conduit to the legislature so this is important work and thank you all for going those of you who are able to do so thank you alright any other school committee liaison reports on behalf of Diane as her backup I attended the Finance Committee meeting on Tuesday night as was previously reported they voted unanimously without discussion to support the new school project Jason Cole will actually be presenting the Finance Committee recommendation at Town Meeting at Acton Town Meeting after discussion the Finance Committee also unanimously voted to support the North Acton fire station David Martin presented an update to the sewer project after significant discussion the Finance Committee

151voted four to three to recommend the article generally the Finance Committee has significant concerns about the large increase in tax bills that will occur as the result of these capital investments and on the operating side through q1 acted municipal finances and enterprise funds are tracking expected results thank you any other committee liaison reports no moving on 95.7 is our consent agenda we have for donations on the consent agenda to vote to accept does anybody wish to remove any of them from the consent agenda if not is there a motion to approve the consent agenda all in favor aye any opposed and thank you for that okay item 5.8 statement of warrants we have warrants to approve and sign tonight I will now read the numbers into the record well while Amy laughs at me there

152are four warrants on the agenda now being circulated vendor warrant 20 - 0 1 0 in the amount of 840 8815 dollars and 46 cents warrant 20 - 0 1 1 PR in the amount amount of 1 million 112 thousand six hundred fifty two dollars sixty eight cents Student Activity Fund warrant number 20 - 0 1 0 SH in the amount of thirty two thousand three hundred sixty six dollars sixty cents and payroll warrant P 2 0 1 1 in the amount of 2 million seven hundred fifty six thousand nine hundred seventy four dollars 28 cents peter is there anything from the FYI that you would like to share before we adjourn no I just want to thank all of the generosity of the various donors that were kind enough to have donations to the

153various school programs that we run so thank you is there a motion to adjourn the sense of the meeting is that they would rather adjourn so is there a motion to adjourn and is there a second all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that passes unanimously I would welcome the poem now there's no prohibition against you no extra meeting poems in it and of course you know the question the question that I have is you know you know who else you know remembers this from their child and who else was thinking about it as Maya was comment about saving the trees I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree in fact unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all