AB School Committee Meeting - 10/17/19

001right okay noting the hour and the and the presence of a quorum I call the Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee to order this meeting is being taped by act and TV so thank you for that well we're not played at full committee but we do have a quorum we have a kind of packed evening tonight with quite a bit of quite a few presentations so I'd like to start with public participation invite anybody that comes to the meeting tonight to speak to something that's not on the agenda you're welcome to come up to the mic two minutes hand it over to our high school hello they trusted me to do everything I'm Carolyne for those who forget so a week ago we had back-to-school night and it was a big hit lots of parents went

002teachers enjoyed meeting everyone my parents had a good time another thing so the school has been really trying to make the seniors have less stress lately so every Friday there's a it's like senior Friday in a computer lab where seniors can come in get extra help on college applications essays and that's really helpful and definitely everyone I've spoken to in my grade finds it relieving that there's that extra support and career speakers were yesterday I did not attend Michael did and half my physics class was out that day or that period so I'm assuming it that was also a very big success and yeah thank you so much all right all right so I do have a number of updates for you as I've heard his tradition the junior member from Acton [Music] [Applause] you

003were surprised I was not so few updates for you first we got some good news the other day we are the recipient of an 80 thousand dollar grant from the state for security infrastructure upgrades school security it was announced at the acton-boxborough schools were awarded $80,000 for security improvements across the district it's noteworthy that $80,000 is the maximum grant awarded to any of the districts these funds will be used to continue to improve electronic access control at our schools so that's the key card swipe in the fobs for security purposes our doors we take the safety and security obviously of all of our students and staff seriously and annually budget for improvements that are identified by our staff administrators and local law enforcement these grant funds though will help us supplement local funds that are

004used to improve our school security and I also included a link if you are interested in reading the full text of the press release so that's your update I also want to congratulate one of our teachers acton-boxborough minuteman teacher Brian Crossman who works at our Jay gray junior high school received a Teacher of the ward a year from the and I want to make sure I get this correct the middle school teacher of the Year award by the Massachusetts Technology and education and engineering collaborative which is mass tech congratulations to Brian on the wonderful achievement we're thrilled about all that he brings to the engineering program and RJ gray I'm happy to report the testing I hosted our first superintendent School Committee coffee with the community last Friday it was a great opportunity to connect

005with families we had just about 20 families or family members in attendance which is a wonderful turnout for our first one wide-ranging topics I will tell you we've discussed everything from early literacy initiatives across the district to high school schedules school start times and the possibility to make microwaves available first students in our cafeterias so lots of topics all great things to hear from parents our next community coffee is scheduled for Friday November 15 more families can continue to join us I also want to give you one more update on our diversity equity and inclusion community advisory group this is the last update for a little period of time here but dr. Bentley and I just recently sent out notifications to family and community members who had expressed interest in serving on our Dei Family

006and Community Advisory Group we were fortunate to received over 70 applications representing a broad range of experiences and backgrounds from across the district for the committee 40 representatives were scheduled to serve on the advisory group we wanted to make that as inclusive a process but also needed to make sure it was a manageable size and unfortunately we just couldn't but we did end up going with 40 people that very broadly represented diversity of the community and also roles in professional worlds to make sure that it was really a broad ranging thinking group you know sometimes we've just thought on we're excited to begin our work with the group next week so we want to just make sure we thank everyone who extended the interest it takes a lot for people to put themselves out there

007I wish that we could accept everyone every time we have an opportunity like that but unfortunately finally actually there's a great picture here that I chose to share with you we had dr. Joanna Christodoulou present to our kindergarten teachers around early literacy and particularly the science around dyslexia that was at our grade level meeting earlier this month just so you know for professional learning for our elementary educators we do a full grade-level day with each grade level every year in order to provide curricular updates research on teaching and learning practices share best practices across grade levels and that's a district-wide professional learning so-and-so she put up this great slide I thought was fantastic if you take a look at it it's a series of license plates but it's fascinating to read and it was used

008to illustrate the difficulty of someone with dyslexia in decoding language takes our kids to make so what was great about this professional learning day not only was in our grade level teachers but we had administrators both school and district administrators from across all schools and districts attend as well as a lot of our special education staff so it was a great kickoff to what we hope is going to be a very long and focused effort improving our early literacy outcomes for our students so hopefully you enjoy that picture and then my final update for you and I apologize that didn't make it into the printed version but I wanted to also share with you that we are undertaking an effort to improve the effectiveness of our social emotional behavioral and counseling supports in a way

009that's sustainable for our staff if you remember last year during budget season we had to make some difficult decisions about what we could add in terms of social emotional supports across the district but we said we were going to come back and study that further what we did what we choose to do in the future is strategic and it targets the needs in a way that's sustainable for the community and sustainable well we're very proud of the quality of supports we have fantastic fantastic counseling staff across the district as well as all of our related service providers who support the social-emotional needs even higher expectations require us to look for ways to further increase supports for our student without increasing stress on our staff the district has engaged the district management group a Boston based

010organization to assist with this project some of you may be familiar with the Levinson's work smarter school smarter budgets the study is going to examine our current services programs procedures and staffing for supporting students social emotional behavioral and mental health needs through the use of quantitative both in district and benchmark district information and qualitative data gathering by using focus groups stakeholder interviews and classroom observations the review will also help the district understand how various categories of staff used their time because they serve students with this information in the district we'll be able to make thoughtful and informed decisions to ensure all of our students and staff receive appropriate support the result should be a better picture of what is working well in the district a better understanding of what the appropriate level of staff and

011services are overall improve delivery of student services I just wanted to comment that both my children so we Brendan I think we're all set so I have the pleasure if you remember last spring we announced that dr. Bentley was the recipient your clothes well there's the reason why here at Michigan State they call me dr. Madi so that's fine yeah thank you so much for allowing me to join you in during your your meeting tonight so as was mentioned I am a faculty member at Michigan State University and I have to give the obligatory GoGreen and just to give you all a little bit of a sense of who we are in the College of Education at Michigan State we consider the College of Ed to be a dynamic place for learning to teach and

012lead but we have a really long standing tradition around excellence in education in our College so folks in Michigan know this folks in Massachusetts may not so I think it's worth mentioning that our elementary and secondary teacher preparation programs have been ranked number one by US News & World Report for 25 years running and our educational administration and supervision programs also a top five program nationwide according to u.s. News & World Report so we consider ourselves to be a direct competitor with that little institution down the road in Cambridge so close to y'all so I am pleased to join you today to honor one of our esteemed alumni and your colleague specifically I'd like to present dr. John Bentley assistant superintendent for student services with the Nancy Kohl flesh Distinguished Alumni Award from the department

013of educational administration at Michigan State University this award was established in 2014 to recognize educational administration alumni who are excellent educational practitioners or researchers in the area of educational leadership and our faculty selects up to two individuals to receive this award each year dr. Bentley completed her master's in educational leadership at Michigan State in 2001 and her doctorate in educational leadership in 2015 and I have to just add here this is not in my notes but you know you guys we were we were so sad to see her leave the state of Michigan and our loss is your gain let me just put it that way this award specifically honors the contributions made by a k-12 educational administration alumna dr. Nancy collage who during her 12 years as an adjunct professor and three years as

014an assistant professor of practice in our department did wonderful work she specifically has worked as an educational consultant with aspiring and practicing educational leaders in districts across the state and I also happen to know that she is a real mentor for dr. Bentley as well and has been a longtime mentor for her as assistant superintendent for student services dr. Bentley has expanded her leadership portfolio in your district overseeing special education English language education counseling services preschool education homeless services civil rights bullying and social-emotional learning initiatives and our understanding is that she has very quickly established herself as a respected educational leader across your state some of her most significant work that our committee really honed in on and one of the reasons we selected her for this award is the focus that she's had on

015suicide awareness and prevention and also just the fact that she is an exceptionally bright educational leader who's very quick to learn and access resources for all students learning and very capable of promoting change so I am thrilled to present dr. Bentley with this award and I really want to offer her a hearty congratulations so we can all applaud now and I think I can see dr. Bentley off there I think in orange is that right yes there she is it can always spot the lady in orange and I want to just show everybody and we have not sent this out because we're gonna present it to her again when she visits us in Michigan but this is the award that dr. Bentley will be receiving and we anticipate we'll go in a very prominent location

016in your office dr. Bentley thank you all so much for having me and congratulations again Don we're really really proud of you [Applause] yes so my husband Ethan my two sons Griffin and Cooper they're 1960s here and my mom and dad Nancy and Alan many of you know Nancy from her baking only so that's the Baker that's when I always have treats and I say Nancy bakes that's thanks for being here with me tonight family and Nancy has been a mentor and was a former professor of mine I've known her for 20 years and so knowing the depth of her work this is beyond humbling to have been selected to not just from the university perspective to be a distinguished alumni but also because of the name that it carries so thanks again for being

017here with us tonight dr. Mattie sounds great thank you all again so much Congrats Don okay so we have a couple of pros we have a couple of presentations tonight the first of which is Nadine Eckstrom who is the executive director of the Ed Koch collaborative she has come tonight to share general information about the collaborative and its activities inside your packet the echo first quarter report has been included so that you can take a look at it and hopefully you were able to get a little bit of a taste before she presents so welcome to sex room yeah sorry don't mind if I just quickly set the table a little bit Nadine had reached out maybe a few weeks ago and said she was always welcome to come to a school committee meeting and

018where I thought that we have a number of new members over the last few years who may or may not be familiar with what Edco does as a collaborative it would be good to have Nadine come talk a little bit about edco and kind of present the first quarter report live as opposed to just seeing it on paper so welcome Maisie thank you thank you so you did receive your first quarter report every quarter as regulated by Massachusetts we are to provide collaborative czar to provide their members with reports every quarter so if there's something specific that you ever like to do it's always great to let Peter know and he can give me that information but typically we have a format that we do pretty much each quarter to give you an update usually

019your February or January report is usually our annual report from the year before so that's like your second quarter but I do like to send you some more updates about some of our enrollment but just before I actually if I actually just leave if there's any questions to the first quarter at the end but what I'd like to do first is maybe just give a little bit of an overview of what is edco and what is that what is a collaborative and and what do we do so I have a couple little notes that I'm gonna go by and explain to you but I will say that Ed Koch collaborative when we meet with the auditors every year they always tell us echo collaborative is really one of the most complex collaborative zhh in the

020state of Massachusetts because we do so many different things we work with federal grants contracted with federal grants state grants and then we work also with specialized services as well as professional development so a very complex there's actually 26 different departments in within Edco itself but Edco collaborative is one of 25 collaborators across the state of Massachusetts and we consider ourselves an extension of a public school system so we are considered oftentimes an out of district placement if you have students that require some out of district placements districts do try to work more with collaborative first before you can start to work with private school districts unless of course students have more severe needs then that's probably not always the match but we are actually celebrating our 50th anniversary this year on November 22nd we're

021celebrating it at the White House eighth house in Massachusetts and in Boston not the White House we will avoid that one but we also are an organization that began with it would used to be a corporation prior to the state of Massachusetts required legislation to have collaborative Edco collaborative actually was an organization a corporation that provided special education training and regular education training to individuals who are interested in becoming educators so that actually those districts were anywhere about 22 districts that served across the Greater Boston area and then in the 1970s we actually service nearly 3,000 students through Edco collaborative but it was actually by having programs within different school systems so schools used to have space to be able to provide opportunities for collaborative xand gradually as districts have expanded their enrollment the culeros

022have moved out and have had to find other spaces and organization organizations to host their programs in their school programs but we have we have a mission that has actually remained the same for nearly 50 years and its really at the focus is very very similar to your own mission actually I was reading your mission as I was in the audience but really developing a collaboration and collaborative approach providing high quality instruction we also on our end we want to really look at our cost effectiveness of our programs and what we can do for that but working mostly with students with at-risk disabilities edco services many districts across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but we do have 16 members and of course Acton Boxborough is one of the members in the in our organization our leadership

023team we used to have 8 individuals in our leadership team the restructuring my predecessor had restructured it so that we now have 5 administrators in the central office and that focuses on myself as the executive director we have an administrator or special education a business manager technology director and a director for professional learning because we still are if you think of Ed Koch in our Bedford office we're actually divided up into two sections we've got a school side and then we have a professional development side as well we offer special education programs our deaf and hard of hearing program is actually housed in Newton public schools so any student who attends it's at Newton North so any student that actually attends our deaf and hard-of-hearing program in Newton North will actually receive a diploma from

024Newton North not their own district unless otherwise specified at the agreement but that services currently we serve as students that are in grades 6 through 12 but we're looking into expanding that into the elementary level we're just not sure how we want to expand that yet we have to do a needs assessment for our member districts to see we also have a our partners program is as students with high-functioning autism and some of the students actually part of their day they are transitioning into Bedford High School because we're housed in Bedford so they can actually go and spend part of the day in Bedford High School we also have a student that's part of his day is actually in Concord Carlisle High School but the remainder of the time is at the partners program our

025North Crossing Academy and 45 day assessment is for certain students with social emotional disabilities and we have a new program that's called our ABCD program and it's the Academy for behaviors and character and development program and that unfortunately is for students that are being suspended in school due to substance abuse and so it's a shortened day it's also an interim alternative educational setting so they start off it's a minimum of 5 days but no more than 45 days and the idea is that we actually are bringing students in getting them some wraparound services providing them with counseling on top of the tooting tutoring and the academic needs that they have and then they will go back into the school and then we also work with the the sending school district to make sure they have

026the supports that they need so they feel that they can support the student to further continue their education in their school so the idea of this is to get them back into the school but with more supports than what they had when they left and then also we have a new program that's for 18 to 22 students ages 18 to 22 and it's our Academy for Career Pathways and that has been going really well we were able to get that program up and running because we just received a two hundred ninety-eight thousand dollar grant from the governor through the workforce skills grant and we have students who are able to work on certifications in the area of CAD and 3d printing they also have a culinary program in February first we're going to be starting

027our certified nursing assistant program for our Health Sciences and then we have a dual enrollment so they may attend middlesex Community College or a part-time and then our fifth attract on that program is to go directly into the Korea force and so how can we help them with the workforce and getting them jobs and internships and and practice that way students who attend that program they have to have past at least two out of the three M casts and so they are more of a higher functioning students that's the different transitions and what you see mostly in other areas it's usually a life skills transitions program so this is really for that other group of students and special needs that have not been able to maybe get a diploma for various reasons maybe they need

028an additional transition year but we provide those types of supports so it's been really cute watching the students bring me either a cookie that they make so I'm probably gonna you know gain my weight pretty quickly because they want to have me try it or they I have all neat little gadgets right now I have a cell phone holder I just was given salt and pepper shakers that they're all making with their 3d printers and everything going on so it's been cute to watch the work in progress that they're doing we also have contracted programs so for 40 years now we've contracted with Boston Public Schools and a youth alternative program servicing students that are at risk and then we have if you've heard of the special education surrogate parent program that's actually through Edco

029so we service all of the state of Massachusetts for the special education surrogate parent program that's actually housed in Westborough and Massachusetts migrant education program so again we're for the entire state of Massachusetts if we have migrant students we actually have some services that we can provide to help support schools and for the families we have an office in Springfield we have New Bedford and we have in Bedford as well and then in Wrentham there's the Wrentham Rehabilitation Center and that program is actually for adults with special needs that require residency and they require long-term care and so our population is going down the numbers are going down there in that program as they're aging out and then but the services and the needs we're seeing are really increasing so that's actually a partnership with

030DDS as well so we do a lot of partnerships with the Department of Education in our contracted services as well as other rehabilitation services and DDS we also have our professional development Learning Center it's called the McSweeney Center and I won't go into details with all of that but we have we have a lot of professional development opportunities of which Acton Boxborough is able to participate in and have participated in and then we have an ideas program and that's called our initiatives for developing equity and achievement for students for that time we actually provide workshops sometimes for districts we also have recently in a couple of districts we've had consulting to parent groups and to help parents with understanding equity and diversity and then we have conferences every year we have a conference last year

031we had zareta Hammond and it's held at Bentley University so we keep it small well we have no more than 300 people last year we actually had a waiting list because it was sold out so that's great and we have anybody who's a new school committee member and you need your new school committee orientation we do that every year as well we provide trainings usually we get requests from districts that they have new school committee members and we need to do our orientation we provide that usually on a Saturday a full day at Koch collaborative so I think Adam you did that last year right yeah I thought so so we have that we've also just recently partnered with William James College we have some interns that are getting their doctorate level degrees in counseling

032and so they're in turning over at our our programs this year and we've also just this year we've partnered with teachers 21 for our experienced special education directors Institute also partnering with the Department of Education so that's a full year I would providing programs and coursework on Saturdays but in in addition this year I have also reached out to different districts such as Palmer public schools Gloucester Public Schools and I also have been working with SCC collaborative on their Institute and providing trainings and opportunities in those districts and any trainings that the collaborative is offering we're trying to work together with different collaborative zazz well we currently have 26 roundtables and I think Acton Boxborough is gets a star for the amount of roundtables that everybody actually participates in I don't know if there's a

033roundtable that Acton Boxborough doesn't participate in so that's that's wonderful to see including school committee roundtables so please if you're interested in that please let us know we'd love to get you all on the list I think some of you have actually participated in that we have two new roundtables that we're starting this year one is for out of district coordinators or educational team leaders and also for transition specialists as well so we finally we've gotten some interest in those two areas so we decided to expand round tables are only offered to people who are members to districts who are members of edco so we have had some people who have no longer become a member of Edco but they found the round tables really effective and they asked to come in but we've actually

034turned them down because if you're not a member it's a service that we provide to our members only we also have an educational Leadership Institute that has been running since I think it was either 1992 or 1997 but we've had over 300 graduates since 2003 and more than 70 graduates are in leadership roles within edco districts and nearly 150 graduates are in leadership roles outside of Edco but it's an 18-month part-time program that people have been able to participate in and we just got a review and it was a great review from the Department of Education with that program as well we have 16 board members that are voting members and we have 12 advisory members they're non-voting members our exit we have an executive finance committee which is a subcommittee that actually makes recommendations

035to the full board our board responsibility is very similar to school committee responsibilities is the financial the accountability and then the oversight you know which all is very similar and then our our collaborative we have been working with grants we've been developing new proposals for new grants and trying to work on those we have curriculum that we are able to provide some support consultation home-based services research or any types of partnering that we can find with the Department of Education as well so this year is will be our third year that Russell Johnston who's the deputy superintendent of special education I mean deputy Commissioner of special education from the Department of Education he has his regional meetings for Greater Boston area housed at edco because we do have the zoom capacity in our organization and

036so we are able for example on October 25th is when we're having our first regional meeting with the Deputy Commissioner this year and we have 70 people that have signed up to be in house and we have over 78 I think or 80 at this point that have signed up to also be on the zoom capacity so in that meeting we have a minimum of 150 people that will be in attendance on that one day so the we work very closely with deci on that in regards to what does edco collaborative what is the cost for you to be a member back in 2017 it was a thirty thousand dollar well twenty-nine thousand four hundred and nine dollars they have cut the assessment costs down to nearly fifty three percent over the last few years

037and this year for acton-boxborough it's fourteen thousand and fifteen dollars so it's been cut extremely through the years by doing some restructuring what does this what does this give you for a value you have professional development savings so anybody who's a member you get a 20% discount on all of the professional development offerings just last year alone you had more than 60 [Music] acton-boxborough participants in our FY 19 which is actually approximately about 3% of all of our PD has a have been including acton-boxborough employees also the there's tuition so if you have anybody that comes into our in our tuition it's also a 20% discount on tuition in some cases if you have two students it's it's more than saving you more than your assessment costs so and we also have special education round

038tables again all that PD that happens some happen four times a year some six some eight some even ten times some it every month so some a lot more progressive on one can't they can do and so I think that's trying to give all of it to you in a very short period of time without overwhelming although I probably did but we do have a lot happening at Co we're very excited about all the different work and I do feel we're we're moving at a very very quick pace but a positive pace at this time so I'd love any questions I'm tempted to say really is that all you do thank God I've always been very impressed with them with the collaborative x' and the and the just the breath of work and the and

039the creative things that they're doing and Edco in particular i just want to tell you that the the school committee roundtables was really the only source of professional development that I could find when I first joined School Committee five years ago and it was it has been absolutely invaluable to sit with other school committee members and the facilitators just to just to learn the myriad things that you were exposed to when you said at this table so I really do appreciate that I hope they continue that's great and and I have to say Tom Marcum who facilitates and coordinates those meetings he's also not only is our business manager but he is also a school committee member for Wakefield public schools so he understands firsthand what some of the challenges are that you're going through

040as a school committee member as well so I think he does a great great job with that yeah also benefit from the echo collaborative a lot I actually have a question for the so other than the SKU comedic collaboration that we attended do we does our special ad or any other committee or from the school district attend the coab on a regular basis I'm just curious because they have so much resources I'm curious if other committee joined the echo on the regular basis so in regards to anybody from from acton-boxborough so we have English language arts like all of our round tables our 26 round tables they actively participate from acton-boxborough and I think they bring back a lot of a lot of work and I'm not sure Don or Deb I think Deb you

041were working with the assistant the the pal group right the assist right last year and what they worked on is how do you give the report to the school committee on when it came to the MCATs work to accountability right so we were able to collaborate all together on the new accountability system from the state and I really understand it unpack it together and create a slide deck from which we could all pull from so that we could make presentations to our school committee so it was really invaluable to have colleagues from other districts to work together and I was actually a dead code this morning for my PAC group and again just invaluable resources so we do we do have your department heads and so forth that are actively involved as well I'll add

042I am - yes superintendence roundtables all the time so great resources yeah and one of our better attendees for our board meetings - I will say so it's great to have Acton Boxborough as part of our group in terms of your work with students you talked about having different goals for different students some students might have independent living goals other students might have trade goals and I was curious you know how you went about setting expectations and goals for students and related to that how you managed to student stress sometimes we have to deal with our own stress right so but no actually we have in each program we have program directors and we have counselors and transition specialists so they all work as a team with they're sending school districts as well so the

043students are involved I can give you one example I had a student and I I wish she was sitting here with me tonight because he's just a great story for me he he's 19 years old and he advocates for himself which is just amazing to see and he came to us from another he was in a private school last year and over the summer he came in to join us and we thought we were just gonna have him for the summer and he looked at me and he said they all call me Nadine they don't call me dr. extra no more miss extra marine it's just all Nadine we're just all first-name basis and he said to me he said you know needy and he said I want to be in that 18 to 22

044program when's it going to start and I said to him oh we're gonna get it to start at the beginning of the year and at the beginning of the school year and he said good because he says this is the first time he said I'm 19 and he said this is the first time that I feel I'm part of a family and I feel like I'm at a school where somebody cares and so we really spend time with each of those students and really listen to who they it doesn't matter what role you are we're business manager if we're in a central office we have students in our program and we really sit and listen to them we try to work with the parents as much as possible but obviously also with the school system

045so how does that you know I think your question is how do we work with that it's really very individualized we have community meetings at the end of each day with our students and let them work in their own abbacy groups advisory groups and talk about what their stress is and what they're liking and not liking interestingly enough the students decided yesterday that they didn't like the fact that they we collect their cell phones and so they decided very creatively they decided yesterday about 3rd period that they wanted to pick it and they were going to protest outside so very clever and so I got a call and I said they said I was on my way in and they said needy and don't be shocked when you see the students sitting on the front

046lawn ok and so they told me so at the end of the day we let them you know say their piece but at the end of the day when we had community meeting I actually sat with them and talked to them about policies and protocols and appropriate actions and so forth so we all are invested in how we can help the students learn and to help them exercise their voice and advocate but what's the right paths and work ways of doing that because we do want to teach them about being independent and what you know and how it's important to be able to express what they're feeling so we you know it collaborative have a much different especially ours being so small I think that's the beauty of we're big in that way our big

047organization doing many different things but our programs themselves are so small that you know sometimes students will come on to the onto my side instead of the school side and I like to sit with them and and just say how's it going or maybe they earn a lunch and be able to have a lunch with me and I can kind of hear you know how's their engine running kind of thing so yeah we worked a lot of different ways there's no one answer to your question I think there's many different facets and and you have to work with wherever the child's add at that time Nadine thank you um I've always known of the the richness of the offerings that Edco has had but I think this is the first I've heard someone actually come

048to talk about the program so I very much appreciate that the things I'm a little curious about is the ABCD program yes when did that start and can you tell me a little bit more about the enrollment and and how that's progressing sure so actually I have Flyers on all of this so I will just give it all to Beth and she can send it to all of you so you'll have it but the ABCD program it the reason why that actually started as well as the 18 to 22 career pathways program is last year was my first year Edie Coe so I went around to every district that was a member and talked to them about where do you see your needs how can I go better support you what do you need for

049your district how can we sit and this overwhelmingly the ABCD academic behavior and character development program overwhelmingly became a need unfortunately for as even as young as sixth grade we're seeing students with substance abuse and so I started to under try to understand more about it and actually Marian Ryan our district attorney for North Middlesex she did a presentation last February and I actually Metro West and framing him and I actually went and listened to that she's on a on the task force and I went to this task force and listen to what different organizations were doing and I started to pull more information and then we started to do more research on what we could do with this this is a program that and then I met with the Department of Education to tell

050them this is really where I want to go and they say of course substance abuse is not a disability and I said right but anxiety and depression all that can and those factors obviously can can assist and I just went on and on you know with why I feel this is just a really important program to have so the way that they explained it is that because it's an interim alternative educational setting that it would be okay to be able to provide and be considering more of those wraparound services and so forth so the other piece that we had to look at is how do we run this program that's cost-efficient but also is helping districts to meet the needs so a student when they're to being suspended whether they're a regular ed student or

051special education student they require tutoring but we know that students with substance abuse tutoring is going to give them the academic piece but nothing like that is going to give them the counseling support so then I reached out to the children's Children's Hospital in framing here and while theum and the Lahey Clinic the Emerson Hospital as well as Samaritans and advocates and they all have given me letters of support for this program and that they would help us with these wraparound services that we should we need them so what we have done is the program starts at 10 a.m. and goes to 1:30 p.m. now the reason why you do that it's three and a half hours and if a student is in school for three hours and it counts as a school day so

052they could be suspended but we could be looking at it as not a suspension but as an alternative educational setting and the reason why we started at ten is some districts and I don't know about acton-boxborough what your transportation is like or what you offer but some districts either have their own transportation vehicles or they have an agreement with their transportation service but it doesn't matter if you do one run or ten runs in a day it's a cost of the day so because of that if we did at 10 o'clock in the morning we figured that way there the buses could drop off the students in the regular school setting be able to pick up the students bring them to Edco and then if it's done at 1:30 they've been back in time for

053the afternoon run so there would be no additional cost for transportation the cost for member districts such as acton-boxborough is 160 dollars a day with a memo because we figured middle of five days we had we don't know if this is a first offense for a student or if this is a second or a third but it will help us to at least get some systems and supports in place if it's a longer placement then it also allows us to have counseling to be able to come in and work with the students there this is such a new program we're just still just getting it off and we currently have a school psychologist on staff as well as counseling staff as well as transition staff that are in our other programs that when we start

054to have students that can be enrolled into this program we have the staff and we have licensed certified educators regular ed and special ed content and special education staff that will also be providing the tutoring the tutoring we have could be provided by the school district where the school district says you know what it's only five days this is what they're gonna be working on what they can be missing and we can use the school districts or if it's a longer we're actually using more of a recovery curriculum program I hope that answers your questions right Thank You dr. Ikram for giving us such a great overview of what you do I think it definitely gave us so much more information about things when we see a collaborative or what I do for inviting me

055and anytime I love to be able to come out it's it's a it's an honor for me to be asked to come here tonight so thank you so much excellent thank you yep all right so I don't three point three is we have Joe kibbutz with us tonight to talk to us and prevent present an overview of our early childhood program and discuss implications of the building project on the educational program of the school so again is we're cueing this up I thought this is an opportunity I think you know since the committee has changed membership over the last few years I don't think that Jo has had an opportunity to come and talk about what the preschool does but we're hoping to give you a little background all information on why our preschool exists

056the students it serves and some updates about what's been going on but also talk a little bit about the implications of the building project for programming at the preschool we thought that a timely presentation for you well you already did my introduction so thank you Peter no that's okay no thank you though for having me here tonight as Peter said I haven't there's me there's some of you I know and the committee but not all of you so I'm happy to talk about the program tonight talk about who we are what we do and then as Peter and Tessa said to the implications of a new school the new school building project and and how that could impact the early childhood program so the Carolee burner early childhood program is an integrated learning environment for

057preschool aged children so students with identified special education needs and those developing typically learn and play together meeting eye-dea regulations to educate children in the least restrictive environment so the integrated preschool which is one of the big components of our program is a special education program and the lead teachers in each class are special educators students with special needs are placed in the program following initials special education evaluations and enroll when they turn 3 or if they're identified with a disability throughout the school year students developing typically they serve as role models in the program and are enrolled by their parents at the beginning of the school year parents of children without special needs choose us as they would any other preschool in town classrooms generally have up to 15 students 8 students to aid

058students developing typically and up to 7 students with special needs that require specialized special education programming beyond the integrated preschool program which I said is a big part of what we do we also do provide evaluations screenings previous pre referral services and support so the early childhood staff works in collaboration with pediatricians parents other agencies that support early childhood programming and area preschools as well to provide evaluations observations screenings and consultation so we do this for all four students in Acton Boxborough we also work very closely with early intervention many of the students referred for initial evaluations come to us or are referred from early intervention we have a strong working relationship with early intervention and the transition process for students with suspected disabilities may start as soon as two and a half years so

059they're two years six months as soon as the student turns three and is eligible for special education following an initial evaluation they may be placed in the program or their services would be initiated so the our program philosophy we we strongly believe that all children can be successful they can all learn and develop and maybe at their own unique pace but they can all learn and develop and they learn and develop through active exploration of their environment they also learned through interaction with peers and adults and they may need a nurturing and predictable environment in which to grow and learn we believe children learn best in an inclusive child centered and developmentally appropriate environment and the role of the adults in the program is to support and facilitate each child's learning play is really the

060foundation of a child's learning and development and that's a big focus of what we do that is long as well as fostering social-emotional development the curriculum in the integrated preschool is developmentally based it's child directed and aligned with Massachusetts early childhood learning standards much of our focus as I said is on play and social-emotional learning and we we reinforce working and playing together social interactions and provide act group activities to practice these skills the curriculum encourages the growth of each child at his or her own individual pace while social-emotional learning is a big focus of our work the program also works to support early literacy development for the district's youngest learners little free libraries were established at each site last year at so at both early childhood locations the goal of these little free libraries

061is to build community spark creativity and inspire love of literacy through increased access to high-quality and developmentally appropriate books we've also continued our collaboration with dr. Joan Kelly who's an educational researcher and developer of abound parenting which was formerly known as the parent uptake project or pup which helps to support our students early literacy skills so abound parenting it's an app that's designed to build crucial early language literacy and critical thinking skills through enjoyable parent and child conversations so it's not an app for the child to do but more it's things that are sent to the parents as ideas on how to foster those skills so we're currently the only public school system in the u.s. that's that's been involved in this beta testing of the resource so Joan Kelly has made this resource free

062to the preschool families and staff in acton-boxborough we've invited all pre-k families to participate in the abound parenting program which provides families with age-appropriate ideas to help their child's early literacy skills and social-emotional learning skills as well I just added a little picture here to this slide actually needs a clarification from me on my end so the Acton site actually has six classrooms but it does have eight sections so six integrated sections and two specialized classrooms that's that's how I made a mistake with that so we the program itself the karoliina early childhood program has eight classrooms across two sites so the act in sight and the Boxborough site as well as parent drive-in and drop-off itinerant services for students requiring those special education related services half-day and full-day integrated services are provided across six

063of the classrooms so there's nine sections of integrated sections three full days sections and six half-day sections and the integrated classrooms meet four days per week the program also has two classrooms that provide specialized instruction for students who require individual or small group support using the principles and teaching methodology of applied behavior analysis or ABA given this format the students needs the students needs and the direct instruction generally occurs one to one or two to one children in the preschool ABA classrooms require small group instruction and or discrete trials but most students spend a portion of each day participating in an integrated preschool class in order to foster social growth I want to continue to talk a little bit about the locations so six of the eight preschool classrooms are currently housed in this building

064in the administration building in Acton which was built in 1957 so the building is shared with the district's administrative offices and the community education program the district capital improvement plan and master planning that was completed in 2016 2017 determined that the preschool ended in the administration building was in significant need of relocation the current Acton site space was not designed for preschool age group or that type of program and has been retrofitted over the years to attempt to meet the needs of preschool age children so the preschool bathrooms and several rooms and the administration building where students receive either speech and language or motor therapy are not fully exist accessible for students with physical disabilities so to access some of these rooms staff and children would need to walk through other therapy spaces or meeting

065rooms such as this one the playground is located in the middle of a parking circle and nursing is also not available in the administration building and children must be accompanied to the building next door to see the nurse the Boxborough site of the other two preschool classrooms our house to the Blanchard Memorial School in Boxborough those classrooms at Blanchard do have a nurse on-site in the playground at the Blanchard Memorial School is enclosed in safe location however it's not accessible for students with physical disabilities well related services well related service staff the OTP tea or speech and language therapists have more accessible therapy spaces than the Acton site they're really not located in close proximity to the classrooms so when services are not provided in a classroom the therapists may spend a lot of time

066bringing children from one location to the other so beyond addressing the current buildings deficiencies for the preschool program the new school building project is an exciting opportunity I believe to bring the entire Carroll heating our early childhood program to one location so there's a lot of efficiencies I think that could that we could benefit from merging both sites into one location which would be coordination of student programming and services reducing travel between locations for staff increased staff collaboration for the preschool and early childhood staff and sharing resources and educational materials as well so I I just want to say having the Carroll Heavener early childhood program in the new new school building would enable the program to be accessible and also inclusive it's important for the classrooms therapy rooms and playground to be accessible to

067young children of all abilities and I'm really looking forward to that opportunity thank you good Joe that was very enlightening does anyone have questions Joe I have a series of questions for you shorten to the point if there's a student who receives preschool program services at the Blanchard site who qualifies for extended school year programming where do they end up going for the summer currently we have one location for extended school year programming and it would be and currently it's been at the administration building over the last several years so they've been regionalized program they have to transition for the summer from one site to another yes so I would say not necessarily actually because with the opening of a new school I think it provides us with opportunities particularly air conditioning is one of

068the big barriers for us which is why we use the twin school and so we anticipate really considering big the new building site isn't yes why yeah I'm mostly asking questions to further highlight some of the deficiencies of this building and to advocate favor of joining the schools into one so my second question would be are there any facilities in this building to provide for lunches for any students who might qualify for a free and reduced lunch no and are there any facilities regular supports after facilities in this building that would support specials for students to get extra enrichment and art music physical education that could be another benefit of going to the new school okay thanks Joe um I have a couple questions the first of all is that you mentioned that about parenting

069it's up right is it down yeah it's all right tell me again whose application rate is it's an app it's a it's like it's an application for the phone so the computer yeah are we paying the license fee no no it's a weird because we've been part of the beta test to to trial this out it's actually free for Acton Boxborough Regional School District teachers okay as well as the parents enrolled in the excuse me as well as the children enrolled in but this is a beta version right so going forward as soon as the beta version this down then are we going to pay the license no we are not okay all right so the second thing is that this is Wilkin - we have that it's a new building and then we're going

070to combine the two locations to one location right to the new to the new yes that's what the district has put forth in the education plan so I you know I think we think probably this is a you know the best solution or a best I was a convenient thing for the students because you know like you know the therapy location and the classroom right they can you know they can move pretty you know easily from one location to another location inside the class inside the building right so but our way did we do any survey among the students and their parents to bring in our to bring out so we plan to combine two locations to one locations right we think this is a best for passing interest for the students and their families

071did we do this early among the students and the parents so we actually no we did not do a survey but what we did do Mary Brolin who's the chair of the building committee and I actually hosted a forum for the preschool parents at Blanchard where we actually presented an overview of the building project very clear that the intent is to merge that into the Douglas Cates project answered questions provided that opportunity but it's not necessarily a survey I think one of the other reasons we're doing that is the Blanchard classrooms are at capacity and if we're going to continue to offer priority to Foxborough families to enroll at Blanchard we need to free up the classroom space to expand the K through six program as well so it's actually meeting a variety of needs

072by combining this but we hosted the forum for the intent of giving people an opportunity to come in and ask questions provide feedback oh can we can we do a Sri I want to see the survey results later on because you know the forum is just you know you give the information and you answer questions but you know survey it's going to show the results how many parents how many kids the really you don't prefer this one location instead of two locations because we are Michael yeah preschool is two years the children that are in preschool now will not be attending preschool at the new building so and they'll be like one overlapping year so III understand what you're saying 100% but there's so many layers to this in terms of the other benefits of

073a preschool it's one preschool program in two in two locations it's not like it's always been so Michael I apologize because I was just checking with Diane to refresh my memory I actually think this committee voted that as final last year so I don't know if we would reopen that discussion I think we had to vote that as a piece of the building project it's a middle to MSBA I'm pretty sure I don't know if Beth if you remember that I am I'm almost positive we voted that last year yeah I just was wondering how do you if you whether you get more applicants for typically developing preschoolers and you have spaces I would say each year we do for our all-day classes and it does depend year to year depending on what families each

074year are interested in or looking for for early childhood programming so some most years though I would say and this is my seventh year here that I would say we typically have more applicants for all-day seats than we have capacity for and how do you select it's through a lottery okay and are you is what is the fee structure for currently it's 7070 for a year for all day which is 8:30 two three four days a week follows the school calendar and a half day would be thirty six fifty so 3654 a half-day for an entire year yes so 707 for full-day per month and 365 for a half-day so yeah it does fall relatively in line with some some of the preschools but I would still say it's yes it's it's a lower cost

075yes thank you yes have the same question as just asked what is the kind of enrollment trend is it always is getting more you know more competitive every year in terms of lottery are we in the in the past like three to five years and also for the new building I have the same question which is the capacity with are we keeping the same as capacity as we currently have so one thing one big thing to keep in mind about regular education seats so that this is a specialized special education program that were mandated to provide that type of programming in the public schools that's why the preschool exists in the public school anyway so we have to our philosophy is an integrated philosophy so that all children of all abilities children with special needs

076and those developing typically they can learn side by side and we think that's really important but we have to look at seeds on based on pretty much special education referrals and kind of and and that enrollment to then make the basis for how many seats for regular education students we would have so that's sort of not really they answer your to one of your questions but I'll try to answer I would say that maybe the last couple of years I would say the all-day seats we have more applications than we did maybe in my first three years I can't give you an exact number right now but I would say that that would that's my instinct to reply that way I really appreciate the fact that the program is play-based and and sort of a

077child inquiry driven and I think that's really refreshing to see when there are so many preschools that are really heavily academic at this point and I did take a look at the Bound program and thought it was really interesting I had a couple questions about it one of them was when you said it's being offered to all of the students did you mean all priests Kate pre-k students in a B or just the ones that are in your program just the ones who are district enroll are enrolled in the district but we are expanding our work with Joan to to also do some work in kindergarten as well and some of the students who had been in preschool and who had done this and who have already matriculated have been able to continue abound itself

078is new but it's caring over the premise of what pup was which is the parent uptake project when I looked at it I thought it was really interesting with the the literacy focus and the way it's engaging parents with their children and different aspects of literacy and I was wondering if if you know if there is any leaning toward including more early sort of dyslexia type screening in the abound program I'm not sure if you're aware of that if that's something that developing not not within the abound program it's really about setting up conversations between their child the setting up giving ideas on how to have meaningful conversations providing activities to do to help support early literacy yes that's correct and have you gotten any initial feedback well they really just have launched under the

079new abound just a couple weeks ago we've had a couple parent ambassadors who were part of the parent uptake project so the first two years of the beta test who have come back and spoken to some of the parents when we've had Joan Kelly come out and do a presentation to the preschool families on what this is and why we're doing it and so we've had some positive feedback from from that I can ask another question yes so then I also was thinking about I had a couple questions about the new building project and you said that currently the the sort of ratio of IEP students to typically-developing is about 50% is that by preference or is that by space by space so and and by regulation so when to have an integrated class it

080really you need to have more than 50% students not on IEP s so 15 is a way to I don't want to say maximize a number but you could have a you could have set up to seven students on IEP s and eight children developing typically so and with the new building project we currently have one extra classroom that's recommended in the education program through for the new school building project then we currently have yes back on but you said Nora so Joe you are I thinking in a very unique position and a very exciting time to impact the trajectory of a child's literacy development in a really positive way because you're coming in like you know on the front end where it should be there and and I and I understand that the most

081important thing a parent can do with the preschoolers read aloud to them and talk to them and and make sure they're exposed to books and and that they're seeing about their peers and adults around them reading and so I think these are exciting times I know that we're in the beginning of a you know very large-scale kind of revamp of K through 3 the governor almost a year ago on October 19 2018 so I'm the the act to regarding students with dyslexia well well well relative to students with dyslexia that's the exact wording which in part launched an amendment to mg/l - I think it's 287 chapter 287 and there are three big pieces one is the Family Partnership and I think about does a great job creating the the beginnings of a family partnership

082with the school system in building capacity at home to enhance illiteracy so that they're their school ready when by kindergarten the other two pieces and this is my question the other kind of two big big areas are professional development and and and the assessments and and the screening tool so you kind of spoke to the screening tool but I was just wondering like big picture what you see the future is in those three areas at the preschool level for getting children kind of up to speed with literacy before kindergarten sorry for the long winded question I mean currently there isn't any screening tool for our children that age for preschool age children but I would not be surprised down the line if there is something that you know gets developed I do think the relationship

083between the preschool teachers and the parent to help support I am agreeing with you I think that's a the relationship relationship between the parent and the preschool teacher and teachers in general as they children continue to get older is an important one to try to be on the same page and to help support child's learning whether it's in literacy or social-emotional learning or what not okay just jump in real quick I just wanted to mention that um as part of the literacy visioning that we are doing pre-k is part of that work so we do have representation from pre-k so as we are looking at tools as we are looking at professional development pre-k is going to be right alongside us doing that work I can add one more thing to Deb thanks for getting

084me to think about something just we work with Sharon Ryan who's the district's literacy specialist as well so she does work with my early childhood teachers as well hold on one second done I also could say I downloaded the aband app because I wanted to see and I put in leading information that I know my own personal children couldn't answer and the app does like tell you these are risk factors for dyslexia you should talk to your pediatrician that you may want to bring this that like it that conversation is part of the thing so anyway go ahead John thank you I appreciated your statement that play is foundational for those who can remember the beginning of this meeting we sang at the beginning I would hope that the idea that play is foundational was

085not restricted to pre-k and school committee meetings I also wanted to and you know tests they asked me if that was important and I think that that is actually extremely important you know I think that sometimes people get a little overly serious and lose sight of what is actually important that what will work in an educational context secondly I wanted to affirm what everybody already at this table I think believes which is that early interventions are a wonderful thing my son attended the integrated preschool many years ago and his experience is in fact aligned with that general understanding that early intervention is very important and then the last thing that I wanted to do is ask a question with respect to whether or not the curriculum of pre-k would change as a function of the

086district moving from its current model of half-day K and full-day K to an all-day K model you're asking if the curriculum would change if you knew where those kids were going and they were all going to all-day K instead of some other mix of things would you do anything different I think we need to meet the children where they're at and and keep our work child centered and developmentally appropriate so Nora had mentioned earlier that she was she appreciated that word that we that I spoke about play there are some families who will come and visit the program and choose not to send their child here because it is more play based and focus on social-emotional development and learning than the academics so I think our program philosophy and what the staff have done and

087delivered for such a long time would have to shift drastically to not continue to provide play and social-emotional learning as a foundation for what we do and really they're the right thing to do for young children thank you so much so for answering all the questions and for giving us such a great overview thanks for having me so our last presentation is Deb and Don are here to present an overview of the key data themes from the challenge success and homework surveys that the district administered last spring their presentation is going to focus on district level data so school level data has been provided to principals and each principal will work with school based teams to analyze the data and develop school specific action plans principals are gonna submit a brief report an action plan

088to the district in early winter and a copy of the aggregate plan will be made available to the school committee then so I know there were some questions around that but just to read to you for what they're actually going to present welcome wiki that was actually like my introduction I'm sorry copied and pasted some of that text around what's coming next so you already gave a preview thank you so tonight we want to share a little bit of the information that we have around the surveys that were administered we administered seven surveys last spring so the data is sort of pulled from a variety of sources challenge success looks looked at students and parent input this year from grades 6 through 12 the parent survey was new this year so there's not any baseline

089data for that particular piece and then this year working in conjunction with West Ed who we were already working with through some of our data inquiry teamwork we developed some surveys for parents students and teachers as well the teachers that's also new so sort of looking at all of the different data sources and as Peter shared in an earlier update and Tessa just shared as well you'll be hearing more about that in early winter so as dev and I look back we think it was the spring of 2017 that we last sort of came into a formal presentation so certainly a number of school committee members are new and we thought it would be good to refresh your memory just about what challenge successes so this is one of its co-founders Denis Pope speaking about

090that any design challenge success as a way to basically translate the research we know about best practices with school curriculum and parenting to teachers administrators parents and youth we call it challenge success because we're challenging this definition of success that starts with grades and GPA and test scores and saying it's got to be more than that it's got to be about more than that they've got to buy in to more than that so we're actually challenging the system what do we mean by success first and foremost helps health health and well-being character resilience engagement with learning being truly prepared for the 21st century a really good overview we also provided for those of you who weren't here a few years ago when we gave out books there were books on the table for you over

091there so please feel free to grab one of the overloaded and underprepared we plan to highlight five areas for you tonight and the first one is support in school so in the last I don't even know how long like year they've created these one-minute video clips that sort of give a highlight of some of the chapters so Deb and I have chosen a few tonight to share with you as we get into the next area and so this one is about success or support in school on what students report you [Music] the best climate for learning is really a climate of care and what we mean by that is where everyone feels like they belong where there are adults who have their backs where they want to be there they want to get along they

092feel like they have friends they're part of a bigger unit we work with schools to do this in lots of different ways you can specifically teach social and emotional skills you can have advisory where teachers are with small group of kids that they know deeply and it's kind of hard to fall through the cracks when you're in an advisory every week with a teacher or you can have some practices like mindfulness and yoga to help lead to a more calm and caring environment where you're focusing on what really matters and you're centering and you're getting past that anxiety and performance pressure of school so we are really pleased with this particular data set we looked at students who felt that they had a trusted adult in school and you can see from grades six through

093eight we had an eight percent jump and for students in grade through 12 we had a one percent jump the other question there were a number of questions in the survey that related to teacher care and support that were rated on a Likert scale with one being I strongly disagree in five being I strongly agree and you can see that we also had some growth on these it was a little bit smaller but scale was a little bit different the other piece that that was interesting they asked they asked parents and students to sort of categorize or they asked them three words and then they categorize the words into a series of categories and so in this case it's it's so interesting to me that fun is first and then difficult or stressful in a

094second but okay so in 2019 for example students in grades 6 through 8 said that school was fun it was difficult or stressful it was caring and welcoming and I think part of the interesting piece of our data is that we have sixth graders which are in you know our elementary schools and then we have seventh and eighth graders and so I I don't know what the other datasets look like from other districts but I wonder if that isn't a piece of sort of our data I don't know as our junior high students would rate fun as top but maybe they do I hope they do and then again students in grades nine through 12 difficult or stressful was the top one competitive which we hear a lot about and you can see that sort

095of the parents basically said pretty similar things at least for the high school as well as caring and welcoming which is always one that we would definitely want to see as we think about our school cultures and our climates so the next piece that we wanted to talk a little bit about is around stress health and sleep and so students rated the most common source of stress being homework and grades and workload as well as grades and assessment and things that we would expect for students who spend six hours a day five days a week in a school setting the interesting there was a couple interesting shifts one of them is around the extracurricular which then took a back seat for some reason for grades 6 through 8 and became workload and homework but I

096loved the procrastination or time management it makes me wonder like whether we talked about that the week before or something in school and that sort of rose to the top but workload homework those sorts of things in certainly college and college and future are going to be present in our surveys around 9 through 12 parents reported so this was this is interesting to to sort of look at the parent data versus the student data so 20% of our parents reported that their children are always are often stressed out about school work whereas whereas 33% of students reported that and first 6 through 8 and then grades 9 through 12 so just interesting differences in perceptions around how parents perceive stress and workload and how students perceive it as well this is my favorite data piece

097and it's really the data that I personally am most excited about because it really speaks to a decrease in the amount of health-related symptoms that students have reported or they reported in April last year when they took this particular survey so you can see both from the grades 9 through 12 and the 6 through 8 both groups have reported substantial declines in those health-related symptoms and so we're really hopeful that as a metric that we think about in terms of how are we doing around all the work we've done around social-emotional supports whether it's budgetary or programmatic our family learning series are ongoing messages to the community and the family around sleep wellness health downtime playtime all of those things are hopefully contributing to this overall understanding of the importance of these things and that

098we can attribute it to perhaps those things but we were really happy to see that and finally we get to one of the areas that we have looked at a lot in the last four years sleep and I'm not sure there's another artist that has captured as many humorous moments as Bill Watterson with our two beloved Calvin and Hobbes around sleep in general but sleep continues to be something we need to look at as families and to talk about a little bit more so we're excited to see that the needle moved we have 36 extra minutes on average of our six through eighth graders oh no we don't these are parents versus students so this is hilarious so basically six through eighth graders are and their parents are sort of right online but the students

099are getting another quarter hour of additional sleep which okay we'll take the 15 minutes but you can see that we're still only at slightly under 28% of our students who are getting that recommended amount of sleep and we know that research is pretty clear about the impact of a lack of a sleep on our bodies on our well-being on our mental health on our relationships our ability to handle stress and perform all of those types of things so this will be an area that we'll continue to talk about probably our school Wellness Committee will take another bite at it this year that was a little sneak peek for you and then finally 9 through 12 unfortunately only you know I'm not even 5 percent of our students are reporting that they received the recommended number

100of sleep and so and and this is actually very consistent with our 2018 YRBS sleep data which indicated that students in grades 6 through 12 got an average of 7 hours a night so those two data sources are aligned and so if I could make one public service announcement it would be this alarm clock cell phones do not belong in the bedrooms of teenagers and children and so if parents could all go to Kmart and buy a $10 alarm clock for their kids and get cellphones out of bedrooms I think we would see a substantial decrease in some of the bullying that we pick up at school the next day in some of the snapchat incidents that we're dealing with in some of the inappropriate pictures and things that are passing getting passed between students

101in these hours when cell phones are being used in bedrooms what in places where kids aren't supervised using them then they can't be tempted to get drawn into Netflix or snapchat or 50 other apps that were created this week that our students are using that we haven't even heard of yet so anyway that's my one public service announcement is that if we could do one thing it would be to not have our kids have their cell phones in their bedroom and I do wonder if that number would would move a little bit more so the next highlighted area using student engagement and we were excited to see we've done done some work in the district around engagement and when we talk about student engagement we do talk about it in these three areas the behavioral

102engagement cognitive engagement and student effective engagement I'm going to talk a little bit about what each one of those three types of engagement mean so when we talk about behavioral engagement you can think about you know seeing students on task paying attention when you go into a classroom sometimes you can ascertain sort of their persistence or their effort level but that's what when we talk about behavioral engagement that's what we're looking for cognitive engagement is really around the depth to which students are learning something if they're finding that their work is meaningful and purposeful oftentimes when we're talking about learning this is really the essence of what we're talking about because this is where disequilibrium has been is created or some productive discomfort productive struggle occurs that's where the brain starts firing and so that's

103really where when we talk about rigor later this is what we're talking about the cognitive engagement and then the effective engagement some other kinds of research some researchers call this the emotional engagement you can see that they're talking about emotional reactions and feelings that a student might have towards other students towards the curriculum the task at hand or even the teacher so just keep in mind the three different types of engagement so now when we're looking at six through eight let's start with a second column from the left our six to eight these are our student responses and about three point four four percent of students said they were disengaged so that means they were low in all three of those areas of engagement doing school that's a challenge success term and what that means

104is its students are high in behavioral engagement but low in both cognitive and the affective engagement so that they're doing school they're paying attention but maybe not having that depth of that cognitive engagement we talked about or those feelings towards the learning purposefully engaged is when they're high in both behavioral and cognitive engagement might be low and then low in the affective and then fully engages when our students are fully engaged in all three areas and then back to that first column again is sort of any other combination so for example there might be high and affective but low and the other two and so you can see these are our six through eight students where we have you know a third doing school about a third purposefully engaged and then only about 25% of

105our students are fully engaged in the learning and then nine through 12 for both categories it really does decrease as our students get older and so their purposeful engagement and whether they're fully engaged decreases I'm in doing school actually increases from junior high or from six to eighth grade to high school and then on to our homework which is our fourth category that we highlighted we have another little video to share with you not my computer and [Music] rigor versus load is a big confusion we see in schools so rigor is depth of understanding its mastering a subject matter load is the amount of work you assign and the problem is people confuse rigor with load kids parents teachers sometimes if I'm assigning a lot of work or I've got to get through a lot

106of material I must be a rigorous teacher and it's actually not the case you can cut your homework in half as we've seen some ap teachers do and still have that level of depth and rigor to have the kids understand and end up actually doing well so a kid does not have to do four hours of homework a night in order to be able to master the material learn deeply and pass the assessments okay so when we were thinking of some overarching questions for all the surveys the overarching question we have is does our how well does our aggregate level data reflect our homework policy and these are the same four questions that we've asked the principals to also report back on in January so that we have the same questions at the school level

107that we can then roll up the first question has to do with whether and our students can complete their homework assignments independently and so what we did is we quoted from the policy underneath that section of the policy that reflects that question when we're looking for questions two and three have to do with whether or not the degree to which the homework assignment supplements the instructional decisions back in the classroom and the third question is whether or not the hallmark supports student engagement so those questions two and three when she talks about rigor those are the kinds of things we were trying to get at that cognitive engagement and number four would really have to do with the load piece right so how does the data suggest whether or not our homework assignments are aligned

108with our policy recommendations for frequency so how often and then how much students how much homework students are receiving so if we look at grades three through five um it's about 459 students responding about 80% quite or no one we have here yeah about 80% it's quite or very often I'm can complete their homework assignments and have their materials in which to do so grades three through five and then how easy is it for you to complete your homework by yourself without any help or support again students finding it quite easy or very easy to complete their homework when it comes to asking for an adult my one head of myself yeah thanks and that student most of our students about 80% closer to 90% never or sometimes have to ask an adult to help

109them with their homework assignments so we look at the load so now we're looking at the load piece and less than an hour for about 42 percent of our students again 763 students responded to this question that's about 63 percent of the students in grades three through five last year the next slide we found to be really interesting in a couple of different ways so the blue columns from 2016 the green columns from 2019 and you can look to see that for both students and in grades nine through twelve and six through eight the homework load decreased from two point nine to two point five for our students in grades nine through twelve and from one point five to one point one so just a little more than an hour for our students in grades

110six through eight well we found fascinating so this was the first time that parents were surveyed if you look across what I can do there we go that our students in grades nine through twelve and our parents both reported the same group the exact same number of hours of homework as did students and parents in grades six through eight we thought that was pretty remarkable and then we think about load perception so then what do we really think about how much homework we're getting and call this the three bears graph we had about 1183 students respond to this and about 549 parents in grades 6 through 8 and so you can see that in this graph and in the second the next one I'll show you for grades 9 through 12 the percentage of parents

111is greater who think that their students have too little homework than the students think right so 66.7% of parents I feel it's just right about the same for students and parents but parents thinking students have too little homework as compared to the 20% for students and then the same thing grows actually for grades 9 through 12 but again students thinking they have too much homework as compared to what parents feel and then the last thing we wanted to talk a little bit about is just the parent expectations they asked to choose three words that would best define your success for your children and so the top three words this is a nice Wordle that they put together for us for grades 7 through 8 and 9 through 12 we're happy good and Happiness so we

112just found that really terrific that that is hopeful outcome whereas parents are defining success for their children and we are happy to take any of your questions first as a comment seconds question the first comment that I have is that I'm really pleased that we're spending time talking about these types of topics as we were driving to Taekwondo this evening my daughter and I listening to NPR we were listening to the news about the teachers that are striking I believe it's in Chicago and they're striking because they don't have enough nurses or social workers or specialists in their school my daughter turned to me she said you know I'm really happy that I go to school here because we have all the help that we need when we need it so you know I think

113that this is great that we're spending the time talking about this and how we get better as opposed to trying to address deficiencies that we don't have so my question relates to trying to remember the slide 21 920 around engagement particularly in in the high school and the change from middle school to high school in terms of engagement so I this is really telling to me that we have kids in middle school age range who are pretty actively engaged and then as they go into high school they they transition more into just doing school so I guess my question is what what are the next steps now that we've identified this as a pretty big trend what next steps do we take to move the respondents more towards the Philly fully engaged side and you

114know how do we how do we dive into this to understand what's happening between 6 through 8 and 9 through 12 so I so first know that I'm Larry and his team are going to be taking a look at these results as well and so that's a big piece so we want to hear what their thinking is around this but from a district perspective and the work that we're doing I do think the steam work I think trying to think about more interdisciplinary kinds of projects that students can engage in it will be really helpful because I think no that's not doing school you have to be cognitively engaged in what you're doing and thinking about that so I think there are some things that we can do curriculum wise as well we're looking as

115we're John and I this year are walking and visiting classrooms with all of our principals and these are the exact kinds of things that we're talking about with principals what do you what kinds of engagement do we see and what kinds of feedback can we be offering to teachers around those kinds of practices yeah the one where I've used it now with five of our principals including at the high school in the junior high we're looking we're using two equity walkthroughs to sort of look at through different lenses how we're looking at classrooms particularly focusing on students student and the student behavior instead of teacher behavior and we've been focusing on rigor and relationships those are the two big ones and so the conversations that we've been happening around what is or isn't happening in

116in certain classrooms and then chatting about that has been has been huge but - so in the evaluation process - we revisiting our evaluation work together as a district leadership team so about sixty educators supervisors and evaluators and we're focusing in on standard - which is teaching all students and what we are trying to do is shift our what we're looking for in classrooms from what the teacher is doing to what the students are doing right and having a lens and really thinking differently about that work so I think that'll also help I'll just jump in as well you know a couple weeks ago I presented kind of the first blush draft at a district strategy and I think you know we we've seen a lot of work around wellness we've seen a lot of

117work and over the last few years to begin the work around equity and certainly around social-emotional learning and I think the probably the most prominent addition to this next strategy is around engagement that wasn't by chance we had actually seen this data before and you know this is actually an indicator that I would love us to look at as a district as kind of one of our key indicators that we look at annually or every by annually maybe depending on how we do these surveys and really think about how do we increase engagement and I think it's there's a couple complex and yet simple strategies to do that one is to really look at the types of courses that we're providing as opportunities for kids as they go through high school that there's a lot

118of particularly steam related courses that kids can take that get them into hands-on learning opportunities that are relevant they mean things to kids in their daily lives I also think there's opportunities within every class to provide an increase in the number of hands-on learning opportunities that kids engage in and I think doing those two strategies alone you would see a real shift before I call in someone I was just piggybacking on what Adam asked I wonder because we have a funny division between our grades and how this survey is is that is the drop off really from eighth grade to ninth grade or is it really from sixth grade to seventh grade because we I mean I imagine you guys can take apart the data that way but it just makes me curious a similar

119question on one of the first graphs we looked at and that had to do with students who feel they have a trusted adult at school I'm encouraged by the trend but I still think the numbers are low and I'm wondering if we can identify the drivers on that trend and and my hope is that we can feed the feed the drivers so one of the pieces of data sort of underneath that they asked the students who in particular in the school is that person and the the by and large its counselors that folks are identifying which is interesting for me to think about given how often our students most of our students are able to interact with counselors when we look at our ratios I also think I forget where I was going with that

120thought but it'll come back to me Paul can I offer one thought on that too you know what was interesting and we didn't share this data here tonight but for a lot of these indicators we actually also get a comparison of how our students responded versus peer cohorts which are all high performing similar districts you know across the country and our indicators in those areas were significantly higher than any of the other peer groups that's where I was going thank you it's not where we would want we certainly want to continue to improve that but when you look at similar schools across the country that's a higher percentage than than many places are getting the same idea with the engagement pattern that engagement pattern is almost identical to all engagement patterns as you progress through

121from elementary to middle to high school years that that's a that that's pretty typical I'll be honest it's also a pretty sad statement but it's been the topic of why high schools are really continuing to look at how we're addressing student needs and why we need to continue that that discussion testa we were able to pull up that data and so it's just it's just about the same so if it's just seven through eight we have thirty seven percent of our students said doing school 35.7% purposefully engaged and twenty percent twenty point six percent fully engaged so off by a few percentages when you take sixth grade there's a lot of data to cite and talk about you know the 41.3% of high schoolers think they have too much homework 67% of them think there

122are super stressed about school only 12.6% have real and deep engagement or full engagement and their homework only dropped down 20 minutes in three years this is all this data is on the heels of three years of work on our part and an attention so I guess I've read this at you know the last couple days and just felt sad I felt sad and disappointed and I was kind of curious to see like what and what air you would bring about it with you because I think this is humbling and I think I'm embarrassed and sad and this isn't good enough I just think students in this district are super stressed I don't think we understand the difference between rigor and load I don't think parents understand what they have to do at home it's

123completely you know a whole lit a problem come coming out kids from like every aspect I couldn't believe the 82% that sleep with their phones in the room I was shocked these are the things that we could be doing as parents aren't happening the things that the district ought to be doing aren't happening quickly enough or with enough attention despite three years of focus and paying and highlighting and talks and saying to our high school look at your assessment schedule look at this look at that like it's just I don't think we're completing things that are good enough pace and I don't think these numbers stand behind all this attention and work and we have had some like leadership turnover and so I would really like to think that with your position dawn and with

124your very long stay with us Peter that we're gonna do better but I just want you all to know that the feeling that I had and I'm going to now impart upon you with a lot of emotion is we haven't done well enough in this and our report card kind of stinks and I'm not I don't have anybody else got that sense we're all talking about it here very neutral II I don't feel neutral about this this isn't good enough we have to work harder and I think we're going to now with better leadership more consist less drama I have to think that like you know because we brought in challenge success like this is a great report card from challenge success from you know from our students from our parents so we have to

125do better and I cannot you know say this with enough emotion I'll jump in and I appreciate your thoughts very much I'm also going to look at the positive day by long tenure you mean into the future not the like 15 months of the past and so you know I think I think here's a here's a challenge that's the real-world challenge in this district and I and I agree with you that we really want to continue to see these numbers improve but there as a school district we serve a lot of constituencies primarily it's our students but it's the schools don't exist in a vacuum of the expectations of the community and I'm gonna you know I'll be really blunt after you know being here a year and a half now almost a year and

126a half while we want these areas to improve there's no interest on any part of the community to not continue to be a high performing district and there's a tension I think that exists between how do we continue to have strong academic performance and tend to kind of the intellectual capacity of the schools and the students needs with how do we balance that with creating this environment that is supportive caring reduces stress reduces unnecessary stress some stress is good too much stress is unhealthy and actually leads to poor academic performance like you know there's there's a lot of research behind that so I think one of the things that you will see and and I've talked to area superintendents about this but in typically high performing districts change is going to be very slow and

127it can be infuriating in the moment but vast fluctuations in practices also can lead to very unintended consequences and I think what you know and I've talked to enough high school teachers to know that you know they really have to think about how do we work these strategies into our current practices in a very thoughtful way so that we can reduce the stress on kids but also continue to make sure that kids are learning at a high level and I think that's I mean I I fundamentally agree with you we want we want to see this improve but I also want to be sensitive to the need to continue to educate students well and with excellence but again we have to get rid of the unnecessary stresses that kids I'm not saying it well but

128it's kind of balancing all of the needs and if I can converse for a minute one perfect example of that is us changing the start times with a horrible different like hardly a difference in sleep patterns like and that that's where it illustrates like a greater community problem right like this this is where you know we we did our best it wasn't what it should have been in my opinion in terms of like shifting the clock but we did it and it isn't getting followed up at home obviously in terms of more sleep we try it's not translating to more good sleep for kids so I I totally agree with you there and I understand shion's and I'm and I do think we're paying attention to all the right things and I don't mean to

129diminish anyone's work or effort or attentiveness and I agree with you that slow measured to change will be better I just feel that we were so ahead of things with this program and I just hoped for like I hoped to open this and be like more more pleasantly surprised and it saddens me and that's not to put down anyone's efforts it's just to say like we have more to do and I'm excited for this team to do more and for parents at home and I appreciate your public message your public service message I think we clearly have to be a little bit more blunt maybe about some of like the very black-and-white issues about what's what's really unhealthy for kids I guess it's yes well you know change is slow I know I agree with

130you change is slow I wanted to kind of go next because I had some question about the sleeve and I had a question on on the homework and dependent slide just to kind of details one when I saw the nine hours just nine I think I know where that came from but you know I looked up the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidelines and it says that thirteen to eighteen year olds should be sleep sleeping eight to ten hours per 24 hours regularly to to promote optimum health and I'm just wondering why nine and what because we knew we were coming in eight more toward the eight eight hours of sleep end of things and it was disappointing to see that the high schoolers aren't there at eight

131yet I see a difference in in my home with my height with my kids who are in high school for sure they're getting more sleep they're getting eight hours actually but I just wonder why nine why just nine my guess is because of the range from the Academy that they just sort of settled on the middle between the eight okay I would like hope that we could put a range in just so people are aware that you know there's different sleep cycles so so that was one thing and then I'm slide 24 on homework independence I'm wondering why can you unpack that having materials because like 20% of kids said that they either don't or sometimes don't have materials and I think that should be zero but maybe I don't understand the question and we

132want this was part of the equity piece to make sure that we're not assigning homework that students would not readily have the materials at home like internet access or they'd have to go to the store and purchase something to actually complete the assignment so that's where we we need to hear from our elementary principals about what they dig into their own individual data and then look at those kinds of homework assignments like what really does that reflect I have a question so if we I forgot that the slide number but is this Student Survey and then I showed that teacher support and care if we go we could go there now this one that yeah here so see that number it just you know from 2016 4 point and one for a great six eight

133only point 1 / 1 point 1 point I think and then for the same thing for a great 9 to 12 so I'm encouraged I think we didn't nothing to improve this number 1 and I want you to know what could be the next I mean what could be the stat to improve this and then we can see the number a job in the next year I think you I think some of this is going to be data that you're gonna hear from mr. Chen and mr. Dory directly with some of their reports later honestly because they're gonna be looking at that as a school in terms of the number of adults the greatest growth that we saw was in grade seven and eight at eight point nope it's this one so our just our

134students in grades 7 through 8 in terms of the number that felt they had a trusted adult went from sixty one point five to seventy point five in one year and the eighth graders had or the sixth graders excuse me had like a three percent shift so there was a much more substantial shift in the number of students at the middle school seven and eight who said that they had a trusted adult in school so we know that they're doing things specifically I know you're talking about the second chart as well that one is a little bit more curious and it it involved the the top one is one question the bottom one is a series of questions and the the numbers were aggregated so I think that one's a little bit more difficult and

135they're gonna be working to sort of pick that apart and think about it I just also want to jump in back to what Peter had mentioned earlier though that's on a Likert scale of one to five and when we looked at comparable other districts across the country who are relative like us that we're already high so the four point two and the four point one on a Likert scale of five was already considered quite high in comparison so it's not much at all of a bump but already where we were on the Likert scale Michael did you want to come up and say something I saw you waiting for a while I just that by nature of being a high schools and think I might be better suited waiting for mr. Dorian mr. sham but

136I just guess I want to chime in if I could and first of all second Adams point about the engagement with the high school decreased a can you look at I mean I personally always thought it was just inverse to workload as workload increases as grades go up up obviously but I guess my main question was like Mike my takeaway was that like there was a lot of things that the district can do around I'd say objective measures like sleep went down objectively we took some measures to do that homework went down we can measure that the number of hours spent I guess even but like and then I just didn't see that translate as much to perception based measures if you will as much as part of what Michael was talking about or slide

137ten with the most common phrases that was sort of and I guess I looking at the videos that was shown that it sort of that challenge success seems to be more very focused on that perception aspect I'm curious from if I was to take a district level perspective I'm curious what the next step is to go in that direction to fulfill the mission in that way I can jump in on that so you know I think that's a great point and that it's actually something that we're talking a lot with our educators about this year as well through a goal-setting processes you know there's really four peas in data that you want to look at people perceptions performance and process and if you look at a combination of any of those data sets you come

138up with a different view of how things happen when you look at data there's two types of data you want to look at one is that quantitative data which are the things measured in hard hard numbers but you know in in doctoral research in particularly you learned that that's actually only half of the picture of data that quantity quality of data is actually equally important as that and that's around those perceptions we tend to shy away from it because we're more comfortable as statistician statisticians with numbers and hard figures okay that we reduce this by a half hour whereas some of that softer data we tend to shy away from but I think we can't lose sight of that when we look at how we're impacting students and families because you can't necessarily measure that

139in a number you're never gonna have a seven for impact on students and how students perceive something there's there's no such thing but by tracking the types of qualitative data over a period of time you do get a different picture you can't only look at qualitative you can't only look at quantitative but you have to look at both to figure out what your overall impact is is that it get to that yeah I think like personally I I don't have much of a dataset to draw on for my person it seems like we've been rather aggressive at least at the high school in pursuing those objective measures shall we say and like the things like that can be measured more objectively and I'm not sure that the perceptions are trickled down and guesses that's where

140my question was coming from I'm curious what the policies around that to try to get that to trickle down and community buy-in I think was mentioned by a couple times already and that sort of concept I think an answer to your question I can get actually released to some of the things that Maya brought up earlier so when we first got the first set of results back with challenge success how we identified three different areas start time and schedule homework and workload and the family's student and school engagement thanks time and so when we think about all of those things start time and schedule those were somewhat operational kinds of things that we could change we changed we changed the bus schedule change the start time change the Bell scheduled this year for the high

141school when it came to homework and workload while you know when I was talking about the different aspects of the policy we can change the amount of work right the number of hours and that can be measured but the quality of the homework right that's the piece questions two and three that's gonna take more time to work on those pieces and then family community engagement I think that's just always ongoing we just can't stop doing that we have to continue with that so as I've been thinking about this and I know I won't speak for Dawn but I I do think those three areas we were able to do probably relatively quickly because they were more operational those are things we could just do this next phase when we're talking about engagement that piece is

142gonna be more intense with it's going to involve a whole lot more folks at the table thinking and talking about teaching learning and I think that's when you're going to start to see some of that trickle down and have a change in the perception thank you I was just gonna say that I actually feel really optimistic and I think the reason why is hearing Peter talk about emphasizing engagement and your questions around engagement and this team presentation that was at the last school committee meeting was also something that gave me a lot of optimism that there are actual real changes that can be made in terms of curriculum which is where the students are living and I really like the emphasis on focusing not so much on unstressed because I think that we do live

143in a community where our our students aren't shying away from hard work and they're not shying away from their own you know competitive in a healthy way or sort of striving for excellence but if that's done without engagement that's you know where I see that the doing school and where things start to fall apart more emotionally for kids and so I really am excited about that 58% of six to eighth graders that are purposefully and fully engaged and I think that's wonderful it we want that number higher but that's such a great starting point to try to find out what's working for them who are these kids that are fully engaged and purposefully engaged and and where does that sense of purpose and joy and passion for learning come from and how can we expand

144on that and I think the the steam and also the the person who spoke about teaching art in a different way just those ideas of allowing students to take some direction for what they're learning and and find meaning in it is really important and at the high school it's you know forty percent I guess that are purposefully or fully engaged and I'm just so curious about what is working for those students and how are they so engaged and how can we bring more of that you know and I imagine a lot of it comes from outside of classroom learning that helps students feel engaged all of the extracurricular parts of school that help them feel alive and passionate and that what they're doing matters so so I love the emphasis and I think that that

145it you know that tension of excellence with with health and purpose you know I think is really important and and and I really appreciate the breaking down of engagement into the three types of engagement and looking at that in a deeper way just a couple details I guess it would be helpful in the slides if the number of respondents was sort of posted on each one yeah that would be great to see and then I also was curious about the in size for them if you feel like there's a difference in people who are responding from people who aren't responding are there more dissatisfied people responding more satisfied people responding so I was just wondering if you saw a pattern and who's responding and who's not so that our data is meaningful and then I

146also thought it was really helpful to hear how this compares to other districts I have to say when I read the hours of sleep I thought wow this seems great just compared to what I hear as national averages high school students tend to sleep 5 or 6 hours a night I believe and so 7 is not ideal but it's approaching eight so that that to me felt also like not a terrible number when you compare it to sort of what you hear going on nationwide and so it's nice to hear about how the connection to an adults in the building compares to other school districts and you know I think that's another important one to emphasize how can we increase that how can students feel more connected with their teachers and I think when what

147goes on in the classroom with these longer blocks at the high school allows for more interactive and purposeful student driven student directed learning that their relationship to teacher as well so it probably feel more meaningful when they have that time together and so hopefully that would also shift toward feeling like like their teachers are a trusted adult in the building would be an important goal okay so we're like 40 minutes behind so if you I don't want to cut off conversation if people really still have questions for Devin Don but let's try and stay away just from her life rating on what they said because we're like pretty far behind okay Angie go ahead yeah so just want to clarify the question the survey question is actually standard challenge success questions right they're coming from

148not we we get a designed by ourselves it's just inherited right I just want to clarify that so you can see it yeah okay Egyptians that work from challenged success and then the ones for the students parents and those were developed with West okay so I guess that I cannot grasp how we improve in our homework rigorous from the survey because this are kind of the standard survey so as you can see that I remember that what we inch well my kids are older and the old homework policy is ten ten minutes per grade and as they go on and this is I actually I I kind of like that because it's like building muscles that you build us gradually and and I'm concerned because I look at the data the for the junior high

149and there is one thing that's pop up which is the time management and the procrastination so my biggest concern is when they they don't have this habit in in the in the elementary school when they go into the junior high school and they are kind of facing the home were low they never have had to have to deal with before so I have some concern kind of jump out there and the high wood high school lower they it is still there so I also noticed the in the highs in a junior high that year for the the one thing is missing from compared to before which is the high quality is kind of disappear and also the the four point then our high school student still has has has still has were still facing the

150sleep problem and did I did look looking at the Hamburg and the homework policy is noted in the Elementary's handbook but it's not part of the host high school home handbook and I understand that for the high school it is you know because of the schedule with that you cannot really coordinators but I guess the question is are we going to look at the the policy because we have a homework policy now are we going to implement it district-wide that consistent that for every school is gonna have the same implementation then we expect that kind of similar result are we gonna look at that and when we look at are we only as we move into then toward the next step especially across the elementary school because the elementary school from the data that I

151see is is inconsistent in terms of a homework policy and the next question is I noticed in the high school that one of the biggest pressures from the grading and the tests so does that mean that we're gonna take a look at our grading policy distri white and what we be able to how we how we going to improve in the next step in in terms of this area and also one gesture that is like a questions well we are like 45 minutes behind let them answer and if you need follow-up afterwards then we appreciate your passion I'm to the first question around the consistency I think that's one of the reasons why we wanted to do this and to hear back from all the elementary principals the goal of doing the survey was to

152see if there's consistent implementation of the policy so that's one of the things we will be looking at especially as we get all the elementary reports back and then thinking about what other kinds of things can we put in place to ensure greater consistency across all the elementary schools so that's one of these the second question was I'm sorry Angie asked a lot of questions so I think some of them you're pulling out pieces of the data where it's a there was things about high school where was talking about load and the class I think those questions again coming and have more information there's so other people have their hands up and we have and we have an audience member that wants to ask a question so I'm gonna have you hold it at that

153okay because they're going to come back to us with additional information would you pretty much what Maya said I'm a parent very concerned about the homework load I have a sophomore this year sleep stress anxiety over the homework load is gigantic stress about returning to school stressed about doing extracurriculars which I encourage don't drop because that's what keeps you connected that's what we want we don't want you in isolation so I echo everything you said I'm getting emotional about it too I do think it's not at a quick enough rate as well I think it's not gonna affect my sophomore he's gonna be in the same boat the entire time he's at the high school I'm hoping it changes for my seventh grader I also have a quick question which I don't know in terms

154of the survey when they're talking about kids perceptions about too much homework and the load did they separate it between like kids that are in like CP honors AE AP all of the different levels to kind of check where kids are because I know when they're entering the high school there is to talk about if you're in a CP level class you're gonna have this much homework a night if you're in an AE level class and have this much if you're in honors you're gonna have this much so that definitely played a factor into what classes my child was allowed to choose going into the high school I'm wondering about the equity and the wellness in terms of kids across all levels kind of looking at the same amount of homework load be cause I

155mean I know my student would would have chosen more and we said no way you're not allowed to already having to send him to bed at 10:30 at night with the stress of not finishing his homework after four and a half hours so I think it's a huge concern when I saw that homework was going to be discussed tonight I was like I have to come and at least start voicing my opinion on it so I just didn't know if that was looked at when the kids did the survey because it's a national survey they don't know all the different course levels that every individual district has they only tease out AP courses so students indicate if they're an AP taking AP courses okay I think that's a huge piece here in a B in

156terms of the workload that I think that we really need to look seriously at because it is definitely affecting the stress and well-being of many of our kids I want to save some time here I just want to ask a question I don't think I'm kind of looking for the answer today so for our policy I don't know seems like there are a couple of years I think the most effective group is the elementary school kids not for the junior high high school from the table we have here we can see the 6 to 8 I don't want to reach anywhere there but everybody knows I mean the 6th to 8th grade and 9 to 12 they're fine and for the elementary school we have many datas here but there doesn't do any conclusion so

157I hope our curriculum designer our you know so assistant well I mean the the district leader really take a look at the elementary school [Music] give us what kind of the policy our policy written is very work very well I think that that's really lines over there but how the different school interpretation you know how their implementation is really different we have junior high and high school they are totally fine my kids are totally finds nothing to do with myself so I just worry about there's a concern when those elementary school kids right now they are rich in junior high and high school are they gonna feel more stressful or how do we do how do we do with that you know so I hope you know the data here for the elementary part can

158I do some conclusion but there is no conclusion for that thank you okay yeah John hold your hand out tried to raise it alright I I think that was a really good discussion obviously something that we need to continue to talk about and you guys are coming back in the winter right to report back or there was something from the principal's are they'll be follow up and we can talk about it more so thank you for your presentation all right yes yes most of life is lived after high school and today we had the opportunity to reflect on what a life of full engagement actually looks like with the death of Elijah Cummings so illogical means you know served the state of Maryland as we represented the house for more than 20 years and recently

159was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee for people who have seen him on television over the last few months you've seen everything that you were looking for in this survey you've seen behavioral engagement cognitive engagement and effective engagement and you saw that even as he entered hospice care a few weeks ago and continued you know through last week to participate in the Democratic caucus conference call and so you know I'd like everybody to not look too closely in front of them but to look all the way down to a deep meaningful life and see that the goal is you know regardless of these trends here there is a longer game that we must play and that's very important to play and then the last comment that I'll make about this is if you looked

160at Elijah Cummings you would find both rigor and load this isn't you know for everybody but it's for some people and I think we need to let everyone find their own level with respect to rigor and load thanks John all right Dave Dave is here to provide us with an overview of the FY 21 budget development process as well as draft guidelines that were developed in conjunction with the budget subcommittee would you like me here or there I think you're easier to see over here Dave finance people don't often get the limelight here nothing you've got to documents that I don't think are going to appear on the screen so we'll just walk through them briefly you have a FY 2021 budget development schedule starts at October 3rd the the materials have been sent out

161to the admit to the district administrators next to the next item I've got a little box that says you are here so we're at the worth the inception of the of the process obviously the next step is is the internal work that's done by the by the day help they it we lay out the School Committee budget agenda in a series of meetings between November and January that culminates in budget Saturday January 25th the budget binders as a preparation for that exercise will be out on Friday January 17th 2020 I put in this year the expected release of the governor's budget on January 22nd it's a cut three days before budget Saturday I expect there'll be some high interest in that if the student doctor Opportunity Act passes and we've discussed that briefly in a

162prior meeting and in the final stages after that so it's all laid out in a familiar format from prior years the budget subcommittee has looked at this and we've made several several changes to it but this I would propose is thieve is the final schedule for the FY 21 budget questions budget subcommittee also developed in conjunction with the with the administrative district administrators FY 2021 budget guidelines you have that there are a total of 11 bullets I'm not going to read them if you have them in front of you the first two are somewhat related the budget trend needs to be sustainable and we recognize that and I think both of those two guidelines react to that statement the next two are also somewhat related the budgets need to reflect the district stated values and

163also our previous commitments toward implementing those and recognizing those values the one about exploring bringing full tuition free all-day kindergarten to the district there's been some discussion about that to the extent that is a budget a piece of the budget that's that's part of what we're what the framework has been set in in developing that budget we've engaged a consultant that will help us to evaluate special education resources in the district that might be something that the that has manifestation in the in the upcoming budget negotiations are underway with bargaining units the district's capital improvement plan the heavy lifting was done last year now we're in follow-through getting the projects done and oversight of the work that's been done and the financial implications of that we've discussed the thought about issuing the bonds sooner than

164later it made this disrupt the previous anticipated CIP cash flow but overall if there are savings to the district and the taxpayers we're confident that we can show that to be a positive thing and the last couple of things are also related maintain annual small annual budget variances and adhere to the newly formed policies we need to manage the E and D balance we may not hit a two and a half percent budget increase every year we got we got a lot of kudos for that last year it's it's the numbers it's it it's it's great when you can have three and five percent decreases in health insurance that goes a long way we may not be able to come in at that low but we're trying to do it in a system with recognizing

165that we need to have a sustainable level of budget growth for the district so that is the schedule and the guidelines that we anticipate using this year thanks Dave as always completely thorough look there's not even any questions great job okay thank you sorry John no cartoons Oh true does anyone have feedback on the guidelines that he laid out they're in the packet not that separate I don't there thank you they appeared to me to be very comprehensive I think when I was on Budget Committee this this is more than what we were doing on the committee so it's it's kind of taking it up a notch of more I would for lack of a better word a professional guidelines for how the committee is going to operate so I you know it's it's a

166serious endeavor and this these guidelines reflect I'm just wondering whether we should change the stem to is te am the fourth bullet it says to continue to implement multi-year face and staffing for stem if we want to change it to steam great good suggestion all right next thing a new business is the recommendation to accept the FY 2010 Elementary School's PTO SR a second all those in favor any opposed any abstentions all right sure on the budget guidelines its stem coaches and they are called stem coaches even though it's the steam curriculum we've been working on so that's why it said stem because their title is stem coaches that makes sense specialist okay the next item on our agenda is many of you know the MAS C conference is coming up in just a few

167weeks and one of our responsibilities is to select a a voting delegate at an alternate voting delegate for the annual meeting so that we can weigh in on the resolutions we're not going to the resolutions were included in your packet to look at for next time but there was a deadline for when we need to select a delegate Diane did you want to speak to any of that or so last year I was a delegate Angie was the alternate we were both present I had voting rights but it's a great opportunity to see you know what goes on in terms of advocacy at the state level so I recommended whoever's going to step up and volunteer for that you're volunteering do you buddy to be the voting delegate all right is there anyone that would

168like to be an alternate who's who's going it's it's just there's just that one part of the meeting right where they have to I mean it's Friday afternoon I don't know what time but it's about an hour maybe I don't have commitment it's not a big deal yeah that's really interesting Thank You Beth if no one will step up as the alternate I'm happy to do it do you have other responsibilities as are like division to person does that great okay so we need to officially vote that right so all those in favor of Angie I'll move to designate Angie as the a BRS C's voting delegate and that Diane be the alternate voting delegate at the MAS C annual meeting on November 8 2019 all those in favor any opposed any abstentions great Thank

169You Diane and Angie all right so as I said the resolutions are in your packet so I recommend that you look at those because those we will discuss at the next meeting so that our delegates know how we want to vote ongoing business we have the approval of the minutes from the meeting on 10 3 and on your tables right Beth this is what you told me on your tables are a copy of the minutes with some suggestions that were made ahead of time so I don't know if you want to take a second to look over the the changes that were suggested or if anyone had anything additional I will move to approve do we need to say with the proposed edits or is it as amended I'll move to approve as amended all

170those in favor aye any opposed any abstentions okay my abstained and next we have the school building committee update so did you say that I will turn it over to Peter yet again all right so I think the biggest thing there's actually a memo in your packet to this effect and I think it's also on the table you said with the separate motion for tonight in preparation to come up to for the towns to be able to develop warrants for the special town meetings both of the town warrants include votes of the school committee's as recommendations and then in addition Boxborough includes language around recommendations for the building project right in the the narrative of the warrant so they're different in both towns so there's two steps that we're going to be asking for one

171tonight is for the recommendation that appears in the warrants for special Town Meeting that's what we're asking you to vote tonight and we the reason we're doing that is Boxborough needs that for next week so their time line is very tight to be able to produce the wants the second vote that we'll be asking for will take place at the next meeting but we wanted to put it on your radar tonight because that is the official vote of the school committee to approve moving forward with the building project the building project requires a series of votes the first of those votes is a vote of the school committee to authorize the project to proceed and for the funding to happen that then has to be approved at both towns in special town meetings and then

172the third step of the approval is for ballot elections in both towns so the piece that we're asking for tonight is the recommendation that will appear in the warrant for acting and Boxborough for the act inside it's only the vote of the committee for the Boxborough side it's the vote of the committee and the language I also believe in Tessa you can correct me if I'm wrong if there's any dissenting opinions on the committee then those also whoever was dissenting would end up writing up the dissenting opinion and that would also appear in the Box borough special Town Meeting warrant that's something that's unique to Boxborough that doesn't take place in Acton that's tonight and then again the official vote to proceed with the building project and funding his next next meeting but and I

173wanted to conclude the draft language for you tonight because these are both obviously important votes for you to understand what we're what we're requesting and and just so you understand it feels it feels rushed I understand but the Foxborough warrant is being signed on November 4th and our meeting is on November 5th so our next meeting so that's why the language is drafted ahead of time and and as Peter mentioned you don't you don't have to vote YES on this although I will remind everyone that this is a school committee project in a sense that we've been authorizing the school building committee along on this so but as he mentioned in the Boxborough warrant there is always a if it's not unanimous there is always a dissenting opinion that is actually published in the warrant

174so it's absolutely fine but just know that you will have to compose that if you descent yes yeah I have more of an operational question are we making two votes one for the warrant articles and one for the recommendation that's going into the Boxborough warrant or are we combining that both into one vote you don't actually vote the warrant articles themselves okay this is the recommendation that gets included the warrant article is very much spelled up by MSBA that actually we took it from the MSB a template we then had our project manager input the specific requirements of this project into it that was then reviewed by our attorney it's been sent to both towns for reviews by their attorney it's also sitting at MSBA for their review by their attorney as well and that's

175for your vote next time warrant articles and ballot so the only film are being asked to vote on tonight is the language in the recommendation and whether or not we recommend that is correct okay thank you rekt yes Michael so so this is going to be this version this drop version is going to be including to the worn right worn article right it's not the warrant article so the way will appear in the box for warrant if we agree on this language and this is a draft there could be you know small changes made to this tonight before that we can do it now if there is if there's if there's something within the school committee is going to recommend the building project so as a whole so if you if you want to change

176the language that is in the draft right now we can do that that's why it's in draft form well my question see if there is a no change then this just this paragraph is going to be included as it will say it will say whatever the number of school committee members you know Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee recommends whatever 11 to nothing whatever and then it will say this so but the article has something else yes this is not the article and what what was going to make up the other are the parcels already called that's what that's what Peter just explained the MSB the MSB a dictates the language in the actual warrant article what I can tell you if you in the packet in the memo it's like the and I apologize because

177it was a longer memo the second page of it I gave you the draft language for next week's vote which is again the official vote of the school committee for the building project the warrant articles are remarkably similar to that vote and that those are the official articles I didn't include the separate language because it's so close to what you're gonna see there that it would just be repetitive so then them might I'm still confused with them what's this so so so Michael in in the box for a warrant right that gets mailed out to everybody's house okay so it lists the actual articles with the legal language and everything else and then underneath each article is always a recommendation by the boards or the committees that that are affected so like the Select board

178will say though there will be multiple paragraphs underneath the warrant article that correspond to like the fin comm will have a summary like this of their recommendation and and the Select board will also have one and the school building committee will also have one so that's what we're voting on is the language from the school committee right and just as clarity like I think the fin comm ended up voting unanimously in favor of the project so they'll have their recommendation there but if there was a dissenting member then that dissenting member would have an opportunity to write the kind of dissenting opinion which would also appear in the warrants so that it gives a fair and balanced Nora okay that's fine now we have discussion what her microphones on you have to turn your microphone

179on when you I just had one idea for an edit okay I hope that's okay yeah um one thing that felt really important to the box for oh I'm sure active members as well as how I'm fiscally responsible the proposal is how cost-efficient it is so I just wanted to add a couple words about that to it okay um so in the sentence that says this project will allow over a thousand students mm-hmm could we say this cost-efficient project does that make sense I felt like it was important to highlight there was so much work that was done toward making this really a cost-efficient project and it didn't seem like that was highlighted in this recommendation I thought it might be helpful for voters when they read this to know that it's fiscally responsible or

180cost-efficient or I was just sort of looking for a little bit more of that language so I had another place where it could be added instead but that was so that they're okay and then the new building would allow us to address space concerns accessibility efficiency and environmental quality in a fiscally responsible manner maybe I did squares that you know amendment for conservation this you know it's a relate to because I said many times you know I'm not happy I'm not going to support that you know the that bird law effective reimbursement rate it's not cost-efficient so I hope we were not going to at this admin so Michael this this summary is for those who support it so are you are you going to are you going to are you saying that you don't

181accept that but you are going I just want to know where you're going because if you if you weren't going to accept it you've now added this conservation I don't know how this cost-efficient adding to here but if it says this project is cost-efficient then I cannot support this otherwise you know I will support us okay Angie maybe you can change to the stay supported from that you know because it's a project that's supported by state funding so the the first sentence ends with the partnership with the MSBA could we change that to a lot of the work was really done with the MSP a sure support the work that the school building committee has done to date in partnership with MSBA she's saying instead instead of and the just a thought I'm a little

182worried we're gonna lose track of which changes in motions where we're making I'm not sure I heard resolution to nor as I heard a couple comments on it but I just want to make sure because I just think that we need to resolve one concern at a time right right so yeah right so Nora made of suggestion and now someone had so my thought would be the will you will be better to allow an open discussion whatever people want to put on the table and then go down the road of making a series of amendments to actually implement whatever changes people want to make so I agree that we didn't have resolution though on this there was a couple of comments Michael dissented yeah so I you know I hear what Michaels saying in terms

183of Nora's comment I don't think cost-effective is the right way to describe this I do like fiscally prudent or by highlighting the financial advantage of the consolidation of the three buildings into one because that that that feels more appropriate to me so there is a sentence that says we recognize that a single building likely operational by 2022 consolidating these three separate educational programs has the added benefit of increasing operational efficiency with shared common spaces I haven't thought this through all the way but I think that is the sentence where we add another clause that speaks to it being a fiscally responsible to consolidate the three buildings so since readers of the warrant will not necessarily know what the MSBA is I suggest that we write out MSBA so that everybody will know what that is

184and then to this discussion of fiscal responsibility and leverage at the end of the the sense that animal is just talking about operational efficiency with shared common spaces I think that should be shared common spaces and services that's slightly confused to me because not everybody will understand which services are actually shared in a building like that in terms of janitorial services or food services or other things but I think that captures the spirit of there are some shared services albeit ill-defined and I actually do like Nora's original position of saying that the building will allow us to address all these things in a fiscally responsible way I think that captures the idea that we looked at numbers and tried to do something good I agree with Nora's Amendment because I view you know considering the

185options that the alternatives that we have this project I look at as to two-and-a-half buildings for the price of one I think that is incredibly incredibly cost-effective so I'm happy with Nora's amendment I think the the reasons for the reimbursement rate have been unpacked in detail 1.7 you originally it said when operational by 2022 likely operational I mean we could just start with consolidating these three I would be happy to so on the second line where the end of the line where it says and uh we're suggesting we're placing the antha with just the word in they're not there it's not proper names okay and then about two-thirds of the way down at the end of the line where it says we so now we have saying we recognize that a single building and then

186inserting after single building yep right there is a fiscally responsible choice period and then we suggest to delete likely operational by 2022 comma and capitalize C and consolidating so so can we consider in that second sentence this project can we consider this cost-efficient project and the reason why I'm bringing that up again is I think that if we're asking people to vote for this that is first and foremost in many voters Minds that this is cost-efficient and not only because we're consolidating buildings but because the project is so carefully designed to be cost-efficient and because we're having financial support from MSBA I really think that needs to be highlighted so that it's not a letter that says work cited about a new building but we're excited about how cost-efficient this particular project is for our

187towns it's a real savings I think people need to know that just I just a note I'm adding things here just to track the conversation not because it's agreed that this is going in okay I'm not I'm opposed to that but I just think you have to remember that this isn't the only thing that voters are gonna see in here we don't have to capture in here everything about it there's going to be extensive explanation about how the numbers were arrived at there's going to be an opportunity for questions and answers so I don't think that we need to feel the pressure to include absolutely everything you know in more than one time well I would object to her that cost-efficient there I'm fine with that what Adam said building a single building is a

188physical response responsible choice and fine with that I think that so I don't think it's appropriate thank you yes I my response to that would be that I would rather have us so you have a unanimous vote then insert additional language I do have one comment this is this is I think it's on yes Gary Kushner Finance Committee Boxborough we spent a lot of time with the educational programs piece in designing the building I don't really see that covered up in here and I'm wondering if for it says this building would allow us to address space concerns accessibility efficiency environmental quality and the plant educational program or the education sub like that I thought might help a little bit just a comment okay so I think we should take out cost-efficient because I agree with

189Adam in that I would rather have a unanimous vote then add language where I I appreciate a hundred percent where that sentiment is coming from I think we're getting partially there but it's saying it's a fiscally responsible choice so what Gary suggests and is after right Gary the new building down here lower the new building will be fully handicapped you know not there yeah and they're right in the middle the new building would allow us to address space concerns accessibility efficiency environmentally quote environmental quality would you like me to add support and support the educational program before the other items are after program vision well I think what Gary was speaking to is how much time was put into actual that actual document of the programming so maybe program so can we also eliminate the

190word handicapped well the educational program was the actual document that that we came up with to support all the things I always seems like I just want to see it as the staff may make some recommendations to it but I want to make sure that that's your voice just say fully accessible rather than handicapped accessible okay yes okay okay yes so so if there is no more discussion about that then I can accept a friendly friendly amendments to Jenny's initial I propose a friendly amendment to Jenny's initial motion as indicated on the screen above us second all right all those in favor of the amended language any opposed any abstentions all right that passes unanimously thank you that was a lot of work good job you from budget so we're looking for your vote tonight

191on a updated charge for the budget subcommittee this the budget subcommittee discussed this on ten eight 2019 at that meeting we finalized the changes and now we are looking for a vote for approval I'll move to approve any discussion all those in favor aye any opposed any abstentions all right those passed unanimously Thank You Diane for your work on that ALG report so I was not able to attend Amy it's not here I do not have a report though she didn't send it okay must have been the night club all right blf has not met just a just a reminder that the tribe board meeting in Acton is on Tuesday November 12th John would you like to report on the fin cop apologies the action Finance Committee met on October 8th 2019 the LG spreadsheet

192was reviewed Steve noted that the placeholder for the school bond two million dollars was not consistent with current loan projections a planned update of the LG spreadsheet for the October 10th LG meeting resolved this concern but I think the School Committee needs to be mindful of the challenges of keeping current and consistent financial information in the public discussion of the building project and I would notice an aside that you know if you look for sources of potential confusion you know if you look at the proposed warrant article you immediately see 116 million dollars if you go to the school website of course you see 117 million dollars and why is that it's because we've already paid a million dollars but that's the kind of thing that is very confusing so we just need to make

193every effort to keep those things explained Paul Campbell the town engineer presented the status of the West Acton sewer the estimated 15 million dollar project would be funded by government contributions of 3.5 million dollars in user betterment charges of 11.5 million dollars the new school is designed with a septic system because the school project cannot be contingent on the proposed West Acton sewer project the approved MSBA cost for the septic system is $550,000 if the new school and the West Acton sewer system are both approved at special Town Meeting in December the project manager is expected to exercise the option to transfer the septic system cost of $550,000 to the sewer project and Aspen had been noted elsewhere the cost of the school project does not change if the sewer option is exercised after the

194meeting I spoke with mr. Campbell and learned that the schools in town have discussed the logistics of sewer installation relative to the school building project so that the sewer would not impact the school building project the sewer line and pump house would be installed by July 2020 as phase 1 of the sewer project the required high-pressure main sewer line is a 6-inch diameter pipe so that installation and connection to the existing sewer treatment plant is not particularly difficult and then again as a twiki kind of note you may see that the sewer is ultimately bonded at a lower than what we have because they have access to some clean water bonding which has a favorable interest rate associated with it thank you John all right there are three warrants on the agenda now being circulated

195vendor warrants 2200 eight and twenty - zero zero eight PR and the total amount of two million three hundred twenty thousand one hundred six dollars and 22 cents and payroll warrant p200 eight in the total amount of two million five hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred seventy one dollars and eight cents and that is the last item on our agenda are there any FYI is that you wanted to highlight Peter before no I think the fYI speak for themselves the only thing I'll say it we did email it out earlier to you but we wanted to include a working draft of what the chair and I use to kind of plan the course of meetings over the period of the year so that you had some sense of what to expect on a bigger scale

196I will just add the caution that that is absolutely a working document it changes several times per week there's no way to keep emailing that out to you but what we will do is every month or two we'll send you kind of a PDF of it so you can see what's changed and what's coming up but it does change regularly based on items that come in and out all right is there a motion to adjourn so moved second all those in favor all right any opposed all right we're out thanks you