Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 11/19/2020

001i can broadcast let me just make sure he has a second to get going oh there's yevon anyway a lot of attendees given that there's really anything on the event all right i think we're probably okay to go okay note in the hour the presence of a quorum i call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order this meeting is being conducted remotely via zoom webinar for our remote participation policy bedja the following members are in attendance via zoom avalon abaya isa kira cook adam klein jenny kremer amy christian murthy john peterson nora shine angie so evan wang and myself diane baum is absent public participation is possible via the zoom link or call-in phone number our school committee meetings are also live streamed on actin tv's youtube channel although public participation is not possible with

002that option the links and phone number are found on the posted agenda on theabschools.org calendar this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on actin tv's website at actontv.org for our remote policy all votes will be done by roll call i will call each member's name and they will state how they vote thank you for joining us welcome everybody sorry for the last minute change to um a completely remote meeting but as i have mentioned in meetings before it becomes really difficult to manage um both remote participants and in-person participants and when we hit that tipping point of five for one reason or another it makes it really really hard to conduct it in person so for that reason um we hit that we hit that that number and it just didn't make

003sense to do it um both ways as a hybrid meeting so thank you for being flexible and attending this way and i guess i feel a little rusty doing it this way since we haven't had to do it this way in months but here goes nothing right so the first item on our agenda is public participation according to our policy bedh members of the public may speak for up to three minutes on items not included on this agenda comments regarding items that are on the agenda should be made during that part of the meeting typically the committee and administration will not respond to comments during public participation so if i call on you and we allow you to speak i i may ask um i may ask uh what you'd like to speak about to

004ensure that it occurs at the right part of the meeting because as i said the public participation part is is purely for um items that are not actually on the agenda all right go ahead peter you want to um sure um korean you can speak and also i will hold you to the three minutes tonight so you will get a one minute warning when you're done when you're approaching your um your time limit and then if you don't finish up at the end of that three minutes then we will be using the mute function because we need to keep the uh meeting running long so go ahead comment i i was gonna um make comments about the colonial mascot is that nowhere on the agenda um as long as it's not in regards to the

005open meeting law uh item then you may make comments okay all right my name is karen hogseth i live on seminole road in acton i have one daughter remaining in the high school i'm asking you to hold another vote to reconsider doing away with the colonial name and mascot the process you followed in getting rid of the colonial was rushed one-sided did not consider the input of the community and likely violated your own naming policy although one member said at the september 17th meeting that she didn't believe the community should be able to weigh in on such decisions that's not for any of you to say you are elected to represent the community not to act on your own personal social or political agendas in a note to the community the chair invited comments through

006october 14th that prompted a student-initiated petition to save the colonial over 2700 people signed that petition in a matter of weeks compared to the 2200 that signed the petition to cancel the colonial over a course of three months in a memo written on october 13th the chair broke down the emails to the school the school committee had received by 4pm that day her tally showed about 40 favorite keeping the colonial 50 55 wanted to cancel the colonial and about five percent had no opinion many of the people who signed the petition to keep the colonial were students who thought this was a way for their voice to be heard when they and their parents learned that this was not the case they started writing emails in the last two days before the october 15th meeting

007those emails tell a different story while the chair's tiling was about 40 to keep the colonial and 55 to cancel the late emails were nearly the same in number but the opposite in opinion 54 to keep at 42 percent to cancel both tallies included emails from people who expressed no opinion would implore the school committee to take their time considering this move to create a truly inclusive process rather than to rush to vote some of your own members even asked if the vote being delayed but the chair wouldn't care of it now the community has split in half on this issue this was entirely avoidable but you couldn't resist enrolling over the opposition i also have concerns about the process while the public was made aware of this petition on september 17th and invited to

008submit comments through october 14th the school committee had the first reading of a motion to cancel the colonial during the remaining meeting this was this made it abundantly clear that the school committee was going to rush this vote through regardless of the input they received we already know the school committee was sympathetic to this cause as one member had already said it was quote the right thing to do and one member's daughter was one of the petitioners present at the september 17th meeting should these two members not have recused themselves from the declaration deliberations and vote on this topic i find it ironic that we have an assistant superintendent for diversity equity and inclusion that this committee failed to truly consider the diversity of opinions throughout the community and include them in their deliberation instead

009you alienated half the students parents alumni and many members of the community in a member of about no in a matter of about two hours the debate was over the votes counted and the colonial was canceled you can do better they take this decision set up a comprehensive inclusive process that allows all voices to be heard thank you mark uh you can speak good evening my name is martin benson i'm a 2006 alum of abrhs during the last school committee meeting on november 5th i expressed my concerns to the school committee that many members of the community are troubled by the way they considered to have been are troubled by what they have they consider to have been an unfair process used to retire the colonial name and mass but on october 15 2020. during

010that meeting chair tess mckinley cited a naming policy which gave the committee the authority to retire the name and mascot thereafter superintendent peter light read aloud the opening line of the file ff naming district facilities policy and then referred to other paragraphs within this document i have referred this reviewed this document and i believe that it is important for the school committee and the entire afghan boston community to cure the entire first paragraph of this policy mr white read that the policy's opening line with states quote the acton-boxborough regional school committee believes naming or renaming a school building structure space property program or other district asset end quote he neglected to read aloud the remainder of that sentence as well as the rest of the opening paragraph which continues after asset quote hereafter referred to

011as a facility is a matter of significant importance one that deserves the most thoughtful attention of the school committee and the administration and one that is an unusual occurrence or event further the committee believes it should not be influenced in its decision by personal prejudice favoritism political pressure or temporary popularity end quote as a reminder the school committee heard a presentation from a student group advocating the retirement of the colonial mask on september 17th 2020. less than a month later in october 15 2020 he voted to retire the colonial name and mascot in doing so the committee violated its own policy last week i submitted an open meeting law complaint regarding violations which occurred at the school committee's october 15th meeting tonight the school committee will vote to authorize their council to investigate and respond

012to my complaint urge the school committee to consider my concluded remedy instead in return i will then withdraw my open meeting law complaint without prejudice as a remedy to the violations i urge the committee to take the following three actions in abbreviated form they are one hope to vacate their vote of october 15 2020 to retire the colonial man two chair tessa mckinley shall issue the acton-boxborough community an apology and three if and when the school committee decides to change the colonial name it must spend a year studying the topic and be open to receiving input and suggestions from the community in conclusion during this pandemic the town and the schools have more pressing concerns than mascots however the school committee administration might disagree and feel that erasing our town's treasured history is in fact

013a critical issue that needs to be addressed immediately if they come to this conclusion the school committee should at least follow its own policy and not be influenced in this decision by personal prejudice favoritism political pressure or temporary popularity thank you can you hear me now yes i'm trying to get uh i've been in town for a long time during that time the town has been noted earlier previous meetings changed demographics rather drastically without the need to pass policies decisions resolutions and so on it just happened because basically acton is a very very welcoming town look at the population i was really disappointed when i found out what's going on with the mascot which i did not know about the early stages it has divided the town which is exactly the opposite of what everybody

014says the intent of examining our attitudes towards race and so on should be now why did this happen i think the students that generated this addiction were doing what they thought would be appropriate the adults that were guiding him failed miserably to make him aware of what this mascot situation may have been all about it's not about glorifying some white racist miserable example of a human it's to recall some of akron's history which is remarkable when the mascot was instituted it was not representing the then student body it's related to the history of action if the students now wanted the mascot to be more represented one minute remaining thank you representative of who they are that could have been done by having a discussion i'm sure most people in action would be sympathetic to the

015students desires but you don't have to get rid of something which to replace it or something else common ground could have been found i think there is still time for that superintendent like told me that this will take years to implement anyway so there's time i think you should start over take a good look and create a situation where both sides can begin to understand what the other side is talking about which has not happened thank you thank you it's like we have two more peter yeah dave you can speak you need to unmute yourself can you hear me yep you hear me all right so uh in the interested time i'm going to overlook the fact that on october 15th ms mckinley falsely stated that no group came forward offering to present in opposition

016for a time to mascot there were groups of students and they were all barred from presenting i'm also going to overlook the fact that the petition opposing retirement which had to be thrown together in a few weeks extends still and greater numbers was summarily dismissed from consideration many alumni community members and students use that platform to voice their displeasure and were therefore ignored lastly i'll overlook the fact that on october 15th we had to listen to several members most notably miss abaya go on discriminatory tirades herself about whites and about males all while trying to loosely connect it to the improper definition of the school mascot i have taken the time to read all of the emails regarding the mascot and with the exception of a handful every single letter in favor of retirement cites

017the wrong meaning behind the school district's name every single one just because two words can look similar in this case colonial and colonialism does not mean their concepts nor time periods are similar as well all of you sitting on that committee know or should know by now exactly what the true definition of the mascot is conversely the vast majority of emails opposing the retirement provided thought out polite and constructive feedback that not only cited the proper symbology of the mascot but also noted its cultural significance to the area and its positive impact on the kids while also offering up alternative solutions for actual social change these emails were from alumni current staff and students community members near and far progressive minded citizens themselves and even immigrants of color this entire process and that meeting in

018particular were ashamed to watch a premeditated agenda from the very beginning being destructive to culture especially at taxpayer expense is not making progress it's nothing more than narrow-minded self-interest that is only creating more division i certainly hope you all take a long hard look at that vote you made on october 15th do the right thing if discrimination is taking place in the school system then handle it directly with the parties involved but for god's sake leave the school's name and legacy out of it that's all thank you just one second leo you can speak if you're on you all right can you hear me yes hello i'm leo fetchman from wright terrace in west actually i'm very disturbed by what i learned about the process to retire the main colonials and remove the mascot thank

019you marty benson for bringing to my attention this issue reminds me of a favorite story written by hans christian anderson in 1837. the emperor's new clothes if you haven't read the story please read it and if you have read it it's time to re-read it in the story a very vain king has closed relevant from magic thought that he was told could not be seen by anyone who was unfit for the office he held who was very stupid everyone was afraid to admit that they could not see the cloth because they didn't want to be called stupid it took a child to speak the truth the emperor has nothing on at all what would happen if we replace the word stupid with racist pushing the narrative that colonials is a racist term and that anyone

020that wants to keep the name is racist is untrue people including students are being pressured in other words bullied into going along with this narrative to remove the name because no one wants to be called a racist i want to state that the emperor has nothing on at all i'll repeat it the emperor has nothing on at all we were a colony of the british empire thus colonials does anyone remember the statement no taxation without representation we fought to gain our freedom from england by brave men and women there was nothing racist implied by the name and let me remind you that the first person to die in the revolutionary war was christmas addicts who was african and native american descent he is buried in the granary burying grounds in boston along with sam adams

021paul revere and john hancock do we have a perfect society no we don't are we working towards a better society yes i believe we are but to move ahead we need to understand our history one minute remaining cancel it but to move ahead we need to understand our history not cancel it i had read that there was a recommendation to every refresher about our colonial colonial history in the schools did that ever happen we need to have more discussion on this issue please rescind your decision to remove the name colonials and the mascot until the community has more time to discuss the issues thank you thank you looks like we gained two more hands peter since i said that was the last one can you hear me um my name is leela and i just

022vehemently disagree with what's been said tonight um everyone is entitled to their opinion but not all of them hold water and i hear people saying that the process was rushed but the process started over the summer and the school committee has put in hours and hours and weeks and months into this decision it wasn't like it happened in a matter of two hours like someone previously said um there's also claims that the school committee only heard from one side but that negates all of the school committee's work to try and open it up to the community um you could have spoken at public participation at multiple meetings emailed in or the very least there were multiple social media accounts and posts that would have brought your attention to this issue um people were not alienated

023and others have said that this decision has divided our community um but to quote ayanna presley unity at the expense of our freedom equality existence and safety is not an option we have sacrificed shelved and moderated our demands in the name of unity for a very long time it's long past time for justice healing and liberation i think at this point in time we have more pressing issues to deal with and we need to let white folks be uncomfortable and fragile and move ahead with the decision that was the right thing to do thank you okay yeah two more cheers 2010 um alumni i did have something written down but i got a traceable education and you guys have zoomed zoom by me so i'm gonna make this short and brief um i'm gonna speak

024for the uh student sport more more than any other stuff i think the people are more mad about you guys get didn't get rid of the uh colonial name um the um at a mascot if you want to change it around sure the clothing short but you can't just take the colonial name out of acting box bro active box with a family what when you go to a sport event in indoor and outdoor once you can come together you're one big family ruined on a team if if you brought this question to an av basketball game and asked over the loudspeaker everyone will look at each other saying what what are you talking about all all people want to do is is watch your ap corneals play sports root on your teams what let the

025other history go you want good history going to field house lower gym look up at the banners now now that's history and i'm sure people there there's somebody there that can name each and every person on on that banner and and it tell a story about that person of how they thought hard to to to make a record now now that's been remaining that that's the history that people care about any other of other history that that just being left left that big some people are some people are are against it some some aren't but it apa ap is about the education and the sports and if you remove the coil the vacuum box rule we're open to hearing the ideas of a different name but we're all happy with the colonials of actonbox bro

026because it just sounds good makes us happy and makes us proud thank you scott hi can you hear me yep hi my name is april hershberg and i'm a parent here in acton and i just wanted to call in and i just i agree with the students just now obviously it's really important to be proud to be a part of the av community but i wanted to just point out that you know i've been listening to these meetings now on october 15th when the colonial mascot was retired i was extremely proud to be part of the av community and i thought that the um the whole committee and you know the the leadership showed a lot of hard work dedication and very thoughtful deliberation um over several weeks and months and certainly on that evening

027and i just wanted to voice my support of the decision and thank you for all the work that you're doing thank you april okay i don't see any other hands raised um so thank you for all the public comments and we will move on to the next item in the agenda which is the superintendent's update so peter i'll hand that over to you peter you're on me okay thank you you would think that if i'm the host of the meeting i could figure out how to unmute myself but you know life is about learning um so the superintendent's update tonight is actually also the public health update so i'm going to go ahead and i'm looking for let's see don do you see julian oh there there you are joanne i found you i'm bringing

028up joanne chadwick who is our one of our lead nurses and um has been a point person with us uh throughout pandemic and so you know i'll just do a little introduction and i'm gonna share my screen as well i will say you know and i'm probably not the first person that you are going to have heard said this but um i think we're all extremely concerned heading into the thanksgiving break um about possible spread of covid we've been here in public health uh public figures talk about this for a period of time it has us at least equally concerned at the school level and you know we're certainly going to be sending a note out to families tomorrow urging them to keep gathering small and try to stay local i wanted to come to

029you tonight because i've we've been monitoring cases since the beginning of the year and in all honesty we we planned this a couple weeks ago um as just a timely update for you to review some of the overarching metrics we've been monitoring share some of what we're seeing in schools uh but in the time since we planned this and even since i've written the original memo we've really seen a steep increase in the number of cases we're seeing here in the community and it has me deeply concerned at this point about what we're beginning to see not only in our public health data but what we're seeing for cases in schools um and that's really causing us um you know me in particular as superintendent but us as a leadership team to have to really

030think deeply about what that means for next steps so you know just to start at the beginning you know we're going to go through the memo that i had sent you but presented hopefully in a little bit of visual way and just talk through it but we're going to talk about some of the key data points that we've been looking at we will talk you through how we manage cases in our schools everything from working with a positive case to the contact tracing process and how quarantined and traveling works in the schools we also want to talk through the public health data and some of the recent changes to the metrics but also give you the most recent update from the state website that was released tonight talk a little bit about managing risk and

031understanding that risk is not a one-sided view it's not only about the public health risks it also is about other risks that we have to balance and then i want to share a little bit of some of the summary and key consideration so i'm going to turn this over to joanne to present a little bit and trade-off as we go between don joanne and i joann's on joey and your mute hi i'm yeah i'm one of the nurse leaders in the school district and um i've actually been working as uh the major sort of covid point person and working with peter and dawn and the principals and the team of nurses and i have to first say that i think the work's been tremendous and i really thank everybody the communication has been very good

032and everybody's been putting in a lot of work to try to keep students safe and also i'd like to thank families because we've spoken to a lot of families and everybody's had incredible understanding and patience and we're very grateful for that so um these are the numbers that you see um currently i think as of tonight um i could be a little off on this we've had 27 positive cases reported in the school so that number 24 is now outdated um there's been um the thing that we're particularly interested in is transmission within the school and you know we're very happy to say that that's only happened in one instance currently that could change any day that's transmission between people within the school and i think that speaks to the you know the very uh

033good planning we've done all the work we did about uh ventilation having the these students wear masks trying to keep everybody six feet apart um following the protocols the hand washing the use of sanitizers so we're very we're very happy with that so what we're seeing is kovic coming in through um you know coming in from outside of the school and we have also seen cases coming in through sports not not necessarily school sports but um extracurricular activities that students are involved in um so that's a breakdown of uh the reasons that we're tracking them so maybe we go to the next slide okay so i think that's 27 positive cases um what happens with the positive cases um we look at them on a weekly basis and um we break them down when peter

034puts the the metrics out we break them down by the different schools and this these numbers are reported to the boards of health on a weekly basis we work very closely with them [Music] we also in the one case where we suspected there was in-school transmission we were able to utilize the rapid response unit from the state and what we did everybody who we had identified as a close contact which was i i can't remember the exact number it was like 23 families we offered testing um we had people drive up to parker daymond building a stay in their cars and have the testing done and we were very pleased that we didn't find any spread within that group of students [Music] okay so maybe go to the next slide i don't know if peter

035or dawn want to speak to that that slide or this is um so i actually put in our our cases and you know maybe we have to reconcile a little data but um i actually think we might have gone over 30 cases as of today uh so i actually think we hit the 33rd case uh school year today and you know what was has been telling to me is you know in the first you know month and a half of the school year uh we had probably a total of around 10 cases and you can see these broken down by school these have been on our website but since november 1st we're seeing a real spike in the number of cases that we've seen um and that's a concerning trend um i think in the

036back of my mind i was hopeful that maybe the spike could you know maybe initially have been attributed to halloween um and then we would see you know a dip in the cases maybe heading into this week but we really have not seen that slow down we had you know another case yesterday and then four additional cases uh today over the course of the school day so it's already been an active week for us and that's you know as i said that's that's increasing our concern let's see slow down so um how we how we um what we do um the key as i said we have collaboration between um the building the building principles the building nurse so the how we work it is uh the building nurse becomes the lead professional from the

037nursing point of view when we get a case in a building and we use we use a tracking form that um we all have access to and we also share with the board of health and we can we can try to keep a note of the people who have tested positive and all the close contacts the major thing we do when a test when somebody is identified we we either hear of it from a parent calls us or we hear from the board of health or sometimes we've even had an email from the the student themselves what we do we look at um we look at the date we look at uh when they either became symptomatic um or they tested positive because we have people who are testing for procedures like dental procedures or

038traveling when we get a positive we have to trace back 48 hours so we go back 48 hours and then what we do we convene a zoo meeting with the building principal vice principal senior management myself and the building nurse we identified identify the close contacts and then let us go out but before that happens uh the nurses sometimes with the help of administrators but usually the nurses contact each one of the families um with a telephone call because we think it's very important to speak to people because people have different needs for the level of explanation and information they need we make sure that that is followed up with an email and a letter that day and then um we try as a team of nurses to follow up with the family two to

039three days later yes just to make sure people understand the information we've given to see how they're getting on with the testing protocols and then we ask them to keep us informed because sometimes we need to know what the test results are i will also want to know um if they if any other close contacts have been identified that we initially probably hadn't identified so that's how we've been doing it so it has meant that we've um most of our work has been communicating with families and telephone calls and the board of health so that takes up a lot of time um also we um i'm lazing with the um the school physicians [Music] and the town nurses so we're just trying to make it a very much a team approach and i would say

040i think the collaboration of communication has has and is working very well to date to what peter said i think the last two to three days it's beginning to get to a point where it's um it's constant we're not getting much of a break between cases and we are you know we have had to put a lot of students out onto quarantine um today three three different uh groups of students had to go out today so yeah we're very aware of the disruption it causes and um as i say families have been very understanding is there another slide there is okay there we go oh so quarantine we're calculating that from date of exposure and that um until yesterday when your guidance came out that was 14 days to so the day you're exposed because

041day zero and then we calculate forward there has been new guidance which we're discussing which might change that with a 10-day quarantine with a test at day eight [Music] anybody that comes into the health office unwell if they meet the criteria which is set out in the documents on the transition site we send them home and ask them to test before they come back otherwise they have to be out 14 days and also the nurses are following up with everybody that calls in on absentee lines every day because um we need to you know why why people call out so you know we did feel an issue that was somewhat intrusive to families but i think people again have been very understanding when we call and say you know your child was out sick can

042you just give us a little bit more information and it usually means we have to ask them for a covert test the other issue that we're seeing more of now is travelling um people traveling out of state we're keeping up to date because the states that you can travel to change all the time i think possibly in the next day a couple more the states will come off and then it will be almost all 50 states uh be like 48 states that you you um when you return you have to wait 72 hours to get a coveted test and we need to see that test result before uh students can return to school so um it's becoming i mean with thanksgiving coming up it certainly is becoming more of a challenge for us and um

043we're also finding that um families are having family members visit for thanksgiving so they are testing just thinking you know auntie's coming out or grandma's coming i'm gonna test and then uh people are asymptomatic people are testing positive so we are seeing more of that that's something we're seeing more of since uh in the last couple of weeks i'm going to shift and talk a little bit about some of the public health metrics um one of the charts included in the memo was a comparison of the previous public health metric that dph had used to categorize communities and then a comparison with the newman and about like i said about a week and a half ago or maybe two weeks ago um bph investing jointly released this new med along with some guidance and the

044intention of the metric was in particular to focus on smaller communities like foxboro with a population and to be able to at a more granular level um code them properly within this kind of stoplight you know red yellow green and gray system because they were finding that the metrics particularly with smaller populations could steal how the data appeared so you know you can see a little bit of a comparison but what was kind of interesting to us in addition to you know providing for the clarity around the smaller populations the the state also you know more than doubled some of the thresholds um so for example if you look at um like the yellow level let's take for example prior metric uh was that if you had between four and eight cases per 100 000

045residents that was considered yellow now the new yellow is if you have over uh 10 average cases per 100 000 residents or uh greater than five percent positivity rate so if you had four cases previously you would have been yellow and now if you the have like that i think the state's intention is to be able to keep those students in school um but it's been certainly a challenge to make sure we can translate that publicly this is today's data as of 6 o'clock p.m the state relates released information on the website and this is the first week where we've actually seen acting go into the yellow in terms of the categorization so we in acting right now we are at 10.5 uh average daily cases per 100 000 residents um and we're still just

046about a two percent positivity rate on boxborough uh we have nine cases over the last um two week period and so that still keeps that community in the gray so just a little frame of reference um incidentally middlesex county is seeing i believe it was 25.6 average daily cases per 100 000 residents so that's a very steep uh increase over what we've been seeing since the beginning this is a chart for comparison purposes over time you can see uh since the beginning of the school year when we started tracking this information on the left is the town of actin the top chart is tracking the average number of average daily cases per 100 000 residents and you can see how we've progressed in particular over the last three weeks uh we had been hovering anywhere

047between about one and a half and three cases pretty consistently for the first you know nine or ten weeks of school um and then since then we've seen that very sharp spike you can see it's recently gone into yellow and the chart below that is the percent positivity and that's showing almost a parallel uh increase to that in boxborough you can see the average for the cases starting with size so you know that community would will likely go into green in another week or so if the cases continue to rise i won't speak to the bottom chart because i just just talked about it for a minute one thing we have done though i thought it was important because we had been tracking metrics since the beginning of the year in a previous system that

048the state had published so i've been continuing to publish that on our website just for comparison people who are interested and like to keep track of data and if we used the prior state metrics what we would see is in acton uh we would have actually gone into the yellow two weeks ago around about november 5th um and last week we would have almost been read and this week we'd be significantly into red or interred um and then in boxborough you would see a similar spike in and they would have passed that red metric um and again it's based on the old data um i think atkins may be a more realistic picture of that but foxboro i think does get skewed jesse has also issued some updated guidance and i apologize for the number

049of words on the page here i did cut out some from the memo still it's awfully wordy for a slide um but what i wanted to do was do a little comparison of what jesse's issue for guidance and how we're considering our decision making um you know districts are expected according to deci to prioritize in-person learning which we absolutely agree with across the color-coded categories unless they're suspected in school transmit districts in schools and communities designated a gray green or yellow are expected to have students learning fully in person and then there's this caveat that says if feasible um schools in red communities should implement hybrid models while maximizing input learning on each students and in those communities with the highest coveted 19 case loads and test positivity destiny and dph are kind of more

050efficient bessie does note for the remote structural models i thought it was also important to talk to you about some of our considerations because there's a reality to how some of this plays out in schools one of our considerations if we were to close our schools would be because the overall public health data no longer supports in-person learning because we're seeing a high degree of community transmission we're certainly seeing that rise into a concerning level but we're not a red community yet another reason we might not open our schools is there's evidence of covet 19 is spreading within one or more of our schools to date we have only one suspected case that's connected to another school-based case and that was in october at the miriam school of the current cases right now we don't

051have any suspected transmission how we are we are monitoring one of two of the post contact right now see if that does come to a another case transmission the third reason we could close is because simply the volume of contact tracing that results from an increase in positive cases in our schools exceeds our ability to do it safely with reasonable certainty we need to know that we have the available staff right resources to contact price every single positive case with accuracy because if we can't do that we can't safely keep our schools up and then you know fourth is also an extremely important consideration for us the number of students and staff were required to quarantine could result in a substantial negative impact on their ability to offer an effective learning program i talked to

052marie earlier today and you know i don't want to quote this number but i believe she said it was somewhere in the order of 39 staff right now are in quarantine across the district um that's very concerning for us we also know that over the last um you know i think even just today we had probably i think larry said between 30 and 40 high school students quarantined and we had 50 high school students quarantined the other day um there can be a really significant loss of learning from students that's something that we also need to consider i think you know the message that i want to send is we absolutely understand and support state's goals and having as many students possible but there are a lot of considerations that we have been above um

053you know i can tell you that as of last week i felt we had a good handle on where we were at to be very very honest with you as i come in tonight and having had you know four cases today in five cases so in the last couple of days i'm becoming increasingly concerned about where we're at right now i don't have any answers for you and i don't have any decisions about what that means but i want to be honest in my assessment um i'm going to turn this over to dawn for a couple of minutes to give you maybe a bit more positive of an assessment we want to try and keep our schools open as much as possible thanks peter and joanne um we've been spending an enormous time uh together

054lately and i'm very thankful that we have one another and we have such an amazing team um as many of you remember um i spent 20 years in michigan and did not we didn't have school nurses um and so when i got here and you know was told that that's one of my areas of supervision i'm like what do they do i have no idea and in those four years of normalcy i was like wow they do so much would have been really cool to have school nurses in michigan and now this year i'm like i am really concerned i don't know what it would look like in a school that doesn't have a school nurse in terms of what the types of things that our nurses are doing and tracking so i just can't

055even say enough about how much my respect for them continues to grow every day so one of the things that we look at certainly is this balanced approach to risk i think peter did a nice job on the last slide of sort of you know when we talk about balance there's a lot of things that we're balancing um and so you know joanne mentioned earlier a lot of the evidence-based strategies that we have implemented since september when we reopened um and you know it's really important for us to recognize that you know a strategy to reduce risk um is different from a goal of having zero quoted cases because there's no such thing as you know a risk-free environment right now and particularly in the case of the pandemic so but we do know at

056the moment the data and what we're seeing from public health metrics right now um is that schools are not major contributors to the spread that could certainly change over the holidays as more and more kids are coming in um and you know as peter and julia both shared i certainly share a number of their concerns that um they've expressed with the really sharp uptake in cases we've seen in the last few days next slide peter please so as we think about risk mitigation we have implemented a lot of key strategies for our for buildings and keeping them healthy we actually attended a webinar last week with joe allen who runs the harvard chan um school for public health and their healthy schools uh initiative which we've used for many years to help inform our approach

057to hvac and ventilation in our buildings and so we've looked at a whole bunch of different strategies that come from the risk reduction piece but i love that that dr allen spoke about buildings as breathing and it gives me such a good um visual to think about that because they really are and so the more we're able to leave windows open a little bit doors open get air purifiers um all of those things it allows the building to breathe and it allows the building to remain healthier so i do think that the warm fall and other has been a huge factor as we've really looked at mitigating risk in a lot of cases we actually exceed industry standards in many of these areas and we implemented a whole lot of strategies they're outlined on our

058transition to school website which i'm sure you all spend a ton of time perusing because there's so much information there but there's information on our hvac systems our colbit 19 control plan our custodial training protocols and the the products that we're using right now very building specific operational plans so what does it look like in each one of our buildings and those are all publicly available also as we opened our schools we did purchase air purifiers which we shared with you earlier in the year for spaces without in without operable windows that was over 200 different spaces some of them are smaller offices that are on the inside of the building but we do have some newer builds where the windows were not made to be operable so in order to continue to maintain our

059high um and healthy indoor air quality we are we've just purchased a whole bunch more of on these air purifiers so to help us in the winter months when it's going to be challenging to leave the windows open all day they'll still be open for little periods of time but we've ordered air purifiers for all the classrooms and we hope they'll be installed in the next couple of weeks so that's another piece that we're we've implemented and then i think the other the last thing that i want to talk about next please is really the long-term effects and this was one of the sections in our report that we put together for you um where dr who you've heard you may not recognize the name but you've probably seen him on the national news and

060he's the currently the brown university dean for the school of public health and he was done he did an interview on november 2nd where he talked about the large mental health cost to children he talked about the what the achievement gap widening between wealthy and poor students and between white students and students of color and he spoke about the long-term effects that we're going to feel for a long time and he said you always have to weigh those very large costs against the cost of going back to in-person education districts that are being too cautious are doing enormous harm to children and families in their communities and then if any of you caught the um press conference last friday that the governor did make dr mary beth miato who's the vice president of the massachusetts

061chapter of the american academy of pediatrics spoke and she talked about her own practice her own private practice where within the pandemic pediatricians are seeing rapid weight gain in children they're seeing this increase in sedentary lifestyle limited physical movement they have a lot of concerns about nutrition and the amount of screen time that children are seeing and i know that my mental health team can definitely speak to the last one as well around youth hospitalization and suicide attempts and most of the folks that dr miyoto speaks to speak to the fact that there are far more um instances of youth who have been hospitalized for suicide attempts than there are youth coveted cases um in the commonwealth right now and so that is and a lot of these kids never had um previous um behavioral

062or mental health concerns and so that certainly is really really hard to think about she reports that that's just typical children bending or breaking under the stress of the pandemic and for being you know home alone or alone for long hours at the computer and my favorite part though what she shares is that many children struggle academically but schools aren't just about learning schools are places to find trusted adults they're where nurses help manage chronic diseases they're places where children get extra healthy meals when food is scarce and schools are places where friendships and mentoring provide safe havens for growing youth to establish healthy identities and ride out tough new emotions with the support of caring and experienced adults and so this is really tough because we we i think are already seeing a number

063of the the different effects um with the students with whom we work who are both in person and in our remote learning and um it's this is a big it's a big piece for us to weigh as well so peter i'll turn it back to you you're muted um there i think i'm unmuted again now you didn't give me a bug yet to say that so that i don't have to say it anymore i can just hold it up i know i know uh i can't see you though because of them screen sharing the screen um so you know some some really key questions um you know a lot of this data i think is we see upticks in cases um across the state and across the country you know we need to wonder if

064schools will continue to show that they're not a source of transmission as we see increasing the number of initial cases in schools you know it's one thing to say that they're not sources of transmission um when we're not seeing cases come into the school but now that we're seeing a significant number of cases in the school will schools continue to keep that spread down i think is one question we have to monitor will our state and nation take steps um as significant as those that we're seeing in europe i think one thing that you know we're hearing a lot about is europe's ability to keep schools open while closing the rest of the country i think there have you know and and this is a tough judgment to make there were some priority decisions made

065there um where they did close down other sectors of society in order to make sure that those could remain safe to be open um and you know we have to see if our state nation are willing to keep um which you know again from a lot of lenses is understandable but uh you know it certainly can make it too much will our community continue to adhere strictly to all of our safety protocols including mask wearing social distancing rules on gatherings hygiene as we enter the holiday season you know we continue to be concerned about this area um you know we do know that you know we're just about right now um almost at the peak number of cases we saw at the height of the pandemic in the spring and i think it's a good

066opportunity to pause and ask ourselves if our personal behaviors now mirror our own personal approach that we had in the spring when we were seeing almost 3 000 cases and i think no we're not behaving in the same way um i think you know we've become accustomed to wearing masks um you know sometimes to a point where we think of it maybe more as a shield than you know one tool um and while masks and social distancing and you know all these rules you know they know one tool we have at our disposal is going to solve this pandemic it's really about the whole combination of these things and you know if we're seeing the same spike we have to think about you know behaving in such a way an individual and a family level

067that you know mirrors some caution so that we can try and keep schools open and then i think to you know one thing for our district is as we start to resume indoor sports um and that's you know not only our district ball districts and youth sports that take in the winter as well um will we see any increases due to the indoor nature of those sports you know we're hoping that we don't we know that youth hockey has been a particular challenge across the state and there have been some additional restrictions on that you know sports are incredibly important to students who are involved in them they're a piece of their identity and so we want to try and maintain those things but we do have to wonder if we're going to see increased

068transmission as we move into the season here you know and then you know i've talked a little bit about um concerns that i have you know we're at really a crossroads i think in some decision making we're hearing a real question for all the right reasons from the state to be thinking about trying to bring more students back and you know we we saw the language at the state level that spoke to the need to be fully in person but there's this caveat if easel and there are some pieces in the state guidance where right now for us at acton-boxborough it's just not visible um i know that the governor visited carlisle and you know i know carlisle well i know the superintendent there and i'm thrilled that they're able to to be fully in

069person um but their average class size is probably about 15 total students and you know that's as many students as we can fit in an entire high school so it's just not a comparable um district so although for some of us it was kind of frustrating that that was the example of what you know can happen to be fully back in person because they're able to get every student in and still have six feet um you know there's inconsistent agreement still among some of the medical experts about whether or not less than six feet is appropriate you know we hear some reports that say you can go down to as little as three feet particularly with the youngest students but that the adults really need to maintain six feet i think for us to consider

070that at some point in the future we need to see really consistent agreement from the medical experts and we need to see that congeal for us transportation is also a particular challenge for us um when we operate a normal transportation system go back one year from right now we're putting you know three elementary students on every seat on that bus and right now the max we can operate with one we don't have the transportation system that we can add you know 20 more buses even if we had the resources to do it we would never find the bus drivers so you know unless something changes significantly in terms of our understanding of how transportation works that will be a challenge that has to be overcome and then in all honesty access to testing is something

071that um it really needs to be a priority for our state the testing program that we heard the governor announced the other day we explored that and discussions with our health department with our own nurses and with our school physicians we determined it really not the appropriate solution for the challenges that we have that was rapid testing and it's only to be used if you have a symptomatic individual in a school um but in our conversations with our internal health professionals and our consultants um you know the the rate of false positives and negatives on those still remains high enough that it you know could really run the risk of keeping you know symptomatic individuals in the schools so it was not a good option for us you know we would love to see state

072really expand the use of surveillance testing in schools using a pcr based test as opposed to the rapid tests so that we're getting good reliable results we continue to explore this at district level and try and find ways we have another meeting tomorrow um with a vendor that's working with broad institute trying to figure out how we can bring this to the district i'm hopeful that we can make some progress on that over the next week or two um but i do worry about asymptomatic individuals in the schools because that could be a source of transmission that we're just not something that we want to think about before we get into questions you know you know i have to first say you know thank you to don thank you to joanne thank you to every

073single one of our school nurses uh because they're working countless hours behind the scenes to make sure that everyone's keeping us safe throughout this pandemic um we know all of the risks to students um you know and i'll be honest with you tonight that as i look at some of the public health data increasing and i look at the number of cases we're seeing in schools it's weighing very very heavily on me that we have thousands of people on a daily basis who are entrusting their health and safety to us and to the decisions that we make um you know as i said before we're really at a turning point here we're seeing a sharp increase in the number of cases we're you know seeing an increase in community spread of the virus at levels

074that worry me a lot and you know i think we're going to meet with a leadership team tomorrow have some more discussions about this in the morning but i'm also interested to hear some of your feedback tonight um you know and with that i'll pause and stop sharing and see what questions you have so i'm just going to remind everyone that it's way easier amy if you raise your hand in the in the chat thing than than if um because there's so many people on the screen and it's too hard to keep track of whatever i also want to note that i know that there is an attendee that has their hand raised but as we always do in these um conversations i'm gonna have the discussion with the committee first and then um and

075then we can take questions from the community um so kyra i actually think you had your hand up first the following direction sorry i mean um all right go ahead kira um peter i'd love to know a little bit more about how many um staff hours it takes to um do the contact tracing when you get a positive um when you when you get notification of a positive test um and and knowing the strain that we already have on our staff just doing all the other normal operations is there a tipping point for those staff hours around contact tracing that we should anticipate or be concerned about as we go forward sure um i'll let joanne jump in as well on this um but i can say you know the tipping point today when we

076we got four cases luckily one had not been in school for over a week so that saved us bit of fun um but the other three cases you know that that was close to the tipping point within a day um you know which i think is the result that you know joanne don and i had to kind of make up the presentation as we went wanted we were we were creating the slides i think at about 6 45 apologies for that by the way everyone yeah i would i would say um uh for two nights this week um myself and some of the other nurses have been in the building um flat you know junior high we we usually finish by three we've been there till nearly six uh i was at the high school

077i left at five today um yeah we're putting in a lot of extra hours it depends and it depends when the the calls come but you know then um dawn is doing an incredible job i mean i don't know how she's doing her other job because you know she's sending out all the letters and the notifications so it's it's a huge part of our day now i would say that in terms of time cara to sort of quantify it it depends on the level um and it depends on how many classes are are involved really and you know at the elementary level it's a little bit easier because we usually take out the whole class cohort and the greatest time factor at elementary is calling the families um at the secondary it's chasing down the

078bus attendance and the bus seating chart and then each classroom and each classroom seating chart and then attendance and then you know so there's just a lot of moving parts but everybody is so great about sort of knowing which part they need to do and and coming together um but i'd say one case if you took all the time that everybody spent i'd say it's probably good eight to ten hours if you took all the time that folks were spending across the different positions i mean it wiped out our day-to-day that's all we did so um you know it's easy that you know we start a day with you know delusions of grandeur and very quickly end up nope that's going to be set aside for safety so all right amy thank you sorry about

079that i'll i will use my hand raised from now on texas thank you for the scolding um i so one thing i wanted to ask was a clarification and it's going back into your presentation where you talked about the metrics and how they were originally and how the governor changed them and i'm i'm just wondering was he moving the goal post to to try to change our reactions to the whole covet situation or what how do you see this you know i think um i take a pretty balanced approach in in view of that i mean it certainly did move the goal posts i mean there's no no doubt about that but i think you know the governor doesn't certainly doesn't operate in isolation nor does dph or the department of education um you know

080everything that we've seen out of them you know is generally well not generally almost always in consultation with you know harvard medical school mass general hospital um you know the pediatric association within the state i mean there's really you know we're lucky to live in massachusetts because there's a good number of medical experts advising in all of this and we're fortunate to have some of the best in the world in our state i do think that there was an intention though to make sure we provide metrics that allow schools to operate i think you know um there's no decision that anyone can make in this pandemic that is going to be the right decision every time and i think the early metrics were the best guess that everyone had around what would work and what

081would be good thresholds and i think what we saw at the state level was there were a lot of communities that didn't have really widespread cases quite yet but were going into the red very early on in particular some small communities that were being put into red and when you looked at the total number of cases they might only have eight or nine cases in the whole whole town but they were showing up as red for several weeks and that that was really knocking a lot of kids out of school so i think it was done with good intent it definitely moved the goal post but it was also not ill-informed that's a that's a balanced assessment thank you i just wanted to add that i completely agree with your decision to not participate in

082the rapid testing um so everything i've read about it shows that it is you know there are as many false positives false negatives as there are true responses so thank you for standing up for that um and i'll just say very quickly to thank you so much to everyone who don i mean all of you that are working hours upon hours to to to try to find a way to keep our kids from school because honestly you know it you know it it we know that it's the best thing for our kids and i i just i really appreciate it i also don't want to leave marie out of that discussion either because marie is one of the people making all of our staff calls and i want to make sure she gets recognized for

083that absolutely marie is a freaking superstar no freaking superstar absolutely i agree thanks peter all right adam thanks first of all thanks to to joanne and don and peter for the presentation and for the work that you're doing and that the rest of the staff are doing i know that it cannot be easy for a nurse or a principal or an administrator to have to make all those calls um when when uh when doing the contact racing so i really appreciate that um i i have a question that sort of relates to maybe what some other folks in the community are are are wondering um and and i'd like to just sort of have us uh understand the your your opinion on this um with the the trajectory that we're on and with thanksgiving coming

084up why not just go fully remote following thanksgiving so i i think you know one um we started to hear that you know a month and a half ago you know what about going remote after thanksgiving and one of the commitments i've tried to make throughout the pandemic is we're going to look at the information in front of us and make good decisions based on what we're actually seeing um i think what we've all learned through all of this is it's very hard to speculate about what's coming next um you know i know that there are going to be people who wonder you know if we'd make it a week and a half into the school year before we had to shut down again um you know and kind of where we're playing the odds

085that that wouldn't happen so you know here we are coming up on thanksgiving and we've had a really nice educational program so i firmly believe we need to look at the data with that said what i'm sharing with you tonight is i've started to become increasingly concerned over you know the last few weeks but in particular the last 72 hours about what we're seeing in this um i'm not telling you i have a decision tonight about what we're going to be doing uh but i uh all i can say you know to be really honest is i think there's a lot of things in play and i want to be able to talk with our leadership team tomorrow look at some of the data um and make good decisions but i'm really not ruling out

086anything like that about what we're going to be doing over the next few weeks thanks and and to be clear i am fully in favor of giving every one of our students as much opportunity to be in class as possible um but i think that there are there are clearly uh people in the community who have that concern and so i think it's important for us to be frank about that and and also you know from my perspective make sure that when we're prioritizing the learning community as a whole and giving students every opportunity to be in class you are muted i'm busy eating my dinner because i haven't gotten yet yeah then thank you tessa so yeah i really appreciate our nurse and also uh district staff to keep our community and our students

087safe that's a tremendous effort so uh but we needed to keep working on it but so i have a three questions or comments can i go tessa are they related or are they three separate yeah it's a related okay so if they're relatively related then i'll say yes we're not on the hard time line of being in the building tonight so i don't want to go forever but okay thank you uh so this is it probably goes to the jaws uh so because you mentioned the some cases are tested just because of the procedure or something it's not for partners for the showing the same symptoms so i kind of agree with peter's uh concern like the number of positive cases doesn't really i mean show the severity of the our community uh spread right

088it could be also a lot of cases maybe a asym symptomatic so how many i mean what's the percentage of the positive cases are really symmetric uh that's that's actually a very good question um do we have that data peter what percentage of our positive cases were symptomatic we're symptomatic um in the spreadsheets yeah we're at like 2.2 well it's probably different after today we were 2.2 positivity when we look at everybody that we're tracking um and so i i think maybe half that of kids that were symptomatic before they and i would like to add there that um also some of the um some of the cases we've seen it's that the symptoms have been incredibly mild it's um it's you know we've asked kids to go home with a very very mild symptoms

089or um you know their parents reported that you know they went to bed with a bit of a headache had a slight tummy upset and just seemed a little bit off i mean we've had kids more sick than that but we've heard that the symptoms have been very mild okay so uh thank you so the second question is a computer actually so you showed us the criteria over the entire district alright so to say this is a like yellow green or whatever so are there any criteria at a school level to say take actions yeah so those um we've actually shared with the community before in in on our transition website at an individual school level it's going to be based on whether or not we're seeing internal transmission within the school um you know

090we you know spoke at length with the miriam community and miriam staff when we were concerned that we had kind of a connected case in that community back in october when we enacted that mobile testing unit the rapid testing but not the rapid testing the mobile testing unit um in october you know internally we said we were about one more positive case in that group away from closing miriam for a couple of weeks um we'll allow that to kind of clear itself out um you know i think on a school by school level it's it's about the transmission you know so if we were only seeing transmission in the high school for example then i would not be concerned about our elementary schools and i wouldn't be concerned okay but what's concerned me is we're

091really seeing cases come in in just about all of our schools at this point um and that that's a different type of concern okay so uh thank you peter last one uh so what do we learn from the source tracing like the source of the positive cases like say this could tell us something right so we can take preventive uh measures more actively say i just make make up some examples right examples so like because keeping in-person learning is as much as possible of our interest right always so i was wondering if if the source chasing tell us the family gathering or a big big big priority i'll be gathering is a is a big plays a significant significant role in the positive cases can we advise or come up with some policies if you

092coming back from that big gathering you should bring up negative tests i think i think the the cases that we've seen have come from a variety they've come from uh family gatherings we know some have come from sports like um hockey and [Music] informal gatherings at um you know fields and things like that we've also had cases where there's traveling people traveling back so um my feeling is we've more or less seen the whole range of uh where the sources have come from so i think it's uh it's a question of people trying to adhere to the the guidance put out by the state about you know avoiding gatherings uh we've had you know had a case in acting well also with uh dining so it's it's it's crossed the whole spectrum so i don't

093i think the guidance that we have which is in line with what state is saying is is kind of on point right now and i don't feel that we've seen any trends from anything particular yeah but you you have uh say in uh you actually in one slide you should if you uh if people come back from uh travel right then he should bring the uh kobe test yes absolutely and that's that kind of uh it's a it's a recognition of the say traveling is a it's a high risk activity yes yeah keep our communities safe let's do something like that yes i was just wondering if because also like a doctor faulty or a lot of a lot of people just one uh i mean a lot of people say this let's uh be

094careful with uh uh bigger gathering right yeah and so on so i was it's it's a really totally reasonable to me if we identify that's a primary source yes of all advocacy then that's because we wanted to keep our community safe and keep our student in person learning as much as possible that's important i would say we can do something like that requirements for that category as well yeah but i can actually jump in on that um so we had an incident earlier this fall where we had a group within our in one of our schools that had a gathering that exceeded what the governor's order was allowed um and so we actually had that group of students quarantined for the full 14 days um you know we've also investigated some other reports that have

095come to us um and you know if the facts lead us to believe that a group is gathering in violation of an order we're always reserving the right to have the group quarantine um so that's certainly in play i don't think there's any new policy we need to enact be able to do that at some point there's there's judgment because i think uh what we're seeing is there are so many different types of issues that come our way um you know we just have to you know at some point just use good judgment in the moment and think through what we're seeing and make a decision about it um it's it's also interesting because it's putting us to be honest in a very uncomfortable position with some some of our community you know we really

096as schools do not want to be the community police around gatherings um and it's not putting us in a great place to have great relationships with some of our families um because we understand why people want to get together it's not typically our role in society to police it but we're finding ourselves that we need to do that we recognize it's a challenge for everyone but it's something we certainly do well yeah people have a total level of freedom right together i mean just but but people also bear the societal responsibility uh so let's be not of be selfish right so sure like a wealthy mask policy can we do something like that i i just see making up some assumptions right scenario maybe it doesn't exist okay oh yeah that's all okay thank you

097thank you um jenny angie if you have to want to raise your hand you need to raise it in the in the um using the raised hand feature thank you um so i just want to say personally how incredibly frustrating it is to get these platitudes from the state and a gubernatorial visit to a district like like um carlisle and absolutely no assistance to districts um for for what they're dealing with um i spoke to our rep tammy gouveia today and i want to clarify peter that although we have um you know doctors and and some nurses on these teams there are there are absolutely no public health professionals have been included on these state coded teams and there's a huge distinction between health care workers and public health officials so you know that's a

098very very important voice that has been completely left out of this conversation um you know this is really concerning and uh just in talking to people in the community there are certainly a lot of people who are still planning to have fairly regular thanksgiving gatherings um you know who feel that because they're people in their family who they've seen periodically that you know somehow that that makes um having thanksgiving indoors you know eating with masks off um safe in some way um so to me i i think we really need to start thinking about our students who most need to have in in-person learning um and you know and planning for for that contingency because um you know i look at you know i i think our junior high students and our high school students

099many of which i don't know if it's most or you know they're kind of living like little college students with you know on campus days and then not on campus days when they're having a kind of direct their own learning and for some of them it's not ideal but it's it's working and then i talk to parents of kids who are you know young elementary school students and this is just a disaster it's a disaster for their students learning despite you know all the best efforts of our teachers and staff but it's a disaster for the students um social emotional health education and it's a disaster for parents who are trying to work they can't sit next to their kid um you know and and and help them manage so um i just want to

100say i'm just throwing out there that i i feel very worried going into thanksgiving and what it's going to mean for um you know a few weeks down the road after that which of course is you know the full on holiday season and all of our staff and students and nurses and everybody who's worked so hard and you know i don't know if it's time to have a contingency plan for our um you know our most vulnerable students students who don't have um you know access to support or infrastructure in terms of an internet connection um or who for whatever reason just cannot are not managing and are really falling behind and i'm not saying that that's a discussion we want to have tonight but i'm just putting out there that um you know if

101this goes totally sideways those are the kids that you know i think that as a district we need to be the most concerned about yeah no thank you i i would agree with you on that but i think our whole leadership team has been thinking a lot about that evelyn thank you tessa thanks to the team for all the hard work you're doing peter and dawn and john and all the nurses um i just wanted to find out um peter dawn or john whoever wants to answer this what is the projection for when we think we can have schools um open how much longer and also um i was curious we the state just got in um a monopoly antibody infusion which my institution and a few others and i think uh vegan women have

102the honor to infuse is called viva map is a monoclonal antibody and um i hear that there's some good news about the vaccine i know that um a fan of my whole son is in the air force we're getting vaccinated tomorrow and this eminent fda approval how much of that information is disseminating through desi to the schools and how does that factor into um how long we're gonna have this the schools open and what the vaccines are gonna look like and all these therapies that are coming down the pride i'm just curious are we gonna come back to school after thanksgiving um is there any promise any discussion about these therapies that we're supposed to be giving to people including the vaccines and all that i'm just curious how what your take is on it

103you know death is stick so right now um the information we're getting on vaccines is the same as you when we watch the evening news um you know that that's been the only information that's forthcoming to us um you know i have heard some reports that you know at least one of the vaccines you know it's going to be immediately available to health care workers um and education is not going to be in that first tier because we're not the ones you know intentionally dealing with with sick people um but after that educators are in one of the very early tiers some of the reports i've heard you know place um educators you know possibly even having the vaccine as early as march um you know where we might have the educators vaccinated in that

104case you know you know i as soon as we can get our people back to school we're going to bring everyone back to school that would be my goal we just again we have to do it safely um we will not be coming back fully right after thanksgiving i can guarantee that um you know i don't we're not gonna really start discussions about trying to bring people back fully while we're still seeing a spike um in the virus um i just you know i i don't personally feel like i could look anyone in the eye in good faith and say this is the right time to be bringing more students into our schools um as we see more and more cases evolve we're finding kids that are asymptomatic um as i said the pieces that

105need to fall into place for me to be able to put a real timeline for this are expanded access to surveillance testing for our schools um you know really clear um guidance from the medical and public health community that distancing of less than three little less than six feet is is good it is a good idea you know we even at three feet we would struggle to get everyone into our schools um and we know some of our classrooms it would be less than three feet of distance to try and bring everyone i was gonna be thinking um i wasn't referring to when we're gonna get kids back to school fully i was thinking and because i get a lot of questions about what is the projection that we're not gonna be going back to

106are we school be closing schools because um hospitals are filling up and got a bad side getting shot as yeah i don't know if you're looking at the state data yes there's a spike and and depending on how you look at the data the second stage has begun we thought it was gonna be at the thanksgiving but it really has begun and people are calling it a texture but in my hospital as of tuesday we will we're at capacity and they will folks sit in the emergency room with no bags and so i was just trying to pick your brains about realistically are we gonna be coming back to school after thanksgiving and is there a projection from when we think that we will be and as much as i think that we should be

107in person and it's good for the psychosocial health of the children i i think that giving everything that's going on i don't know that that is very realistic if you asked me two weeks ago if we were coming back from thanksgiving i would have said we're definitely coming back after thanksgiving if you you know asking me that tonight i'm gonna tell you i don't know um that you know i'm just highly concerned about what our what our data looks like right now in the number of cases um we are going to be talking about it as a leadership team and you know certainly making some decisions and we want to make sure people have ample warning if if we're not coming back but i i just you know i just wish i knew but i

108don't know tonight thank you sure john and then angie from a government's perspective the first thing that i want to say is you know i think that um this decision about operating mode of the schools is you know appropriately vested in peter and the leadership team uh in the presentation tonight makes it clear why that should be so um because you know there is no simple objective measure that we can look at in terms of you know new cases or positivity that can tell us what the right answer is and i thought the presentation did an excellent job in understanding it explained how certain things were under stress so it could be that the reason that we can't continue to operate is because we simply don't have enough student attendance or it could be that

109we can't support the contact tracing that we need to do or it could be something that we didn't even talk about like the fact that we had a whole bunch of bus drivers go out sick and now we can't transport students to school and i think the other thing that the presentation nicely did was to illustrate that you know we still have you know a huge desire to provide in-person education that we know that that's the best education that we can provide um it's good for students and and conversely it's bad for students when we can't do it bad things really are happening um so you know i'm very supportive that you know of course you know um peter and the leadership team should listen to school committee members and community members but when all

110of that's done um just as they've done tonight they should sit down with all of the information available look at all of the factors that are involved in how successfully we can operate our schools and then make a decision about what operating mode really is best for the whole community so so in that sense you know i found the presentation you know perfectly satisfying although i know there are always people who would be much happier if there was a simple objective measure you know if the number hits 20 we know we're going to close and this just isn't going to look like that um and then the other comment that i wanted to make is that um a few people you know in the course of their lives will have the chance to save a

111life um and there is the chance for each of us you know in terms of our behavior over these next few months to save a life we may not know the life that we've saved but if we can play a role through you know minimizing our number of contacts you know and our behaviors in reducing the spread of the virus lives will be saved you know and it's clear that that's the case um so like everybody else you know i was hardened by the news of the vaccines but i think peter has you know correctly cast this as this is something that's going to start to turn things around in the springtime um but that means we have december january february and we're on our own there is going to be no magic bullet in

112that time frame we're going to be looking i think in a situation very similar to what we have now trying to understand you know what the prevalence of diseases in the communities um and then adjusting our individual behaviors you know in our behaviors our operations of our schools to try and minimize the spread so um i i just want to remind everybody that everybody has some opportunity to contribute you know to the communal good and and i hope everybody will take that to heart and and over the course of these next you know three or four months um to the best of their ability that they'll do that and maybe it's a little bit easier to do that seeing that now maybe there's some light at the end of that tunnel angie hi um just

113want to start with thanks to the leadership team and the whole team together that um handing hand that we have we got we have sustained that the school is open for two and a half months now so i think that's a accomplishment so it's great that we are not only care about the health we also recognize that the short-term and the long-term impact i'm really concerned actually the short-term in long-term impact so the question i have is one day that i have two parts so the first part is when we make a decision um at this crossroad do we also take this shorter and long-term impact into consideration and do we have any data that we collected for the shorthand long-term impact of our students so that's the first part of the question so this

114and the second part is because we're in two and a half months is now and a lot of things have changed so i know how hard it is to for the school to juggle this the schedule if the student want to um from hybrid to remote or virtual vice versa but but but the family knows the student the best and there may be shorthand long-term impact on the students significantly after the two and a half months or now so what is the opportunity how open the school will be considered if families want to change because they may see some short-term long-term impact with the student sure um so angie i want to make sure i answer your your question thoroughly um the first part of that could you give me some examples of the type

115of data you're you're thinking of for short and long-term impact on students who might collect because i'm not not quite following that well in the i don't have the slide but they're in the short and long term and uh there is the the weight gain there is uh the screen time and there is the hospital the suicidal visit and you know there is our student who does not didn't have uh mental behavior problem and but now started to have lose on the data i was looking you know i think um we certainly actually don was working with um i keep wanting to say metrowest um health data survey but that was my my former group that i had um emerson call and emerson college um around doing a short survey around some of that information

116um so we actually are trying to partner with some regional districts do something like that with our students but we know it needs short given pandemic i've done you want to just say a couple of words about that um yeah so i i actually it's interesting i haven't necessarily seen any really specific reports about that angie a lot of it is a collection of anecdotal um reports from a variety of different providers so whether it's the director for elliott community mental health services who deals with the outpatient uh mental health services for young adults to adults in our communities um that surround emerson um whether it's the pediatricians whether it's so so we're hearing a lot whether they're our own physicians whether they're um you know folks through mvph and other things so i actually

117anticipate that any old day now we'll start to see some very crystal clear um reports that are coming out but i think so much of it is just so new that we haven't seen anything you know super concrete that says you know here's the the impact i think a lot of it is just people who've done this work for a lot of years that that you know there's a growing body of concern around it but you know as soon as there is data we absolutely will bring that forward and then the second one i think was around transitioning between programs um you know i don't see any updates to the process and policy that we have in place around transition between programs no we've been taking requests since the beginning of the year um but

118our staffing levels are pretty limited at this point um you know we have certain number of teachers allocated for remote a certain number of teachers are in person and you know in the remote class size is certainly a concern and we can't overload classes there or else the quality of experience diminishes for students and then in the in-person instruction we're really limited by making sure we can keep six feet of distance between our students so you know we've been taking we have you know a handful of people on a wait list um but in all honesty as soon as spaces open up um as the year progresses we make changes for families so you know our goal is to try and make as many changes for families as possible but we do have some of

119the constraints you know really continue to be a challenge for the year okay okay that's one short question angie we're already so far over if nora and raised kyra has her hand raised i have a question there's an attendant attendee that has a question if there's still time i will come back to you okay norah thank you um everybody else is saying thank you for the the time and the um listening to expert opinion and just your knowledge around um managing this incredibly difficult situation i think probably because of my um my professional job i think a lot about the impact of students who are kept out of school during quarantine or who aren't able to return and and i had a question about that i know you're going to be learning a lot in

120the next couple weeks like you said just because the numbers have gone up so quickly and you'll be learning about in-school transmission and whether or not there will be more of that now that we have more students in the schools who have had coveted positive tests um my question is around the length of time for quarantine i have heard some information that that might be shortening based on the limited return to positivity after being tested negative and also i was wondering about how close contacts are defined i know that one of the big impacts of contact tracing for coveting the schools is around the number of students that are out in the number of teachers that are out and the amount of work that has to go into contact tracing so i'm just wondering about

121how um how close contacts are defined within the school and if it is always the entire classroom that would be considered a close contact or if in some situations it would be fewer students than that given the way that students are spread out and wearing masks and open windows and kept apart um so i'm just wondering how the close contact is defined in the length of quarantine for julian you want to take that um you're correct there was a guidance um it was published yesterday the guidance came out um that it's changing the length of quarantine they're now saying um ten days but on day eight the individual has to test with a molecular pcr test and then they have to be symptom-free they test on day eight or nine then on day 10 quarantine

122can end but then for the remaining four days up to day 14 they have to self-monitor for symptoms so currently that's under discussion with between um the leadership team the board of health and the school physicians so we're looking at that because that that does have implications especially when we're putting whole cohorts out if you now have people having a different end point depending on when and if they choose to get a test you can have people coming back on day 10 or day 14 and if you put a whole cohort and a teacher out that does have implications for that so that's something we're talking about um the second part of your question was about contact tracing yes you're right in the ideal world with perfect filtration six feet and masks there should be

123no close contact but um we have always said on the side of caution we also look at something called congruent um contacts where you have a group of people within a room or an area for a prolonged period of time and the time is cumulative over the day so you could have students sitting next to somebody in period one and then in period seven and that total time is for that student is two hours um we look at that and um we also look particularly closely at as dawn pointed out on the buses and then also uh and lunchtime you know we know the students are six feet apart and it's a short period of time but it is more than 20 minutes and they are unmasked at that time so i mean today airing

124on the side of caution has worked well for us um how much longer that continues with the um the spike that peter has referred to uh remains to be seen and also you know we're going into a winter period where the drier air um that's why we're buying the purifiers uh you know the windows have been open today but that that's also impacting i think what's happening currently and just you know i think um just to piggyback a little on what joanne said you know because of that idea of congregate context that's why we treat elementary schools different than we treat junior high in high school the students in junior high and high school are moving every 40 minutes or so or 45 minutes to a different group of individuals so they're not spending an

125entire day in a classroom but at elementary school most of the people in that classroom do spend pretty much six hours together including some lunch time without masks and things um so we're more conservative in that there are times when even in an elementary class a student might only be in a classroom for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or a staff member may come in and out particularly our assistants in those cases we're much more targeted and we really try and dig down as to how much time the student spent or a person spent in a room who they were near you know who they talked to did they touch anything things like that but in general the elementary school were pretty conservative because of the amount thank you all right i know you have

126your hand up but i'm going to ask a question because i haven't asked one yet um so um peter i know that from from listening to the presentation that we're not really going by any one particular metric and that it does get a little um dicey when you look at what our actual capabilities are with contact tracing with staffing with you know the number of teachers who are actually out with the number of students who are actually out so given that we may make a decision to take a pause um to take a break and close for a little bit um i think that something that is unclear in the community is how that is different from last march um because i know that the expectation is that we would then come back and that

127it would truly be a pause whereas a poor as opposed to in march it was like we're closing down and that's it you know um and i think it's worth maybe talking a little bit about since there are sort of fuzzy metrics around what might make us take a pause what might be the metrics around what would allow us to then go back yeah i mean you know i think if if we're coming up on a pause it's you know for right now you know our our existing challenge is staffing coupled with the number of students who are quarantined in the continuity of education coupled with you know you know increasingly higher numbers of cases in our schools in a short period of time but the real you know the low person on that total

128poll is actually the public health metrics because the public health metrics alone um still could support in-person learning that that's not an automatic shutdown um so i think you know depending on what we see you know i think with you know a significant number of cases if we were to take a pause now it would be for a very finite period of time and we would then reopen um once we were able to kind of close for a period of time to kind of squash the infection that's growing um now that's completely dependent on people's behavior at home too and we know that that's a challenge you know if if we close for a period of time and you know families and students don't change behaviors and kind of close down with it then we

129come back and it's right back where we started but if we can kind of clear out any budding infections within the school community then that can be helpful to staying open longer once we do come back um you know so it's you know we're not in a place where just public health metrics alone are going to drive us and so i'm not really concerned at that level that you know we're shutting down and we're staying shut down i just don't see that happening right now um but i guess i didn't a year ago see that we'd be doing this either so you know i you know i'm not going to say never but i just don't see that evidence on our horizon um in terms of the the learning program that we offer you know

130when we shut down that was prices scrolling schools had never operated in a pandemic since 1918 and a lot has changed in that time period so you know i think that was really about trying to just get by and kind of keep kids afloat at this point even if we close down we're going to keep education moving kids you know all kids will be receiving synchronous instruction from teachers during the school day now we're not going to put kids on zoom for six and a half hours a day because it's just not appropriate under any circumstance um but certainly there's synchronous instruction um taking place throughout the day on and off teacher schedules you know we've been working with schools so that it will a short-term closure we might follow a more typical current schedule

131like what we're in and keep the call separated but if we believe we're going to close for any longer period of time then we actually have a schedule um that will provide daily instruction for all students so um it really you know kind of depends on the length of closure or the circumstances we see ahead of us but you know this would still continue to be full education for our students thanks space sure um can did you have another question not another question this will be really brief thank you for letting me speak again i i just i i i thank everyone who's been working so hard on this and echo those comments that everyone else has said i also want to recognize um the educators on the remote learning program side who should we

132have to um take a pause as people have said um and pivot to something else they'll be sharing the best practices that have been cultivated for the last two and a half months so it will still be crisis schooling we totally get that but it will also be different because on the other side of this there's a program that's been evolving um and and really really dedicated educators who have been practicing in this situation successfully for two and a half months and um it's my understanding that they're they are sharing already and that they would continue to share um and so i just i just want to also um recognize them for the public record that they've been um they've also just been incredible and val has been an incredible leader and those teachers would

133step up to share their best practices so that the children in this district will still get something excellent even after the pivot thank you for adding that because i would echo that tenfold um you know there's been a real steep learning curve for everyone on that um our educators have been fantastic and the remote teachers have done an absolutely tremendous job adjusting all right um before we move on to the next thing it looks like um karen and the audience has a question corrine you can hi thank you um i have a question and a comment my question was from very early on in this presentation how many kids have been forced to quarantine oh i thought that was in one of the graphs i thought it was 6 8 i heard like 50 went

134out today and i'm saying total throughout the 10 weeks how many kids have had to quarantine um let's see close contacts we've had well the data we published were from about oh i'm going to say beginning of the year up until i think we did the memo on the 15th or 16th so it was 284 people and of that 248 students um you know that's gone up significantly in the last week absolutely i'm gonna you know i would guess somewhere in the order of 100 or so students maybe 125 in the last week but that's that's only a guess okay so we don't know about this 125 but if the 248 do we know if any of them ever developed any symptoms or tested positive um yeah no no okay so we've had zero transmissions

135involving students all year long but we've quarantined 248 that never got sick i can tell you my daughter was one of those kids and she she fell behind okay and despite the really excellent outreach from the deans the counselors the support staff the kids fall behind and it's stressful and it seems like it was pointless because they were never gonna get sick so there's that i have to okay so that's my that's one comment about the quarantine um i also i have a my uh younger son i moved him to private high school this year he's in five days a week there's a thousand kids in this school the class sizes are 20 to 25 kids same protocols same everything the only difference is three foot distancing they have had i think i get fewer

136notifications from that school that i do from a b about possible um cases in the school so maybe it's comparable but i can see in my own home what a stark difference it is between my previously i could care less about school son and my super high achieving daughter it's just night and day um my daughter has never struggled academically and this year she's having trouble um at least one class there's been there was no accommodation made at all for the fact that there was no learning last spring or that they were only in two days a week this year and so i i i get that the teachers are working really hard i get that they've had to make adjustments i get all that but in the end i really don't care how hard

137people work if the result is that my kid only gets a half time education and she's harmed by it um i think that these these first 10 weeks of school we've had again there's the fact that there's been no transmissions in the school this we've been this district has been far too risk-averse we've had practically no community transmission this has been a wasted opportunity ten weeks that we could have had our kids in full time and already tonight i'm hearing this body talk about when are we going to go fully remote and i'll finish up that's the biggest difference i've seen between the public and the private the private school the public schools have been how long how long when are we going to be remote how when are we going to be fully remote

138and the private high school has been what can we do to get these kids back on campus and keep them here and that's all i have to say but thank you thanks okay i don't see any other hands or questions so thank you to everybody that put so much work even if it was right before the meeting into putting together that presentation and thank you um for all the work that you do every single day to um make sure that our students are safe and to ensure that um our schools are safe places for them we really appreciate it and i know we had a lot of nurses in the in the audience and i appreciate them attending the meeting tonight and um i think you can see on the faces of some of our

139administrators how very tired they are from all the work that has been going into this so it is really appreciated um is it okay to move on to the next agenda item it is all right thank you joanne thank you joanne marie you're up well that is a pretty tough act to follow somehow enrollment data does not seem all that important right this minute but i am happy to share so i'm going to share my screen so um we have in your packet is our annual october one enrollment report which has a lot of different types of data around our current enrollment it's certainly a different kind of year we have the rlp information worked in there for you and um at the in the fyi are the details of the nasdaq prediction um which

140is our projection for enrollment over the next um 10 or 15 years the um we have been relatively flat for four or five years and then the last two years we've had quite a bit of drop so in the presentation i have really shown the two year change here roughly a three percent drop each year i'll talk about kindergarten separately but elementary is down 83 students of which 20 is at kindergarten and the junior high is down 29 students and the high school that's down 65 students for a total of 177 this one year last year we dropped 155 so somewhat proportional to those same numbers although the junior high was a bigger drop last year they had had kind of a two-year increase blip if you will um so we certainly had some kids

141either go to homeschool or pull out of kindergarten to start next year theoretically so we're in the process of surveying the kindergarten and first grade parents who pulled their kids out of school for this year to find out if they are what they're doing are they coming back next year and if so which grade so that will better inform our enrollment for next year um kindergarten this is the enrollment projection comparison and it's honestly pretty disappointing it was off quite a bit now again we know some of this is sort of the kids who pulled out to do homeschooling or to wait a year to enroll um but the enrollment projections were over by 149 kids so our actual enrollment is 149 below what the projection said just a year ago kindergarten in particular the

142projection was 3 30 and we're at 278. um and when we compare to projections i take out the choice kids and the staff kids because we're projecting only acton and boxer residents um and so that was a pretty big um difference and we're guessing about 20 of them pulled out because of covid but still we came in quite a bit below projection the um acton was 33 students below projection and boxborough was 19. and when you're talking the difference between 74 and 55 in one elementary school that's a pretty big difference and to show you historically the kindergarten volatility has been there um it's really amazing to me so the chart at the top um the over and under projection we've been off by 40 to 55 students in both directions four out of the

143last five years um and we there's a company that does it for us nasdaq they are very good at this it's just i think that's how unpredictable kindergarten is um and down below it shows you the historical numbers for acton-boxborough and total kindergarten interestingly boxborough 54 this year they had projected 74 and i remember telling you i'm gonna i'll bet you it comes in in the mid 50s and it did interestingly i think next year's projection is mid-50s and then they go right back up to the mid 70s for three or four years so it's it's important to watch that because if we maintain the hometown guarantee at 100 we could run out of space to fit 75 kids per grade if if that actually happened for more than a couple of years so we

144watch it closely you can kind of see the history here this chart goes from 2005 to 2030. the line up the middle is the current year we are pretty close to the lowest enrollment for the district on whole just over 5 students k-12 not counting choice students and then we break it out by level so we are at the bottom for elementary and projected to go up pretty quickly over the next seven or eight years the junior high is a little bit more up and down because it's only two grades so as i said before we had kind of a a two year increase here and now it's come down three years in a row it's going to keep going down a bit and then there's sort of a one-year drop and we'll see how

145that actually plays out and then the high school is really not that far into the drop of enrollment from the peak to where they're going to end up so the high school is just over 1700 kids plus the choice kids and um they're theoretically at the lowest i mean i would stop here is about 1500 kids and the peak was 1950 or so over here this is my favorite little chart and i know it looks like a bunch of noodles and is hard to understand but i'm going to talk you through it um so one thing that happened is um the 2015 projections were really really low and i think that had a lot to do with the housing market changing um and in in this period of time um sort of right after these

146projections came out the housing market started to boom and and sales went up very quickly in both towns so um this was the 2015 projection the dark blue line way at the bottom the next year they adjusted it based on the housing changes and it's this light blue line that was 2016. then in 2017 we went way up here this is the gold line yellow um and it stayed there the next year 2018 and 2019 in the out years they really kind of went up and now 2020 is this black line so we're sort of right in the middle what concerns me is the difference between last year and this year the whole projection is 250 to 300 kids fewer than it was just a year ago and that's based on what just happened this

147year in the middle of copen so um you know we'll continue to work with nasdaq i'll be very interested to see sort of what next year in the year after shows um but if i had to guess i'd say we'd be somewhere between the 2019 line up at the top and the 2020 line down at the bottom here all right um so the enrollment history and projections this is just putting all three levels on one chart elementary again is near the bottom high school is about halfway through the dip and the junior high is kind of closer to the bottom and just a couple of other points um that were in the october 1 report notice that minuteman had quite a jump this year and that also impacted some of our high school enrollment so

148the acton students going to minuteman grew from 37 to 56. so we have 19 more students going to minuteman from acton and then boxboroughs went from six students to four students um so all together we had um an increase of 17 students you know their new building opened um the programming there is is really excellent with state-of-the-art technology in a lot of areas so um that's just something to kind of be aware of from an enrollment point of view that may impact prior to this we had nine or ten per per year and this year we had i think 25 freshmen that went there so that could continue that trend the second thing that was in the october one report that i just wanted to point out is we are in a period of time

149where the percentage of students is shifting a little bit towards boxborough so we've had sort of an increase in foxborough students relative to acton students the three-year average right now is 84.12 for 84.12 that's down from 85 percent about three years ago so it's been sort of gradually going down like a 30 percent a year on our 90 million or so dollar budget a third of a percent going from one town to the other can have an impact on the assessment so we'll explain that in more detail when we get into the budget season and we'll show you kind of the exact dollar impact but just so you know it's it's kind of shifting that way and my last point was that um the economically disadvantaged students or our students who are on free and

150reduced lunch have stayed at about 11 for the third year in a row um this year's number i'm a little bit less sure about because since we have the universally free breakfast and lunch not everybody had to fill out the form um so we just might not have 100 accurate numbers but we've been at 11 this is the third year in a row and that's up from 6.75 five years ago um so five years ago we were under seven percent and now we've been sort of steady at 11 so there was a lot of data in there um i'm happy to answer any questions you have and you'll also see some of this again through the budget process i think you said me but it was it was hard because you were whispering john a

151couple of things so my high level takeaway is that enrollment is benign in the sense that um we expect to have similar or smaller numbers of students which either you know at a constant staffing level would you know allow us to reduce class sizes or um you know keep set classes the same and potentially have a slightly smaller staff but my main question is um obviously these are covet impacted numbers for a variety of reasons and i didn't see anything in the nasdaq presentation to try to calibrate this against the state or other communities have you had conversations with nasdaq about what other communities have seen that might make some of our elementary numbers look like they're not real in a sense that everybody went down and that can't all really be going on um

152so what i want to know in part is hey did you see that you know do you believe that's the case and then if we believe that's the case how are we going to generate numbers that we think will reflect what's actually going to happen assuming we're fully open next fall yeah um so also the department of ed did a whole survey about this um so they've collected some data as well and they're hoping to make a case to the legislature that they um treat chapter 70 a little bit differently this year because their numbers are artificially low so what we know is that kindergarten in first grade is artificially low and that we have i think it's about 25 more home school students than we normally have or than we had a year ago

153so when we really budget out our sections for next year we've got those numbers plugged in by grade and school so as kids unenrolled or went to homeschool we kept them separately in our list by school and grade so we will account for those when we plan for sections so i don't know that nasdaq had any particular i think across the state kindergarten was particularly low and first grade to some degree and that homeschool numbers are up which is all the kind of the same thing that we're seeing but we've kept track of our kids as they've withdrawn or left there might be a few kids that just never enrolled but we enrolled you know we start enrolling in january we closed it march 1st so most of the kids we would have had captured

154evelyn yeah thank you jessica maria i would have liked to see a little bit more demographic information based on who is really enrolling by ways it's important because our demographic is changing a little bit and also i really want to see who is really um by demographics um applying for these reduced lunches at some point i know we don't have the data now but i want to see because the school of thought is always that it's a people of color brown black people have people that are watching off the system and i would want to see i want i want it out there i want us to see is that the truth and i know everybody is headed right now and we're giving we're feeding everyone but i want to really see i want people

155to see that it's not oh that's always not the narrative and maybe it is an action box world but i want to see that at some point okay thank you thanks evelyn um there is demographic data in there students by race by school and by grade it's not very different than it's been the last few years which is kind of why i didn't highlight it but i'm happy to produce a couple of graphs about it i don't think we've pulled students qualified for free and reduced lunch by race but we can do that we have the data i think it's important for us to know and if in and if it's trending in a certain way i think that some of that is always important to know because the narrative is always that we all

156know what a narrative i don't have to repeat it we know where it always goes so it is important for us to know as a school committee who are the people that are on the review school lunch and it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to go into the new video but it would be interesting to know who they are and what is the demographic uh marie i actually was gonna highlight the things i think that i've been looking at those uh demographic numbers for a couple of years and i would say that the numbers at conan and gates are going up in terms of numbers of non-white students as compared to the percentage of white students and i just i i hope that we're keeping an eye on the fact that we basically

157have three scenarios happening in our district we have some schools a few of them but some where primarily the junior high in high school where students are having the same experience of what they have in the community which is equal percentages of not equal percentages but the the percentage in their school percentages in their school are reflective of the wider community and we have schools that are very very white and we have schools that are very very not and um you know it it they're really stark numbers it's not like they differ by like five percent i mean there's a really huge difference um and i just i don't i don't want to see that go unnoticed because i think that as part of our you know dei work like that's those are questions we

158have to answer i mean we have essentially segregated schools some of them at the moment and i think that that's something that we have to keep at at the forefront especially um as as we face challenges like covet and how that affects different populations and everything else i mean it's it's starkly different um and i just don't lose sight of that okay i don't think we have any other questions thank you for pulling that together marie um i guess that will be a stay tuned to see what happens with the numbers and and where that takes us as we go into next year um okay so ongoing business we put together um a consent agenda to make this go a little faster especially because we thought we were going to be in the building and

159we would only have nine minutes left before we had to be done um so items on the consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion in a separate vote i'll read each item name and if any member would like it held please say hold and i'll go slow since you're all muted and so i'll wait for you but maybe it would help if you like physically raise your hand if you want me to hold something before i move to the next thing okay so the first thing is the approval of meeting minutes of 10 29 20 and 11 5 20. the second is a recommendation to accept a gift of a thousand dollars from lifetouch studios to the junior

160high school for student activities and the third is a recommendation to accept a steam donation in honor of don mckenzie from the telephone pioneers of america okay so a move to approve the consent agenda with gratitude both the donors and beth for writing minutes segments but yes sorry i mean he beat you to it okay we'll do it don't prop we'll do a roll call vote uh john yes amy yes with gratitude adam yes hero yes with gratitude around yes with gratitude any yes evan yes evelyn yes with gratitude angie yes he's a big thanks and myself yes all right that those pass unanimously thank you um all right so the next item agenda is actually kind of another big thing so we're not done yet and it's a good thing we're not in the

161building because this would have to be a very quick discussion um we have um sorry in your packet there was a memo that i wrote um including the recommendation um for recommendations for peter's successor contract and a proposed draft contract covering um the period from july 1st 2021 to june 30th 2026. um in the memo i noted um some of the comparisons to to superintendents in comparable districts there is a chart included in the packet for you to look at um and for anyone in the community to look at um to see uh where we got uh the recommendations but essentially um peter's salary started out quite low when he was hired and that was because of a combination of factors one he did not have actual superintendent experience and um most of his experience

162was as a high school principal and um and and that was that was the biggest the biggest driver was was the lack of experience and so uh when we hired peter he was gracious enough to to take our offer and start from there and over the three years that he's been here he has more than proved his worth as an unbelievable superintendent that not only has taken great care of our district but other districts have looked to for for guidance and support so um in looking at the the comparable salaries um [Music] and also looking at what those um those peers would have received as salary increases from 20 to 21 and 21 to 22. if peter had received three percent salary increases the last uh two years he would be at approximately 214 222

163in fy22 so that was a number where we started and then looking at the average estimated salary for the 20 other 25 districts the average there in fy 22 is 226 639 so um we can see that he's already would already be at quite a deficit if we were to look at those averages additionally some districts we know provide superintendents with additional financial incentives that include money towards an annuity a car allowance or longevity bonuses and if we took those into account the average of those is 237 163. if we narrow it down a little further and look at just the 10 districts that have enrollment within a thousand students of actonbox growth their average salary in fy 22 including financial incentives is 238.003 so um after carefully considering all of those things uh the

164school committee is recommending an fy 22 salary of 228 000 for superintendent light that would put his salary pretty much right in the middle of those 25 districts um we also recommend offering a five-year contract as we've been extraordinarily pleased with uh peter's service thus far and would like to keep him on board in order to achieve some of his other goals i am enthusiastically moved to approve um is there is there any discussion i know that it was it was laid out in the memo a little bit but adam yeah thanks uh you know i think uh well the memo does a great job of laying out uh sort of the comparables around the financials for the superintendent's pay i think it's really important to highlight that the the driving factor here has been

165the amazing performance of peter um both leading up to and through the current situation that we have um with the copen 19 so um you know i i do completely uh agree with the with the offering with the contract and just want to extend my sincere thanks for uh the amazing work that peter's done so far john well it seems funny to look at comparable districts when we have an incomparable superintendent yeah in all seriousness um you know i think i do want to echo one of the points that tessa made but it's important for people to realize this is a clean contract there's no you know funny business compensation it's all straight up salary um which is you know highly appropriate it's extremely transparent um i think the second thing that was important to

166me you know in thinking about uh peter and his perspective on being a superintendent is i think peter appropriately sees the superintendency as a general management position with all that implies mean you know um a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades you know but not needing to be a master of one but needing to know you know how to conduct the orchestra and and i think from my you know perspective on what's gone on over the last year the most impressive thing you know was peter's sort of strategic approach to coba during the summer so as everybody has talked about it's just very frustrating to watch the state move slowly you know and in you know opposite directions as you know we try and chart a course as a district and i think peter recognized early

167on that it was simply going to be impossible to follow state leadership towards a reopening plan and so therefore peter said you know i know the schedule we have to be on so he worked hard with his leadership team and and the staff throughout the district over the summer you know really front-running um things that were going on at the state and local level um and i think that was both you know tremendously important in terms of us actually opening up and people looking and saying wow you guys are pretty well organized and i also think it was it needs to be recognized as risky because you know it's easy to say well the state said do this so therefore that's what we're going to do and it's risky to say well you know we're

168going to have to work through this ourselves and and make some decisions and that's exactly the process that that peter went through and that is in fact the mark of excellent management um and then the final point i wanted to comment on is you know my perspective is that peter also has a very expansive view on what it means to be educated um and i think you know every parent looks at their child and realizes that their child you know is plotting a unique course and all of those courses will be somewhat different um and therefore they'll be served by a variety of educational experiences and i think peter actually really in his heart embraces that and you know nobody you know thinks that you know i'll go into music so that i can become

169a superintendent so peter's life story you know is an affirmation of the fact that you know do the things that you're interested in try and do them as well as you can um and things will work out so i think um you know a lot of ways that you know we couldn't go into right now you know peter has sent that message throughout the district which i think is is really critically important for our students so i wholeheartedly endorse the this new contract both its term um and its compensation and i guess the last thing that i'll notice there's a lot easier ways to earn this kind of salary other than being a superintendent this is probably about the hardest way to earn this amount of money thanks john nora um yes i just wanted

170to also say that one of the things i consistently hear from members of the community is their confidence in your leadership peter and how um how much people appreciate your excellent communication and that parents have feel that there's such transparency in the way you make decisions and how you think about things there's a real honesty and and real compassion and i think that those are just sort of on top of the knowledge and the skill that you bring to your position so i'm just very um thankful that we'll be able to hopefully work with you again for another another five years jenny so so i was looking through the proposed contract for some combat pain provisions because i wondered many days whether peter ever regretted his decision to throw his rank for uh running our

171school system our district during this and um i know that would have to offer a lot of other people combat pay so so i would i would draw that question but i just want to say that as as somebody who works on mystical side um professionally and then has you know had somewhat of a front row seat to the school district side i'm not sure that most people appreciate that you know not only do we have a you know a completely failed and missing inaction federal government but in my opinion our state government um hasn't hasn't fared so much better and as i talk to other people other parents other you know just people i know it really has fallen on our local leaders um to to figure everything out in 351 communities across the

172commonwealth of massachusetts and you know if you didn't have strong local leadership you're you're probably in pretty bad shape school side and town side or city side and um you know we're very very lucky that we our kids have been in school even though it's not full-time all of them but um you know very very proud of the work that peter and the leadership team and our educators and staff have done um and you know i i wholeheartedly support this and and you know think it is well deserved and we're very i feel very very lucky as a parent and a mother of two kids in our district um so i support this wholeheartedly well as someone who gets to work pretty closely with peter although i've gotten to the point where i he calls

173and says how are you doing and i always have to take like a big deep breath before i even answer the phone so um as much as i i have enjoyed over the last year and 18 million months i don't even know how long it's been um i i do i think that peter is the consummate professional and he is so unbelievably thoughtful about every aspect of our school community there are a lot of times where i will ask something or say something and be reminded of why i'm not a superintendent and why he is he's often able to see so much balance in things that don't seem balanced to me at all which is a really big um i give him kudos for that because i think that that's a hard that's a hard

174thing to do and it's really important that it's been what's really important to getting us through all of this as there are so many things to balance so um i'm really pleased with with this contract offering and you know we're really honored to have you be our superintendent peter um evelyn did you have something else to say yes um i remember meeting with peter maybe he was three weeks into his role in a superintendent and we have some difficult conversations and i didn't leave his office really thinking that he would represent this community well i had my biases i said wow i don't know this is gonna work out but you know over the years um i have been impressed with his leadership and not because i am on the school committee i'm speaking right

175now as a parent and you know the work that he's done for this community and um you know i think that you came into a tough job and there were a lot of expectations and um everyone everyone wanted their problem solved including myself and um you've taken your time you've listened over the years and i think that you've gotten where most of us want you to get to and i am saying this has appeared in my school for me to remember that i am thankful for your service and for what you've done for this community for people that look like me um convenient and that there's an equity council group allowing people who look like me kids not look like me to drive in this community i'm thankful to you and i know that um

176there's more to come and you're going to be a principal for everybody in this community not people of color not white people everyone in this community and i and i know that that was not how those were not my sentiments when i met you three weeks or four weeks after you got into your job and i know that there's a lot of work that needs to be done but i think you deserve this and i and most importantly when it was time for you to get your race he said i'm gonna not take it because the the district is heading and i'm gonna sit back and i'm gonna not take my race and all that and that is a good testament of leadership right that is somebody that really cares about us and people i'm

177sure there will be a lot of backlash about what i'm saying right now but it's okay people have owned their own opinions and i own my opinion as a parent of the district and and most of what i'm saying is as a parent and i'm thankful for your service and i think you deserve this thank you thank you angie did you get a chance to speak yet i can't i'm sorry i'm losing track of who hasn't put their hands down and whatnot yeah that's okay yeah i agree with everyone we just said and i still remember the first time that peter was here and my first impression that he's so he was so passionate about it and he's and he's and i would say in the past two years two to more than two years

178it's not an easy two years and i still see and he's all in and he's still passionate and i was really really wholeheartedly that [Music] us and i just want to mention that yeah when we were discussing this there was no there's like unanimously that nobody was kind of um withdraw anything and he just he just very easily that we all kind of came to an agreement um so it is your leadership and and really appreciate that how you are be able to listen and i was also want to mention that i was really impressed by the the finding that after you joined us over here and uh the the insightful thing the information that you can provide it with the diverse community i really appreciate that so i'm looking forward to working with you

179and really happy that the ab school has you thank you thanks angie norah i'm assuming your hand is not meant to be uh additionally okay great thanks all right peter did you want to say something before i move on or okay yeah no i would love to so you know one i feel like i might be dead um because it sounded kind of like a eulogy um but i i very much appreciate you know all of the thoughts um you know i it i'll be honest it's always embarrassing to to do this similar to you know an evaluation and things because you know i i think i try to say this a lot but you know the the work that i do isn't done um by me usually it's always someone else behind the scenes

180doing that work i just happen to be able to be the person who gets to talk to it at times so you know i think um you know and i i said this to the leadership team the other day too um that you know what struck me you know since i came here is the quality of people um you know what i i think i said to you all as well that you know when i you know i came in this was the first time i had been anywhere other than you know my previous community my entire career and so it was kind of a leap of faith for me um so i kind of came in wide eyes wide open and didn't really know what to expect um but i had some ideas and

181you know between working with the committee and all the people who've been on the committee since i've been here um and in particular the leadership team because it's obviously been a very stable group uh since i've been here it's really been about the quality of the people whether it's school committee whether it's been leadership whether it's been our educators in the district whether it's been the various community members or students that i've had been able to work with the quality of people is just so high you know my primary goal in coming in being able to talk with you about you know the next contract was be able to feel like i was here for a good amount of time um so i'm i'm very grateful for you know the proposed contract um you know

182and in particular i'm really thrilled with with knowing that i can be here at least for the next five years um that that was my big goal is to to really be able to continue to work with the people that that i have the opportunity to do that with every day i just want to continue to express my gratitude for everyone um because as i said and i keep saying you know i might be the person talking but there's a lot of people doing all this lifting uh behind the scenes so thank you um you know i won't keep going and drag the meeting on because i know it's getting late but uh you know thank you certainly to you know the entire leadership team i guess would be the way i would end it

183yeah and i'm going to end it because we have what i had forgotten we actually had a motion and a second and then we all had to settle over nice things and now we need to actually vote so um john yes amy yes adam yes hiro yes laura yes jimmy yes evan yes evelyn yes angie yes and me yes with lots of gratitude i'm looking forward to continuing to work with you peter thank you thank you everyone all right so we have a very short budget update which is really just um we'd like to approve a revised fy 22 budget timeline so i don't know if adam or dave wants to speak to that all all i say is that we had some discussion with the folks in uh box pro and the the iteration

184that you have now was the consensus that at this point looks like it'll work and so uh the highlights first budget pres the the materials went out to the administrators today so we're already complying with uh and if you vote tonight we're already uh working our way down the list um first budget presentation january 21st preliminary budget vote by the school committee february 11th the comprehensive program presentation thursday regular meeting march 4th and the budget public hearing and the final budget vote would be either march 11th or march 18th and there's some back and forth with boxborough whether it would be too tight but at this point uh we've got some flexibility that it could be either of these two dates um so is there a motion to improve the body second all right um

185angie is your hand up or no no i forgot to yeah thank you all right john yes amy say yes adam yes hero yes laura yes vinny yes evan yes evelyn yes angie yes me yes so thank you to everyone who worked with boxborough to get those numbers i mean those dates ironed out that's great all right next item on the agenda and then i promise we're almost done we have two things left um a review of the open meeting law complaint that was um received and peter who speaks that yeah sure um so you know included in your packet was a copy of an open meeting law complaint that was filed by a member of the community for i believe it was the october 15th school committee meeting so you had an opportunity to

186see that i did have an opportunity to talk with our council at the district level about this and her recommendation was to have the committee vote to you know refer this to council and she would investigate the nature of the complaint um do some fact-finding and then be able to come back to the committee with more information proposed response and if any remedies are necessary um she would be able to recommend what those are all for so um you know based on that conversation you know i'm recommending that you authorize our district council to investigate and you know respond for the school committee and if any you know actions are necessary on our part uh to remedy this then she would be able to recommend those move to proof second um angie did you have

187a question yes i do so um by moving to the uh because i'm on the uh budget subcommittee um by moving to the council do we have an estimate on hours or you know because it's gonna cost us right do we have a rough idea on you know how many hours and what we're looking at and where would this um yeah kind of to see where the money situation um my my best guess on that um you know i think it's all dependent upon you know what she finds an initial kind of review of the situation and you know any subsequent you know discussions and interviews she needs to conduct with members um but my initial estimate would be probably be anywhere in the order of between two and four hours something like that of

188of council time and i believe our rate is somewhere around marie correctly if i'm running probably around either 175 or 200 an hour so i think we're probably talking under a thousand dollars total that that's my best guess at this point but i i think it's going to depend on what you find does that satisfy your question muted yeah i have a different set of questions okay so um i think the uh the um community member was among the speaker today and so and i think i remember i heard that the uh something about the um considering that we the school committee will be considered uh if the school committee can consume consider that to um to discuss the issue again so i want to find out whether this kind of proposal will be part

189of the council legal counsel process so my understand well peter can ask answer that question angie but my understanding is that the open meeting law complaint and and its possible remedies has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we rescind the the decision you know i think well they they could appear two separate things but that's the remedy that the community members seeking so i don't want to completely separate them out um you know i think the there's a couple things you know an attorney is likely going to want to do you know first is kind of the fact-finding side to better understand the nature of the complaint and understand what happened what the facts are um you know and typically if you're an investigator on something you're gonna first determine the facts and

190then you might look at possible remedies and outcomes and things like that so i think um you know it's just it's following a process and i think you know one of the things you know my recommendation to the committee would be is to follow the process and just go through the thorough process um you know and to i always find that that has a good outcome okay thank you all right are we ready to vote okay uh amy yes adam yes kira yes laura yes jenny yes evan yes evelyn yes angie yes and myself yes all right that person oh sorry john hi oh i'm sorry john it's because you're in the top room sorry john that passes unanimously i didn't mean to intentionally miss you i promise sometimes i want to skip over you

191but this was not one of those times okay um subcommittee and member reports um so adam is there anything additional that you wanted to share from budget nope okay alg yes i can do that alg met this morning the town gave an update on the the uh fiscal 21 budget they're taking things one quarter at a time um so far q1 and q2 uh property taxes are collections are at 98 um we're still waiting for when q3 will find out about excise taxes and meal taxes um town town hall is still closed but they have a walk through window and they are working very hard to accommodate any citizen that needs uh needs something that they will figure out a way to make it happen even in coveted times that's it kenny is your hand

192raised because of question around that or because you want to share something when it when we get to that i have something to share i'll call music um blf i i i missed a big chunk of the meeting and adam took over running it but is there anything in addition to the i know the budget timeline was discussed at length yeah a great deal of the the meeting discussion was both the budget timeline and the the um coven 19 uh cases both in town and and how they've been handled in school great uh amy did you want to update us on your masc delegate experience everything that we vote that was presented was voted and passed i'm not really sure that's okay all right that's it i mean did you enjoy that as part of

193your birthday celebration i actually okay so i completely nerded out and had a fantastic time having listened to the discussions and jumping in um yeah it was kind of weird i loved it i loved it so thank you so much for letting me go to the to uh this um convention of vmasc it was really it was really great just like being on the cape right now no no all right jenny did you have an update to share yeah i just wanted to say that i i did speak to our state rep tammy gouveia today um and she uh just you know we talked about a bunch of things that i'll i'll update you on after i've talked about to the rest of our state delegation but she did let me know that the house

194included 50 million dollars for schools which she thinks is about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for ab for code response so you know that could go anywhere or nowhere but it's definitely on her radar in terms of the burden the burdens that uh this whole um fiasco has put on our school districts and you know we've talked about that a lot and um as i as i stated earlier uh you know it's very frustrating to watch the lack of action from you can help uh and just you know having everything fall on our local leadership in terms of figuring out budgetary and other items so you know hopefully we'll get a little bit of relief it's not a lot um but we are you know we we do have advocates at the state house

195um hoping to you know to help us out so i will be keeping you posted on that as i have more meetings with our state delegation thanks jenny does anyone have their hand raised have a question for jenny yes john you did yeah jenny i you know since you know both of these remarks and your earlier remarks the frustration with the state and i think there's you know two elements of that one is the substance of what has been done in certain cases and the other you know is just the terrible timeline that they've worked to and i wondered you know if you had any interest in um bringing a resolution to the the school committee uh where we might as a group um you know put on the table you know our desire to

196have them make timely progress on the budget next year you know they know when our town meetings are if they don't do anything in a timely way we're forced to guess and i think you know we should at least try you know as a group to reach out to them and say we as a group you know want you to do better you've got to do better on your schedule i have a lot of interest in doing something along those lines and and i have to say that um you know although our house and and senate is overwhelmingly democratic uh elected officials it's it's also ruled with an iron fist by the leadership um in those bodies and it's very very difficult for um rank and file house members to get any of their concerns

197addressed so i i just you know i've been um you know reflecting on the frustration of people who are trying to get some action out of beacon hill even in the you know the face of the pandemic when our um our legislature has essentially been on vacation since july out of session on a formal session so um you know i'm interested um in any thoughts you have in that area and i'm happy to you know bring them uh you know work with you if that's something that you want to talk about doing i think something needs to be done it's just it's just it's just unconscionable at this point as far as i'm concerned as a as a proponent of good government for my whole career it's just a total failure thanks all right nora

198kara and i attended the edco round table um so um edco's in a great time of transition right now and one of the things that they brought up at the round table is really looking for input from um districts and school committees about what we would like from them so that's really the only thing to report from them thank you um amy do you have your handwritings for a reason yes i was just i was gonna share about think um so is that okay yeah okay great so fincom met last tuesday on the 10th the majority of the meeting was focused on developing a point of view um and i will say similar to four years ago there was a great deal of discussion about how to um measure how to quantify resources um so

199there there's a debate regarding whether to count so you have free cash from the town you have end from the schools um and there's a great deal of debate asking whether we as acton um include end into our free cash account or not um and hopefully you know there's there's fincom is still kind of working that out but you know it is that that idea of taking 80 percent of end and including that in the reserves for um to account for you know town reserve town reserves so that's a big discussion i do want to say that alg is planning to meet on december 10th at 8 30 um assuming that the fincom has kind of come together and solidified and voted on their point of view otherwise the next meeting will be on june

20014th thanks amy cara i just want to let you know that deic is meeting and that subcommittees have been made and sub-chairs have been named um and we have a co-chair and she's amazing and doing a great job um we met as a whole group this last monday and had a very productive um discussion on multiple things including the holiday of diwali um which is wonderful and um subcommittees will be meeting again over the next couple of weeks until our next big group meeting which i believe is in december um the exact date has left me because it's 10 o'clock at night that's fine and i was going to say that uh the the troy ptso met and um and um we and and i think it was decided that that is still a valuable

201group to most of those members and we're working on getting um what we already have some rlp um representation from kira but but firming up who participates in that group evelyn did you have something that you wanted to share yes quickly um they recently convened um acting box for high school parents of color advisor brought back um this week amy i think you were on that meeting as well it was a great meeting we had 50 parents awesome signed up um i am leading that meeting with a group with lindsay and um it was fantastic our first meeting was really great we had really moderate cultural representation from all ethnic groups it was really great and our first meeting really went well i think people are just up about it and more to come on

202that amy i don't know if you have anything to add but i think it was it's a positive step i don't i just think it was you know really special and thank you so much evelyn for leading this uh group thanks evelyn um i see that gary has his hand up in the audience you want to allow him to speak peter here go gary thank you i want to go back to something amy commented on about the acton finance committee did i understand correctly that the acting finance committee would like to utilize end as part of the actin reserves did i misunderstand that so so is this okay if i talk tessa yeah go ahead okay no no i was just saying that there was a conversation about town reserves and whether we count town

203reserves that includes 80 percent of end understanding that boxborough owns twenty percent of a uh e and d um so they're 15.88 right now well i mean no i i completely agree with you gary i mean it it's it's been a conversation that i've been involved with for the last five years about whether um acton fincom or can include the school's end in acton's town kind of free cash reserves so i i was just saying that again that is another you know again we're debating this conversation so so some members are saying this is no we can't look at town free cash um and schools end is completely separate and then some members are saying no we should include um schools e and d in when we evaluate town reserves and you know amy can

204i just add on to that a little bit yes please so you know gary i think the conversation actually started at a pretty high level with the general concept that the acting finance committee was concerned about the tax impact residents this coming year and the the general feeling was to have both town and schools use additional reserves to try and decrease the tax burden on residents and to to think about ways to draw down reserves to accomplish that i don't think i didn't hear any discussion that somehow you know the district reserves are becoming acting's money or anything like that i think it was more of a general joint effort to draw down reserves to lower tax impact say that um when i i've been on the committee for i don't know seven eight years

205now um and four years ago when we had this we had this exact same conversation when fincom was looking at producing their their point of view and there was a discussion about whether you include when you look at reserve policy like what are what are the reserves that you want to have there was a a big conversation about you know the the the um the least number of reserves versus the max reserves and how do we count that and where do where do the end funds from the schools fit in um so again it's that it it is that same kind of conversation well i'll give you one more comment and then i'll shut up um i've been attending the school committee for probably over 15 years now as the finance committee representative and this

206comes up every few years a point i want to make is the district is not part of acton it's not part of boxborough it's a separate entity the e d is part of the district foxboro has our reserves acting has their reserves it's three different sources of funds but i do agree that we should utilize as much of the funds free cash from acting free cash and box borrow and e and d is the school as we feel comfortable with to help the taxpayers but i don't believe acting should be good looking at ethiopia funds the same way foxpro does not look at indeed as part of our funds thank you for listening and i'll shut up thanks gary thank you gary it looks like charlie has his hand up charlie you can unmute yeah

207having been on the finance committee in the previous century i can tell you this has been a discussion that's been going on for at least 30 years but it's really very simple it comes up at aog alg is looking at the total potential budgets of municipal and schools and comparing the potential reserves from the schools and the free cash to that total when it comes to actually calculating whether the reserves meet some standards such as what moody's wants free the certified free cash applies only to the municipal budget as a percentage of the municipal budget it should be somewhere between three and five percent there is never any question that the school committee has total control of the end budget and can appropriate it any way it sees fit so this discussion is really sort

208of confusing because it invariably involves both the total of the two budgets as well as the individual budgets i wouldn't get too excited about it this is just something that this alg keeps track of the potential reserves how much is actually spent on the school side is entirely up to you the school committee and how much of the certified free cash is appropriate is up to the selectmen it's that simple thanks charlie okay is that all right if we move on it's 1007. we've been here for three hours and i'm running out of steam um peter i know that you needed to give a short edco update i will keep this very very brief um so you know the executive director of edco had resigned um you know and the board which is comprised of

209you know a combination of superintendents and school committee members from all the 20 member districts um hired cindy taymor as the interim executive director um cindy i believe is a former off-hand director of student services special education director in bedford for years um and was also a superintendent of the melrose public schools for a good number of years so she brings with her a wealth of experience she was willing to take on some of the challenges of edco uh we're thankful to nadine for her service um you know edco is very much as norah said at a transitional time in its history it coexisted for over 50 years as you remember from last year's presentation from uh but there are some extraordinary financial challenges going on in the pandemic and the future of edco is

210very much uncertain at this time um you know in addition to being a board member this year i'm serving in the executive finance committee for the organization as well um just to make sure we're staying very much abreast and in tune with the finances of edco it's something that concerns me greatly something we're monitoring closely and as we progress through the year that will certainly keep you updated but just not at 10 o'clock thanks peter thank you for sure um okay i have the payroll warrants in front of me so if adam and john are i'll read them i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrants as follows number p2110 dated eleven five twenty twenty and the amount of two million six hundred seventy four thousand two hundred forty nine dollars and

211ninety four cents payroll deduction warrant as follows number 21-010 pr dated 11 5 20 20 an amount of 533 thousand eight dollars and 68 cents vendor warrants as follows number 21.00 dated 1029 2020 in the amount of two million three hundred sixty seven thousand sixty eight dollars and forty one cents and number twenty one dash zero one zero dated eleven twelve twenty twenty and the amount of nine hundred eighty thousand 965 and 92 cents yeah john okay fine give it to john john yes amy yes adam yes hiro yes yes yes evelyn yes angie yes myself yes all right those pass unanimously um the fyi in your packet as marie noted includes the nasdaq enrollment projections in addition to the information that she had in there um our revised abrsc meetings going along with the

212budget calendar and all that are also in there as well as uh the information about the qpr training that that peter had mentioned last time there's a fire just so you know in the middle of the chaos of the day and covetrates him uh don actually managed to get in a full qpr training as well um so kudos to dawn for somehow managing to find some quiet in the middle of chaos john you're awesome thank you all right so with that i will entertain a motion second i don't know who got the second tent but adam definitely got the motion john yes amy yes adam yes yes laura yes ginny yes evelyn yes yes angie yes and myself yes thank you everyone that was a long meeting i appreciate it thank you everyone much appreciated

213thank you thank you have a good night you