Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 3/11/2021

001broadcasting now everyone and we are also recording we're going to start in a minute we're just waiting for yemen noting the hour in the presence of a quorum i call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order this meeting is being conducted remotely via zoom webinar for our remote participation policy b-e-d-j-a the following members are in attendance in the auditorium evelyn abaya diane baum may be late she's not here yet adam klein jenny cremer john peterson angie so yep and wang and myself and the following are attending via zoom amy christian murthy nora shine and kira cook in an ongoing effort to make our meeting as secure as possible we ask members of the public to view the meeting using actin tv's youtube channel found at the top of the agenda those who wish to comment

002during the meeting were asked to register 24 hours prior to the start of the meeting using the link also found at the top of the agenda these procedures are now posted with our public participation policy b-e-d-a-h b-e-d-h sorry there's no a in there this meeting is being recorded and will be posted on actin tv's website at actontv.org for our remote policy all votes will be done by roll call i will call each member's name and they will state how they vote thank you for joining us okay welcome everybody welcome back to being in person for anyone who's watching i just want to clarify that the the biggest reason that we have been remote the last couple of months was not necessarily for safety concerns but for convenience concerns for me because it's very difficult to

003run a meeting into formats so i'm happy that we are back tonight as far as public participation tonight those members of the public who registered to who would like to speak at that time at this time should raise their hands and you will be recognized for three minutes each we also received an email comment from the public regarding mcas testing and adam will read that for us now but he will not because he doesn't have it so i can read it or i think i have it but if you do you have it beth okay go ahead sorry adam so this was i believe it was addressed to all of us on the committee it came to each of one of us individually it reads in light of the coronavirus covet 19 and its impact

004in our schools and students i believe it is critical that massachusetts officials seek and obtain a testing waiver from the u.s department of education and cancel this year's mcas tests i was encouraged by the m.a association of school committees 112 to 9 vote in favor of a resolution calling on the state to suspend mcas testing this year in addition at least 28 school committees have passed their own resolutions calling for an mcas suspension and reaffirming the vote of the mcas masc delegates as your constituent i'm urging you and your colleagues to join them and pass a resolution calling for suspension of the mcas this year this resolution should also instruct the school committee to inform governor charlie baker education secretary jeffrey riley and our state legislative delegation of your position in favor of suspending the

0052021 mcas tests standardized tests have never been a comprehensive measure of student learning and during a pandemic cannot possibly measure student learning with any validity mcas testing during a public health crisis will only mean that all students will lose precious learning time while black latinx low-income english language learners and students in special education will fall even further behind during a pandemic where students educators and families are facing high levels of distress we must put the health and social emotional well-being of students and families at the center of learning and prevent the damaging effects of drill and kill test prep and it was signed julie schwartz from acton massachusetts sorry okay i wanted to be able to see it because it's easier all right so it looks like we have one hand raised in the audience

006so um corrine um one of them will and you have three minutes yep okay you can unmute and begin speaking hi um thank you i won't take nearly three minutes i love the letter that was just written i would also ask that the school committee um including that resolution that the state waive the graduation requirement for the classes of 22 23 and 24. um that is a state requirement not a federal government requirement um and they said they haven't been in school they shouldn't have to spend there's no guarantee they'll be in school right now they should not have to take mcas it's a gross waste of time thank you thank you corinne um so i don't see anyone else with their hands up with regards to what um adam oh there is someone else

007but let me just respond to to the letter that adam read in that that corinne spoke to is that if we would like to write a resolution that was not something that that we have prepared in advance and if there's anybody that is interested in doing that then um certainly i guess send me an email or volunteer now or whatever and we can put it together possibly for the next meeting because i don't believe that's been posted yet yes jenny i'd be happy to draft a resolution for consideration super so beth will just let you know when we're going to post and what the deadline is for that thank you and we'll consider that at the next meeting amanda amanda you can talk on mute yourself hello my name is amanda montero i'm an educator

008an acton box bro and i felt moved to make a comment tonight really just because for myself i needed to claim a small sense of agency by using my voice to just express what i know i'm not alone and feeling put simply i feel drained it should go without saying and i know you all understand this that this year has been exhausting and tumultuous and of course it is nowhere near close to being over i felt my profession disrespected by society at large not by any particular individual in this community but you know in the media and society at large and i kind of carry a baseline feeling of like an inner anger sometimes just that's kind of always in my stomach um and it's towards like what i see is like broken systems and

009sometimes upside down priorities we educators are accustomed to confiding in each other and we vent to each other as for our own support system and we and i think it's appropriate that most of the time we hide our true feelings from you know obviously our students our supervisors and and families and i think it's right that we do that most of the time that's that's the professional way to be but i really felt this week in particular of all weeks that for my own like emotional well-being i really needed to just express some small piece of what i was feeling so thank you for listening to me thank you amanda for sharing your thoughts okay i don't see any other hands up so we will move on to the next um agenda item which is

010peter's superintendent update well good evening everyone so in a few minutes we'll talk about transition planning back to school but i just wanted to highlight a couple other of things going on in the district i do have to say i think it's very fitting and appropriate to mention the fact that we are here in person tonight because it was one year ago tonight on a thursday maybe not to the calendar day but one year ago to the thursday that we shut down our schools and kids went home they didn't know that they were not returning our faculty went home they didn't know they were not returning and there's been a tremendous volume of change that's happened in education over that same period of time so i just didn't want to go without marking the moment

011and recognizing that and taking an opportunity to thank all of our educators thank all of our administrators thank all of the staff in the district and i also want to make sure i also thank all of our families and our students because what we have learned through the pandemic is there's no one group that can do all of it and we are all interdependent on each other in order to try and provide for our students during this pandemic and i think every group that i just mentioned has gone to extraordinary lengths over the course of the last year to be able to provide as much as we could for our students during that time so i just want to say thank you mark the moment and recognize that i'm going to turn it over to

012murray altery now and she's going to give a couple of hiring updates for our administrative searches good evening everybody it's nice to see you all um as you know we've been busy with administrator search committees and processes over the last several months you know that we hired joni dean to be our next principal at the high school to replace larry dory when he retires in june we are at the culmination now of the search for the director of special education and the search for the principal of mccarthy town the director of special education we announced last week that we have two finalists and we had them visit the district over the last couple of days so the two finalists one is jennifer trusslow she is the director of student services for the weston public school

013district and she was with us on tuesday this week and um dr courtney dunn who is the director of the edco program for the deaf and hard of hearing within the newton public schools and dr dunn was with us yesterday and then last night we had a family community forum with our two finalists i know many of you attended thank you for that and so peter is in the process of finalizing that and reference calls and all of that he'll make a decision and he will bring the final candidate to the committee next week this particular position the school committee votes to appoint upon the recommendation of the superintendent so next thursday night he will bring forward his recommended finalist for your vote today this afternoon we announced that we have two finalists for the

014mccarthy town principal as you know david crane is retiring in june and we had another extensive search committee of 15 folks we had 23 applications we interviewed seven candidates and we've identified two finalists very similar to the numbers um for the other two searches that we had so the two finalists are christie nieland christie is the assistant principal of the center school in stowe she's been there for four years and prior to that she taught for 11 years here in acton-boxborough at the merriam school so christy will be visiting the district on monday and spending most of the day at mccarthy town and a faculty forum and meeting with peter and all of those good things the second finalist is kelly o'brien kelly is the principal of the west brookfield elementary school in the quebec

015regional school district she's been there in that role for three years and prior to that she was the assistant principal of the paxton center elementary school in the wachusett regional school district for seven years so kelly will be with us on tuesday and then tuesday evening we're going to have another family forum for the mccarthy town community to meet christy and kelly and then we'll finalize that process over the next week week and a half or so so i really want to take a minute to thank the members of these search committees it's a lot of commitment and work we've had between 15 and 22 people on each of the searches representing parents teachers administrators in the case of the high school students and really it's been since november that we've been working on all

016three searches so um my heart goes out with thanks to all those folks that participated thanks all right so i'm going to actually just jump right in to our presentation in first agenda item which is our transition of our hybrid program to the return full in person so i want to be able to talk about a few things i'm going to ask dawn to speak as well a little bit and we're going to talk about a few things tonight one we want to just share a few pieces of data with you around why we believe it's safe for a full return to school for our students we're going to very very briefly update you on pooled testing i know we spoke about that i believe at our last meeting we are going to go through

017some planning updates at each of our levels for elementary junior high and high school we're going to provide a few operational updates around travel and quarantine updates that we've made and then we're going to talk just very briefly about initial budget implications so you know what to expect so i'm going to turn this over to don and she's going to talk a little bit about the science of returning to school absolutely good evening everybody these were a number of and some of these slides are from our school physician dr jasmine darling presented them at our family information evening on tuesday of this week for our elementary families about our return to school so a couple of these slides are hers we take no credit for them so these are a list of a number of

018the things that we've been doing this year all year to reduce our risk and everything from you know adding industrial air purifiers to every classroom certainly hygiene sanitizing and vaccination is the last one we're adding and very excited about so lots of things that we're doing that we will absolutely continue to do as we move into more of our students back and this is a study we actually just posted it on our transition to school website um and what's interesting is about about it is that this is the first study that they've done where they actually looked at distances specifically a lot there's been a lot of studies done about six feet um there's not been one yet that really sort of called out three feet by itself and you can see from the chart

019um although it's hard to see that the the case rates for both of them at three feet so the bottom the top two there's a gray and a blue line the blue is three feet and the gray is six feet and the bottom and that's staff and then the bottom one is the orange is three feet and the yellow is six feet and so you can see from those that really the trends and the patterns sort of mirror one another and actually peter as i think about our slide and a few slides about our own case rates the pattern looks pretty similar to our pattern of cases overall so you can see that there's not a tremendous difference between spread and the virus between students and staff regardless of the distance and then we also

020know that masking is the number one thing that we can do we we've learned a lot about a lot about a lot of things initially we thought that the virus might be transmitted through touching and surfaces and all sorts of things and we're finding that that's largely not the case and that it's really about masking and maintaining distance whenever possible that said we also know that the exposure risk based on how far folks are from one another does not necessarily change significantly unless we're talking about a situation where you're not wearing a mask so that very first line at the top with the long light blue line at one foot of distance that whole top row is is when you are unmasked and so you can see that from just from wearing a mask across

021those different things and then the masked one is next so we've got unmasked first and then the next two lines are where the source is masked and you can see the huge drop off even at a one foot distance when when people are masked in terms of um mitigation or not mitigation but in terms of risk of virus exposure so there has been some studies a number of studies done around this we know the cdc has come out about this um they came out a while ago and they go back and forth sometimes too so sometimes i think part of the challenge too is that there's a lot of different folks researching this and sometimes the state guidance and the federal guidance aren't necessarily in sync with each other so we feel we feel confident

022that we can continue hopefully with masking and i met with our operations team this afternoon for a couple hours to start updating our guidance and um you know we were reflecting on where we were over the summer and all the things that we were worried about the kids aren't going to really sanitize and the teachers won't have time to do these things in their classroom and when are kids going to get to you know how are kids going to have time to clean desks and they're not going to wear masks they'll wear masks for a week and then they won't and all the things that we were legitimately concerned about really have not come to fruition and you know our staff have been amazing at implementing our protocols and our kids have been incredible at

023really being respectful about masks in fact one of them commented that all the kids the junior high one of the junior high administrators commented that all the kids come into the junior high and if one of them forgets a mask like immediately they do this because they realize oh my goodness i don't have my mask on so really really everybody's been very conscientious and i really do think that that all those actions have been really critical and absolutely why we haven't seen spread in school these are our cases um and you know the the little bubble over there is that that's the top line on this chart is 20. so before we start to think that that's like in the thousands because i think we're sort of numb to those charts after seeing them on

024the on the evening news so often in terms of death and hospitalization rates um that's this is with 5 000 students and a thousand staff and if you notice the the down times are where we're either on a vacation all the ones at the bottom um or we're coming off of a vacation or sort of in the dip and you can see all of the different peaks i remarked to peter earlier i was like oh yeah that weekend was tough oh that weekend was rough you know like we can we can really and i know the nurses if they're if they're watching and and looked at this chart they could absolutely remember um you know all the contact racing we did during those sort of those high peaks the red line is students and the

025blue line is staff so and all that data in terms of where the cases were and when they occurred are all posted publicly on our website which there's a little cut out on this slide that anybody can get to our transition website it's one of the quick links right on our home page in the grass there you can click on it it's a little bubble with the three dots and you can get to the website for all of our data yeah i'll just expand just to highlight what dawn said you can tell okay well oh there's halloween and oh here we go um there are the cases and then you know you get through your two weeks of cases and it comes back down and then oh well there's thanksgiving okay there we go again

026comes back down and then up there's new year's and and the december vacation comes back down briefly but then you know it pops up for a couple weeks again um i think what i want to highlight though is looking at this tail end of that case count and in particular coming out of february break you know if we had looked at the pattern from you know halloween to thanksgiving to the december vacation and new year's and then coming back what we would expect from all of those we would maybe you know hypothesize that coming out of february break we would see that same spike but we did not see that we actually saw a downturn of cases and i think that's significant because i think the break of the trend is certainly noteworthy i can't

027extrapolate out why i'm not not that type of a scientist clearly but i think it's also significant we will look at our k-6 population which is the blue line this is now two weeks in a row of zero cases um within our elementary schools and that's including staff at those levels so i just wanted to highlight that because this we're talking about a return particularly of elementary school students and i think it's important to take a look at that um and as we progress we're certainly going to be talking about secondary students as well so tessa i don't i see jenny with her hand up just i just wanted to clarify because dawn you said that the i misspoke about what the lines meant thank you can you just clarify that please yes so the

028blue line is the k-6 in person and the red line are total cases across the board and so the reason that we highlighted the elementary is because we're talking about a full return to elementary school here shortly so to really sort of look at where elementary fell in the trajectories um and in the things that we saw does that answer your question okay yes both are in there yep thank you all right pool testing so um we've done we did a webinar earlier this week for gates families we also covered it earlier this week when we did our last week excuse me and then earlier this week we covered this with families that joined us we had almost 300 families on our webinar earlier to just sort of talk through this we're rolling this out

029one by one at our elementaries and it happens in the classroom and students there's sort of a station set up students go in they swab their nose they become part of a pool so everybody puts their swab in a tube and the tube gets sent to a lab and we've identified who's in that pool the lab in a 48 hours or so returns the results and tells us if any of the pools are positive i'm really happy to report that of the about 20 pools that we submitted on monday and tuesday none of them are positive from gates so that was really exciting news for us um and it wasn't unexpected but you just never know so we were excited about that and we also have had in the last 48 hours or so a

03067 uptake in gates families who have said that they want to partake in pool testing which is fantastic news for us we're excited because it really is not a great mitigation strategy if we don't have enough people participating so we're excited we think a lot of kids came home and were disappointed they couldn't stick a q-tip up their nose and they were like come on mom so that's what we think um so once that happens and we get the results so for instance if um yesterday we we would have received results that one of the pools was positive we would have had each one of the folks in that pool come to the nursing office and we would test just the folks in that pool using a rapid test to isolate the positive or positives

031that are there and what this does is instead of isolating an entire cohort just you know poof you're out of school for 10 days we are really trying to sort of narrow it down and from there we still would follow our same contact tracing that we would do regardless but we can do it in a much smarter in a much smarter way the whole purpose of pool testing is really to identify asymptomatic positives within the school so that's why it would be important for us to have you know we're hoping for 85 percent participation or so and we actually anticipate that as as parents are thinking about kids going back to school and distancing distances getting smaller this probably will be something that a lot of families choose to do so it's completely free and

032it's completely voluntary and if parents consent and then decide uh i don't want to do this anymore they can withdraw it at any time and vice versa they can sign up again if they choose to do that so we've been we rolled it out of gates we're going to start hopefully i think maybe late next week at a couple of the other schools and by the week of the 29th we will be in all six of the elementary schools so stay tuned well that was that and then this is really exciting information we think we know that this week actually today was the first day that educators could um really access vaccine now i will say that a number of our providers particularly those in sort of the health related fields so nurses occupational and

033physical therapists school psychologists aba trainers folks in roles where they're working in a lot closer proximity with students for usually more intensive durations were eligible earlier so we do have a number of staff who are already vaccinated due to um being in one of the the groups that was earlier than this so um we know that as of yesterday the governor designated four dates specifically at those mass vaccination sites for educators and we should hopefully find out more information about that shortly we also know that approximately 10 percent of our staff are now fully vaccinated and we know that many more are either scheduled to get one or have already received their first shot the other exciting news is that we partnered with our unions and our staff and with the um ptso pto and

034ptf's in the district and um looking for vaccine finders they really wanted to be able to help and so we've already been not we not me i haven't done any of it um these amazing vaccine finders have already worked to get 42 appointments so today was the first day they really sort of tried to like get in there and get after it and of the 86 employees we also know that five of them were able to get their own appointments and so they're off the list so more than half of the folks who signed up for help getting a vaccine have already um have an appointment so we're super excited about that um and we'll we'll hopefully have some more information on that and pushing for everybody to be vaccinated in the next few weeks

035so and anecdotally many many many more of the educators have scheduled their appointments yes we're going to talk in trains oh do you want to do any committee questions i see evelyn i'm not used to having a weapon look at everybody evelyn did you have a question yes i did um so i have a question about the pool testing don why are we not labeling the swaps in the beginning why are we duplicating efforts so for instance if there's there's a positive in one pool then we pull everyone out is there a possibility and i'm asking because i'm naive about how this happens is there a possibility to label those swaps in the beginning so that we don't have to pull a group of kids so yes there is it's extremely cost prohibitive and so

036the the piece with the pool is that the you're going in with the assumption that you're going to have a less than one percent positivity rate that's what schools across the nation have been seeing and so that you're getting really a lot more bang for your buck in terms of that isolation and then the kits the rapid test kits i think they're 47 to 64 dollars a piece then which that cost is that it's actually higher i think if you do that at the individual level right up front and we actually were thinking about just purchasing those for symptomatic individuals initially and sort of costed it all out so that's where we are now and it could very well be that as we move through this and think about the fall the strategy may very

037well change in terms of you know as as more and more folks get back vaccinated but it's actually a really cost effective way to do it um and to just isolate that now if we have like three positive pools in a school at one time that's going to be very interesting to manage um and so we're hopeful that that doesn't happen but that's also if it did happen that's a good thing because we're isolating a cluster and hopefully present preventing something that could have been significantly you know in terms of a spread right so so yeah you could hypothetically do it but um it's a lot more expensive to do it that way good question i have a follow-up question and just to if i can just add some detail to what don said um

038you know the state program is free and i think when we priced out the idea of having you can buy a program that will do you know pooled testing with individual results uh but that program was somewhere in the order of almost 100 000 a week i think um and so right now it's free through the state to do it this way for six weeks um so there's six hundred thousand dollars plus then having to do it after uh this is probably a third of the cost um to do it this way so just yeah um i have a quick question and another one um so um do we anticipate that our educators will be vaccinated by april 11 all of them at least those are that are interested in getting vaccinated we hope so

039and i would think at this rate it's highly possible um and not just i mean all of our staff not just our educators certainly but um yeah we're hopeful that we can get everybody vaccinated by april 5th thank you angie did you have a question thank you this is great news to hear the vaccinated date yes um i should have asked earlier for the graph that you're showing is the junior high and high school pretty much in line with the elementary school or they're not we have significantly higher rates at the high school especially and the junior high is less but the elementary by far has the fewest number of cases which sort of scientifically we you know that that plays out for us the bigger you are the more you seem to be able

040to contract and carry yeah i'm kind of curious but the curve is about the same right the curve the trend yeah the setting is about the same but yeah you you can if you subtract the two lines from each other you'll get the junior high and high school cases got it um as well as some of the remote program because we have been tracking remote program cases in district wide but you can kind of get a sense of that the gap is where the age goes and you can play with this online you can select certain schools and certain populations and you can play with it a little bit on our data dashboard okay thank you john dawn i want you to put your equity hat on and i want to ask you how you

041feel about us as a community of privilege working towards full vaccination yes right i i i i i sort of struggle with it you know my my parents are 73 and 74 and they don't have appointments yet um and so i worry um i worry about the fact that we've added 400 000 people to the pool and i don't think any of them are less deserving than the others and so without changing something else in terms of supply or availability it's it's a really tenuous it's a tenuous space to be in i appreciate that you asked that question ginny just real quick um do we have any comparisons between rates at our remote learning program and rates in our in-person program for covid yeah so remote learning program we have asked families to report we

042have had a number of families reporting it's hard to say whether or not everybody's completely you know sharing information with us about that and and that's certainly families rights to to not do that the rates are very low in remote yemen it's good to see everybody here right now very excited so uh two clarification question actually regarding the mask efficacy so why is a is that also applicable to the recent variance uh virus second is a so that efficacy is uh [Music] what is the assumption about the exposure time is this is just 15 minutes or one minutes or like a day so so we didn't include the slide that we shared with elementary families but our school physician did share a slide around the variants and what we're seeing is and i we chose

043not to do it because it was going into a little bit too much detail for a school committee meeting but with the variance there's probably an increase about four percent um roughly um across all age groups and brackets in terms of the transmission of the virus it's not like a 50 jump that everyone thought it would be and i think you know there's a fifty percent jump in terms of the fear but about a four percent increase in terms of transmission um you know so i think you know it's significant um but you know our school physician dr darling spoke much more eloquently and much more scientifically to that during the presentation and we're working on getting that published up on our website so people can see it and we'll likely send that portion of

044the presentation out district wide for people to see just because it really does explain the science well for everyone yeah that's actually posted on our um the presentation slides are posted on our website and some of them are here again tonight and i'm in thinking more about your question john which i'm probably going to be thinking about for a while because i've already been thinking about it um you know we've been frustrated as well because you know we have we have a plan to you know run 400 people in our community through a vaccination site if we could get the the doses and we just can't our health departments are only getting about 100 doses a week and i i i don't know if that's going to increase or not um it they've applied a

045number of our communities around us acton lexington concord sudbury a number of districts i'm probably not naming them but there's like six or seven of them and they've applied to be a like a mass vaccination cohort region and they're not anticipating according to the health director they're not anticipating being approved for that and so in that regard i also see some things happening at the state level where they are prioritizing communities of color and communities that have been especially hard hit by the virus and really trying to to pour resources into those sites um and even some of the the limitations with like you know if you try and get on and register they ask you where do you live you know are you in one of these communities that we serve and if you're

046not then you know you're going to go to the end of the line so more thinking thank you evelyn so uh school committee members and school volunteers considered part of the staff of the district and can they get vaccines if they wanted to i don't think they're considered part of that i just wanted to check thank you it's worth asking right evelyn all right so we'll move on to the the nuts and bolts of this now um i want to just start by ripping the band-aid right off and let you know what the status of what we're doing is as of tonight um so for kindergarten um the next change we're planning is april 5th the change though what's not changing is we're going to need to continue a half day program for the remainder

047of this year and but we are adding alternating in-person wednesdays to the am pm cohorts so they will each get additional in-person time over the course of the week i'm going to talk more about kindergarten in a subsequent slide so i'm not going to go into details on this slide for grades one through six on april 5th we will transition from a hybrid learning program to full in-person learning we will maintain half days on wednesdays with the dismissal at 11 50. for grades seven and eight we are planning to return on wednesday april 28th i'll talk about that after and why we chose wednesday and we are planning to transition grades seven and eight to full in person learning on that date um we are planning to continue with some kind of an early release

048but the details and time of that are to be worked out um and then for grades nine through twelve we still do not have a solution to present to you tonight and we are hoping to be able to have more information on our feasibility stun done next week i will share some preliminary data with you so you know why we're not not done with that you will see the red asterisk on all of these all of these continue to provide all of our families an option to continue in a fully remote environment for the rest of this year so when i say we're transitioning to full in-person learning families who opt for fully remote programming may continue for the rest of this year some desi updates and guidance it's been an active week at the

049state level the board of education voted to grant the commissioner authority to amend you learning time regulations on a temporary basis pending the subsequent board of the vote and what that means is he now has the authority to remove the provision that allowed schools to count any time spent in hybrid or remote learning programs from what counts toward time on learning so it was a different method that they used to kind of force a return across the state essentially any schools that continue in a hybrid hybrid or remote learning mode their time doesn't count toward time and learning and they would have to make up that time in other times during the school year so for example a school could choose to continue to be remote now and choose to go to school throughout july

050and august in order to stay in a remote setting they could choose to be hybrid and then choose to go to school on saturdays next year in order to make up that time but that change in regulation carries with it the force of law um and your district's chapter 70 funding um so it's not something to be you know taken lightly that has to happen um so the times that were specified by desi are april 5th for elementary schools for full return to in-person learning april 28th for middle schools for a return to in-person learning fully and they have not released a timeline for high schools yet because i think that many high schools are seeing some of the same challenges we are right now and we're trying to make sure that it's feasible before

051we start making promises with people um districts become accountable then to the former learning time regulations and i'll just say from our perspective minus those 10 days that deci cut off the school year at the beginning of the year we don't have to make those up that's okay for students who opt into the fully remote program that doesn't change and the time spent for those students in the fully remote program still counts toward their time on learning this is just for the predominant model of instruction in your district family choice surveys there's a lot of red in this because this is incredibly incredibly important language to draw everyone's attention to and this is unanticipated language we did not see this language coming out of desi the language specifically and you were sent this in the

052packet so if you read the whole thing i'm sure your eyes opened wide when you got to this section parents and guardians have the option to choose full in-person or remote learning for their students right there is no qualifier to that there's no if the district has capacity there's no you know what if they committed or anything like that it's parents and guardians have the option to choose either full in-person or remote options for their students we you know heard from the commissioner about that that is required of districts so if a parent wants to change now we are required to honor that request deci also added the following language to make sure people understood the implications of forcing districts to have that requirement for many just i'm going to read this because it's so

053important for many districts this will be a substantial programming shift mid-school year families should expect that districts may need to take challenging trade-offs to accommodate full in-person instructional mode for instance if students are currently learning in a hybrid model the shift to more in-person days may require changes in classroom learning spaces and in some cases teacher-student assignments if students are currently in a remote model or choose to learn remotely when the new requirements go into effect the remote learning option may look different than the model offered prior to the implementation of the new requirements what they are saying is districts it's likely that districts cannot honor what traditionally are a lot year-long commitments to continuous programming that has been offered previously or a continuation of a child's classroom teacher and we're already hearing many districts

054having to change children's classroom teachers mid-year heading into fourth quarter and that is a very very very significant language for us as a school district to pay attention to we have started our survey process we are surveying our families on excuse me we already completed surveys of our elementary families i'll talk to that in a few minutes our junior high school is preparing to release surveys there and again our high school right now is still to be determined some other selected updates from desi i'm going to go through the deci information first then get into our district distancing between students moves from six feet to three feet and then students should continue to face in the same direction there was some speculation maybe they would allow students to sit across tables if they were six

055feet apart or three feet apart that's not the case they need to be three feet apart and they need to be facing in the same direction we can use tables but students still need to be three feet apart and sit in the same direction that means that the table would between be in between the students the students may sit at the end they could have materials there but jesse actually suggested giving them clipboards and um having them write on their laps in order to keep them apart desi also suggested one way to manage this in classrooms that didn't have enough furniture would be that half of the students might be able to sit at desks at a time the other half might be in a rug or on the floor somewhere and then they would

056get to switch halfway through the day we're not doing that i can tell you that that's not our plan um we'll we'll be better off than that but you can see the seriousness with which desi is making a statement students need to be back in school and all of your operational concerns need to come secondary to getting students back in school in terms of transportation there is now no cap on ridership for elementary students right so you know maximum ridership on school buses is three students to a seat uh we have 13 rows um so our ridership i believe is 78 students on a bus we will not hit 78 students on a bus we can say that but we do not have a cap in terms of what families should expect in terms of

057the number of students on buses that's actually backed up by a lot of research that was done out of the chain school of public health at harvard university and really looking at the science of air exchanges in preventing and mitigating spread of the virus and air exchanges you know were really secondary only to masking in terms of the power of mitigation and so a typical a typical home has somewhere on the order of about half an air exchange per hour a reasonable classroom might be in the four to six range a really good classroom would be in the six to eight air exchanges per hour range we are up in that higher range and then we also added air purifiers on top of that school buses exchange somewhere on the order of 40 to 45

058air exchanges per hour so really the virus is not sitting in the air in school buses and so the the all the scientists have kind of come together and believe school buses are one of the safer environments for students at secondary level they did put some cap on it and that is two students per seat in secondary so that's just something we need to consider when planning our bus routes meals and recess are another area that we need to pay particular attention to when desi looked at the data the primary areas where we are seeing spread of the virus is during unmasked periods and so the guidance around that continues to be students absolutely must be kept six feet apart during meal breaks when they are excuse me it should say when unmasked this is

059what happens when you write the presentation on the same day you give it but students must be six feet apart when unmasked some of the key strategies to get there desks can be used instead of cafeteria tables that's what we do at our junior high in high school right now individual student desks or could students could sit at tables facing the same direction six feet apart outdoor options as much as possible i was kind of shocked given desi's stance on clipboards and rugs and things like that that they didn't include rocks and brass you know as as seating options for students to eat but they did suggest outdoor options with tents to the extent possible some strategies we're using at elementary school would be staggering lunch and recess so half of a class would remain

060in the classroom and eat lunch at their desks the other half would go out to recess and that then goes to six feet per student and then they'd switch and the other half would come back sit at their regular desks they'd get to eat the other group would go out to recess or we may also stagger time in between some half of the class may use classrooms to eat the other half of the class would go to the cafeteria and be able to be six feet apart so we have a few different strategies and then our secondary schools are looking at using multiple spaces including the gyms cafeterias and combinations of outdoor seating to be able to get to this lunch is certainly a big consideration i'm going to go through by different levels i

061want to start with pre-k just because i want to make sure i acknowledge that and you know for our all of our pre-k families but there is no change to pre-k programming it is already a full full day program um i'm not going to spend any more time on that kindergarten so kindergarten will be need to continue as a half day program through the end of this year the primary reason for that is a staffing challenge we had to assign some of our kindergarten teachers to two different cohorts or in the morning they teach a cohort of you know half like half of a class but in the in person but then in the afternoon they're actually teaching a remote cohort and i think the remote core might actually be like 24 students in it

062um so it's like a full remote cohort plus the in-person cohort that challenge we we don't have a way to solve that challenge in this short of a time period so we're leaving kindergarten as a half-day program this year students will however have an option to move from in between the remote and in person learning programs so families can still choose to switch um and then that program is a 13 and a half hour a week program which does comply with state guidelines for kindergarten so we're we're still within state guidelines we are alternating in person wednesdays beginning on april 5th so wednesday april 7th will be the am cohort will be in school and then the following week it would be the pm cohort is in school for the day so just to keep

063that in mind um elementary grades one through six the return to full day in-person programming begins is on april 5th some of the planning steps we've completed to date we have already gone through every classroom in the district and you know no two classrooms are identical in size and shape and so each classroom has its own individual capacity of the number of students and desks we can fit at a three-foot minimum i spoke with the commissioner and i've spoken with the head of kind of their coveted response unit and safety planning we cannot go under three feet of distance it's not full return means just stuff the kids wherever you can fit them full return is you still have to maintain three fitted distance and figure out how to bring all your kids back within

064that guideline so we've determined the capacity limits for all of our classrooms at three feet we've looked at what spaces we may have available in all of our brick and mortar schools for students to transition back and forth from remote programming we've inventoried all of the furniture at the elementary level and we've done a needs assessment of where we have tables where we have desks how many can we fit in different types of rooms and do we need combinations of things in order to have enough furniture in the district we have done furniture trading between buildings that we're in the process of where you know one school who may have an extra 40 desks because sending those over to a school that has you know needs 10 but then they get 10 more from a

065third school and you know it's you know i i think the principals have a game going around that but i'm not sure um and then you know we're already beginning to add that additional furniture into classrooms so that teachers and students can start to see that come in over the period of time and quite honestly we have to do it that way because operationally we don't have the custodial staff and facilities staff to try and do it all over in a short period of time we've completed our family surveys we are beginning to address scheduling modifications in special education and in specials a lot of student schedules have to be reworked as a result of this so that's in process and we have been developing and just about done with our lunch and recess plans

066for each school so that's what's been done to date in planning some of our survey results from families by the numbers as of today 124 families have requested a change from remote programming to in-person programming nine families have requested a change from in-person to remote you will note that doesn't balance 204 new transportation requests so that includes the families requesting a change but also we had a large number of families who could figure out how to get their kids here two times in a week but they can't provide five days of transportation so we have 204 additional transportation requests that we will work on re-routing our buses to the impact we do not have sufficient space in our home school classrooms to accommodate all of our requests we don't we are short by 52 seats

067in the home schools it was really important to us and continues to be important to us that if we're transitioning students from remote programming back into a brick and mortar school that they go to a school that they know and that the staff who are there know them so that when they receive them it's not this random eight weeks of school in some place that you've never been before and don't recognize anyone we really think that the peer relationships are critical for kids to transition and the staff to peer staff to student relationships are critical for that um we have not solved how we're going to manage the 52 requests yet it could mean significant changes in our district um and we don't know what exactly that looks like but i just want to prepare

068you and i want to prepare families that we have to honor these requests what i am going to caution is that we start to get into a blame game the pandemic has i think worn everyone's patience very very thin and what we've seen over you know the last several months is that when something doesn't go as expected there's sometimes a rush to judgment about that because it didn't go expected someone must be wrong and you know i think one great prime example of that is when we sent out the data around um we saw a spike in hockey cases there was a real rush to judgment that somehow the families of hockey players or hockey programs weren't taking the right precautions they were something happened it's called a pandemic and it's called covet that is

069not a reason to rush to blame or for people to jump on social media and start posting about irresponsibility or anything like that we have to stop that behavior it is not conducive to a healthy society and i'm just going to say it that bluntly families chose to transition from in person to remote or remote in person for very personal reasons and it is not our job to judge those reasons and it's no one else's job to judge those reasons we have to respect the fact that we're in the middle of a pandemic and everyone needs different things what we want to do is provide a really good high quality education regardless of the program students choose and so i just wanted to pause on this slide because i've heard a little bit in the

070community already and i've received some emails saying things like well they already committed why do they get to choose again well a lot of time has passed and kids needs have changed over time and we need to make sure that we take care of all of our students needs the way they need things done so i just want to make sure i make that statement loudly and clearly before i move on from it but we do not know how we're going to do this and i do anticipate that we're going to have to make some significant programming changes in order to accommodate these requests so please stay tuned i also didn't put this in the guidance but you know we sent out a survey and then we closed the survey because now we need to

071plan families through the end of this year can still request a change under the deci guidance however they may see delays of between four and six weeks in order to get that change to happen so if families are contacting us now we may not get them in this additional batch and we may have to plan based on what we have and then once we're settled then we would get to the new requests and i just want to make sure i'm clear about that because this is a lot to happen you know in quarter three of the school year um and no one has ever done this before so you know i would love to say this is going to be beautiful and pretty but it probably won't be and i think we need to prepare

072people for that elementary next steps this is still kind of a long list but the clock is ticking so we'll do it we need to determine modifications needed to accommodate all of those requests i think i just talked about that for long enough uh we will be confirming placements with families on march 18th round about it may take us a couple extra days based on the slides you just saw we need to continue to prepare our classrooms physically get the desks in there make sure the distance is there make any other changes we need to welcome students we obviously need to publish modifications to our operating protocols that we've developed and don is already working with our operations team on that we are also and i want to draw particular attention to this we are

073in the process of finalizing kind of a continuity of education plan for quarantine students there is no secret that this has been a gaping gaping weakness in our educational program this year our ability to keep students engaged if they get quarantined and that's had a significant impact on a lot of students and i don't want to underplay just how important it is that we have a good plan in place when our kids return so that if they get quarantined we can continue education for them that's meaningful so we are working on that as well we need to rebuild and then communicate our new transportation routes we need to really think deeply about you know this is not you know how you've been in a remote program for you know the last six months uh welcome

074to school there's your seat let's go and it's also not i know you've never seen these students in person in the classroom but here we go and let's get let's get started we need to think about the social emotional needs of our students and our faculty as they transition in through this process and that's something that you know for all of the operational work we have to do we also have to do educational planning to be able to welcome students in a way that's appropriate and meets their needs as well so i i want to draw attention to that and then certainly we need to finalize and communicate any of our schedule changes that need to happen so you know i wish i could tell you that a lot of this would be you know

075forthcoming over the next week or two it probably won't be this a lot of this is going to take us the full two three weeks that we have between now and thinking about four weeks before we return our students i want to talk a little bit about junior high school now return to full day in-person learning is scheduled for wednesday april 28th the first step in that process is going to be when the junior high school provides its guidance in returning to school options to families that's coming up soon and an opportunity for families to then submit change requests to the junior high level um that the actual requests will come in about mid-march and then the junior high will then spend you know several weeks taking a look at the numbers there figuring out

076what schedule changes need to look like i think you know having spoken with andrew i know similar to what we're anticipating at the elementary level you know significant schedule changes may need to take place for junior high school students who are changing programs at this point um you know and we don't want to downplay that so andrew will be communicating directly with families about that we do have the vacation week so where elementary classrooms right now we're gradually putting furniture in because we have no real break at the junior high level we have april vacation and that's where we're really going to you know take care of all the furniture at one time we have to take about 250 desks out of the high school in order to be able to have enough desks for

077the junior high school students and that's because right now our cafeteria at the junior high has all individual desks fortunately the high school has an ample surplus of desks to be able to have enough desks for all of its students and to give 250 to the junior high that could also potentially help us in sixth grade as well we have some shortages um so why did we pick a wednesday to return students fully um we need to think about the transition process and at the elementary level you know we right now are looking at doing a couple of half days and i probably should have put this on a slide so my apologies we're looking at the two days we have the friday off because it's good friday and we have that day off what

078we're looking at is the two days prior to that having scheduled half days for elementary school students those are both in-person days because it's a planned holiday week so they're both in person days so our students would get half days and then during the afternoon that provides our educators time to make sure their classrooms are set up appropriately it also provides us maybe some thinking about orientation opportunities for some of the students who will be coming in new to school it allows us to really just make sure we're ready to receive students at the junior high school there's no real opportunity because of the vacation to tie in the idea of orientation closely with bringing students back into the building and so what we want to do is have monday and tuesday as traditional hybrid

079days but the desks will all be in there students can get used to what things look like teachers can talk with students about changes to operational procedures make sure students are really prepared for this transition and then on wednesday andrew's initial thinking is to really take a pause and have that day serve as kind of a team building day and really bringing students together thinking about the social emotional needs of students getting to know each other building cohorts again so that then they can really launch into learning in the full five-day program so we think that's probably time well spent so i just wanted to share that with you tonight the high school as i said that continues to be to to be determined some of the things that i'll talk about briefly uh one

080of the things we're thinking about spaces and plans for how we're going to deal with our larger classes um and still allow for a minimum of three feet of distance again i said it before i'll stress we cannot go under three feet uh lunch spaces have to be assessed right now we're serving 250 students we now need to be able to serve 500 students at a time at the high school level and then again we really have to have a more robust continuity of education plan in place for any quarantine students and that's just such a huge priority for us as we we return students to schools um just to highlight a little bit of the reason why we're we're really having to think this through these are the number of sections per period that

081have larger numbers of students so you can see right here and i'll point to 26 is kind of the magic number our larger normal size but larger classrooms at the high school can fit 26 students at 3 feet it's different than elementary school because the classroom is larger but they can fit 26 students at 3 feet 27 students is not 3 feet 28 students is not 3 feet 29 students doesn't magically get to three feet either so we need to figure out how these classes are going to continue to function and where where we can have learning spaces for any of these classes that are over that limit there's some good news in this slide the number like all of these 27 pluses are already included in the 26 plus so where i would draw

082your attention to is actually this line right here the 26 plus column but we have about 59 actual classes in the high school that exceed or at 26 students each and i will say you know some of our classrooms at the high school actually have a 24 student capacity at three feet so we have to work through that operational challenge before we can give any commitments to it and that's currently what larry and his team are taking a look at we do hope to have that process you know far enough along to be able to share more information with families at some point next week it could go slightly longer but i anticipate next week deci as i said has not set a date for a return for high school students the state did say

083that once they do set a date they will give it districts and families at least two weeks notice to prepare for it so you know in my conversations with larry i said what we we need to get prepared now um and just be doing the work because this is not two weeks worth of work as you've seen from what i've what i've shared with you already so uh we're working on it we do hope to have more information soon i'm gonna turn it back to dawn for just a couple of brief updates around travel guidance and then you know changes in quarantine procedures so everyone's on the same page sure so this is exciting news i know for marie and her team that does subs in the district the the mass department of public health

084just released yesterday that um if you are fully vaccinated meaning you've had your final shot and you're two weeks out from that that you do not need to quarantine or do any testing when you travel anywhere outside of massachusetts so whether that's domestic or international it does not matter so that's excited for individuals who are vaccinated and we're excited about that however we have revisited this guideline in an area that we get quite a bit of pushback from families um and concerned folks about is that we still do require for international travel and for travel to certain places that i'll use puerto rico unfortunately as an example but our mdph has decided that that is a safe place to travel the cdc still lists it as a level four high risk do not travel so

085we're really trying to to be as conservative as possible when we're establishing our travel guidelines part of what we know is that when you travel and particularly when you travel internationally or to places that are far away and you're you're in an airplane for long amounts of time you're waiting in line with other folks typically for ticketing and other reasons and you're sometimes taking mass transportation to be able to get from one destination to the other so there's a lot of factors that go into that that increase risk for folks to be infected while they travel and so our goal has always been and continues to be keeping as many students and staff as safe as possible and this is one of the strategies we just reviewed this again with our health team which has

086our school physicians and our local health departments that are part of it and they really wholeheartedly support the continuation of the 14 days for those who are unvaccinated for travel internationally and for some of the territories so we're going to continue with that through probably the remainder of this year but good news on the vaccine front in terms of folks who you know can maybe get out of here for a little bit which would be good for their mental health and you did highlight that students who may travel with vaccinated people that doesn't count right right um you know i only know of one student who's vaccinated due to a job and um there probably maybe are others i have no idea um and that's you know but if if students aren't vaccinated then they

087still are under the 14-day travel guidelines yeah we did hear you know at least one inquiry of well i'm vaccinated so my kids will be all set to travel with me you know to mexico and then we can come back and and we're okay and we said no you're your kid you are your kids are not um so you know kids are still gonna have to quarantine if they do travel and i think you know april vacation is something we're hearing that and you can see it on the news a lot of interest in travel again so we need to make sure that families understand that these restrictions are in place um and then in terms of quarantine updates um we the only change we made to these um in well there's two changes actually

088because one of them today with the vaccination so if you are fully vaccinated again um then you not again if you are fully vaccinated comma um then you do not have to quarantine um or test or any of those sorts of things so that's also exciting news for us if somebody is determined to be a close contact and they're fully vaccinated um we don't have to have to worry about them following um quarantine restrictions in terms of returning to school or work so we're excited about that right marie and the other ch the only other change we've made to this since the really the start of the school year is that for students who are identified in school as close contacts we've not seen spread from student to student in school and so at this

089point in time or not at this point time we i think we updated this in uh mid-february we are looking at a 10-day quarantine for those students so um and that's based on the data that we have so if it's if it's due to exposure from something outside if it's due to sports exposure if it's due to something else we're seeing much higher rates of transmission in those and household the household spread is really when we talk to the health departments that's also what they see as well they see a lot of in in household spread which makes perfect sense we you know when you live in the same house with folks um that's what tends to happen so those are the updates there i think did you want to highlight something i just want

090to add one thing um i want to go back to evelyn's question about would all educators be vaccinated before april 5th just it's important to know that we don't have control over the number of vaccines available the location availability and all of that we know lots of people have been very frustrated trying to get appointments cvs opened it up to school staff and educators a week ago we know a number of people have gotten appointments today was the first day it was open for the massachusetts sites a lot of people you know tried hard some people got appointments some people didn't i looked at we have about a hundred people who have reported that they are fully vaccinated about half of them got the johnson and johnson which is one shot so if you get

091an appointment now for next week or the week after for one that requires two shots three weeks apart you may or may not make it by april 5th so you know we do think a large percentage of our staff will have the first dose by then but you know if we can't really say that everybody will be vaccinated before we get back to school with the kids fully in person so we certainly hope for that we were thrilled to hear there are four days dedicated to educators getting vaccines and we hope that will help and you know maybe johnson and johnson will be you know available on those days but we don't know that so we certainly hope so and we've advocated as much as we can but thank you marie so just want to

092very briefly talk about budgetary impact and i'll highlight the first one it's not fully known yet however you know what we do know is we have a couple possible sources of funding to look at one would be our contingency line in the budget the other would be any additional federal stimulus that's coming in to us you know we have heard it's probably somewhere in the order of between 2 and 2.3 times what the last sr round was so we're thinking it's probably somewhere in the order of a million dollars just shy or just north of that is that fair dave okay um so you know that's the kind of current thinking around the next round of stimulus the towns will also receive stimulus money that is available to schools by design um so that's something

093to keep in mind we have not had any conversations because it's so preliminary but we do know that that's out there um we know there'll be additional staffing costs right now we think it's fairly modest on the order of probably about 65 000 or so um you know we are monitoring the pooled testing program because they were finding that could be staffing intensive as we ramp that up so that could be in addition to what you see here but this is really for additional hours we're going to need for some assistance special education assistance some aba tutors you know positions like that but also some bus driving hours and crossing guards so that's where the the staffing money is we think there's possibly other budgetary impacts desks and chairs potentially something to sit on for

094students we could also see purchasing some additional tents possibly for springtime and or fall use and then you know there we know there's going to be some need for additional school and classroom supplies particularly around like manipulatives and things like that that students because they really can't share those things still so we need to make sure we have the right number of things for all of our students so just a quick overview there will be a budgetary impact we don't know what it is i put the 65 000 number in there now i it's not going to be that low but that's kind of our starting point and so now we have opportunity to pause and do some questions answers feedback okay so ordinarily i would go around and do um the school committee first

095but the person in the audience that's had their hand up has had it up for a very long time so um i will let you ask first maggie go ahead and unmute yourself maggie hi so i have a couple things to say here i first of all want to start by saying it's very disheartening that our district has done less than most others around us i speak to parents throughout the commonwealth and they've been horrified by the fact that our students are home for two days a week without any teacher instruction or interaction we asked the state for a waiver so that we could continue to do less but they denied that and we began to have a three-minute check-in for high school students three minutes three minutes is the average time that my senior

096spends being quote unquote educated on his day's home we've done far less than most surrounding districts and i asked peter light some time ago about live streaming in classrooms and he stated that it had been discussed but teachers felt it would be quote unquote too difficult i'm sorry but i think that we can all agree that all of our jobs have been very difficult this year and teachers are not exempt from that many students find it difficult to educate themselves two full days a week mr light also stated that there were tutoring services available at the junior high and he would speak to larry dory about that being an option at the high school but that was over six weeks ago and i've heard nothing so i don't expect a return on that other districts

097are taking their students back earlier than the state mandated times but we're waiting until the state forces us to do so our children have received half of an education this year our high schoolers deserve to be back our seniors deserve to be back are we going to wait until may to decide they can come back for two weeks it's it's just a joke we're waiting until the state tells us what we have to do and then we are doing the bare minimum what was our plan we're saying that this is it takes more than two weeks we should have had a plan all year long did we not think that schools were going to reopen at all this year i mean at this point set up tents outside and allow these kids to come back

098to school and be educated i think as a district that boasts of being one of the best in the state we should hang our heads in embarrassment because we are an example to absolutely no one that's all right okay i'm going to go to kira who's online first and then we'll go around the room can you hear me okay brilliant i i have a couple questions um i as a an rlp mom i i saw the slide about um how many students are migrating back to in person um and and then we talked about you know the changing of programming and i just got that little that little tug in my stomach um so i i love for you to talk a little bit about um maybe some thinking around the balancing of how that's

099gonna go um um especially because um i'd love to know a little bit about what the um what the new population of the rlp is going to be after our 120 students transferred in person and what that'll do to class sizes please yeah nokia i appreciate that question um we got the survey results you know this morning for the first time so today's our first day of looking at those results we do not have an answer to any of that right now we need to look at you know the specific classrooms across the district and we've started that where we can fit students where we cannot we can't make any commitments right now to to anything at this point um we're probably going to need the next week or so before we can really come

100back with a good answer for you on that um i wish i could reassure you around that but it's it's just too early and we do know we have to to to make that happen um i don't in i don't think that we're going to see significant changes in rlp class sizes um i don't think in terms of going upward um i think they're they may come down but but a lot of how we organize all of that is still to be determined angie yep thanks peter so um for the high school student that uh you mentioned about that um you're thinking because there's space problem and all that but what is the thinking right now are we planning to have the high school to return in full in person or what is the trend

101what is the thinking right now i'm actually asking a special request for seniors because like maggie mentioned earlier that you know the junior high is april 28th and they're getting out on june 4th there's not that much time of the seniors and they're really missing out the whole year and this is their special senior years so would there be any consideration to have the seniors coming back or are we thinking about bringing all the grades all the high school back now so you know and i i know it's frustrating but if i had any thinking i could share around that i would share it tonight but it's still still too early we don't have that you know i know i heard the comment from from the community remember a minute ago of you know thinking

102about just putting the kids outside in tents for classrooms you know the problem is there's no white boards there's no technology access you know when we we start placing kids around campus like that so you know we need to make sure that we put kids in something that resembles a learning environment what we are looking at doing is assessing you know where you know classrooms could shift within the building it might be that a class has to you know go to a gymnasium because at least they can get wi-fi access there to continue with technology um you know some of the larger classes may have to take larger learning spaces some smaller classes may move to smaller learning spaces so it's just we're in process and we have to narrow down exactly how we would

103get all of our classrooms to fit in the building will you consider prioritized seniors so you know we hope to have more information next week but i can't guarantee anything right now thank you sure all right john go ahead i wanted to thank you for a very cogent explanation of the importance of air exchanges mass and distance because i think there's been so much information and so much back and forth that it was really nice to see that you know at the root some of the most important things are things that we can in fact control and so i wanted to use that you know to remind everybody that we are in this transitional period and although people talk about vaccination as the shot you know some of the comments that have been made you

104know very appropriately talk about the fact that it's the shot plus time for antibodies to build up so there really is a duration so regardless of exactly how many people have been vaccinated everybody needs to be on their best behavior you know as we go through these next two months that will maximize you know everybody's chance for success i was really pleased to learn that our buses are actually wind tunnels i had no idea that was extremely impressive and then the last comment that i wanted to make is you know one of the other pieces of data that you didn't touch on was the work that was done by the nfl which um identified you know one way that it was good to get coveted and the good way to get covent is to go

105and have a meal with your friends um and so there really is a very special risk you know around meals so i hope that both in our planning you know we do what we can uh to protect you know students in our community and then i also hope that you know students you know are particularly sensitive to the fact that this is that moment of risk and exposure and will do what they can to help make sure that we can make it through to the end of the school year thanks chong um i want to point out that uh chair mckinley had to leave for a personal emergency so i'm going to take over um and we do have two more comments from the community so with that i will move to uh let's see

106here corrine you can go ahead and unmute yourself hi thank you um i want to echo what maggie was saying before um i the state required that all the districts have three plans for bringing kids back to you know for educating basically three different models on full remote a hybrid and one that had all the kids back to school so i don't understand why we're just now looking at how we get all the kids back to school there should be a plan sitting in a top drawer of a desk someplace that we take out and we implement i yeah shake your head amy i don't know why like why there was no plan and the plan like i said when i look in the district's plan it says oh if we can if we do

107this we'll do but we'll still keep six feet that's a plan to not bring kids back to school um again it feels like just like maggie said that we're doing the minimum and we didn't plan ahead other districts have already started bringing their high school kids back they're bringing their seniors back first their quincy has like 9 000 students they're they're gonna have their kids back in by march other districts comparable you know to a b in size they're about they're back in school uh you know by the end of the month i i'm very frustrated um this is a especially for the seniors i don't have a senior but i agree with angie and maggie get the seniors back thank you thanks uh amanda go ahead thank you adam my name is amanda bailey

108i'm one of the co-chairs of the special education parent advisory council and acting president i want to thank the administrators um for what is a logistical this is going to be a nightmare and thank you for your ongoing service and dedication to our kids and our staff um i just wanna flag for folks that we have a number of students who are going to be coming back um and may have trauma responses from having their lives upended um from being home without structuring routine and i would just caution everyone who is going to be focused on academics and we need to also pause and realize that these are children who have been through a year of pandemic some of them who are very young um and a nightmare scenario for me is seeing trauma responses

109treated behaviorally by stressed out adults so i really really hope that we will also spend time energy and resources on preparing staff for how to support one another but also how to support these kids thank you thanks amanda and lastly sarah go ahead and unmute yourself hi good evening my name is sarah lent um i am going to um also agree with the two previous community members who talked about the lack of of communication that we that i just feel is coming from um the district in terms of the high school students um i do echo current statement that i thought there should have been a plan that was presented to us in the in september or august of this year that there was supposed to be three models and that we could transition to

110either one of them depending on the way it's going so it's frustrating to learn that there are not just one but many over-prescribed classes that have 26 plus students in them and it made little sense to me why those even were allowed if we were always hoping to get classes to go back into full um full strength i would like to reiterate i i understand spacing is different in each community but ls our neighboring community they are currently have communicated to their families that they are bringing back high school students four and a half days with remote um four half days so wednesdays would continue to be remote similarly concord carlisle another neighboring district march 8th they are starting to bring back their high school seniors they have thought creatively about the loss specifically to

111the senior community um and they're starting to bring them back between march 8th which is i don't know three days ago um between the 26 to transition to them um inviting them back on wednesdays for remote classes followed by social activities in the afternoon i just would hope that what i'm hoping for is this a communication be forthwith i know mr light said that we're supposed to hear something um in the next week or so i would hope that would be done on the shorter end of it um families are anxious seniors are especially anxious to understand what's happening and two is to really be creative in terms of using of spaces i know desi talked about um talking about looking within the community broader community for instance grade levels with schools could be moved

112to local community spaces non-profits businesses everything needs to be on the table we need to get these kids back to school and um waiting to um for the last minute is um unacceptable in my opinion thank you thank you all right seeing no other comments i'm going to move us on uh to item 3a which is our consent agenda um in the consent agenda we do not usually require discussion and are and items are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion and a separate vote i'll read each item name and if there are any members who would like it held please say hold approval of meeting minutes for february 8th february 11 2021 march 4th 2021. oh we'll be read at the next meeting i guess if

113i had read that whole line i would have read that so the only thing on our consent agenda is the recommendation to approve an 865.49 donation from o'connor studios to the gates school to support student activities move to approve with gratitude second ah it does include the two first sets of minutes apologies yes so the consent agenda is for the meeting minutes of february 8th and february 11th as well as the donation amy and kira do your emotion and second still remain yeah i still move to approve with gratitude and i second with gratitude so we'll do a roll call vote going around the room first john yes yevin yes evelyn yes uh what's your name again jimmy yeah yes i'm shooting from the hip tonight uh diane yes angie yes amy yes kyra yes

114and myself that passes unanimously i'll get everybody's names right uh next item we have is a 3b budget update um shall i read what's in here first and then hand it over to you guys sure okay uh our meeting last week was totally dedicated to the fy 22 budget so there is no presentation or new information tonight if anyone does have questions peter and dave can address them now please note that the annual budget hearing is next thursday night at 7 05 pm at the end of the hearing after questions are answered the committee will vote on the final fy 22 budget which will then be presented to the voters at the town meetings in may and june are there any questions seeing none is there an alg update regarding the presentation of the budget

115to the alg there is not because there was a posting problem so we did not have an alg meeting this morning that we anticipated having excellent and uh the the boxborough leadership forum blf is scheduled to meet on the 16th uh next item on the agenda is an edcall update i'm sorry um sorry adam i just wanted to say that alg will be meeting next wednesday morning so we will be able to meet before the budget vote on thursday great thank you um so the edco update is is pretty brief i just wanted to draw your attention really the two items in the packet you know you obviously recall that we had voted in favor of dissolution of the collaborative uh once those minute meetings meeting minutes are approved uh we will send those over

116to edco to formalize that vote each district has to do that in order for the process to proceed and the majority of districts have to to vote in favor of dissolution i do believe that will take place but you know there were a number of districts that you know had maybe not provided all of the same financial information to the committee that i had given to you previously and so i wanted to include just two items in your packet you know the first is an additional assessment for the current fiscal year because as i've said to you before edco is operating on just about a million dollar deficit for the year so each of the districts is going to be assessed based on their percentage share which is really based on district enrollment so we

117have a seven and a half percent share our you know fy 21 assessment is about 83 000 um we've received an invoice for the first half of that um you know we can prepay all of it dave's going to work on that uh but i wanted to draw your attention that that's an additional budget expense for the current fiscal year um to prepay that assessment and then we got um a range of potential closing costs and i was saying range to see if john would perk up but we did get a range of potential closing costs for the collaborative and i wanted to draw your attention to those they are not insignificant um you know the challenge and i think the the primary drivers in there are costs and projected costs of employee health insurance

118post retirement that's an unknown of what the liability will look like because it's an asset but there's also a liability associated and it's probably going to take many months to sort through all of that and in addition liabilities are on the lease at the end of the the process that's also the other major liability in there so that's why there's such a large swing but you know it shows kind of the potential liability on the low range for acting in box for we're talking about a hundred thousand dollars on the high range it's about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars um that is you know something we we will probably have to be talking about how we would you know fund that if that comes to be especially at the higher range next year you

119know that is something that the committee may want to think about longer term thinking about a use of end for i don't know exactly but that's you know something we want to make sure we have a good robust discussion of probably beginning in the next fiscal year as those numbers and the range starts to come more into focus and that really is the edco update for the year um well not for the year until next time but for the evening so there's also a description of academic programs in there um you know we want you to know what exactly the edco collaborative does and even though we only have one student placed who's scheduled to graduate this year you know this is displacing a number of programs i think there are approximately three dozen students

120in edco programs now um and so you know it provides some really good valuable services has some extraordinary staff working for the collaborative but you know just just to understand the programming is important go ahead diane thank you got the the big microphone that's really clumsy so i had to figure out how to turn it on um two quick questions one is um so yeah clearly we didn't budget 82 83 000 in the fy 21 budget for this unexpected additional assessment so i'm just wondering where that money is going to come from and then the other question is is edco working to help relocate or just do something for these programs to keep existing at least some of them yeah dave i'll let you talk to the budget piece um in thinking around that let

121me just very quickly edco is working with um you know a number of different organizations to think about how programs could be relocated there are some legal things that have to be worked out about changing collaborative programs in terms of special education programming um that that came into play after the collapse of one of the last collaboratives in the state but um things like ideas programming they are actively shopping around and looking for looking for homes as far as where we would charge that additional assessment to we didn't budget it per se directly but we did indirectly in that excuse me we set up a contingency fund and to have something come at us this out of the blue that is not if we charge this to the normal uh line where we budget our

122edco costs there'd be there'd be a comparability issue going forward we have this fund set aside for unforeseen expenses i think it's appropriate that it be charged there any other questions or comments on the edco topic okay moving on to subcommittee member reports first on the list is a building committee i have want to bring up the fact that back in february mary berlin who's the chair of the school building committee notified us that we do need to begin to think about naming the facility we do know that the two individual schools inside the building will still keep their current names of the gates and douglas schools but the building itself does need to have a name in our packet this evening there is our policy ff which sets forth the policy around the naming

123of district facilities and there's a procedure in there as well that requires the school committee to announce the convening of a screening committee so i believe what we need to do is to begin to elicit some names both from the school committee and the community as a whole to form the screening committee and then have that screening committee go out and solicit names or nominations for names to be submitted so i'll ask the members of the committee to think about whether or not they're interested in participating or leading that committee and letting tessa know so that we can bring this up and form that committee at a in another meeting uh according to mary our timeline is about uh a year from when we were notified in february so we should um be prepared to

124have a name for the new building basically by the end of 2021 other updates from the building committee i was unable to attend last night's building committee meeting nor was peter we were attending a special education director meeting but we do have some great updates that are available online on the website uh about the building there's a lot of steel that's going up they've got i believe most of the gymnasium steel up with the classrooms that are behind that and they're they're moving on to the other building b which they they call which is the administration uh wing and the media center wing peter do you have any other updates you want to share about the building yeah now you've gotten to do the fun updates now i'll take everyone down a notch so we

125did learn one thing we encountered and we've known about for quite a while there was significant ledge encountered in the area of the bus loop and right around that same access road it all of the underground utilities have to go right under that access road through the ledge i forget i think they said like 3 000 cubic yards or something it's a significant amount of ledge and it's almost like what's interesting about it is 10 feet away is where they did the boring to test for it and there was no ledge so it's one of those things that rock underground is really hard to tell sometimes but they have been jackhammering it away at it and they did a complete survey of the ledge because there's a point where the jackhammering takes about three times

126as long and can really throw the duration of a project off and there's a tipping point where it becomes not as cost effective anymore unfortunately the alternative is blasting for that and so we are going to need to proceed with blasting for that area so the building committee talked about that last night and heard a presentation on it i wasn't there but i know what was presented they're going to be doing outreach immediately to neighbors blasting has progressed a lot from what you traditionally think about it's very targeted there's a real science behind blasting they coordinate it at times so it's not interfering with school activities you know but it is something that's going to have to happen even with blasting it's going to mean that the bus loop which is very very important to

127us is probably going to get delayed in construction we thought we would have that for next school year and that's important it probably won't be till the end of september so gates is going to become an extremely challenging site because at the same time we're going to lose almost the entire front parking area at gates because they have to start the septic system for the new building and so we are going to lose the bus loop area we're going to lose the septic area and we're going to have to make some really significant changes to how we operate in and out of that building over the course of you know this spring and into the fall so you know more to come on that but i wanted to bring that to your attention if we

128tried to continue jackhammering we would lose all of those areas probably through next december or january so that's you know the change in impact as many months so it really just has to be done we moved that forward very quickly because if we didn't start now all it does is delay the time that we get the project site back so um more to come the other kind of exciting news was the building committee got to preview some materials for the new covered walkway that's going to connect the douglas site with the gate site we had that specially designed by a bridge builder so you know if you're walking out tonight and you want to take a quick peek at the materials they're right outside my office i believe they were picked up today so you

129are too late sorry but it's going to be a metal roof for the structure and then a really just nice covered walkway through that area so we're excited about that that construction starts um in may of this year so we're going to lose access between douglas and gates starting in may and then we'll lose the bus loop and that area too so it's we we're we're gonna have to do some work on the gate site so thanks adam you have to take all the fun stuff it's about time uh next item is a policy subcommittee update and i will hand it over to diane okay we have four policies that were placed in the packet for your review i'm just going to go through them one at a time the first one is a second

130read so you've seen this before it's the policy efd meal charge policy i received no feedback on that policy so i'll open it up to uh questions concerns any changes you'd like to make and if there are none we'll entertain a motion i move that we adopt policy efd as provided in the paddock packet for the meal charge policy ginny seconded john motion and we'll do a roll call vote starting with john yes yevin yes evelyn yes jimmy yes diane yes angie yes amy yes kira yes and myself yes that passes unanimously okay second policy is also a second read this is policy gbaa commitment to an inclusive and representative educator workforce i did receive feedback to change differently abled in paragraph one line five and again in paragraph two line three to individuals with

131a disability for guidance of the national center of disability and journalism which has pointed out that some consider the term differently abled condescending offensive and inappropriate and also unfair as some advocates have pointed out we are all differently abled and they recommend using the phrase person with a disability so with that i will take questions and if there are none oh there are oh yes angie um sorry i'm still looking forward um for the uh i have a question actually maybe for down for do you do we know the uh the lgbtq percentage in our staff currently in our staff yeah that's not data that we collect right now yep so how do we know that um it will be represented are we going to collect that i would think probably not that that's not

132really data you can ask for right out of an employee i guess my general question is i really appreciate the initiative then we want to have our staff represent the world so our students are prepared but i'm just looking at this procedure and if we don't have that data and how do we know and how we can represent them properly so i think that it's it's deeper than just having data around it um i think for us it's really at least as we talked about it this we started this actually it was a year ago this week that we started talking about this policy um and this is really about how do we make it so that anybody who applies to our district feels like this you know from the sub school committee down they've

133drawn a line in the sand to say that they want people to feel belonging here regardless of their background their sexual orientation their gender identity their race any of those things that we really want to create a culture where everybody feels welcomed and valued so i think it's also more of a statement that this is really really important to us as we move forward just to clarify so you're saying we're not using data point to to uh in terms of hiring or recruiting i wouldn't say we're not using any that's just not one that we're able to ask for and require people to tell us whereas some of the other areas we have obligations for reporting at the federal and state level like around staff race and ethnicity that we we do report and so

134therefore we collect and can i continue yes so i don't know who to ask he's not okay okay so the other question is um i'm looking at the word um the lgbtq and bottom line is it's it's it is sexual orientation because actually i don't know i'm just using look at the word of sexual orientation versus lgbtq because i actually don't know whether there will be new things coming up because this is a policy so i would like to see whether we will consider instead of lgbtq and and we're using the sexual orientation the the wording so sexual orientation is only one piece of lgbtq there's also gender identity and gender expression and so when you when we use a more inclusive term like lgbtq plus we're actually including a whole number of other folks

135and um the the understanding is that that would also encompass new iterations as they come along like i've seen some people you know they start to draw out the lgbtqia i mean people start to draw out acronyms and so the the plus is sort of indicative of you know folks who who aren't cisgender and folks who aren't um heterosexual and so that identify in other ways angie i think at this point we've we've read this uh already in front of the committee and it's been in the policy committee for a year now the opportunity to sort of ask questions and make changes to it has come and gone so i think if there aren't any other questions i'll open up for a motion to approve as amended move to approve is mended second second all

136right and roll call vote starting over here john sorry adam kevin because i still have questions do you have questions about the wording and your comfort with approving the the policy as it's presented this evening i would like to request to consider that we're not voting tonight because the first read we have i remember i wrote a comment feedback and there's only one day to be considered for the subcommittee to consider there's only one day and this one comes out like only two days i would like to have the community to have some time to because this has a lot of impact so i would like to have the committee to consider to to vote next time and right now everybody is focused on the the returning to school so this may be overlooked and

137so i would like to you can consider to vote to take a little time because it has a large impact i i appreciate what you're saying angie but you know like we said this has been in front of the committee twice already it's been on agendas that were shared with the requisite amount of notice and we have a motion and a second to bring it to a vote this evening i would like to have a motion to postpone this to next time so we have a current motion that's on the floor and we'll follow through with that motion and vote and then if that fails then we can have another motion so i'm going to continue if there's no further discussion go ahead diane i'm just looking at your your email which was submitted in

138february and then the subcommittee met several times since then and has had adequate time to consider all the feedback right yeah i i didn't see this version until now until this time so okay at this point i'm going to continue with the roll call vote so john yes yevin evelyn yes with gratitude ginny yes diane yes angie just to clarify so this is a vote to approve that's correct so i would like to postpone no so that's a no amy yes kyra yes and myself yes so that passes with one with one no vote i can't do the math right now uh next one diane yep okay two to go um now these two are first read so you'll get another pass at this the first one is iga this is curriculum and instructional materials

139and it's a company procedures iga r1 and igar2 this is a consolidation of an existing much shorter iga combined with ijl library material selection and adoption which was noted in the packet as well um let's see i have to do we'll do that separately from igd um so i i just want to um first publicly thank um debucus and don bentley for bringing this policy to the subcommittee and i also want to thank policy subcommittee members evan and evelyn ginny and nora for working on this discussion about this policy was extensive and it spanned several meetings with a lot of really thoughtful and insightful conversation about how to develop a policy that captures our beliefs that the curriculum needs to be responsive and relevant and rise to the challenge of locating our own experiences within

140the larger context of an ever diversifying and rapidly changing world um i hope we have achieved that um in this policy so i don't know if there are any comments right away our next meeting is tomorrow but if there are no comments we'll probably that's the only thing on the agenda so we'll probably cancel that meeting but i will take comments now if there are any if you've had time to reflect john the one thing that i would hope you could comment just a little bit more on you know when the committee went through and looked at other school committee's policies around curriculum what kind of things did you see that are now reflected in the policy before us do um we took a look at a couple of other districts um cambridge newton newton

141as well as the mess yeah as well as the mask yeah g1 and so we actually pulled some language from actually a bunch of them and uh to put them together from to compile ours one of the things that we want to make sure too is we look to the library association you can see at the top there that we also included that as part of this policy because a lot of the library policies that were out there also spoke to the diversity of the materials that were necessary especially as curriculum and instruction changes and so it really is a combination of all of those and but mostly speaking to just the changes and looking at things from different perspectives done i think i also just want to highlight that um in general um the

142a lot of that we find was we review policy that a lot of the masc ones are not updated and aren't really reflective of where we are um and a number of our older policies are sort of the boilerplate um sorts of things so we're very grateful for our colleagues in other districts who have done some thinking around this so so you know and captured sort of what we were thinking what we were hoping with it so we didn't have to recreate all of it on our own okay the other the other first read is igd it's a brief it's adoption of new programs and courses of study angie yeah so for the curriculum part is that the school responsibility to in terms of going through the process is it the school's responsibility to update

143and adapt curriculum do you want to address that uh so it would be the schools in conjunction with coordinators department leaders building leaders um district leaders together to review materials it's important that we provide and you'll see some of the exhibits that are also part of now the procedures that we provide the supports in place so that not only can teachers review an educators review the materials that are currently in their possession as they're teaching but as they're looking to new kinds of materials so for example we now have a checklist for digital resources because we know that when teachers find certain things that might be useful we need to make sure we have a process that they go through that they're thinking about all the things that are important to the policy that are

144in here and that we have a procedure so that we can then vet those materials on the other end so it really is a combined effort but we do need to make sure there are some mechanisms in place to ensure that the materials we're using are high quality protect student privacy are protected by copyright all those different things go ahead angie yeah thanks can i have a yeah a follow-up question so during this process whether community has any perspective in terms of preview or you know provide feedback what's it in the procedures i think there are a couple of places in the engine here hang on just trying to locate it it's in the policy section thank you yep right here in the first part usually utilizing their professional expertise and gathering input from parents

145guardians caregivers and our community so there's that opportunity okay so our next policy subcommittee meeting will be um it's probably safe to say it'll be on the 26th of march yeah so if you know just read that read it over it's a the the changes are significant and so um i would encourage everyone to spend a little bit of time with this policy we love your feedback and um you have a while since we're not meeting until the 26th thanks diane uh health insurance trust update um yeah i just want to go backwards one second if you don't mind um to the adoption of new programs and courses of study and the point that i wanted to make is that for all of the the challenges you know presented by remote learning you know there

146have also been i think identified some opportunities in the context of remote learning so i hope that as people are reading the adoption of new programs and courses of study they're thinking about the positive ways in which there can be remote learning going forward and so that although this says that the school committee will rely on you know staff and the superintendent obviously to to do the details you know i i would certainly encourage them to look you know hard at how we can take advantage of everything that we've learned this year to expand you know our offerings with respect to the health insurance trust last month we had a loss of 319 000 that is now projected to result in a loss for the year of 1.8 million dollars which is larger than we

147had originally projected that will still leave us with a reasonable reserve but of course it does put pressure on future budget years by way of things that have happened in covid for people who you know listen to you know the governor prognosticating about various things he said you know what that 45 per shot medicare reimbursement um that's not adequate you know we will require all the insurance companies to to reimburse that not at forty five dollars but at ninety dollars um since we are self insured um that is not going to that bill is coming to us not to an insurance company so it's not a huge number but i wanted to bring that to people's attention just to understand that um these actions that people are taking do have you know real world consequences

148to you know our financial picture thanks john uh fyi peter was there anything that you wanted to highlight in the fyis this evening you know i think just drawing attention to elections and candidates is always important um i also just want to thank dunkin donuts uh for the generous donation of 300 kn 95 masks and we have another qpr training coming up and you know don has been very busy offering a lot of those so information is in the packet thank you uh i noticed kyra has her hand up sorry carrie go ahead no problem i i just want to take a moment to um brag about and thank the parent volunteers who are in the d-i-d-e-i family advisory um who've been working really hard on um surveys that will be coming out to the

149community regarding creating a welcome video for new families in different languages um surveys about our curriculum so these policies that we've been voting in are really important um our subcommittee that's been working on our um our relationship between schools and our police um have been speaking with principals and our sros and even our our police our deputy police chief um just many many hours have been put in by these um these parent volunteers um under leadership um of dawn and of co-chair lucienne who i just want to give a big shout out to um so uh we've been meeting um we have another meeting coming up this monday um and i just want the record to show that um dei um is still happening in the background um and that there there's a small army

150of really great parent volunteers who are working on it thank you kyra all right at this time i do since carol was just speaking want to spend one minute to embarrass her and note that she received the black excellence on beacon hill award um which i was happy to read about in the beacon and of course since we have the privilege of working with her we know that she deserves it congratulations i i share that award with evelyn um who also received it so if we're gonna embarrass me i'm gonna embarrass her too and also thank you congratulations to both of you i have to say it is an honor to be able to serve with both of you at this point we have need for an executive session pursuant to mgl chapter 38 section

15121 a purpose 3 to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining with the acton-boxborough education association abea because an open meeting would have a detrimental effect on the bargaining position of the committee the committee will not return to open session is there a motion so moved second second and a roll call vote john yes yep evelyn yes ginny yes diane yes angie yes amy yes kira yes and myself yes thank you everybody