001noting the hour and the presence of a quorum I call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order members of the public who wish to watch the meeting online may use actent TV's YouTube channel found at the top of the agenda this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on acting TV's website at actentv.org this evening we have a few items of particular public interest I'm grateful that there are residents here this evening who want to participate in this public meeting and perhaps Express their opinion on an agenda item or two if you've never been to a public meeting before welcome have then I'm sure you already know these rules of the road but let's have a quick Refresher you have the right to stand in front of us and share your opinion you
002have a right to be in this space and witness our meeting you have a responsibility to exercise these rights with decorum and civility my expectation is that we share this room do this work together and not forget that we are ultimately Neighbors whole and human and treat each other that way as such I want to be very clear that there will be no booing heckling or even Applause between comments during our public comment sections outbursts like this distract us all and waste precious time please refrain from doing so I will give one warning about this if we cannot maintain order as chair I have the right to close public comment no matter how much time remains and now that I have set the table I will open our public comment our public participation so per
003school committee policy b-e-d-h members of the public are typically invited to speak for up to three minutes regarding items that are not on the agenda for items that are on the agenda the public is asked to wait for that item speakers must be recognized by the chair before speaking the committee does not typically respond to comments during public participation tonight 10 minutes maximum will be devoted to public comment participants may be limited in time based on the number of individuals is there anybody who would like to stand and make a comment not on an agenda item this evening good evening Karen hi Corinne Hawks at the Indian village I want to make comments about the meeting two weeks ago Peter light defined empathy for us as the ability to listen really deeply to someone's experience
004and then believe them even if it's not yours I assume he made that statement put the expectation that that would be taken in and that people here would listen to various viewpoints and digest that input input before deciding how to vote on any issue this committee has has demonstrated over and over again that you do not listen to the community you don't really hear or want to hear anyone who disagrees with what you have to say most of you are here to push your own political agenda you come here with your mind made up with no possibility of being influenced by what you may hear you don't work to find compromise or to incorporate multiple viewpoints into final actions we've seen this in text messages exchanged between members during the mascot debate two years ago
005we've seen it in Facebook posts by several current and former members of this committee over the years and in emails between school committee members and members of the administration we saw it as recently as two weeks ago when one member's first question about the SRO program was when she would have an opportunity to vote to end it before any discussion had even taken place with this change to limiting public comment to 10 minutes we're seeing yet again attempts to dismiss input and to further alienate the community no one comes here to agree with you so I assume it's I think it's safe to assume you're trying to silence people like me I would challenge any one of you to please give me an example I know you're not going to respond but you come up
006with one example of a time that you came here with your mind made up believing it was made up and we're influenced by what you heard to change your mind I would like anyone to have any example of that thank you so anyone else who would like to make a public comment before we get started very well good evening Mr light do you have an update for us I know we have a long agenda so I'm going to you know we'll send out another update to families tomorrow um that we typically do I do want to just you know give one Public Health reminder we are seeing a huge uptick in not only flu cases but we're starting to see increasing some covet cases in the schools and also RSV among musically students so you
007know we just want to really encourage our families that if someone is sick stay home um you know that's that's really like the best rule of thumb and I know a lot of our students feel that pressure to come in and you know get to class and I know teachers feel the same way but I think what we want to do is try and make sure everyone stays healthy so please if you are sick it's okay to stay home we just want to invite that so thank you so then do you want to tee up our guests and presentations sure um so you know I'll I'll let Deb and Jen Trussell come up and I'll let them introduce the team that they have speaking with you uh tonight but as you are aware from a
008lot of our previous discussions and budget discussions um over the last several years the district has done a lot of work in literacy particularly in early literacy to think about you know shifting more into you know really teaching based on the science of reading that we've come to better understand in education over the last decade or two and so we wanted to come back with a presentation tonight not only talking about um what we've done in terms of literacy but also start talking a little bit about the student outcomes that we're seeing and how we're hoping to shift those outcomes over time and so I will continue vamping until Deb I was a musician and the term is Vamp um if you if you're a musician you would know what that means uh but I
009will continue to talk until I get the eyes up from Deb and she tells me she's ready to go um but it's actually been an exciting thing and I have to really just credit our Educators and classrooms because you know through a pandemic and through all of the changes that are going on as a result of that to also do all of the heavy lifting to shift literacy practices is a lot of work and so just really credit to the Educators who are doing this work on the front lines there's been a lot of change over the last few years this has been a really important one and continues to be important so um with that I'm going to introduce debuchus who will talk until the slides are ready um [Music] that's just having perfect
010thank you all right good all right so this is a slide that you've seen before it's our district strategy but this time I want to orient you to the right side in the lower portion of the diagram where it says evidence-based screening and assessment multi-tiered systems of support and literacy outcomes all of which you're going to hear about this evening so this presentation is divided into five different but very connected topics that are listed on the left side the presenters on the right side will introduce themselves to you before they speak we will pause after each section so that you can ask us some questions I do want to point out that Sharon Ryan couldn't be with us tonight and I also want to acknowledge the tremendous amount of contributions that she's made to our
011work and to this presentation all right so first our district goals and outcomes our district goal number two is to increase the number of students on a pathway to proficiency and literacy and Mathematics through implementation of mtss a multi-tiered system of support our outcome is to increase the number of students meeting their stretch goals with particular emphasis on students performing one or more grade levels below Benchmark on their baseline or fall assessment the fall Baseline assessment for us is i-Ready first thing Christine I want to do is we want to share with you the use of universal screening and progress monitoring by how the district uses it and how then how schools and classroom Educators use it so at the district level we can use the data to remove barriers that we identify for mtss
012implementation and also for student learning we can also use the data to provide needed resources such as instructional materials programs and professional learning for Progress monitoring we can use the data to see how well we're serving our students are we meeting our goals and for which students at the school level we use our Universal screeners to make sure that we're getting data on every single student and you'll hear me say many times across this slide as a starting point so the universal screener is our starting point and tells us the places where we want to drill down into the data we use it to start discussions about instructional grouping whether a student needs Universal Extra instruction or targeted instruction or intensive instruction we use it to start a discussion about the needs in those instructional
013areas and what we might want to look at in the vertical alignment of our curriculum across the school again we use that as a starting point and then look at other data points we again use it to progress Monitor and the most important part at McCarthy town and across all six elementary schools is using this data to celebrate the positive strengths that we see in our students first and then look at what might be some gaps that we want to start to Target with our instruction we also use it for Progress monitoring tool for Teacher teams to be able to look at how their instruction is impacted students positively or something we want to keep looking at because we go back just one sort of a second for that other slide so we also want
014to mention that we use Dibbles for grades K through three and for upper grades if necessary we also use that as a universal screener for very specific foundational literacy skills like phonemic awareness oral reading fluency rapid automatized naming and all of these skills are aligned to the new dyslexia regulations so we also want you to know that we're using that as a universal screener thanks the next slide so this slide represents the aggregate results for the fall i-Ready reading assessment for grades one through eight you can see that 43 of our students scored at Mid or above range level 21 scored at early on-grade level 24 at grade one grade below six percent at two grades below and six percent at three or more grades below it's important to note with ireddy's five scale rating
015that students who are one grade below on the first diagnostic window that's in the fall are performing consistently with students who have just begun their school year so right at the beginning of September If This Were January it would be a different interpretation so noted strengths on the slide are in phonemic Awareness phonics and high frequency words this is though the second year that our challenges are in vocabulary and comprehension the next slide shows the 24 percent or the 694 students who scored one grade below by grade level students again who scored the one grade level Below in the fall are performing consistently with students who've Just Begun their Academic Year they benefit from continued on grade level instruction or as we're calling effective tier one core instruction and you're going to hear much more
016about tier one or core instruction throughout this presentation please know that all students are again assessed in January so we can monitor that progress with the i-Ready tool 377 students or 13 percent of our students assess scored two three or more grade levels below so if you take a look at this example for example in fifth grade we had 41 students who scored two grade levels below or approximately 1.4 percent of all the students assessed 2894. 19 students are grade five scored three or more grade levels below or 0.7 percent and these are the students for whom we need to close their growth goal as fast as possible so that we can shrink the amount of time um for their accessing also accessing grade level content and able to do so so if we take
017a deeper dive now into some of the data of the 377 students assessed that were two three or more grade levels below um 88 or 23 percent of the students are multilingual if we move across in that row to the next chart there are 178 multilingual students who were assessed so of the subgroup population 88 of them represents 49 percent of the subgroup population again if we look at special education in that road and of the 377 students assessed that were two three or more grade levels below or approximately 50 percent were two or three more grade levels below of the total population of special education students 439 in the subgroup 189 represents 43 percent so this data really underscores why we also need to continue our anti-bias work our culturally responsive work and to
018reflect on and identify and remove barriers to learning I'm going to switch over to MCAS so the purpose of MCAS is accountability but it really can be used for us to look at the big picture to see about our standard alignment as well as our curricular alignment Below on the slide is Desi's guidance on how to use MCAS this year so they strongly encouraged us to use the results for improvement at the local level and to be cautious when making comparisons between districts and even across schools within the same districts and district and this is mostly because the last two and a half years really have not been normal so the results are going to be very different we know access for many students was disrupted some more so than others and they really encouraged
019us to find the bright spots that's what they called it and to really look to see where the recovery has begun and to see where we might be trending in a more positive direction they encouraged us to connect it to ongoing initiatives which is what we're doing connecting it to our goals but really to hold at the very center that the big picture is the social emotional well-being of our students their sense of belonging their sense of connectedness and to really keep that at the center of all of our work it's the next slide this is a slide really just to take a brief note and to note for you that accountability due to the interruptions and the modifications the last several years that there is no accountability this year and those determinations will resume
020again in 2023 so next year okay this slide and the next one were presented by the associate commissioner Rob Curtin to District leaders along with state level information and Analysis so the 2022 school year was the first full MCAS Administration for grades three through eight since 2019. so to put that into perspective our grade 10 students in 2022 had not taken an MCAS since grade seven this size shows the impact of covid at the state level so the state showed some variable losses across grades three through seven while grade 8 start to show some signs of recovery in 2022 and grade 7 started to move in a more positive direction so if you're looking at the change column meeting and exceeding 2122 which is the second from the right you'll see down below that grade
0218 across went from negative 11 decrease in proficiency to a positive one grade 7 was negative 5 in 2019-21 to negative two so again trending in a more positive direction things this next slide shows our data in the same way so the signs of recovery for us in grade six um and then we had some trending in the right direction in all of their other grades except in grades four and five grade 10 was a one-year decrease of two percent and that was just for that one year so the total impact for us was about 11 decrease in grades three through eight meeting expectations since 2019. so to read this chart in 2019 you can see the meeting and exceeding expectations for grade three in 2021 is the second column the blue column you'll see
022that 2020 is skipped because there was no MCAS that year and then 2022 the green column the change in meeting and exceeding if we're reading it across negative 10 from 79 proficiency to 69 proficiency and then the change from 21 to 22 was negative 1. so the total cumulative change from 19 to 22 was negative 11. so you can see in fourth and fifth grade we're not trending in the right direction but in all the other grades we started to Trend in that in a more positive direction if we start looking at by cohort Style the ovals will show you the cohorts so third graders and seventh graders which are represented by the red and the black ovals in 2019 after some decline in 2021 started to show some gains in 2022 our fourth graders
023in 2019 represented by the green ovals showed some slight gains in 2021 and then declined in 2022 our fifth graders were pretty consistent all three years they're the yellow ovals and our sixth graders in 2019 showed some decline for both years so they're the purple ovals so it's just another way of looking at the data across that period of time so I'm going to hand this to Jen and she's going to talk about the growth yeah so this show this this slide shows the the state's definition of student growth percentile it measures the state how the measure the state measures achievement over time it uses a cohort model to compare students across the state who earned similar scores on the previous years MCAS it's calculated in grades four through eight and in grade 10 for
024ELA in mathematics in 2021 it should be noted that the state used a different calculation that cannot be compared to this year's or the 2022 scores and then that shows you how they Define the ranges this indicates the growth and how it's defined in the year 2022 and again we should it should be noted that it cannot be compared to 21 because in 2021 it was not the same testing modality in terms of the number of students who who were participating in both the full assessments as you can see this slide shows our Ela scores for our third through eighth graders of note is our students with disabilities who show typical growth but lower achievement as compared to all students in the district there is a similar pattern for our Hispanic Latino students we also
025can see on this slide that there is a significant increase in our number of multi-language Learners from 102 to also our El students showed good achievement and typical growth this next slide shows our Ela by by subgroup in grade 10. students with disabilities showed high growth but still did not achieve at the level of all students in our district our number of el students continues to increase and their achievement was good our multi-racial students showed a decrease in meeting and exceeding expectations so what does this all mean we've not had this data before so we see this as an opportunity we also see that this shows some indicators of the impact of code covid we're providing services to students with a challenge many of all of our students need in-person learning and remote and teaching
026via screens was very difficult to meet their needs so we're steaming some of the gaps in their learning now so what are we doing we're asking lots of questions we're looking at schedules as to looking at who is providing Services where are Services happening are they happening in the classroom are students being pulled out of the classroom when are Services happening we are looking at making sure that our students are not missing core instruction more special education teachers are getting trained in Wilson to support students and we're looking at the curriculum and materials that were being used to support our reading instruction thank you right so we did an item analysis of both iready and MCAS and at the district level we can really use these analyzes to reflect on how our curriculum and other
027resources support or don't support the teaching and learning of reading so for two years we've seen that our students have struggled with both vocabulary and comprehension on both iready and MCAS so I will point out that our students did perform a whole lot better on vocabulary on the MCAS in 2022 than they have in previous years so that's a that's a bright spot for us these are the grades though that performed below 79 in that standard or that cluster so taken together the two years of this data and the lack of an evidence-based literacy program to complement the foundational skills program we already have in place really does compel us to focus on choosing a program that supports teaching vocabulary comprehension and background knowledge and you're going to learn in later slides our process to
028select that program now Jen's going to talk a little bit about dyslexia oh one girl stop for questions I'm gonna stop there first for questions hi there um I have young kids so I know how iready works and I it seems like a great tool my question is how much time is spent preparing for MCAS every year I would like to just say all year every day we prepare for MCAS we don't do a lot of explicit like this is MCAS practice but we do a lot of analyzing what the questions are and what we're seeing in the results and then thinking about and we'll talk more about this when we talk about data meetings but thinking about what are the skills that we need to develop with students I just have a quick one
029on the two slides that we're showing subgroups at the top of the list was an abbreviation Ed is that economically disadvantaged students great thank you as you know the state of Massachusetts has legislation in 2019 requiring districts to address the need for early identification of reading difficulties dyslexia guidelines were released in January of 2020 to provide Direction and support for District staff at all levels and parents to ensure that students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities receive the education they're entitled to starting with early identification and continued access to evidence-based instruction the guidelines provided screening guidelines for all students including students demonstrating one or more potential signs of a learning disability but not limited to dyslexia the guidelines provided a framework of intervention for students at risk of Dyslexia and other learning difficulties that is
030timely and responsive and a comprehensive resource of evidence-based practices aimed at all Educators to support students at risk of Dyslexia and those identified as having dyslexia in September 2022 the board of Elementary and secondary education adopted an amendment to the regulations that requires all elementary schools to assess each student's reading abilities and early literacy skills at least twice per year from kindergarten to at least grade three this amendment also requires prompt notification of families and Guardians about the district's plans to support students who are significantly behind relevant benchmarks in response acton-boxborough has shifted its approach from reactive to proactive stance thus preempting the waiting to fail approach of doing only interventions once a student has struggled with support without Support over a period of time we have early literacy screeners in place and questions about
031family history incorporated into our kindergarten screening materials elementary schools are implementing mtss which you'll be hearing about with progress monitoring we have our instructional leadership teams and our instructional support teams collecting data and meeting regularly to review and Implement timely and responsive interventions for students based on the data the district has purchased evidence-based literacy materials for all of our classrooms we've also created a reading task force made up of teachers coaches and Specialists who are meeting and investigating potential core programs for implementation at the elementary level in addition the school will complete a comprehensive evaluation to determine the presence of a disability as needed we do anticipate additional guidance guidance from the state as to the implementation of the amendment which is required to start at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year stop for
032questions on dyslexia my name is Amanda Bailey I'm one of the co-chairs of the special education parent advisory Council I'm speaking on this issue in that capacity um we love the proactive early literacy the identification intervention early we have a bubble of students outside of that third grade window who were not identified early who have not received that intensive intervention at that early age we have a bubble of students who are still struggling to read fourth fifth sixth and Beyond and we'd like a plan to address that please in addition to all the work that's done in the early literacy the additional thing is that there's this emphasis on social emotional learning there is a deep social emotional cost to not being able to read thank you okay a couple other folks come up we're
033going to talk a little bit now about the literacy program and our efforts to find one for our district good evening everyone my name is Dora Sanchez I'm the 36 Ela and social studies curriculum coordinator and I will be presenting this part along with my colleagues hi I'm Stacy Valley I'm A literacy coach at the boardwalk campus for Douglas and Gates thank you and hi everyone I'm Carrie Cusick I'm a reading specialist at Blanchard Memorial School so as I mentioned in in a previous Slide by Deb our data and the need for an evidence-based literacy program to complement our foundational skills program compels us to focus on choosing a core program the following slides highlight the work we have been doing to put evidence-based practices at the Forefront through our work with Educators from various
034roles and across all six elementary schools we have developed this literacy vision statement strong literacy skills are essential for developing responsible self-motivated engaged Learners who demonstrate a love of reading these skills are necessary for understanding evaluating and disseminating complex thoughts and ideas equity and accessibility are crucial for our students to be successful in a diverse Global society and to be lifelong communicators to increase student reading and engagement direct instruction differentiation and access to complex and engaging texts with Rich vocabulary are at the core of our teaching through high quality evidence-based inclusive culturally responsive instruction highly diverse texts digital media writing and discussions students will develop the necessary comprehension active listening and discussion skills to to become lifelong readers and Learners empowered to share their voices to succeed as informed and productive citizens and in linking
035to the vision statement that we've created as a team of Educators we've also looked at the components of the core literacy block based on Desi's guidelines so when we think of the core literacy black we really think of three components foundational skills engaging with complex text and writing and we think of foundational skills to be systematic instruction with active practice so in our primary grades this looks like looking at print concepts letter sound correspondence phonological awareness phonics and decoding and fluency and site recognition and how we can access that through our Educators is through our high quality instructional materials we have hegarty for grades K to one in our elementary schools for phonological awareness foundations for K to 3 for our phonics program for decoding and encoding decodable texts which many Educators love as well
036as students so with those texts we have ones such as geodes fly leaf the geodes go very well with our foundations program so kids see those connections and then our word study and advanced phonics that's pending with our core program review as we move on up the grades for grades four and up and then with our engagement with complex text we really want kids to be lifelong readers so these texts that we're choosing really what does it consist of we want them to have a background building of knowledge and vocabulary being able to understand what they read and being able to respond to text both fiction and non-fiction and what does that look like in our schools we've actually partnered with Hill for Literacy for our core program review with our reading task force and
037last but not least for writing again the foundational skills in writing are really extremely systematic so what does it consist of in the classroom set in structure and conventions the craft of the writing and just the writing process and we're really evaluating the writing component as part of our core reading process but we are also integrating srsd which stands for self-regulated strategy development with our partnership with Leslie LOD now one big piece of all of this is that oral language comprises all of those components the core literacy black so we're speaking listening actively engaging through text um I'm going to frame our work with the hill for literacy and take you through the timeline that we've been going through and we'll continue through um choosing the core program the reading program so last spring the
038spring of 2022 we sent a request to all Educators to see if they would like to be part of the task force we have an overwhelmingly large amount of staff that want to be a part of it however we had to choose only 23 to be a part of the initial review so those 23 Educators span all six schools they represent all different roles Administration coaches reading Specialists curriculum coordinators classroom teachers special Educators English language developmental teachers and various service providers um in October of this year we began the preliminary meetings during the meeting we first looked at the literacy Vision that shared that Dora just shared with us and then we looked at the five programs that were vetted by the curriculum coordinators and that were highly ranked on Ed reports and curate in
039the beginning of December the coaches myself Marin Gulliver and Joyce Deb Dora Kerry and Michael vodo the assistant principal at Blanchard went to schools in Massachusetts that were using these curriculums we were able to speak with teachers see the programs in action speak with their literacy Administration teams and come back and share our findings with the task force the information were shared with the task force and with the school principals after that time the task force had had time to review and make notes and listen and then we send a ranking survey to them so that the um they went from five programs and ranked them to find our top two as of today that those two top programs have been selected the staff then the rest of the staff were then invited to participate
040in the second piece of the review and we have over a hundred Educators in the district that want to be a part of this review process so we're really excited about that moving forward the next few parts of the timeline are talking from January to March we're looking at the two programs there's going to be two rounds of this evaluation tool that we use the tool was built by Hill for literacy we're guiding us through this process it's a comprehensive checklist that is has important research-based elements of a reading program such as fluency culturally responsive and sustaining Ed vocabulary professional development motivation and engagement listening and speaking instructional design comprehension assessment writing and advanced phonics the review will take place they will rank each component of the curriculum from a zero to a three a
041zero means they didn't find any evidence a one is that it's low quality a two is average quality and a three is high quality um the final decision including the selection and purchase of the of the program will occur in April of this year and that will be based on the information gathered from the review tools and from recommendations from the reading task force moving forward in the school year 2324 we will launch the program and the implementation and we'll have continuously ongoing feedback from implementation monitoring how the program is going and providing on professional learning for all staff and as we're talking about curriculum and some of the changes I wanted to also mention some of the things that are happening at the Junior High in the high school so the junior high they've
042really been working on curriculum mapping to create some vertical alignment between the grains they're also including a lot more prompt Writing Practice for students they have created some tech sets so that students can write across text to make comparisons and connections and there has been inclusion of the ELA fundamentals into grade level class classes so that our students are more ready for the expectations on the MCAS for reading and writing for grades 9 through 12 they've adjusted the scope and sequence so students are practicing with multi-text writing rhetorical analysis and non-fiction earlier in the year before MCAS is given they've also created single point rubrics which is where you take a rubric and you just put the proficient column in the center of the page and you're giving feedback to students on either end of
043something they need to work on or something that they're doing really well along with shorter writing assignments and so they're getting that actionable feedback on a more continual and shorter basis so they can improve their writing right so before we go on to mtss implementation do you have any questions about some of the curricular work that's happening so given the data that we've seen on on Multi or multilingual lingual students I I would just like just a couple more connections between all of that review process that we just saw which yay and the and how that's going to touch the data that we just saw can you tell us a little bit about how this work is going to move the needle for some of our cohorts please so I think one of the things
044that we need to be thinking about is when Jen was talking about the scheduling first about students having access to that Core Curriculum and that being really important The Core Curriculum itself the ones that we're looking at have mtss built into it so we also have sort of the um the different ways that we can be working with students based on some of the assessments it also has multilingual components so we are looking to see some of the some of the strategies that are good for some of our multilingual students are also good for all students such as using sentence frames I'm using think allows using right around so all those different strategies are also and we're looking for those practices to be built into the program so it doesn't look like it's an add-on
045or something extra that's built right into that Core Curriculum so those are a few ways I don't know if anybody else wants to I think too as well just the fact that all of the programs that we're looking at are geared in structured literacy so we're hitting on so much of phonics and phonemic awareness and all of that to make the structure cohesive and so explicit across all of our grade levels moving forward too so I think that's a large hope in the role that we share and if I can just Deb would you mind just bringing back the original I ready slide that broke it down by strand right here um so in I'm I used to be able to read that far not anymore um but behind me um when you start to
046look at the actual strands and domains of how our students are performing you can see right now we have some relative strengths in phonological Awareness phonics high frequency words but when you get into vocabulary and comprehension skills that's where we're seeing our students struggle to be at grade level at a higher rate and so the work that's being done now in the curriculum study is really focused in on those you know High need areas that we're seeing it doesn't mean that we're still not going to say those top three areas are high priority we know they're critical Foundation reading skills however we also need to expand our programming to make sure we're addressing some of the areas that we don't have that same relative strength it might can I just follow up one more time
047on that it might be important to note that we're not changing what we're doing we're keeping hegarty and we're keeping foundations what we're looking at are programs that complement that and bring in those other three areas so that we can put the whole thing together all right so now we're going to move on to the end and while we get settled I just want to share that we're in year one at the district level for implementation across the district this is a multi-year implementation process so we're four months in so we're going to give you a glimpse of what four months in looks like okay do you want me to introduce myself sure um hi I'm Emory Phelan I'm a second grade teacher at Douglas at the boardwalk campus so we wanted to start just
048by giving you a brief overview we know at this point you've had a lot of Education around mtss but to frame the rest of what we're going to say we wanted to give you a brief overview so as we said it starts with universal screening and progress monitoring tools and then groups of Staff go through a problem-solving process to identify problems analyze problems I also will just add celebrate successes plan interventions and then Monitor and evaluate those plans and continue to sort of look at the data and increase the intensity and the focus of each intervention set for each group of students which I think links to your question Kira that this process helps us look at that data and Link the intervention to make sure we're addressing those subgroups um we can go to
049the next slide so there's many highlights so far of the implementation all of the elementary schools now have a shared vision and are making shifts towards a robust mtss model the educators are making progress in the various tiers of instruction they're beginning to shift their own practice and to look at data to make instructional decisions all of the elementary schools are holding regular data meetings at the grade level but also at the district building and classroom levels this provides opportunities to see where the gaps in the learning are as well as what targeted skills are needed for intervention but it also provides the opportunity for educators to think about how to adjust their Universal instruction to meet the needs of all students and provides opportunities to learn about extension activities for students that are achieving
050at or above grade level data driven practices support equity and access for all students and as with any new Venture there may be challenges as well so some that we're finding our schedule and shared staff we have two literacy three literacy coaches in our district but they're shared often with two buildings balancing all the demands and with time and the resources that we have in mtss slash Flex requires ongoing differentiated professional learning for all Educators in data literacy like what do these numbers really mean content instructional practices and of course social emotional learning so we wanted to give you a couple examples of what this looks like at each School the picture here shows a group of teachers looking at the data with the literacy coach we often also have admin at the table and
051our school counselor at the table to make sure we're weaving in the social emotional impacts with the academics so we follow the same process that we reviewed at the beginning we looked at iready data we noticed strengths in phonics and high frequency words we also noticed some weaknesses in that fourth grade vocabulary and reading informational text we then introduced a new assessment for our fourth grade team that Ann Joyce our amazing literacy coach brought to that team they drilled down into the data and found exactly what some of the targeted skills within there are for each group put in place an intervention from bringing words to life for six weeks and then if you go to the next slide looked at some post data for our next data meeting in the progress monitoring meeting and
052you can see that there was some growth but there was also some students still in that category of needing more targeted instructions so we then moved into looking at tier two interventions and that's the process in this first year that we're finding in a lot of our grade levels is looking at first Universal supports around tier one and then in the six-week cycle looking at a smaller group that still needs more instruction and a skill and adjusting that instruction and then moving on and taking data in the next six weeks to see how that's going um the most important thing if you flip back a slide is the collective efficacy this process used to be something that was done by a classroom teacher with the support of a special educator or an El teacher but
053the individual classroom teacher would have to reach out to those resources and coordinate themselves we now have a structural process where the collective efficacy of the whole team is impacting every student and I think that's really the power of this process at a school level so I'm going to share with you an example at Blanchard for third grade so just consistent with everyone else Dibbles has been our screener and it was administered in September to all students actually K to three at Blanchard and then we dibbled actually older students as well um what we found was we wanted to really look at oral reading fluency and when you get a score on Dibbles you get a fluency score for words per minute but also an accuracy score so we want to look at the accuracy
054how accurate are our readers um trying to figure out what they're really doing when they're reading connected text so we found that 37 of our third graders scored in the at-risk or some risk category for this measure so in October our Flex groups did begin and we implemented A Walk To Learn model so what we did was we used those providers that were available during our Flex block of third grade myself as a reading specialist classroom teachers multilingual teachers our reading assistant and classroom assistance and we were able to sort of figure out what needs our students had to make sure that it was most effective for their time so our groups looked like structured literacy that was happening in my room as well as classroom teachers fluency models comprehension both literal and inferential so
055really different treated based on this data and then we were able to progress monitor so that's another dipstick in this process of a dibble's measure to see how is our instruction working is what we're doing effective for our students in front of us so we're able to shift some movements among students that had made progress to other needs that they may have had the arrows in the classroom based on tier one instruction through fundations as well as other things in our comprehension strategies so we're meeting again right after the New Year to see again this process again but if you go to the next slide you'll sort of see just some graphs we have a process called our m-class data system that we can see these graphs and how our progress is working for Progress
056monitoring data so I just gave three Snippets of students but if you see that dotted line You'll see that for their accuracy they're progressing either on or above that line for their reading fluency accuracy which is a joyous celebration and the next slide just really shows kids an action you know students are the center of all of this and all of our work so we are having that engagement it's meaningful text interactions it's so driven by students in front of us and what they need and that's where their literacy skills really shine and come alive so our next example that we're sharing is at Douglas in second grade so just like all the other schools we use Dibbles as our screening tool to look at kids foundational skills and what targeted instructions they might need
057and then we met with our coaches and reading Specialists and looked at how we can better support those students yes next um so here is just a snippet of data so we're looking at the Dibbles data for second grade boy is not boy it's beginning of the year data and so you can see we noticed with the second grade team that 30 to 32 percent of students were in the at-risk or the red or some risk which is the yellow when it came to letter sound knowledge and decoding decoding is just the ability to read a word with familiar phonics patterns and so nine of those students in second grade were in the at-risk for the letter sounds and 10 of them were at risk for decoding so after we gathered this data we met
058as a team where reading Specialists Educators coaches met and we looked at all the data and we said okay what skill deficits do these students have what more interventions do they need and that's where coaches really provided us evidence-based activities that we could do with those students to better their learning and just to highlight these are flexible groups when we say we're grouping students they're not in these groups for these this eight week cycle we are constantly looking at data and we'll talk more about that so this is just a template that we use for our grouping when we're having our data meetings it's an opportunity for us to look at students and where they fit and then we can have our conversation so when the data first comes in the coaches are doing a
059preliminary grouping Based on data alone and then when we meet with the team we're looking all together and making some adjustments and the team makes the final decisions on the groups the students the focus and the teacher that's going to be providing those Focus targeted instruction so we also did A Walk To Learn model where all Educators Specialists coaches were involved in finding out what they were going to be teaching these students in these next couple weeks of intervention and that's again where coaches were very valuable in continuing to touch base with Educators and when I say coaches I mean Stacy um she is our coach at Douglas and continuing to provide activities and look at data and continue to think about what students need this was a four day a week 40-minute cycle um
060with lots of different activities and it's been getting to know different students as well so here's a few pictures we always want to bring the students back because that's why we do this so this is some students during flex and you can see that they're engaged in reading a text with a teacher and this one they're creating compound word oh no sorry this one they're using reading nonsense words for fluency to increase their decoding skills this one there are matching words to create compound words and in this one they're doing a sequencing of a comprehension retail for Stellaluna so they're putting the story back in order and as you can see that during Flex the students are working collaboratively they're engaged and they're giving multiple opportunities for practice and for learning progress monitor ing either
061Dibbles or other in-class data that we had and we met again with coaches reading Specialists and looked critically at this data and thought about what more do students need do they need to do they need more intervention are they ready to do some more vocabulary work and we really just looked at some of those Focus areas and so I come back to the data in column F and K those are the beginning of the year scores for those students that we talked about the nine and ten these are a representation of them and so the red is at risk and the yellow is some risk the purple columns is the progress monitoring and purple represents that they've increased their scores so a hundred percent of our students made progress and then if you look at
062column H and M those are the middle of the Year goals so when we go to assess in January the goal is for students to get to 68 and to 20 and so you can see that already in letter sounds three of the students are already meeting or exceeding the middle of the Year Benchmark that we haven't even given them and three are still at some risk and two are still at risk and then for the decoding five of the eight students are already meeting or exceeding the middle of the Year Benchmark two are still at some risk and one is still at risk but there are still three or four more weeks of instruction before we do the middle of the Year Benchmark so I'm anticipating seeing more green and more progress so thank
063you for the overview and you did you you shared some highlights with us and you also share some challenges what can the school committee do to help address those challenges that you laid out and one of the most important things that you do is the budget and so just making sure that we have you know the resources to purchase the materials to make sure that we have the funding for professional learning and I know you look at every line and and I know the challenges um but that's actually one of the most important things that you can do thank you okay we'll move on to the last section thank you all right our last section as on family engagement and professional learning and Dora is going to come back up and join us hello again
064so a group of Educators from various grades and elementary schools work together to create this these literacy guides for families and Caregivers for grades Pre-K to six the guides include students skills students will develop throughout the school year suggested at home activities to support learning and resources these are translated into various languages and are found on our district website we're also working on adding information on how reading is taught the shifts in literacy instruction based on the research and the materials used this site is currently under construction it is worth noting that we can put literacy at the Forefront without professional learning and this past year I just want to highlight some of the things that we've done so far this past summer a group of Educators including literacy coaches reading Specialists and classroom teachers
065worked on developing lessons for decodable texts that were purchased for each elementary school building foundation training continued for new for new teachers at new teachers at the at the grade and also new to a b this also occurred earlier this year we've been able to continue to partner with Melissa Orkin from crafting Minds to support Educators with understanding these shifts to reading instruction based on the research as well as support small group instruction currently she is working with grades k-3 but we're hoping to bring her back for grades four to six next year literacy coaches reading Specialists and curriculum coordinators have been part of a research-based research practice seminar to explore structured literacy interventions the resources compiled will support small group interventions and be shared with teachers A literacy coach and reading specialist have also
066LED some initial m-class Dibbles training for grades k-3 in their building literacy coaches have also LED ongoing building-based professional learning across the six elementary schools professional learning will be crucial as we Implement a new core program next school year from one of our previous or just very recent school-based mtss professional learning these are a couple of quotes the yellow represent you know some of the challenges more time for independent looking at the data so again time is always such a such an important piece of this work and having the opportunity to dive deeper to really Define instruction and the intervention needed so again back to time and collaboration but some of the positives the collaborative discussion was really valuable the productive and professional struggle working together as a team and the ability to make choices
067about a protocol and to follow it and to have success with that protocol so all of what we shared with you tonight and this evening it takes time it takes learning and it takes collaboration which is what we also hope we shared with you tonight we were able to demonstrate that it takes a whole team of Educators at the classroom the school and the district working together for our students so we'll close out with a big thank you and a big shout out to all of those individuals who helped support the work every day and if you have any other final questions we're happy to answer those thank you does it work it does work and I just want to say if we were ever going to applaud anyone would be our reading specialist um
068lovely lovely people I love your question Evelyn I love it because the school committee has two policies on reporting student progress and student progress reports to parents and Guardians and this is a major hole here because we talked about family engagement but we did not talk about progress reporting to families we've had instances where parents have been happily provided i-Ready scores when asked when they asked teachers and in other instances we've had Parents ask teachers for I already have been told I don't know if I can share that with you or no response at all we don't have report cards in every school we don't have homework and our early primary grades we have the iready information we are taking gobs of data reams of data at this point parents need to know caregivers need
069to know so that we can partner with you in helping our kids so these policies were last looked at in revising them takes work but in addition to regular reports parents should be notified when students performance require special attention we have parents who do not know that their child is working with a reading specialist we have parents who have learned this because a child saw a sibling in a hallway multiple times a week pulled out they're not aware necessarily it's not Universal maybe in some schools they are told but it's not Universal that parents are told that their child is getting this kind of help we love the help we appreciate the help deeply but we need to know so I would encourage you to take a look at file ik file ikab and see
070what we can already do to improve this for families so that we can partner with the schools more effectively thank you all again so much for your time thank you to the committee so that's really important actually so I yeah I'm in a school that doesn't have that doesn't do report cards and I don't think I've seen either of my son's I ready scores so can we will you please address that sure so um with the principles last year and Liberty coordinators Specialists and coaches we were able to write in some i-Ready data um guidelines around communicating with parents and caregivers and we have a whole section that was shared out so if it's not happening we need to know and we need to know where it's not happening so that our principals and our
071teachers can address that but we have provided guidance at the district level and it's in our FAQ for our Educators about the expectations for communicating to parents and caregivers foreign just to add to that um you know when we provide the guidance at the district level that's a technical solution to an Adaptive problem um and in reality you know the amount of work our Educators have done to shift practice over the last several years is nothing short of monumental and so you know I want to make sure that there's an understanding that you know things that happen at the district level can't happen instantly everywhere it just doesn't like we sometimes wish it could but it doesn't um and so you know we want to know when it's not happening not because we want it
072to become punitive but because we want to be able to support consistent implementation of something and I think that's just a really important message to keep coming back to our educators are working really really hard to do this well it's a lot of shift in practice and that takes time and so we want to also know you know we want to help them you know continue to inform families and everything else and I know no one said it was punitive but I just want to really stress that we don't want a punitive approach to mtss that is not the goal of this thank you and I I want to applaud the teacher as well and all the Educators for all the work you're doing but I'm just trying for my own understanding that the goal
073is to partner with parents correct to do this work like inform parents about where their kids are because what Amanda um just highlighted is you know it's problematic If the parents don't know where their kids are what how they're doing and they're not partnering with the Educators it takes a village to really raise a kid right and so our Educators should be partnering with families to do this so I'm just trying to understand from you Peter and Deb that the intent is that ultimately we're gonna get to a point where parents are looked into how their kids are done and parents are gonna be partnering with our Educators to ensure that their kids are meeting the targets is that correct yes that's correct um thank you so much for all of this and for answering
074that question but I don't feel that the question was really answered because if parents don't know that something's wrong how are they supposed to inform you that they're not getting the information so it seems like it should come from you first to the parents and then you can communicate but parents can't come to you and say what they don't know yeah I think what Deb was trying to say was that actually is supposed to be the process that when we get the data we share it with families I think what we're saying is it's not consistent everywhere right now because there's so much change that it just takes time to implement that and to make sure there's a level of consistency around it so going forward when I ready is done parents will be notified
075with whatever the score was every time so we want to make sure that we also put I ready in context right so the fall conferences is actually one of the way one of the areas when we gave the guidance to share it along with other things student work classroom-based measures it's supposed to be used as a screener right so it's a very high level look to see is there something else as Christie was explaining earlier is there something else we need to dig into to find it's a one-time really high level overview it may be again like any other screening tool it may have been just that day it may have been something that we do need to look further into but we need to put it together with other information just to find that
076out so we our guidance is to encourage folks to use it at the fall meeting the conference so that parents have a good understanding about what are some of the challenges and what are some of the strengths again celebrating those strengths that a child has I also know that last year all the reading Specialists came together to create one document that they share with students as families if they are seeing a student for reading support and that is reading support and I want to make sure I differentiate between Flex block and reading support by a reading specialist from the classroom if as reading specialist to seeing a student on an ongoing basis that letter is sent home if a reading Specialist or any other Personnel is seeing a student during Flex block which changes rapidly
077like every other week we're not sending letters home for that because it would just be too much to cumbersome so it's very specific about seeing a reading specialist for a very specific reason and we do have something district-wide and I just want to follow up on so if children are meeting with reading specialists and parents aren't being notified that that's happening is that just a accident that this shouldn't be like a continuation problem or do you just don't tell parents as a rule what's the general rule for that the general rule is that they should be informed that they're seeing the reading specialist and there is a one District letter that goes out to all parents that's similar and how long has that role been in place I want to say Carrie can correct me
078if I'm wrong but two years so I guess what I'm hearing here is there's a lot of concern around the table around whether or not parents are given specific information and I wonder if there's an opportunity for us as a district to share some general information as an update on our mtss process similar to sort of that overview that we get right when we get the MCAS scores that say hey here's this new flex block here's and here's what you might expect in terms of things that could come home because I think what I'm hearing is a lot of concern that there may be differing levels of additional need that's identified for our student and the parents may not get that in a timely way or may not know what is something that I will
079get informed about a discrete intervention from a reading specialist versus something that I wouldn't get informed about a tier two intervention and a flex blog for three weeks and so I think you know a general letter that just might say hey as as part of our evolving process of implementing this tiered structure here are some things that you might see from your from your kids school and it can include I ready results and and notes about pull outs or what have you I think that might help sort of calm some of the concerns and give a a nice letter to just sort of say to everybody here here's a progress report on what we're doing because I think we you know I'm hearing Peter say also like we need to take a breath here it's
080there's a lot that we're asking is a lot of change very quickly two years ago when these letters started going out I think we were all still locked in our own bedrooms so like I want to recognize that there's a lot of changes that have happened and maybe we just haven't been really good at communicating back out to the families what the current state is so um it takes a lot to implement something right and it takes a while for that to stick so do we know when we think that because to Adam's point it's been two years now but you know anybody who knows implementation science it takes it takes a while for things to be implemented and for them to stick and to hit a stride when do we think that we're gonna
081hit that straight where everybody in the district is going to know what is happening every parent is going to be aware of how their kids are being educated in our district and then get the feedback that they need or pull in when they need because we in my mind we should have a timeline for when this is gonna happen and I I don't want to put you on the spot but I think that we should have a goal even if it's just a goal that it's two years maybe in the next year whatever time it is and if we don't have that that information maybe we should come back with that because I think people would want to know yeah I want to give that a little thought um just because I think it also
082might assume that there's a perfect linear progression to it that everyone will be on the same timeline and I think there's different amounts of information based on the different needs of students that parents may receive I think it's a good point I want to give it some thought I just don't have an answer for tonight I'll just add Evelyn that that timeline is is also dependent on our ability to both provide adequate funds to support and policy to support so I mean we're we're a key component of that as well okay hello John Peterson six Jackson Drive I just wanted to disaggregate the parent group in this discussion just like our students you know our parents and families you know I exist across a spectrum and a spectrum of needs for communication so yes we
083want to reach out to families but in order to do that effectively that's also going to be a tiered kind of communication in order to be effective and that was the point I was going to make which is I hope that we make those communities if I'm a Madam chair um look again at the subgroups look again at the subgroups that are underperforming this can't wait no you got to give me more than that so what does that mean when we look at the students with disabilities on the iready when we look at students by race on the I read when we look at the students who are underperforming that initial slide of who wasn't making the mark those are the subgroups when we talk about Not Giving progress reports to parents and not keeping
084parents informed of progress and those are our subgroups we have a problem we need to address not on a two-year timeline we need to engage families now Amanda it would be helpful if you reach out to us and give us some examples of where it might not be occurring so that we can actually look into that because it's the the generality of it is hard to defend yeah okay yeah thank you and so what I was trying to say is that when we start doing that communication with families I hope we can do that in a language that understands that that everybody understands and what I mean by that is is not just multilingual but also you know we use a lot of Education speak here you know and and a lot of us are
085Educators or or you know or adjacent enough that we can we can follow with this but you know it cannot be a letter that even says devils like it can't it can't be that because not everybody gets it and it's not it's not fair to have to Google all the jargon to be able to read the communication you know what I mean sure and so I think Dora early had eluded that we're under construction right now to create also a website so parents can have an understanding of how we're teaching reading and to that end to be able to really unpack what does it mean to teach letter sounds right and talk about it in that way and then what are we doing in the classroom so parents can have an understanding of what actually
086takes place and I think that will be a good grounding for these other kinds of communication that needs to happen I I just want to say thank you so much for the preparation um in the presentation I took set took down several questions as you were presenting and throughout the entire presentation you touched on all of them so I really appreciate the work of all the Educators and everyone who who came to present us this evening was really well prepared and thank you all for staying late Doris thank you for coming back a second time and staying late we see you have a good evening y'all okay so we are now pivoting to um fy24 budget so are we inviting Mr vertolino up or is he staying in a seat Peter Mr vertolino was always
087invited up well we'll both go up together so I'll just uh Miss Dave's getting seated I'll just jump in to keep us moving um this is not intended to be a budget presentation typically that you would have on a first budget presentation instead what we're trying to do is give you an early preview of the budget um we're coming back in January on January 12th that is the first in the series of actual budget presentations that we do on an annual basis this is just to give you a sense of the the big picture of what we're dealing with for some of the challenges in the fy24 budget so I just want to make sure the context is clear because you're not going to get any answers out of us as to how we're solving
088the problem we're just telling you what the problem is first so Dave do you want to talk to them so here's a here's a bar graph that looks looks like there's growth right it says Day-Day revenues and the and the the columns look to be growing and state aid growth has been and is expected to be continue to be positive but it's small you look in the bottom right the growth is about one percent a year we only get minimum Aid in as far as Chapter 70 increases there's been a little bit of growth in Regional Transportation Charter reimbursement if we get more we end up paying it back and on the other end by way of assessment so to support budget so these revenues are what keeps the assessments down we have a budget
089the budget's funded by assessments but revenues defray some of those costs to not have all of our operations funded by assessments well if revenues are only going up by an average of one percent and our budget growth is going up by an average of say three percent there's the need to provide additional funding from reserves and assessments that's the the tension that that we face in constructing the budget and you can read the note on the bottom as far as the as far as state revenues and where they fit into the entire budget picture we talk about reserves often we still have a fairly healthy Reserve position if I back this back the chart up a couple of years when I first got here about about five six years ago the bar wouldn't have gone
090through the floor which is which the the base is a million dollars so we're in a decent position we're not in as great a position as we were pre-covered but there is there is still significant uh significant reserves certainly not enough to consider proposing an override to fund the uh to fund the district's operations and you can say we'll go about one more one more thing I'm sorry in the the um we are at this point in at this stage in the in the development process planning to use a million and a quarter of the Indy down from a million five uh in FY 23 this may change uh during budget development but but the numbers that we're going to be presenting in the next couple of slides are based on using a million and
091a quarter we we've had a pretty stable uh budget rate of increase over more more years than just the three that are presented but you can see that in order to provide the same level of services in fy24 and there are a number of reasons Beyond inflation to explain that and as Peter said we won't get into that today there's there's a bigger increase at this point in the development process and so to get to the Target established by the school committee of two and a half percent the budget Gap if you will between what was proposed as level service costs and that two and a half percent is about three million dollars again note the footnote at the bottom we're coming off a year in which over 20 positions were were reduced and the
092expectation is that closing the FY 24 budget gap of 3 million is going to require a similar strategy of reducing positions just again I just want to really reiterate if you look at the FY 23 bar here the reason that it's coming in at that three percent rate is because we reduced 20 positions to get to a three percent increase okay and I want to be clear if if we hadn't reduced those you'd probably be looking at a four four plus overall budget um you know I put some highlights of some of the reasons why we're seeing such a large budget growth um in the memo in the packet but you know we had a number of different factors I think we have health insurance rates um you know we thought maybe initial guidance would
093come in at five percent that's actually going to be eight percent is what we're now projecting so health insurance is certainly a major driver in a budget we also know that the state approved a 14 increase in out of District special education tuitions and transportation costs so we have to hold a relatively High number for that we think that not all organizations will end up coming in right at the 14 so I think there's you know we're likely to see that number come down a little bit but until we have more information we have to have that held in the budget we did hear some positive movement out of a conference call with Desi today that they might be looking at some pothole fillers around that 14 cost we have no information on that yet
094so again we can't count on anything um and then we also you know have had the opportunity to have some grants um over the last several years and you know pandemic relief Aid things like that that have allowed us to maintain services for kids and prioritize services for kids but some of those grants are now coming off um and we can no longer rely on them as funding sources and so we either have to discontinue to provide things or we have to look at how we're going to fund those programs so there's really a variety of factors leading to that large gap between what we would project for level services in other words education as we do it today and what we're going to be able to fund looking at a two and a half
095percent budget Target just to give you a summary of where we're at right now um you know we've been meeting bi-weekly with the budget subcommittee from school committee and so that's been productive and we've had good discussions around you know where we're at with the big budget picture from a school committee perspective you have approved the overall budget timeline you've set guidelines and you've set increase targets for us for both the act and assessment and for the overall budget development so we're working toward that we've had multiple meetings with our central office staff and Senior leadership including all of our building principles to talk about strategies to do that and I have been conducting you know a number of different budget meetings available for any staff who are interested in learning more providing feedback on
096the budget process to try and make sure we're communicating well with staff through the process and soliciting any ideas that they may have about priorities or ideas that maybe we didn't think of that we could look at foreign we are going through all of the different departmental budget submissions and we are developing those into our recommended budget um those cost centers include Personnel Health Insurance employee benefits our audit District tuitions the use of circuit breaker reserves to offset any out-of-district tuitions and then really trying to hone in on those FY 24 Revenue estimates I will say from a state level perspective we have a new Administration coming in and when the administration turns over it's just a friendly reminder that the new governor is given two extra months to submit their budget proposal so instead
097of seeing anything in January it's likely to be probably the middle of March correct Dave early March and so that's not going to really be helpful for our budget deliberations along the way because we can't count on things that we don't know coming out of the governor's office um you know we heard a lot about the millionaires tax and you know we've had a couple questions can that help us in this budget we're an entire fiscal year away from seeing any Revenue if that revenue is appropriated um by the legislature so you know we know the money is there for a combination of Education or infrastructure projects but it has to be appropriated based on a formula TBD right so um we just we have to play a waiting game with that although we are
098hopeful and if there were any legislators that might be listening we would certainly say you know please keep us in mind um um and then you know we're gonna have to obviously get to some suggested reductions uh to address the three million dollar budget Gap um things you know we're we're being very open and we've talked about this in budget sub um we've talked about this with you know in our staff meetings but we are planning to come back to you it will be a smaller more efficient central office District leadership um we know that that's happening we're looking at areas that we can um make non-staffing reductions how can we tighten other things up are there any other Revenue sources that we might explore we anticipate those are going to be very small in
099comparison to the overall budget picture and then we just know even with doing a lot of that there's still going to have to be reductions in school-based Staffing we are prioritizing things that provide Direct Services to students and other areas within the budget guidelines that you provided us so we're working through that now we will have our first proposal to you on January 12th and then that starts the school committee side of the deliberations so happy to answer any questions on the early part of this hi Sarah sorry I said that this is I know that this is not a surprise for a budget sub folk but for those of y'all who do not have the privilege and pleasure of being on that subcommittee do you have any questions yeah sure High answer and then
100Adam so what would the best way for us to go after our local legislatures be to get money from the government to help us you know one of one of the things that I think is important um is we have to really understand that the state funds education on a formula basis and legislators can't change individual legislators can't change the formula that's out there um they're you know chapter 78 has gone through a major shift and we've heard a lot about stupid student Opportunity Act the challenge for us in particular is that based on the relative affluence of the community and declining enrollment we are really held in a category called hold harmless which provides us minimum aid for a student which by law is set at thirty dollars per student so with five thousand
101students that's only a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and when you're talking about a budget that is you know over a hundred million dollars that's not going to do much um it you know it doesn't pay for even health insurance increases it pays for about a third of the health insurance increase on a good day so you know the that that's one challenge I think you know and you know our representatives and I have stayed in touch and I know they with school committee members you know I think we're looking at for creative ways if we have programs in the district we're trying to fund that are kind of startup programs or specialized opportunities to look for earmarks that may be able to help with that that is always helpful but I also
102want to set expectations to the committee like that whole Chapter 70 formula is really set in stone um and that's a challenge for the legislators as well the set in stone aspect of it not to not to disagree but they can change what they've what they've what they've put into what they've enacted to this point and there are movements out there to do things that would help not just accident act in Boxborough but more than half the districts in the state who were in the same hold harmless category and only receiving minimum Aid despite the fact that the student Opportunity Act will be in year three in in FY 24 not to get in the weeds but one thing that you don't even have to understand the mechanics of the formula to know that right
103now the state funds 41 of the foundation budget there are there have been proposals filed to raise that systematically up to as high as 46 or 47 percent by one percent a year that would so significantly shift the cost of the foundation budget between districts and the state that in my opinion that would uh that would result in a benefit to acton-boxborough is that going to happen I don't know the bill has been filed there's there's history of it there are progressive legislators who will likely file it again you know for my money that is the biggest thing that that could benefit not just again not just acting box bro but a majority of those of the districts in the state to be filed by Progressive legislators very interesting hello Adam it's very Progressive um
104I I want to just sort of remind everybody we talked about this a bit before and a lot of what's driving our budget is the the challenges that we have on the acting side of our district and so I just want to say that as part of our budget process we have members of The District administration and school committee who sit on on the ALG acting leadership group which you know the the core of that group is to look at the financial model on the how the town of Acton is going to be able to afford this within the constraints that they have and so I just wanted to remind everybody of that and then also sort of express my gratitude to the members of the Acton select board and finance committee who are being
105who have been excellent Partners in this very very challenging year for both of us and so you know we'll continue to work on the budget and we'll continue to work on balancing what we see as the needs for our students but also the ability of our residents to be able to afford all of the services that they want in town which include the schools but also plenty of other services that the town provides to them and then the other component I want to add here is that obviously the town of Boxborough continues to see an increase in the number of students that are coming from Boxborough and as a percentage of students in the district so while we are working really hard to keep the budget and the increase in assessments down for both towns
106because at because Boxborough is going to have a higher percentage of students again in the district next year their increase in assessment is going to be higher and so you know again it's really important to make sure that the residents of Boxborough understand that we're doing our best to keep our budget down but Boxborough is such a wonderful place to live that more and more people with kids want to go there and therefore they're sending more students to our district so those are just two more reminders that I wanted to share about some of the work that the the budget subcommittee is doing tune in on the 12th y'all tune in on the 12th thank you so much okay and so now we are going to turn to the administrative update up to the book
107challenge I'm going to let you all know how this is going to go um I believe that Peter and Deb are going to give a presentation or they're going to they're going to talk to us the members of the committee will have a moment to chat and then this is a decision that has been made I'm going to open up the floor for a public comment and I have changed my mind we will have 15 minutes of public comment instead of 10. all right so thank you Kara um so you know just to summarize the memorandum that I have in the packet um I want to just start by saying you know I think it's really important when we have difference of opinion about things that we don't try to read intent into why there's
108a difference of opinion I think we can make a lot of assumptions about people that way and so you know there's no effort to make an assumption why someone might challenge a book but I think one of the things I want to recognize is you know the challenge I think made members some members of our community particularly those in the LGBT plus part of our community really feel more isolated and marginalized um in our district and we've heard that from staff we've heard it from students and so I just want to reaffirm our commitment to all of our staff and students and families um who identify as lgbtq plus because we are a safe space for all of our students staff and families and we just want to make sure that we continue to make
109everyone feel safe in the community and that's not reading any intent into why someone may disagree with a piece of literature but it certainly just wants to recognize and hold the space for individuals who may feel impacted by it um we had a process in place and I'll let Deb just say a few words about the process but we've had a procedure and a policy in place around curriculum and in particular reconsideration of curricular materials for a number of years now so when we received the challenge you know the first step in that is to try and resolve it informally with the principal and if that doesn't work then we send that to a committee of our Educators to really take a look at that and try and understand if that's going to be appropriate
110for our either our school curriculum or our school libraries to have as a resource so we convened the team through that process they did reaffirm that it was an appropriate piece of literature to have in our high school library and so that was the decision of the committee so that will stand the way the procedure reads is once the committee makes that decision that is the final decision on the issue and that is not up for reconsideration for a three-year period afterwards so that's really where we stand on that right now you know it's always tough I think our team did a nice job really thinking through the complexities of this you know we heard from families who had concerns about it we heard from families who support that literature so our team read through
111that and has reaffirmed our commitment to that piece of literature for the high school library I just want to make sure I thank the review team I know you know for some Educators it feels like we're working in a very politicized you know Society right now which doesn't again all it says is our society is not agreeing on issues right now and I think for institutions and Educators they didn't go into it to be caught in the middle of disagreement Educators go into it to do the right thing for the students in front of them every day and I think that's the focus of the decisions they make but we want to also recognize that when there's disagreement we have a responsibility to consider something and consider you know the merits of any argument and
112so that's what we did um and I just want to thank them for their efforts on that because I know it's you know considerable time to go through the process of Reading literature read the reviews of books understand what's out there for other information about the books consider perspectives from community members who may disagree with each other about it and then to you know meet enough to be able to make a determination so thank you to the members of the committee that did that um you know and I also just again want to end by just saying you know we're really committed to continuing to expand the diversity of our our you know classroom libraries our school libraries this is something we've talked about for several years now and has been ongoing work of the
113district we really are committed to that and to making sure that all of our students see themselves identified positively in not only the curriculum but the resources that the school provides so thank you Deb I don't know if you want to make some comments sure thank you so as Peter shared the process that we went through as a committee to come to the conclusion and I just want to highlight from the memo four aspects of our rationale the book as a whole has a message about being true to yourself as well as prioritizing safety which will be valuable to any student who reads it the theme that ran through this book is safety and it really can be found throughout the book this is an important book for our lgbtqia plus students to feel and
114be seen to be heard and included in our community which also aligns with our District's belief that schools are places where they belong our high school students we felt are developmentally able to discern and think critically about the information that was presented in this book and from our school committee procedure where we are really charged to look at not just select passages or pages but to look at the book or the material as a whole and while the challenge cited isolated pages on profanity obscenity and sexually explicit information we felt as a book the whole book includes important chapters and discussions on bullying and harassment physical and psychological safety safe sex practices and information about organizations and allies and so we looked at the book on the merits of the whole book I also want
115to add that the committee recommended that the junior high follow a similar procedure to determine the appropriateness of this book for students of the 7th and 8th grade range it's first important to note that this book was purchased and added to the Junior High Collection by a former library media specialist at the junior high and not by our present Junior High library media specialist so we did convene another group another committee we followed the same procedure and recommended that the book be removed from the junior high Library I will open up two committee members hello Rebecca and then loss we're going first okay uh thank you Peter and Deborah I think that's great that we have this process in place so that if anything comes up we can handle it I did prepare a statement
116in general and I brought along a sheet about effective sex education and how to keep Kids Safe knowledge is power kids need to be empowered to think critically to explore and to be themselves queerness is not a social contagion it cannot be indoctrinated or taught it is nothing to fear sex is not bad it is not dangerous it is not shameful it is not disgusting as long as the participants are engaging in consensual practice there's nothing wrong with exploring your own sexuality kids need to be safe and how do we keep them safe by knowledge and communication how does removing books help how does that facilitate conversations with our kids it doesn't it does the exact opposite just like teaching kids silly names for their genitals makes them less safe keeping sex ed materials away
117from kids makes them less safe kids who learn about sex and consent are actually less likely to engage in it at a young age kids who are taught about self-pleasure are less likely to engage in sex with a partner at a young age we are not hearing any outrage over heterosexual scenes and books only queer ones I think it's clear that fear is the driving emotion behind this outrage not only that but this is clearly manufactured outrage it's not lost on me that right-wing News tells their viewers what to fear and how to take action all in support of upholding problematic systems where women and marginalized groups are made less safe fear of sex is not helpful fearing each other is not helpful now my kids go to a b schools so I mean that
118we are keeping our kids safe and our schools safe this is our community and we keep us safe thank you so I just want to sort of state and double check because I actually was a few minutes late to this uh particular meeting I missed the beginning of it but I just want to reiterate so the issue that was raised with this particular book was not that it was being taught or part of any curriculum just the fact that it existed in the library is that correct okay so that is correct and then the other question that I have is uh and forgive my ignorance on this my kids are very young but um do we currently have a sex education program in the high school right now so we do parents have an opt-out
119of sex ed and that's per Massachusetts law but we do have sex at in the high school and I think one of the things that you know we talked about with respect to sex ed is that you know many of the topics in this book that people found most offensive are also questions that come up from students regularly in the course of learning sex Aid um it may be that you know we don't look at it kind of from a heteronormative standpoint all the time in Sex Ed but these questions are very similar to what is already being asked by students of the the Educators that teach them and we did reach out to our health Educators at the high school to make sure that was an accurate understanding and so from the perspective of
120sex ed we really didn't find that this was presenting material that was inconsistent with some of the other goals we have in sex ed I think um you know what it was certainly was a resource for students who may be looking for more information or information that was more specific to their situation that wasn't covered in a in a you know in a way that made sense to them in in the course of class we did look at some of the language and it certainly was written in language that we would not use and our Educators may not use to describe sex to students in classrooms but it's also because it's a supplemental resource that kids could access and it was written in a way that was designed to relate to students not 45 year
121old Educators so that that was certainly a part of the consideration that we had as well excellent but so that does make sense but um you know so the information is there I just know you know one tiny anecdote I won't take too much time but the one book that was banned when I was in high school was the world according to GARP I was not even remotely interested in the book until then it is still my favorite book today because I started reading it out of spite you know I I thought about this uh a bit afterwards and I took uh Peter's comments at the beginning of our meeting last time around you know looking at this with an empathetic eye and you know I I realized that the parents who came up and
122and those have expressed concern about this that is that is their that is their concern and they hold that belief and I I want to I want to represent that um but then I I started to hear something in the language that concerned me which was talking about our children um and you know I think as a parent you are well within your rights to have concerns about your children because they're yours um but I think it's uh it's more challenging uh and and even so for this committee to represent what are the needs for our children and for our community and I think when you think about the broader hour versus mine you have to be broader in terms of what's available for people so I do want to recognize and hold that those
123people who have concern that is a that is a valid concern and I would encourage you to continue to work with the school administration to find ways to make sure that you feel your students are well protected in the school environment but the flip side of that is that I would like my child to have opportunities that may not be available to them in the classroom setting but may be accessible to them in in our school library thanks Kira um so like you had a last time brought some thoughts to mine and in the past couple of weeks we've had a book that's been in our schools for the last few years suddenly become viral we've had data points coming in from all around the country and meeting attendees from Acton and Foxboro and even
124Concord folks who just really wanted to huddle with us here at abrsd tonight outside groups have been providing tactics and guides and support for how to make quiet the noise that's coming from this book and in the same few weeks we've seen a recurring vandalism in our Junior High where swastika has been placed in open view but no one's come here tonight to talk about that no outside groups are kicking up dust about building talking points no coordinated messaging or supports coming in no one is here to talk about this active symbol of hate and why well they're not equal one is a book it's a sweet and funny profane and true and I know I read it last week it's on the Shelf of a library for anyone who may need to find find
125it to understand who they are it's a private object it's intended to be read and considered privately and at its core it's a way for the reader to better understand their identity and the other the other is a symbol that's used purposely to spread anxiety and fear and hate it's placed out in the open viewable and visible and purposely to create a response it's intended to be in the public and to antagonize and upset or even worse to recruit others who enjoy spreading this kind of message it's used to divide and suppress to hurt without contacts what we heard last time what we were sent could be disturbing but the book isn't intended to be pure ant it isn't meant to incite its insight into the world of a member of the lgbtq plus Community
126is going to live for the rest of their lives and as a community and as humans We should strive to build for our neighbors to support our friends and to help our kids become the best versions of the cells that they can be and this book it does that yet no one is here to talk about that symbol I'm glad the Review Committee came back with this and understood the book and I just think you know Lenny Kravitz saying it let love rule it's good advice for us let's focus on the good of this and not the knee-jerk reaction to find a way to try to trample down some other that we don't understand foreign I just want to say very briefly that um some of the things that have been said online just seems
127so completely out of bounds we are a community we are a town our kids all go to school together and I just want to say that some of the most upsetting things that I've read accuse or you know disparage our teachers and I I just I just think that you you know you really have to stop and think about it when you start accusing teachers of um having agendas I mean nobody becomes a teacher for the fame or fortune and the amount of oncoming that our Educators and staff have taken always but particularly in light of covid um there's you know a lot of I angst about what's going on you know the loss of positions last year and and the potential loss of positions this year everybody's trying to take care of their families
128and do the best they can and to be disparaged like that it just is beyond the pale as far as I'm concerned so everybody can have their opinions about books and that's fine and we're grown-ups and we can disagree but I would just ask people to think twice before commenting negatively about all of the people who work every day you know to educate educate our students because you won't agree with everything but if you've been in this district for even a couple of months you've met teachers who are just amazing and and really working really really hard and I just ask everybody to please just dial it down and let's set an example for our kids that's all I have to say I just want to ask you a quick question since Liz brought up
129the sex ed program at the high school are we including anal sex now in the curriculum it's talked about in regard also to preventing and talking about STIs yeah absolutely so just really briefly I um I'm really pleased that the students in our high school have access to this book all of our students are beautiful and whole humans which means that they should each have access to information on how to be their full selves even their sexual selves providing books that allow students to practice their whole Humanity Humanity safely and confidently is important and appropriate for us to do as a school district all of our students should have this opportunity because all of our students no matter their Identity or who they love are whole and human we should have a high school library
130that affirms that I'm grateful that this committee did a full and appropriate review and that this book will remain available for our students who might need it it is important to reiterate this book is not part of any curriculum it is not in classroom libraries it is not required reading it's one book of thousands in our school library that is available to be read or checked out is not forcing There Is No Agenda this is access and availability and if this book being available to our students means that someone will see themselves as whole and human and they'll make safe and informed decisions when they begin their personal sexual practice then we have done good work because that is its purpose any other comments before I open it up raise your hand if you would
131like to speak to this agenda item sex very good then we can keep it to two minutes each for a total uh well that breaks into 12 we will open the window to 15 minutes but it's looking like two minutes each my name is Evie Shoemaker I am the current president of the Common Ground GSA at abrhs High School um and I just wanted to say thank you um because within this committee and within this school district I can tell you that every other week I have a classroom of like 20 kids and we all sit in a circle and oftentimes we are talking about how we feel so safe in so many of our classrooms and part of that is because we have these books in our library and because we have discussions that
132are like allowing us to exist and I think that that is so valuable and I really really hope that people are able to see the value in those 20 people that sit with me in a classroom once every other week we feel safe and there's so much value in that even if it's just 20 people even if it's just 100 people even if it's just one person there's value in that and I love everything that we do here and I cannot thank you enough for making us feel safe thank you I thought there were like six or seven people anyway I'm still Korean still in Indiana Village um let's not pretend this is just about one book okay um it's you say there's not an agenda and yet the poster there's a poster at least
133in one classroom that shows the list of books I mean clearly this teacher wanted to raise awareness about these books an email was sent out to students I think in September about Banned Book Week you are trying to where someone is trying to raise awareness about this agenda um I I think there is compromise here um I think it would be pretty simple to tag certain books maybe they're the ones that are raised through challenges maybe they're about certain topics whatever and you could have parents when they fill out their emergency thing of the you know in the fall and yes you can give my kid Tylenol or whatever it could be the same thing my kid can have unrestricted access to library materials I think technologically it would be pretty simple and it would
134address a lot of people's concerns thank you um hi I'm David Martin I live in Acton I want to thank the committee for reiterating that this book is gay it belongs in our high school library frankly I think it's a thoughtful book oriented towards teens I really don't understand the objections yeah you know people complain that it mentioned grinder but it's oriented towards uh safety with warnings about what not to do It also says that quote downloading a sex app to find a committed partner is a little like going to KFC for a healthy meal and yes it has a chapter on sex with bold warnings up front to skip that chapter if one is not ready it also notes that straight sex is taught in schools um I think that's the key uh people
135objecting at the last meeting started by saying that they weren't homophobic but I didn't hear any complaint about straight sex books even generally available romance novels have amazingly explicit sex scenes these are usually straight sex um we cannot ban books because they are not accepted by everyone by the way this book and many other books if they're not available in the high school library are available at Acton Memorial Library thank you I I haven't read this book so I don't know this particular case but I read The Grapes of Wrath sorry I'll start with my name Jim Carrey I live on gustler road here in Acton um so let's see if I can start again I haven't read this book no that's all right um but I read The Grapes of Wrath before I found
136out that historically it's one of the most banned books in the United States um to my mind it's one of the greatest books I've ever read so I hope we continue to have a high bar and a thoughtful bar for determining the book should be banned and that we lean towards inclusion of all of our children as you said um as much as we can I think that's becoming a value of actin that I value a lot which is the diversity of the town the inclusion of the town and the willingness to embrace to work hard to embrace more and more differences instead of just guys like me thank you Christine case bold in Boxborough I just want to make a couple of comments with regard to safety and particularly Internet safety as we know
137both Instagram and Facebook claim to enforce a minimum age restriction of 13. it's established by entering a birth date in the user profile so anyway it's reassuring assuring to know that both Instagram and Facebook have instituted such stringent measures to prevent pre-teens from accessing those platforms secondly and more seriously the Grindr app is being used currently and has been used by predators to lure victims and commit crimes included including but not limited to sex sexual exploitation and assault human trafficking and prostitution and hate crimes this is a um a part of a WG gbh news investigative series on the subject of Grindr it's local I've highlighted some some pieces of it that experiences of people who have been victimized and I just wanted to to leave this with you I'm not going to read them
138I just want to leave this with you for um for reference because this is about safety as you said and this is a serious safety concern now the use of social media anyway I'll leave this here good evening Alyssa Nichol um I live in Acton I want to thank the this committee the school committee as well as the Review Committee um I do want to mention that comprehensive sex education um as Rebecca alluded to keeps our kids safer there's Decades of research backing this up comprehensive sex education includes the social aspects of Psychics education not just the biological it decreases intimate partner violence it decreases STIs HIV teen pregnancies so it's it's evidence-based that this is keeping our kids safe when my stepdaughter was I think nine years old she and all of her friends
139got a Facebook account by entering a different year for their birth date so they know how to access the things that they want to they're also students even though they're under 18 afforded constitutional protections and censorship denies our students their constitutional rights in fact the Supreme Court stated our constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas the ruling affirmed the special characteristics of the school library making it especially appropriate for the recognition of the First Amendment rights of students so I don't feel that an option for a form that parents fill out is really in the best interest of the Constitutional protection of our students and I just want to end with a quote from Lori Hulse Anderson who is the author of speak that censorship is the child of fear and the father
140of ignorance thank you as well can I make one more comment my name is Wendy Vino Taylor I do not live in Acton but I am an assistant in the classroom at abrhs I am also the advisor for the GSA known as common ground the club my students are beautiful amazing brave people they come in and hang out together and celebrate one another embracing differences embracing the things that make them the same but not all students feel safe coming to my club not all students feel safe talking to their parents about what books they take out from the library not all students feel safe having Frank conversations about the fact that they're going through puberty they are figuring out who they are as a person that includes their sexual health this book is I've read
141a cover to cover twice it is wonderful and it's unwillingness to shy away from what life looks like for people who are gay our students need this book for when they're afraid to talk to them 30 seconds or afraid to talk to their Educators they need this book for when they're not willing to talk to their doctors thank you so much my name is Michelle Densmore I'm an actin resident I'm a mom of two young kids a licensed certified social worker and a proud member of the lgbtq community I'm here tonight to thank the Review Committee for the decision to keep the book this book is gay and others like it available at the high school library as a therapist I deeply understand and have witnessed the devastating result of what happens when lgbtq youth
142have no reflections of themselves in their home and in their community the series The Theory of self-psychology highlights the need for mirroring the need to see oneself and others without this piece of development anxiety is more likely to manifest and self-esteem diminishes keeping that in mind and bringing to light the fact that suicidal ideation rates for lgbtq youth are more than double their heterosexual peers it is critical that we continue to make this school district a safe and welcoming place for all specifically continuing to offer the lgbtq youth in our community access to literature that mirrors who they are and who they may be discovering themselves to be thank you okay I wasn't going to say anything because I got pretty angry after last time and I didn't want to you know do that again
143but oh I'm Molly I'm a student representative I'm only usually here the first meeting of every month but you know I obviously wanted to come to this one after what happened last time um but one of the most common arguments um to twist people's words uh the homophobic agenda is the fact that people say oh gay people are predators and gay men are predators um so using that grinder example as a predator thing is I mean obviously that's going to happen but that also happens on apps like Tinder I have watched those shows on YouTube The Catching of Predator shows almost every single one of those shows starts with them using Tinder signing up with to Tinder pretending to be a teenager and catching the Predators by finding them on Tinder it's not just something
144that happens on Grindr and I'm sure it happens on Tinder a lot more because there are a lot more members so unless you can show me some statistics that say it happens more on Grindr then I don't want to hear about it I'm good with sacred silence y'all alrighty then I think that we're all set thank you for your comments everyone thank you for keeping it together I really appreciate it y'all did very well thank you so much and thank you for sticking around so long so if you want to take a moment because you would like to leave uh politely then take that second we'll take a breather okay thank you for everybody who came back we'll take this one minute break everybody so if you want to get up and stretch go for
145it right again [Music] it's YouTube really appreciate what you had to say well stated foreign I'll note that it's after nine so committee members if you could come on back and the next minute I'd be grateful y'all paging all committee members in the interest of maybe not being here until 10. we're probably gonna be here until 10 everybody just needs to buckle up hi hi what's up I'm sorry I got caught off guard okay this is a meeting that's coming back together y'all all right so um Peter is bringing up the calendar so now I am vamping I guess that's what the term he used until he's ready and then we'll let other committee members come in this is a first read of next year's school calendar typically a second read and vote are done
146at the next school committee meeting which will be on January the 12th comments from the public are welcome before that meeting so before that meeting please and thank you you ready Peter yep all right so thank you um welcome back everyone so I wanted to just go through next year's calendar with you and highlight you know a couple of changes um one we're playing with the format a little bit um this year to try and you know just think about how you know parents might want to access that and make it easily readable um so you know we put in things like NS stands for no school just to make it really clear what's a school day what's not um if there's a half day that's actually a district-wide half day you know don't take
147it like that for clarity's purpose so you'll see some formatting things overall you know the right hand column is much longer than the calendar that will all get fixed once we know what the dates are but we didn't want to spend a lot of time on formatting until we got the calendar in order so um this is a little bit of a shift from the current year and a lot of it is due to when Labor Day falls we have an opportunity to rethink a few things um and so what we're actually proposing in this calendar um couple things you're going to actually see three teacher days before the school year starts in this proposal we actually moved the professional day out of November on this proposal and put it before school starts one it
148allows teachers to have a little bit more time in school before kids arrive but two we were really looking at what we happened this year in November where we had two broken up weeks almost back to back you know we can't do anything above Veterans Day where we have to take that day off it's a Federal holiday Thanksgiving it's also a Federal holiday so we're off then and we know people are traveling and everything else but we thought you know where it's not a national election in a presidential election specifically There's an opportunity to maybe not have quite as much broken up time in the month of November so um that was one reason why we wanted to move that professional day this also I think came from our principals wanting to maybe think about
149sliding that earlier so um wanted to recognize that because of that we actually also have an opportunity to start the school year after Labor Day for the coming year and still end at a reasonable time so what we're proposing is bring the teachers back on the 29th of August so it'd be 29 30 and 31 right 30 days half September everything we lost the numbers in the teacher days um but you know bring teachers back for those three days give a long weekend there which is also that Labor Day weekend um and you know then start up with the Tuesday Wednesday schedule for students based on you know the traditional path that we've always set which you can see in yellow um you know we've listed things as no school days and then listed you
150know the reasons for them in the column just because nothing will fit on a calendar um the other thing that I am proposing in this one is to consider the day before winter vacation uh in December is a half day that's another similar to Thanksgiving that's a really high travel day and it's has not traditionally been the most productive days in school and I think it's just an opportunity to let people whether it's you know families or staff who are getting out of town do so with a little bit of a break so um you know we're not impacting you know our ability to meet time on learning by making that change um it really is just a bit of a structural change for everyone um around a vacation week and then you know as
151we get into the rest of it it's pretty standard calendar this does have us getting out on the 17th provided there are no um you know inclement weather days that we call we know June 19th is a Federal holiday that's Juneteenth so that's marked as a no school day if we got there we have to carry um 180 school days but we also have to plan a calendar for 185 days in the event of inclement weather so you know that would put us out you can I'm not sure it really comes out well but it's bolded on the 25th would be that fallback of 185th day on the calendar so happy to take you know any thoughts and feedback on this um you know you can provide me some commentary now or you know if
152you just want to think about it and then provide commentary please email me with thoughts on the calendar and we can we can do that I'm going to actually go back to my seat though before I start taking comments so that I can write them down I I have a self-interesting question is graduation going to be on the 7th regardless of when we yeah graduation I believe it has to be the first it can't be earlier than the first week in June so I I want to confirm that but yeah I'm pretty sure so we're talking about the FY I mean fy24 23-20 next school year yep so why is January 22 2023 the something we oh it should say 24. we'll fix that but that's January 22 2024 is a Luna New Year I
153thought of that's this year uh coming or New Year is we actually have it listed it's I believe a Sunday but next year January 22nd 2023 that's a Lunar New Year for the 24 I don't know what day is it let me look at it I'll confirm the date yeah because that day is for this coming new year okay I'll confirm Lunar New Year for the next year for some reason I thought it was on a Sunday when I looked it up but I see the date listed as the coming year what's that yeah I'll I need to look at it I just wanted to say thank you so much for this new format uh without a doubt every single year I miss one of those little like boxes that circles the number so I
154think this is going to make it a lot easier on my refrigerator thank you February 10th thank you um so I guess my question is just going to be about uh child care that's sort of the ongoing issue how are we coordinating with after school extended day Rec programs all that stuff for for the non uh federal holidays you know professional development days uh you know extra days that are off that parents wouldn't have off are we going to give people some information on how to where to send their kids sure yeah actually the professional development days are now no longer during the school year so that was actually one change we took it right out of the school year altogether and put it before the start so that would take that concern off the
155table um you know the other thing I know ComEd actually always wants to offer as many extended day programs as they can because it generates revenue for them as well they also have to look at available Staffing and the ability to get people in so I know you know Aaron does a great job that if she can get staff in and she can provide a program she tries to offer it but that doesn't mean she always can so but I'll I'll work once we set a calendar we can start working with her around what's available Marie you have some history on that I don't know if you want to comment only no school day in the calendar are the um the cultural and religious holidays that the committee voted last year um and on most
156if not all those school days Community Education offers a day camp slash extended day alternative for students are actually quite a few kids take part in that so those options are available certainly not for every single um federal holiday and that kind of thing but for as many as as makes sense and we can staff I know that the information is usually in emails the newsletters you know but I I feel like we could make an effort to make it just like really obvious for people like hey here are some options for where to send your kids because that's just like a chronic thing that people are always worried about and it always falls to moms to have to take the day off so that's important I just want to also thank Peter and staff
157for doing a great job in redesigning that calendar it's a lot easier on the eyes so thank you I I will credit Julie on that um she took it all on and she said can I come up with something new are you okay with that and I said let's go for it I don't know how it will be viewed but we'll see small question are half days considered full days for the 180 day calendar say that one more time our half days in this cool year counted as full days in the 180 days we need to hit yes okay yeah they are and um there's two requirements that we have to meet um we have to have 180 school days and meet a minimum hour requirement on the year for secondary education it's 990 hours
158for elementary it's 900. okay I got comments uh first of all I really appreciate that we're able to get all the information on one sheet um I think it's really important that we are highlighting the religious and cultural observances in there they show up on that that front page so I I appreciate that um I first looked at the calendar and the first thing I went to is the end date and I saw okay the 17th but if we have five days of school we go into the last week of June and our contract carries us to the 28th of June and we've been in this situation before so I was kind of concerned about you know if we've got more than five snow days and we need to go to the end of the
159month we start to bump into not only contractual issues but also summer plans I don't see any way around that so you know this I'm sort of talking about my thought process like oh gosh did we put in so many holidays that were now pushed out but then you back up and you see hey a lot of the religious holidays and cultural holidays are on weekends but it's because we start after Labor Day it's the nature of the calendar so I don't see a better way around it what I would say is from a formatting standpoint I might do a better job of highlighting for our families that we could go to the 25th so maybe put the 17th through the 25th in yellow so that they see that as a block of time that
160is variable depending on what we have for snow days just because you know none of us pay attention to this and we book summer camp or we book activities and then oh my gosh it's five days of snow days and now I can't get my kid to their their program so I think we should I don't see a good way around it but I think you know we have to sort of protect ourselves by put that in there so that that was my first one um the next one and I'm curious well my the next one I have is around uh the information that's on the right hand side I really like that it's all um chronological but then we get to the blue section which then breaks up and and breaks the chronology and
161so I might say from a readability standpoint take those the blue sections of district-wide half days scheduled half days all of that and somehow separate that from the chronology of the rest of the special events just so that you you it's easier for the eye to scan and then the last one which is the one I'm curious to get feedback from the committee um for years and years we've always gone down in the calendar left column down in one and one month reads into the next to the next and this column goes left right down left right down left right down and so I'm curious how people feel about that um because for me it's really hard because I see the end of the month and I want to carry it down to the next
162month and I'm used to seeing first half of the Year break second half of the year so some of my feedback is hey we probably don't need July in there and is there a way to instead of do left right left right left right we go down all the way one column and then flip over to the second half of the year in the in the other column I am sure Julie would be happy to retype this curious to see to see the rest of the committee thinks about that um because I know it's a pain in the butt but you know I think about you know this is a big change but then also changing sort of the directionality that you read the calendar could be you know that thing that pushes some of
163our families over the edge half of the calendars are going to be published without listing the month too just to be clear there is more page space to work with right like what we see in the packet is that white space around is useful we're going to deal with formatting after all of the dates are set yeah yeah and so I also have a question about I just want to make sure that so we we voted an inclusive calendar and this is the year when like Diwali is not is is not on Lunar New Year we it might end up being on after all it's definitely on a Sunday February 20 th oh okay great so um okay great so you know it's still fully inclusive it just this time around we we don't have
164days off for those okay very good um very good I'm I'm good with this so I I do think that you know as much as I love Community Ed and I think that we should coordinate with Community Ed I hope that when we hear feedback from parents about you know what do I do with my kid because there's no school today that we push some of our other local Private Industry to make those days available for them to make money with you know not a no school day activity right so I you know there's there's plenty of there's the kung fu schools and the karate schools and the sport camps and the gymnastic things I don't understand why these these businesses don't offer things on those days we're going to vote this calendar in January
165that means that they have a whole year to figure it out so I I hope you know we're going to get the feedback and y'all are going to at me now and that's fine but I I feel like that there's a lot of capitalist opportunity here to entertain and keep children safe and also make money doing so hi Evelyn not that my opinion matters anymore but yeah I love the school color and I have no kids in the school anymore but I just wanted to say that um those activities that you just mentioned gymnastics whatever they all have you know activities it's just not well publicized so I think what Rebecca is saying is and but I don't necessarily think that's our responsibility but maybe they are listening to us tonight and they can make
166the effort to make it more obvious that you know if there's a half day here there's a holiday here we have activities yeah because I used to struggle with that too it's like a really great thing for a ptso to figure out and publicize and put stuff out there sorry I'll just add Kira I I do think a lot of the local businesses and activities are well aware of the school calendar and do offer things it may be the last two or three years with covid and the way staffing has changed it hasn't been as available but I I think you'll see um as people are coming back to being more active that that there are a lot of things out there that I do think a lot of families are aware of but we
167can think more about it hi you're going to have to step up to the mic and tell us your name and your address thank you so much hello okay uh Kristen graffio Stony Midway Acton um I don't see a mention of the early release Mondays that the junior high and high school have had I wasn't sure if that's continuing or not and to add to that if those dates could be available sooner that would help those other extracurricular things do things on those days as well thank you yeah no at Great point and yes those dates were finalizing them now but those will be on the final version of the calendar that comes back to the committee in January for approval all right now we're cool all right friends um consent agenda items on the
168consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold on item for discussion and a separate bill I will read each item name and if any member would like it held please say hold members do not have to have attended a meeting to vote on the minutes one approval of the abrsc meeting minutes of 1201-22 two approval of donation of Sixteen thousand dollars from Friends of the Acton libraries to the abrsd libraries three approval of Life Touch commission check to RJ gray Junior High School four approval of donations valued valued over one thousand dollars from Middlesex Savings Bank to persimmon ium circus item five recommendation I mean recommend to dissolve class of 2014 and fish Student Activity ledgers item six recommend to transfer FIS funds
169to economics club and future Business Leaders of America and item seven approval of donation to acton-boxborough Regional High School softball program of batting cage and storage shed move to approve with gratitude to all the donors seconded okay so that was Adam and Ben I hope that somebody is keeping count yes you may all right so obviously we have a very large donation from Friends of Acton Library so we want to make sure we just thank them for that the dissolving activity accounts happens after a period of inactivity for so many years and then we transfer the money to something similar that students might be involved in so that's what that is and then the last one the softball boosters have been very generous in donating you know prep and site work for a batting cage
170for the softball program as well as looking at a shed for storage purposes that has been extensively vetted by our facility staff for location making sure the contractor was approved everything else so we're happy to recommend all of those um so why do we have a check amount on the live touch commission check agencies check there's no number there it was in the packet I want to say it was about a thousand dollars uh three 371.36 okay so I think then wait Jenny can you just vote on this really quick though can you just say I for all in favor thank you so much okay um any any absentions objections okay great thank you so much so all of those are approved thank you with gratitude to all of the donors okay subcommittee and member
171reports so um in your packet we've seen a memo from Adam to create a subcommittee to do a review of the SRO program I'm going to Adam do you want to speak more to the memo and the creation of this subcommittee sure uh so following our discussion um I drafted a memo uh uh Define or putting putting together a recommendation to form the subcommittee to review the school resource officer program um and the memo details out both the charge of the committee and the makeup of that subcommittee um we are looking for a pretty broad group of input uh folks to sit on that subcommittee including three school committee members uh superintendent of schools three school-based administrators representing each level two school-based staff with a preference of having at least one staff member from the
172mental health staff three parents to include one from Dei family advisory one representing students with disabilities and or multilingual Learners and also two students we will be sending out an invitation to fill out a form for those who are interested and I'd ask both members of the committee and the members of the public in the school Community to fill that form out and send that in and then we will try to form the committee um well we're asking everybody to sorry to fill out the form by the end of this year December 31st and then we'll put together the the committee and start meeting in January and there's a recommended Motion in the package should you wish to make it a question about the uh input that is going to be sent out do we
173know how that would be sent out and I'm just wondering if maybe as a secondary we could have like a link on the school committee website to be able to go in and complete that for input for membership on the committee or membership on the committee yes uh I think that the plan is to send a blast out to the school committee using our standard broadcast methods to everyone in the school Community right Peter yeah we've completed we have a survey that was created that asks people you know name what role do they play in The District but also ask a couple of open-ended questions about what unique perspectives do they believe that they hold that would add value to a robust discussion of the topic um and then you know ultimately where Adam's chairing
174typically the process we would have is Adam and I would sit down and look at you know the responses to that and try and select from people who are interested to come up with a good representative group from the district so but Liz asks where where the links are going to live so can can links go out in the in the blast and maybe in the superintendent's update and can they live on the website that's what Liz really wanted to know yeah we're going to put this out on the superintendent's update tomorrow so to All Families but can there be also a link that lives on the website so like you know if I miss it or I deleted it or something I can just go to the school committee website and also click to
175fill that out sure I just want to make sure that we're transparent and reaching as many people as we can yeah Community engagement so school committee members have to fill this form no we don't we need some way of after the fact having like not in this meeting right now having members of the school committee Express their interest s okay so you could email me you could fill out the form either way we just want to make sure that if you're interested let us know and then my other question is I missed a meeting when this was discussed was this when we elected Adam's chair of the committee how did Adam become chair I'm just curious so I'm not opposed I just know I hear you so so this came up about from the end
176of last meeting so at the end of so we had this long discussion um and the feedback that we got from the community was there hasn't been enough time to give feedback um and we haven't we don't have a diverse enough uh pool of opinions about this so while there has been a minority call for expedience to just get rid of this what we heard during that meeting was we didn't have enough to make a vote and and actually because of clerical error we couldn't make a vote anyway um and so uh I suggested that we create a special project to bring back some of that data and that is going to happen but to discern and shift through that data to take a deeper look at the um the SRO subcommittee that was part
177of the Dei family advisory and to get some more information from um Sergeant Sergeant Campbell sorry is that his title officer Campbell um it is Sergeant thank you um because he says that there's more there there is more information available now we're going to make this subcommittee to get all of those things so you know because I know that there is a robust discussion out there um happening in another space but you know anybody who watches that video can understand and hear loud and clear that that there is a large contingent of this community that wants to actually think about this I totally agree Madam chair I think that we're doing the right thing I think that we need to have a robust discussion we need to see the data we need to understand whether
178we need this program or not I think what we're doing is the right thing I guess my question is how did Adam become chair of this committee did you elect Adam did the committee elect Adam how did he become the chair of this I know we had to set up I I'm not nothing against Adam I'm just trying to understand what process God Adam to be chair of this SRO subcommittee so what happened was that he raised his hand and said he wanted to do it I suspect Adam that if you you know if you if you want to think about what leadership in that subcommittee looks like you can do that I think that first what we need to do is populate it and then we can have a discussion to be clear there
179was no communication within this committee after that discussion last week and I I wasn't any here so I'm not opposed to Adam being but I would have expected that if we were setting up a committee to talk about this that there would have been some openness in the leadership of that committee and that it should have been extended to the whole committee to say who wants to step up to lead this community I think Adam will do a fantastic job at it I don't have a doubt about that but I think that when we're setting up committees just like we did in the beginning of the year people were asked to do what what do you want to be part of this community do you want to take a leadership role in this committee that
180same courtesy should have been extended to all of the committee members for somebody else or of people to step up and say I want to do it that's all I'm saying I'm not saying that I have no doubt in Adam's leadership capabilities and that he'll do a fantastic job leading this I just think that I'm just gonna I'm sure people are thinking it but I just want to put it out there I think he would do a great job but I think that in the future if we're setting something like this up that we should open it up to other committee members to say who wants to do this and see what the interest is around I I probably would not have stepped up and this is not about me I'm just saying that that
181would have been a good thing to do Okay I accept that feedback except to say you know as as I have communicated I am a chair who's begging for Quorum for just about every meeting so when somebody raises their hand and says that they want to make something I say yes because right now I'm struggling to get people to come to meetings this meeting and other ones so I I accept that feedback and I will take it for next time but if there are if there are colleagues who would like to take on more leadership roles then I hope that you will actively communicate that because right now that's not actually what I've been experiencing and I understand that and I think that it's not fair to you as a chair to always have to
182ask I wouldn't be want to be in that situation and I completely empathize but maybe there's a reason why people are feeling disengaged and it's because of some of these things that people don't feel like they're included in the way that they want to be included so we don't know I'm just I'm just I'm pointing something out that I think that people are thinking and probably not saying anything about it as a committee so that we can make corrections I completely empathize that you shouldn't be in a situation where you have to beg people or have to always um be worried about Quorum and we should all step up myself included I just have had so many restrictions and I apologize for that but I think that part of the disengagement might be I don't
183know might be something like this Madam chair may I I accept the feedback Evelyn I think it's it's really well placed um I was the one at the meeting who suggested that we create the subcommittee and so I wanted to take at least that responsibility to follow it through and put together the structure but I think your point is well taken and you know might I suggest that including myself members of the committee who wish to serve on the committee can send their their interest in their application to the chair ultimately the leadership of of any subcommittee is assigned by the chair and so I'm I will gladly step back and make space for others because I whether or not anybody wants to that's all up to you to independently email Kira and I I
184hear what you're saying I feel care is pain too sometimes I will act too quickly because I want to help move things along so I I understand that Adam and I'm not I don't want you to take this message I don't know I don't no I think it's and it is it's not I I don't want it to seem as though um I'm challenging no not at all curious leadership in picking who should serve on the subcommittee I'm just pointing out something you know when when at the end of the year when um care was putting up subcommittees she did ask who who wants to be in which committee who wants to lead what you know and I I can understand why she's reached the point where she's Rich because there's a lot of disengagement
185and and she wants to take the fast passing down presents it makes total sense but I did also want to point out that we have to be cognizant of the fact that you know this varied interest on the committee and people there may be people that want to step up we don't know and it just it's it's not a bad idea to ask I think it's an extremely valid point which is why I will gladly step aside and let the chair and let the rest of the committee express any interest that they have in both serving in the committee as a Committee Member or in the leadership position I think it's really valid feedback and I think now would be the time to take action on that there's we've not set the the makeup of
186that subcommittee nothing's been decided yet we haven't even taken the vote so I think it's it's really valid feedback I appreciate it and so I you know I think the the recommendation now is that members of the public would fill out that form and Kira as the the chair could have the opportunity to review that members of this this committee can express their interest in serving on that committee in or out of a leadership position on that subcommittee and Kira can make that decision and maybe once that that committee chair is selected they can work together as a group to to evaluate and select the rest of the makeup of the committee from the community I I think that's a excellent feedback I appreciate it um thank you Evelyn for speaking to that because I
187think as a new member of the committee I've been trying to figure out is this a meme thing is this an us thing like what where are my feelings coming from I feel a little frustrated sometimes at the process and the way that things are done and it's also new so you know that could be part of it too um I think we're trying not to rush this process because it's so important talking about sros and lots of people have big feelings about it I know I have strong opinions about it but in some weird way it does feel kind of rushed because we had uh you know just we finally got to speak to the police they did not bring the data that we asked for conveniently and then said that they could bring
188it uh so it kind of bothers me that we're now talking about bringing this to a subcommittee where it's going to be kind of Hidden Away instead of continuing to talk about this in a very open way I mean I would happily put my hat in the ring not to lead something because I don't know how to lead anything yet but I would like to be part of the process and I'm happy to help in any way with anything um there's just something I don't know I I don't really like how this has progressed I guess it feels rushed I feel like there was so much on the agenda last time that we didn't really get to say everything or really hash everything out and I think that you know really open democracy it's a
189slow process to make sure everybody gets to say what they want to say and we can come to some kind of a consensus and I really feel like moving this to a subcommittee with just a few people it's going to feel very hidden foreign it's not hidden away when you do this they're all open meetings with community members which is what was asked for we're not rushing it we're actually going to spend months talking about this there was a push to just get rid of it that would have been a rush process what was asked for by this public was for us to take this time which I am now trying to make infrastructure to do processes process I'm I welcome your questions about how all this works I know that it's hard to do
190this as a first-year member and I I'm happy to um to help with that part again because I I'm I'm gonna be frustrated in public you know I I am a chair that is begging people to show up for meetings now here I am trying to make this the process that a majority of people who showed up last week where we spent over an hour talking about this over an hour talking about process to make this happen and so to now hear that you know the what we don't want this either when I'm trying to hold it together with with help but not a lot of it we just saw a member leave early for this meeting members haven't always been here I'm doing my best at no no I'm all set actually Evelyn I'm
191all sadly I do not recognize you no but no Evelyn I do not remember you can say that I'm a valid member of this community and it's okay I am not done be patient no I cannot be patient with this I do not think you're not taking feedback I am different I'm pointing out something I'm a valid member of this committee and I can speak Cara yes you are chat but you cannot silence my voice okay listen to me be patient I understand I just said I acknowledge your frustration I know no chair should be in the situation you are I I personally even said I apologize that I have not been able to make me that nobody should be in that situation there's no need for frustration there is a need to listen every
192leader should listen and make corrections to say that you're frustrated it's as if we're putting you on the spot and we're challenging your leadership that is not what it is that is not what it is I hear you I am a member of this committee and I can say what I see that is not going correctly or I have a concern about this is not a a an attack on your leadership at all I oh I'm pointing out a situation I accept your feedback and I'm grateful for it I accept the Green in the face the the feedback from this group I will take the data and the applications from the public and I will accept the emails from anybody who would like to be part of this committee and or lead it I look
193forward to getting all of that I don't feel attacked I am just putting it all out there because I think that this is hard this is a hard chair to sit in this is a hard thing to do hi Evan big comments it would be good to do this in the email or the invitation you put out more information say expected expected time commitment and also the timeline to say when we are going to make a recommendation right so you know some of us probably will be an audience go for it um to answer your second question first there's not necessarily a timeline for when we'll make a decision because I think the feedback that we got was we wanted to get as much information as we could and so I don't think it's fair
194before we've assembled the committee and decided what we were going to collect and evaluate to come back and say you have to do all that by X so there is no timeline the request was that the subcommittee brings the recommendations back to the full committee for deliberation and vote and then in terms of time commitment it's a it's a large committee it's 9 10 11 12 13 14 members I I think that it may be difficult to get everybody there all the time but one of the benefits of having a 14 member subcommittee is that you can have Quorum with a smaller group of that and hopefully you get the right people who can show up but again it'll be a balance of who's available when and that subcommittee will have to work to to
195figure that out I think particularly for this different than maybe some of our own subcommittees because we're use we're asking for support from members of the community it's more important to build the right committee shape than it is to say this is the day and time we're meeting only sign up if you can meet this day and time Rebecca um could I suggest that we have somebody from the select board and or the finance committee also because I think one thing that stuck out to me in the last meeting is that you know the funding is really an issue that if we didn't have the program teachers would have to take on more and there's no more funds to give them would that be a possibility to rope them in um I hear what you're
196saying there you know as we we shared there's no there's no money in our budget that supports that program and so should we decide to discontinue the program we don't have much of a say and how the town would choose to move that forward should we decide to keep the program then there's not much of a change from the the town's point of view and and I'm not sure and I'm happy to discuss you know I'm happy for us to deliberate that but I'm not sure if we want the finances from the Acton Police Department to affect some of our decision making clearly there could be a financial implication if we need to add services and supports inside our own District budget but I don't know if it if it's the right makeup to have
197someone from the the actin police or or I think so the reason I say that is because I think that could affect people's decision making on the committee is like you can't even consider getting rid of the program if you wouldn't be able to move those supports you know on to teachers plates because that's a lot and I think that at least for me is like wow that's a huge issue when it comes to reimagining how these roles could be shaken up or redistributed I guess but wouldn't that be more of a budget concern for the school committee than it would be for the town of Acton yes but I think at the last meeting I had said something about could we talk to the select board and ask about like how much do you
198guys spend funding that program and I know the SRO has said that they would need some money for the program because of private schools also it just money does seem to kind of come into play is all I I hear what you're saying and I think you know the role that we might ask for the town of Acton and and the public in general is to provide input and data about the potential outcomes of some of our decisions so I think that's a valid point to have you know that Outreach I'm not sure if it makes sense to have them as a voting member of the committee about the future decision I guess that's where you know I when I put this memo together and sort of envisioned it I thought okay so here's a
199group of people who are going to sit around the table and deliberate but they clearly don't have all the information so they're going to have to do Outreach they're going to have to send out surveys they're going to have to get input from all the right people so I think you pointed out a good set of stakeholders that we may need to that the committee may need to reach out to my apologies for my gracelessness I'm grateful for this discussion I look forward to more feedback and for all of your applications to this committee Evelyn I'm sincerely sorry for my gracelessness Community engagement oh I'm sorry well actually Beth can I take a vote because now I've got I've got no chair for it I've got no what can we do okay very good so
200then would somebody like to make a motion I would like to motion that we vote on the creation of this subcommittee seconded okay so that was Liz and that was Ben all those in favor anybody opposed any absentions very good yes that was unanimous thank you yeah Community engagement hello Andrew the acting box for a Regional School District school committee Community engagement subcommittee met on December 2nd 2022. updates were provided regarding policy connections with Community groups select board and parent teachers student organizations a school committee working session is being planned for February that will align the committee on message processes policies and procedures the ABR sd-s-c-c-e-s-c is also qualifying publishing platforms that will make releasing information easier the committee recognizes that access to information about the activity of the school committee may be an addressable
201issue new methods of promoting committee activities will be tested the acted Boxborough Regional School District school committee Community engagement subcommittee meets Fridays after each school committee meeting at approximately 10 45 in the morning thanks foreign so we are going to table policy because Jenny is not here to present the second read on the class live class size guideline so we're going to go ahead and skip that item we're going to go and head to statement of warrants if somebody has it begin to read Madam chair can I give an update on the school building my apologies yes hello thank you School building committee continues to meet while the building is occupied there's still plenty of construction that's going on we did meet last night we talked in depth about some of the future parking and
202drop-off flows but also there has been a bit of a delay in our ability to install the solar system so nexamp is the company with which we will be contracting with to install the solar system they have to get approval from eversource our local electrical provider electric provider and there's been a pretty significant delay on eversources side in terms of approving that solar plan what does this mean to all of us there's some additional cost to the school building project to be able to reserve some space in our very environmentally friendly permeable asphalt parking lot so that we can put the footings in for the solar canopies later on and so because of the delay from eversource Nex amp is delayed and that installation of the solar canopies has since been delayed but because this
203parking lot is extremely fancy we need to protect it and so there needs to be some work in advance to protect it so that when eversource gives nexam permission and nextamp starts doing their work that they can go and put the the basis for the canopies in without destroying the very fancy permeable parking lot so it's a it's the tune of about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars right now there is still adequate funds in both our contingency and what was appropriated by the towns to be able to support this so we're not concerned from a budget overrun standpoint but there was pretty significant discussion about about that and about sort of the the chain of where responsibility lies and if there's any ability to recoup some of that cash those things are still getting
204looked into but that was the the big update from the the building project the the main part though that this affects is our ability to get the solar system installed and as you know once we have the solar system installed that's when we start offsetting our electrical usage and so the time at which the building becomes net zero energy consumption is now delayed a bit because we don't have those the permission to put the panels in that was about an hour and a half of the meeting at that point my computer died so I was unable to stay for the rest of the meeting I don't know how it ended but that was the most important part of the update from that meeting from last night thanks if I guess one thing I've had some
205folks get in touch with me about potholes that are in the drop-off lot on the Elm Street side which is getting worse with weather rain use and whatever and I would like the building Community you have the opportunity to bring up what their plan is for that as well as the safety of the pathway from the drop-off through the boardwalk bridge I know at least one very good 12 year old boy that broke his ankle slipping on the path but it's great feedback Andrew and it brings up a really good point which is that neither our committee nor the building committee has a lot of say in that part of the operation of the facilities and so I think those concerns are best brought to the principals who continue to have regular if not daily
206communication with the construction company and and that's the best way to get something done quickly you know we as the building committee it's it's a larger committee than this and you know we don't know about you know how those daily operations work but we do know that both principals and and the director of the The Early Childhood Program have regular contacts um with the with the construction company so I think that that's the best path to sort of figure out what's happening if some of those things fall on our facilities side then obviously it could go through the operations Department and just to follow up on that Andrew my understanding is the potholes have been filled already um based on the email that I got from a staff member Thanking us for filling all the
207potholes so I'm I'm not sure but if you were there today we can take another look but um a random staff member emailed me and I said thank you I didn't know there were potholes because this is the first time hearing of it but I'm glad they were filled but we'll we'll take a look at it so I just wanted to confirm this building project it is not overseas the funding is not overseeded by the CIP right it's a separate thing correct you got my arms I do thank you before I read the recommended motion for the warrants I'll remind everybody that these warrants are sent out to the entire budget subcommittee in advance of checks getting sent out the budget subcommittee does review everything and sends their approval so that checks can get sent
208I would ask that all members of the budget subcommittee keep a lookout for those emails typically coming on Thursday afternoon and review and reply as quickly as possible so that the AP team can actually send the checks we need three committee members to review and send their email consent over to that group to make sure that we do get those checks out in a timely manner I do keep an eye on it so I think if we get to two I'll start sending some harassing emails out to those members of the subcommittee with that I move that school committee vote to approve the below listed warrants totaling 6 million 236 000 10.79 AP vendor warrant as follows 23-011 dated 11 23 2022 in the amount of one million six hundred seventy nine thousand one hundred
209twenty one dollars eleven cents 23-011a dated 12 1 2022 in the amount of 892.97 23-012 dated 12 8 2022 in the amount of nine hundred eighty four thousand seven hundred sixty dollars sixty five cents payroll vendor warrant as follows 23-011pr dated 12 1 2022 in the amount of five hundred seventy one thousand five dollars 41 cents and payroll warrant as follows p2311 dated 2 1 2022 in the amount of two million 883 230.65 cents seconded Ben's on fire today all those in favor all right all right no objections to that one no abstentions thank you very much that passes unanimously Peter would you like to highlight anything before we adjourn no any fyis are in the packet have a safe and healthy oh what was the summit what did we what we need to vote
210oh to adjourn yes have a safe and healthy and happy New Year and we need to make a motion I like to make motion that we adjourn yeah Ben seconded and Liz all those in favor good night y'all