Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 1/07/2021

001cousins 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 be dja the following 10 members are in attendance via zoom evelyn abaya issa kira cook adam klein jenny cremer amy christian murphy john peterson nora shine angie so evan wang and myself diane baum is expected to join us a little later public participation is possible via the zoom link or call-in phone number our school committee meetings are also live streamed on tv's youtube channel although public participation is not possible with that option the links and phone number are found on the posted agenda on the abschools.org calendar this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on action tv's website at actontv.org per remote policy all votes will

002be done by roll call i will call each member's name and then we will state how they vote and according to john i am very lucky that there are not a hundred of us as there are in the senate and that i should be very grateful that i only have to call and ten other people for a roll call vote so well i'll keep that in mind and in our thoughts tonight uh thank you for joining us um we are really lucky tonight to have our uh student uh council representative join us rick mizunder um would you like to give your update yeah sure okay so today i want to just update everyone on me and my peers opinions on the hybrid schedule and for the brief period that we went remote which i believe

003took place between the between the days of december 20th and december 22nd so uh me and my peers have spent pretty much most of the year in the hybrid schedule and we decided to weigh the benefits and the downsides of the schedule and compare it to that week and a half in which you went remote so i'm going to start about talking about with a hybrid schedule i'm going to talk about the benefits and the downsides so what me and my peers really like about the hybrid schedule is it's much easier to learn in school than it is over there with the teachers sitting there you all you can immediately ask any questions you have and you can also ask any clarifying questions you have which is much easier when compared to the remote schedule

004where it draws a lot more attention on you if you try to ask questions which a lot of people don't like to have along with that it's much easier for teachers to administer tests and there is less of a hassle to print out tests and annotate on cammy there's so much less hassle when you're taking a test in school furthermore i would say the biggest benefit of the hybrid schedule is that we can interact with our friends and peers this is something we cannot do at all over the remote schedule and this is a really important feature of school that we still enjoy having because without it school pretty much becomes a monotonous mess of just going there taking tests and coming home this interaction like this human meant person-to-person interaction with their friends and

005teachers really makes it different and makes us feel much better about being in school along with that it's also nice to have any synchronous break so we don't always have to wake up at 7 a.m every morning a day a day on our own allows us to prep and get some sleep in when we definitely need it some of the downsides though are there's more to there's more testing with less teaching is it already in the previous schedule the teachers had to test us a lot in order to keep up with the curriculum but now since we're spending even less days at school and less days learning with the teachers we have to spend more time getting tests done because we just have to do this so it's a higher test to learning ratios along

006with that we see teachers less frequently because of the fact that we're only seeing them twice a week and we're really just watching videos for the rest of the week and along with that there's a low covet schedule there's like a low covered risk now as for the remote schedule this was actually an okay period but we wouldn't really like it long term even though it's more consistent and we get to see the teachers more with no risk of coping whatsoever we have to wake up early day and we have to we have to work up early every day we have to sit in front of the screen for the whole day which is not only mentally strained for us but it's like it's it's just it's not healthy to sit in front of the

007screen for six hours a day and along with that it's much harder to learn from home and administer tests from home because we have distractions like our parents working in the same bill like working just in the room next to us or our pets just going back and forth and it's really hard to administer tests like this when there's so many different distractions and all these different tech issues um my final point that i had with the remote schedule was that we had a really weird schedule because of the remote schedule um our school tried to we tried to get back to the drop schedule that we had last year in which we dropped one class per day however this led to some really weird schedules for example one day i had a class i

008had a school day where i had to wake up at eight to do my first class but then the next class i had started at one which was really weird so overall we thought that each of these hybrid and remote schedules had their own benefits but for the most part we agreed that this hydro schedule was better for us as a person because of the fact we don't have to sit in front of the screen for six hours at a time and we get that social aspect which you can get when we're going remote so this is just our update and our opinions about this issue thank you rick it's extraordinarily wonderful and helpful to hear directly from students and even though many of us have our own students it's really nice to hear the

009perspective especially of the high school students because i know that the schedules have been really different and changing and you know we all know maybe how our own kids reacted to those but it's nice to hear uh how a larger group did did anyone else have any questions for rick it looks like all right it looks like there's an attendee that has a question i think i'm not sure uh i think that's probably for public participation okay ellen oh yeah i did something sure i just wanted to thank rick for sharing his feedback on the schedule i appreciate it thank you for listening to me oh it's even so more helpful on my screen when your hand goes up it shows up in your little box okay that's exciting all right so evelyn will you

010put your hand down now so that i can see that it's gone okay there's a landing cab there okay you did it okay um rick that was really helpful thank you so much for coming and gathering everybody's perspectives and we look forward to hearing your next update thank you thanks for joining us thanks greg all right so per policy v-e-d-h members of the public may speak for up to three minutes on items that are not included on this agenda comments regarding items on the agenda should be made during that part of the meeting typically the committee administration will not respond to comments during public participation please use the hand raise feature um adam will be keeping everybody to three minutes so if you wish to speak then superintendent light will allow you to okay and

011just to um go over a procedure here uh so we have made a couple of security updates since the last meeting um one we've disabled the question and answer function um on zoom so that that's no longer available to anyone but in addition at the beginning of public participation um the first thing that we're asking everyone to do is state their first and last name um as well as their street and town that they that they live in um and then we'll then you can begin speaking so again you know please when you are called on first and last name street and town that you live in so thank you all right corrine all right thanks actually i did have my name is kern hawk seth i love seminal ronin acton and i actually did

012oh did rick leave my question was for rick that's all right thank you oh i'm sorry it's okay great um alyssa this is alyssa nicholl from school street in acton thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i want to express my appreciation for this committee's decision to retire the colonial mascot it was obviously a difficult and well-considered decision i gather that you're hearing often from individuals who are unhappy with the decision the process at which you arrived at the decision and those folks are asking you to rescind your vote so i'd like to speak directly to them i know there are some who disagree but this is not a case of political correctness run amok instead it is a case of compassion an effort initiated by students to be inclusive an acknowledgement that the

013time has arrived to act neither is it a case of the school committee caving to political pressure or being moved by a changing wind what an insult to the students and staff who have made it known for years if not decades that this symbol did not represent them benjamin franklin said justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are the events this summer have resulted in not only pressure to be anti-racist but permission as well a tipping point has been reached in terms of the increased number of white allies who will no longer remain silent and aloof and in the number of schools deciding to retire problematic mascots several of you have raised the issue of conflict of interest state law does not prohibit members to advocate

014on behalf of their own children so long as no special consideration is requested imagine if a recusal were needed whenever a member's child would be impacted by a school committee decision a quorum would never be achieved also students have a legally protected right to privacy and yet several of you have demanded that a list of abs edge members be published many of you say you only want more time and more careful consideration to be given to such an impactful decision this discussion and vote took place after a petition and supporting correspondence was submitted in july one minute was given in september and extensive feedback was actively sought by reaching out to every junior high and high school student the faculty alumni parents and community members via email social media and the press the district's values

015of wellness equity and engagement line the bottom of many of tonight's meeting packet documents i thank this committee for showing leadership for valuing the wellness of school community members and for acting in the best interest of the school community i strongly urge you to remain strong in your commitment to stand by that decision thank you alyssa uh andrew can you identify yourself your street in your town please i can my name is andrew ruggiero and i spent my childhood on great road in acton so i appreciate the committee again opening up the conversation to the public and i wanted to start off with a quote from maya angelou if you don't know where you're you've come from you don't know where you're going i think that in the light of the topic of the mascot

016it's important to recognize the history of our town and our country now i want to read a quick excerpt from the pbs history of the american flag today the flag consists of 13 horizontal stripes seven red alternating with six white the stripes represent the original 13 colonies and the stars represent the 50 states of the union the colors of the flag are symbolic as well red symbolizes hardiness and valor white symbolizes purity and innocence in blue represents vigilance perseverance and justice applying that to the history of our town being in one of the original 13 colonies i think it's really disappointing that a creative license has been taken on what the definition of an acting box broke colonial is and then cherry-picking the very worst possible definition of that term and its users throughout global

017history to make a case against it it denies history it denies the history of our country it leads to a sense of complacency in the face of authoritarianism and i think it's more important that the children of acton and residents focus on our town's history learn from the lessons so we know where we're going and we don't repeat the worst parts of our history so the colonial mascot again it is not for creative license its roots are in our national flag and you can see that clearly by the illustration of the 13 stripes and what they mean i see the rest of my time to the floor thank you for hearing me thank you andrew lauren you can speak can you identify yourself and you know street in town hi i'm lauren rosensweig morton um

018i was a two-term select person in acton um back in kind of a while ago 2006 to 2012 i think it was um before that the planning board and the economic development committee and um i came late to this whole mascot discussion and you know i wasn't sure if it's the mascot or the name and you know mostly i've been in covid land trying to keep my 97 year old mother alive so um i have been i did go back and i watched some of the meetings and first let me say school committee that you've been really doing an amazing job in a very difficult time with covid with racial strife in the country with lots of things going on so and i appreciate to see you know i worked very early on on improving

019the diversity of our town boards and committees and i'm thrilled to see more diversity um one thing i learned when i was a select moment was that even though acton has 21 000 and bucksborough i forget how many lately but um we're a small town um the people that we're dealing with on these issues are our neighbors and friends and you know maybe people we don't know so well and maybe people that don't know you so well and the one thing i want to say is whether you bring back you know the discussion on the colonials or not i think there's a group of people in town that this meant a lot to there's a lot of feelings around the teams the spirit all those things and i really do think that one-on-one conversations need

020to take place people need to explain as as alyssa just did and as uh other people have you know what it means to people of color or indigenous people that you know what they went through with um being you know with the name colonial what effect does it really have on you and then remaining okay um on my deck i i bought one of those heaters so if people are very worried about covid and want to come meet one to one with a person that cares a lot about the whole colonial issue and wants to talk about what it means to them and learn a little bit more about why people have found it to be such a hurtful thing for them um i think that would go a long way to healing our town

021um we really can't just dis or dismiss a whole other group's opinions you know it may seem trivial to you but i assure you it's very very meaningful and important to them thank you thank you lauren okay uh andrew you identify yourself street and town hey there this is andrew tavalachi and i live on old harvard road in boxborough on the topic of talking about other groups and other people i want to make a comment about about rick's presentation um i thought it was very insightful um and very interesting and i think um that was i kept thinking he was talking about me i thought he was talking about the working week the things that he said about being home as a high school student i was um very very much uh representing uh for

022uh for a working adult i felt the uh i felt the same way that he did as far as high school students felt i think if you if you consider what he said to be true and representative of all high school students i would say that that is multiplied tenfold for middle school students and then tenfold again for elementary school students so if if the things he says are are valid for the high school level i think it's even worse for the for the younger kids um and i think that should be [Music] you know considered we're talking about our district and the uh the ability of uh remote learning to take place um it should be it should be everybody not just the not just high school students that's really all i i wanted

023to say thank you and that actually is everyone i think the two people with their hand up actually already spoke so i think we are all set in terms of public speak so i just wanted to um read a statement we we um rarely respond to public speak last couple weeks we've had a lot of public speak and i know that there has been some interest in in amongst committee members about clarifying some of the things that that have been shared during public speak not tonight necessarily although alyssa spoke to some of them um the reason for this for the reason that we don't usually respond is that there are often items outside of the agenda but i wanted to clarify a few things however because over the course of the last few weeks a

024few members of the community have persisted in presenting information that is incorrect um that did not happen tonight that wasn't what people have spoken to but but several people did allude to it i understand that there are many members of the community who disagree with our unanimous vote to retire the colonial mascot they persisted in presenting their concerns at all of our meetings since the decision was made so let me clarify prior to our decision to retire the mascot all members of the committee were aware that two petitions had been created while we were aware of both petitions let me be clear only one position was officially presented to the committee with all of its signatures and that was created by the students of absej in their efforts to retire the mascot in our efforts

025to understand the perspective of all stakeholders a request went out on september 25th for public comment and let me quote that the committee recognizes that the acton-boxborough community includes many members and groups who may have a variety of views on the issue before the committee the school committee will deliberate on the petition again and consider action at its meeting october 15 2020 we invite the public to submit comments in writing by wednesday october 14th by emailing us while we recognize the public comment is not a vote we are interested in hearing a variety of opinions on changing the mascot to help make our deliberation more meaningful that is a that went out to all members of our community and was distributed in multiple ways the creators of the petition to keep the mascot did write

026to the committee and they did meet with the superintendent about their concerns when the students wrote to us originally they made clear their desire to remain anonymous the original request they made was to meet with the committee between meetings because we are a public body we cannot as a committee meet with individuals outside of our open meetings so the superintendent met with them one of these students later emailed us again as part of our request for public comment the student made us aware of the second petition and that it had 2300 signatures but the petition itself was not sent to us regardless when we met to deliberate we met with the knowledge of its existence and that there was a large group in the community who wish to preserve the colonial mascot we have heard

027comments that all sides were not represented but this is not accurate as our request stated explicitly public comment was not going to be considered a vote our mailboxes were flooded with comment nearly 700 emails were received and read while there were many impassioned letters about the merits of keeping the colonial most of the responses we received from people interested in maintaining the mascot were simply names with a subject line of keep the colonial let me repeat this was not a public vote and it was never intended to be as many members noted in the in their statements on 10 15 we all spent many hours reading the comments of our community members not only did we receive letters from current students and staff we received letters from alumni community members and elected officials this unanimous

028decision was not made in a silo and it was made with the support of the high school principal and the superintendent as well as other members of the leadership team one of the most passionate community members wrote a letter that was shared by many who wish to keep the mascot that member of the acton-boxborough regional high school class of 89 was impassioned in his defense of the values he felt were at the core of the colonial mascot after our unanimous decision this same alumni wrote again to the committee and i quote ladies and gentlemen i'd just like to say well done thank you for the well-considered discussion of the retirement of the colonial you are each a credit to the town i logged into the meeting very much in favor of keeping the colonial i

029left convinced that its retirement was the right thing for the school i am prayerful that the community carefully decide on a new mascot that all students can claim as their own i understand that we are not all going to agree but to claim that we didn't listen or consider all perspectives is false this decision has been made by unanimous consent we as a committee have many other responsibilities to the students of our district and we will not be reconsidering our vote and i hope that that is the last that we have to say about the colonial but um thank you for listening and um if everyone is okay we will move on to the next um agenda item which is uh the superintendent's update so peter if you're all set then right ahead so you

030know thank you tessa um you know a few different updates um you know one covid case numbers there's a new dashboard at the state level that they just released it's an interactive dashboard um i have not gotten a chance to go on this afternoon between five o'clock and now to look at the the weekly numbers um but i do know you know from our discussions at the board of health you know we are right around that 2223 uh case mark in actin which is slightly down uh from what it had been earlier in december um and we're just in about a four percent uh positivity rate um five would be the benchmark uh that would send actin into because being considered a red community so we certainly need to watch that boxborough has been hovering

031uh consistently for a couple weeks right around the 20 to 21 uh cases and because boxpro is a smaller community it's a different metric than acton uses um so box bro it's a hard case count that would be used to determine whether or not it was a yellow red or green community the threshold for boxborough being a red community would be 25 cases so right now box bro is kind of at that upper end of yellow so we're watching that carefully as well one thing on the covet front we did want to do we have had some gatherings among families and groups of students that continue to be a source of concern for us we really deeply understand the need for our students to be connected and you know but attendance at the gatherings for

032students in our hybrid program in particular poses a really risky situation for our students educators and families at home we're sending a communication to all of our families specific to gatherings but it's important to note that we expect our students to adhere to the governor's executive order with respect to gatherings masks and social distancing and just anecdotally what we are seeing is students might get together with a couple of other students on the small side or sometimes it's you know 7 8 9 10 11 students they're getting together because they tend to be a close friend group so i think families feel like they're doing a lot of things correctly and we appreciate that and i think what we're seeing is that students may start off wearing masks and kind of keeping that six feet

033of distance but over the course of you know an evening or whenever they're gathering uh those masks inevitably come off at some point or um the social distancing is is reduced and students are really kind of close together which i truly understand that because they're kids um and those are you know we all want to be together um but that is challenging for us as a school district so we are sending something out to families um we took a hard look with our local health departments today and as well as our school physicians to think about what an appropriate um kind of duration would be to make sure that kids are safe and they don't have access to the virus so we did revise some of our guidelines we had been having everyone quarantined for

034the 14-day period similar as a close contact but we were able to talk about it a little more with our school physicians and we've reduced that really to where the state is where it's um you know someone can get a negative test that's given on day i believe dawn it's six five stay five or later day five or later and then they're eligible to return on day eight afterward if they don't want to get tested uh then they can um fulfill the 14 day quarantine period so we just want to make sure families know what's going on with that so as people make decisions about what they're doing at home they're aware of the the situation at school this is not a position that we want to be in as a school district but it's

035something certainly that we have to make sure we're consistent about in order to um make sure everyone at school is safe we have a wide variety of beliefs in our community about transmission of the virus you know we have been fortunate that we have not seen any transmission from students to faculty or students to students inside our schools that we know of and that's a real positive but i think it's something that we are going to continue to air on the side of caution particularly as we're in this next surge uh post holidays so just a little bit of information there i wanted to give the committee an uh update into the investigation into the incident from the last school committee meeting um as all of the communities aware we had an incident at the

036last meeting on december 17th where two of you were targeted um you know through the question and answer um feature of the chat um in zoom the acting police are continuing to investigate and i just had an opportunity to talk to the chief of police in today um regarding an update and they are working very closely now with the middlesex district attorney's office and other agencies to determine who may have been behind the incident we don't know that yet and they're still working on it at the district level we have reviewed our security features for public meetings and disabled the q a function within zoom for public meetings anyone wishing to speak publicly will now be asked to state their name and street in either acton or boxborough before addressing the committee because the primary

037function of our zoom of zoom for our district is classroom purposes some of the security protocols that we talk to the town about and they have in place just simply don't work for us so for example the town uses the chat feature to temporarily chat with participants if they don't recognize who that is we explored doing that but it's unfortunately a universal setting so if we modified the chat function for school committee meetings it would actually modify it for all classes as well and one of the reasons we disable it is we found as schools were doing all school meetings the kids found the chat function and they were chatting inappropriately with each other and so we're a little bit stymied because some of the things we're doing for student safety and to make make

038sure that safer kids work against us to be able to utilize more in the public meeting so we are kind of towing that line between um you know being a school and also a public entity at the same time so just you know please be aware we are doing everything we can to make sure our meetings are safe um also as a follow-up to the incident we have been working um really closely now with the leadership in both of our towns uh john mangeretti ryan farrar and i have been having you know several conversations about this about how we can collaboratively broaden the conversation um with kind of a focus on respectful dialogue equity and inclusion to our broader community so that universally we can all do a better job together in combating hate in

039all of its forms we're hopeful that by aligning some of the efforts across the towns and schools we can actually help our community move forward from this um and some of the other hateful incidents that we've had over the last few years essentially what we're realizing is that we all continue to work in our silos where the schools are working on one set of initiatives acting might be working in another set and box pro's working in another set we're really not going to have the impact that we want to have and another thing that we've been really thinking about and this goes to lauren's comments um earlier in the meeting is we want to look at ways that even if we disagree on issues we can think of ourselves as neighbors and understand that we

040might end up disagreeing on an issue but we can still have a you know dialogue about that and you know we may end up disagreeing and it's not always about changing everyone's mind uh because so there are some issues that we're never going to agree completely on but we want to have that respectful dialogue so that's some element of it but um we're also doing that knowing that we're really committed to equity and there's going to be times that we have to make some decisions that disappoint people um and it's not that we're going to shy away from those decisions necessarily it's simply that we have to understand that as we make decisions we're not going to ever be able to please everyone and we still need to treat each other as neighbors we need

041to treat each other as fellow community members and when we see each other in grocery stores we need to be able to have that conversation with each other so um just a little bit of a thought on that and that's something that we are working on uh between the two town managers and i um and we're hoping to have a little bit more information in the coming weeks um because we're we're still in process um mcas testing i just want to give a little bit of information on that desi just recently released a memo and i think um it went out on the msc list serve as well but they are announcing some modifications to the mcas assessment for the 2020-21 school year pending a vote of the board some of the highlights include a

042modified company determination for our current seniors so these are students who may not have received a passing score on mcas yet they are offering an alternative that if they take one of our approved classes within our high school they can achieve their competency determination that way so that they're not being penalized for kind of pandemic learning also mcas tests for students in grades three through eight will be administered in the spring but students will participate in a much shortened version of the test recognizing that time i'm learning has been impacted um there will also be consideration of waiving some accountability for some underperforming districts uh the access testing window also this year is being extended from what usually ends in mid-february right through the end uh may 20th which is almost the end of our

043school year and then deci is also providing some flexibility to schools around the administration of biology mcas for ninth grade students i'm going to put a big caveat on that is they haven't sent any additional information out so i would love to be able to answer any questions that you have about that but um i'm almost literally reading off of their uh memo that they sent us so no other information and i just went to a webinar today where a lot of superintendents were asking and desi said it's forthcoming so we're eagerly anticipating more building project update i'm doing this in the general update portion of the meeting um and you know we can certainly come back to it but i wanted to also put it here because this is information that goes on to

044our families but construction of the new elementary school is underway which is very very exciting our contractor which is consigli has been excavating geothermal wells and pouring concrete for footings and foundation walls that's the major work that's been going on there have been several unanticipated challenges that we found early in the project mostly related to underground conditions these challenges have resulted in some early change orders for the project in order to excavate additional soil and to remove some existing ledge where the new bus loop of the building is going to be located while the cost of the changes was very frustrating for building committee members and everyone involved in the project early on the building committee was able to use the contingency money built into the budget to cover those costs on december 19th we've

045received our guaranteed maximum price from consigli and that gmp which is the guaranteed maximum price for the construction project is now set um at a hard cap of 88 million 737 000 and change that is actually 6.5 million dollars under the amount that was set in the project budget the building committee determined to replenish all of the contingencies that had been used for some of that early work and after all the contingencies have been replenished the project is now running approximately 2.5 million dollars under the original project budget so the budget for that is some good news i also just want to make a note because we recognize tax bills were recently sent to residents and there was a noticeable increase in taxes due to the building project um you know based on the recommendation

046of our debt strategy subcommittee the district actually has borrowed nearly all of the money required for the product early in this process and because of the timing of the bonds we issued an early march we were actually able to take advantage of just about the lowest historic interest rate in history for municipal bonds we are very very grateful to our community for supporting the project we also recognize the challenges of the increased taxes during this really difficult time i don't think as we were passing the building project anyone saw um a pandemic coming within two months um we recognized that and you know we feel for all the residents in terms of tax rate um but you know one of the benefits of of bonding that project up front uh was to be able to

047take advantage of those low interest rates so we are locked in for 30 years at a very very low interest rate we also publish construction updates weekly on our building project website and we'll be sending a link also to families who wish to receive emails uh directly with those weekly updates next update community coffees is something that tessa and i started doing last year and we are going to be resuming those in early february um we are sending up schedule through the end of the year and we will send zoom links to families as dates approach for that we will also provide families with an opportunity to submit some questions in advance of meetings so that we can make the most efficient use of time uh one unfortunate result of the pandemic though is that

048people will need to provide their own coffee and snacks for the meeting we cannot do that um so just you know we are looking forward to families joining us and being able to resume that and then finally fy 22 budget update you know just for families mostly but again due to the impact of coven 19 and the uncertainty surrounding school programming for next year the district worked with our school committee and elected boards in both towns to delay the budget process for the schools fy 22 budget we are currently preparing our preliminary budget presentation for our next school committee meeting which is january 21st we recognize that this may be a challenging budget year and again plan for some uncertainty around fy22 we will keep everyone posted um throughout the prog process and that is

049it for me for updates and you have a question i i wanted to comment on a couple of things one is you know it was fantastic to hear the good news about the budget um and the new school building and you know one of the unfortunate things of all of the things the school committee has had to deal with this year is that we haven't been able to celebrate and enjoy you know the excitement of working towards that new facility which will really really change um education you know in a couple of years and i i just didn't want that to get lost you know with everything else because it is something to be very excited about and and to be very you know proud of um and then i just also wanted to uh

050commend peter for you know recognizing um the the tax impact you know that just came through which you know clearly you know was very noticeable when people got their bills and i think again as peter very correctly stated um this was you know a great decision but we wish the timing had been a little bit different that the long-term impact of that low interest rate is fantastic as we look at the next 30 years of the district but you know this short term impact this year this is tough and i obviously that will factor in our our budget discussions for fy 22. um and then the other thing that i wanted to comment on was uh the colbit situation um and there were a couple things that um i wanted to mention one is that

051you know we continue to be just in a sort of a terrible environment right now in january um and you know i expect that sort of will continue to february so it is extremely important um to send out that message to students and families that you know if you were ever going to work hard on your precautions now is the time to do it but then you know i want to tie together you know a few different themes have been going on and the question is you know how should we work together to change behavior should we work together to change behavior in a punitive kind of way or should we try and work together to change behavior in a constructive and supportive way and i'm sure that you all know where that's going because

052it was very important to me that in our statement um about the racist instant incident that occurred that it included the statement that our objective is to become inclusive and loving um so regardless of what we're doing whether we're working you know on building a community you know around our team identities or whether we're working on our community in terms of uh trying to respond appropriately to a very challenging infectious disease circumstance that work needs to be done by with by what with love you know by you know our our staff by our school committee and by everybody in town and if that work is done with love as we try to um you know deal with these challenges we'll be better off and of course if it's dealt with in a punitive way it's

053going to be very hard so i just encourage everyone to you know approach this work with love thanks john um it looks like we have uh the karina's raising her hand in the audience peter okay corinne hi this is karen hogswell i still live on seminole road in acton um i had two questions and a comment my first question is for peter and i asked this in an email and i um it's regarding the quarantines uh is the requirement to quarantine suspected close contacts a state requirement or a district regulation so the quarantine for close contact the only group that can quarantine anyone for close contact is a local board of health so we actually don't quarantine people um we actually just discussed that today so that that is a state any quarantine here is

054a state requirement however with our physicians and health department we talked about quarantines today and the the health people were very strong in feeling that the quarantine period is exactly what i read earlier from um kind of our gatherings plan which is you know you can either have the test on day five and then you could return on day eight and monitor yourself um that's the quantity however um the the health people really felt right now that we should continue to follow the period that we've been excluding students from school who are close contacts and the reason being is that we have specifically had multiple students um who are converting very late in the period um specifically around i believe between day 10 and 14 and i think a number of them were actually even

055on like day 13 14. so um the the medical professionals that we consult with continue to feel like they want us to to take a cautious group of that but um i i do remember your email i promised you that i would talk about that with our health experts and we did today but um it's still a recommendation that we stick with what we're doing all right thank you i only brought it up because again as i mentioned in my email oh the state of ohio has done away with this requirement because the transmission in schools is so low and it's just causing kids to needlessly miss school um so my other question i guess this goes to um john's comments about the taxes maybe both of yours is any when will it be some

056consideration given to looking at the formula the assessment formula again it hasn't been looked at since regionalization and it was it was broken at the beginning um you know has anybody talked about that i don't know who would do that it would be the vincoms or the boards of selectmen or or you guys i don't know but that's i would just that's something i think that has to be looked at again so and then my other question or comment this is my comment it was with regard to the um the environment i can't remember exactly what you were saying but um that this school environment is absolutely toxic and when you talk about you know like people being able to agree to disagree and be civil and all this stuff there are teachers who are

057telling kids um you know belittling them for their political state beliefs i'll just that's just like a really bland understated way to say it um i ran into one of my neighbors tonight when i was taking a walk and she's in the high school and she said they just she had a couple teachers that just spent the whole time bashing people that supported trump and she's like and you can't say anything and that's part of the problem is that kids who are not in the minority are not in the majority rather than how do i say that yeah if you're not in the majority they feel like they can't speak up i i had another friend i was talking to yesterday there's a no the kids have a word for it now it's called a

058frexit when they stop they have to completely separate from their groups of friends because they can't tolerate each other's opinions and then bring and i know this comes from the families i know it starts way before they get to high school but the faculty don't help that's all i have to say thank you ukraine all right peter did you i don't think we have anyone else on the committee that that has a response um and the next and the next item on the agenda is also you know i know but i'll allow you to just keep on going um so the next item on the agenda um is to i want to share some of the results of the student learning time survey um and talk about you know our recommended resolution um in terms

059of what we're going to do um you know there were some really interesting results that came back to us so i'm going to actually go ahead and share my screen just provide a little bit of an anchor for people who might be listening and have not seen the packet but all of this is published in the packet and people can access the information so there we go are you all looking at something that looks i i just lost my version of the screen so i apologize are you looking at pandemic learning time survey highlights we are okay so you know i just want to give a couple general notes on this um you know uh one you know i'm going over i'm not going to go over all of our data tonight the focus of

060the analysis that we're doing right now is on respondent satisfaction with our hybrid program and the reason being is that we were very very time constrained right now and we are required to respond to deci by regulation within a time period and we didn't have time to try and go through all of our data but we did have to pull the data that was specific to looking at our hybrid program which was what desi uh needs us to respond to so if you are here and you're in the remote program um please do not be offended that i'm not talking about that tonight but everything i'm going to talk about is around the hybrid program overall with the survey though we had about 2 900 families in our district uh respond across all levels we

061had about two students um 2 000 students uh respond in grades three through twelve uh we did end up using the result uh analysis results for grades four through twelve uh when we talked to some of our educators who were seeing the students responding grades three there was enough confusion around some of the questions that we didn't feel the data was going to be reliable and then we had about 500 of our educators respond across all levels there were some survey limitations and disclaimers that i want to give one there was very rapid design and turnaround due to the deci regulation timing uh we were also um very very busy um at the end of the week prior to break with a number of things going on around the district and we wish we had

062been able to give this a little bit more time but we were just trying to get something out so we could get some feedback there were some inconsistencies when we collected the data for example um we had a couple of things that um were either on a 10-point scale or 100-point scale we ended up normalizing our results based on 100 point scales for consistency of reporting there were some incomplete responses skipped questions that could skew some of the data and some of our survey vocabulary around synchronous or asynchronous learning could have been confusing for some of our students and families but we were trying to really match it with what the regulations were talking to so we were consistent with what we were talking about we do have a document and if people go to

063the packet and we will send something to families tomorrow with the same links where people can actually look at a little bit of an analysis of that that's more detailed but i do want to share a couple of highlights with you and i i will probably pull up the more detailed analysis after this but overall satisfaction with the hybrid program about 60 percent of families reported being either satisfied or very satisfied with the program across levels and about 20 percent of our families reported some level of dissatisfaction across the levels um in true acting or boxborough fashion we offered people two categories of satisfaction and three levels of dissatisfaction um that they could choose from and then there was a neutral in the middle about 20 of our families chose uh that reported that they

064were neither dissatisfied or satisfied um high school families report a slightly higher level of dissatisfaction at about 25 i do have a wonder if that's due to maybe differences in access to education for some of our students who had to go through a period of quarantine um it's a wonder i have in hindsight i wish i had asked the question of were you quarantined because that would have given us some insight into that data students about 45 percent of our students reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the program across levels there was a higher level of satisfaction in grades four through eight there were slightly lower satisfaction at the high school um grades four through eight reported around 50 to 55 satisfaction lower at the high school around 30 percent i ended up being

065curious about why that might be and i looked into some of the reports and different questions that we had asked and the one that i was able to correlate that most to was i started filtering some of the high school responses based on the amount of asynchronous work they were receiving and what was striking is as soon as students started reporting more than about four hours of asynchronous work the level of dissatisfaction declined sharply excuse me increased sharply um and the level of satisfaction declined sharply so it does appear that there's a breaking point for kids uh when they are working independently or they just can't have more so um that is certainly something that we've already talked to the high school about and they're looking at um 25 of our students reported some level

066of dissatisfaction again it was slightly higher um at the high school than in the lower grades and about 30 percent reported feeling kind of neutral from an educator perspective eighty percent uh reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the program across levels eight percent reported some level of dissatisfaction and about twelve percent um kind of were in that that neutral range the next piece of analysis i'm going to share actually combines two of our questions we reported we asked families a question about um to what degree did they feel their child was receiving enough remote synchronous instruction but then we also asked another question asking if they thought adding remote synchronous time would make things better for their kids because we want and i wanted to actually correlate those two at the same time but

067what was interesting is for families about 40 to 50 percent of families felt there was too little remote synchronous time or live time but there was disagreement among our families that adding any additional synchronous learning time on the remote days would be beneficial for their kids um so there was disagreement whether or not adding just simply zoom time with teachers was really going to help solve the problem about 30 percent of families thought that would have value but about 50 to 60 actually reported that they did not believe that would be beneficial um and about 10 to 15 were neutral um in their feelings around that in all honesty you know my hypothesis being apparent myself myself is a recognition that kids really just need to be back in school and they need to be

068back with us full-time so that actually would solve the lifetime problem and you know kind of satisfy the sense of maybe it's really not about zoom solving the world's problems um i think for families in the remote program who chose a remote environment there was really an understanding that that was a large piece of it but for families who want to be in person it was really about the value of in-person learning from a student perspective strong majority of our students felt that um the amount of remote synchronous time is appropriate uh 70 at grades four through eight it was lower at the high school but at the high school it was about 52 percent of students feeling the amount was appropriate but 40 percent of high school students felt there was too much remote

069synchronous time i'm wondering if that could be due to the fact that the high school students were the only ones who have experienced kind of that fully remote schedule who had signed up for hybrid learning there were mixed responses by students as to whether or not they thought there was any benefit to additional synchronous time high school students generally did not see it as beneficial junior high and elementary students were either neutral or saw a little benefit to additional synchronous time on remote days educators a strong majority of educators believed that our current amount of synchronous time was appropriate most educators did not report any perceived benefit to adding additional synchronous instructional time there was a small group of educators at the high school who did see some benefit in that but it was still

070very strong majority that did not think additional synchronous time was going to be of that much benefit asynchronous learning time this is not part of the slt requirements but it was a significant enough piece that i do want to share it with you um a really strong majority of families reported that they didn't feel like there was enough synchrony asynchronous work again they didn't feel like there was enough asynchronous work for their their children um there was a small percentage of families about 50 who thought it was actually too much although that was more of concern at the high school level from a student standpoint 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through eight reported they thought it was just about right that does not surprise me uh if we're asking students do

071you want more work so you know that's something to think about um and less than five thought there was too little work for them um at the high school students were evenly divided that there was either too much work or just the right amount of work and again i i just bring us back to that level of dissatisfaction that i mentioned earlier among high school kids that there is a breaking point for what kids can handle um during a pandemic educators the vast majority of educators reported feeling that um students were being given the right amount of asynchronous work that was between 90 and 95 73 of high school educators um reported that as well uh but there were about twenty percent of high school educators that felt there was too much and about seven

072percent felt there was too little a bonus question that we asked was around snow days again there was not a high level of agreement among all groups uh families and educators did indicate a preference for remote learning days over traditional snow days by a margin of three to two and but our students had a preference for snow days kind of at a two to one rate um i believe any seniors that took the survey were unanimous in wanting snow days um with the full knowledge that they are the only group that does not have to make up any days at the end of the year so we're also aware of that in all honesty in terms of snow days i foresee us continuing a general pattern where we are doing remote learning days however i

073really recognize how students feel about this and you know a a good portion of our families and educators i you know am aware of that and if you know we have an opportunity where we're looking at a storm that we think could end up knocking power out will certainly you know consider you know having a traditional snow day in that so it will probably end up over the course of the year being some combination of remote learning but if we can you know squeeze a traditional snow day in i i recognize that so you know i'm just before i get into kind of the the summary information i just want to show you this is the way um we chose to pull the data out um we asked a lot of people um you know

074kind of rate a level of satisfaction with a scale where a rating of five meant that they believed whatever we were asking was just about the right amount um and a lower rating of zero would have been way too little or a rating of a hundred was way too much of something and so rather than just presenting averages i i really felt like an average could get skewed in that type of a question and so what i ended up doing was banding results um for better and worse i i i made that decision myself about how banding should look and i chose a band in the middle of about a rating of 40 to 60 being a group that considered it about right um and that meant some people felt like it was a little

075on the shy side of it and some people might have felt like it was a little bit too much but overall it was kind of that we're about right and under 40 for a rating was we felt very strongly that there was too little of something or over 60 was we felt very strongly there was too much i'm not going to go through all of this right now i know you have it in the packet but i just did want to highlight some of the reasoning for that decision making and what i chose to do just to make it a little bit easier to digest was to highlight some of the significant data that that we looked at so we were transparent about how we were looking at information i'm going to go back over

076to this so overall summary of the data as we saw it as a leadership team is that there is a generally high level of satisfaction with our current program among stakeholders with families in particular reporting being satisfied or highly satisfied at a rate three times higher than those that reported any level of dissatisfaction universally all three respondent groups families educators and students indicated that they wish students were engaged for more synchronous learning time however the data indicates that the respondents didn't all really agree that more time on zoom was going to be the best solution for that and then all of our data excuse me our data also indicates families believe that a daily check-in for junior high and high school students on their asynchronous days would benefit them that is something that we did

077ask and there was a very very strong feeling among our families that a check-in on students asynchronous days would be beneficial i will note um just to make sure our students have a voice here the students did not necessarily feel the same way i think some of the students kind of enjoy the freedom of those asynchronous days but families felt very strongly and that's something we wanted to listen to um recommended actions you know we believe that based on the feedback we received we should implement the required daily check-in on asynchronous days for our students in grade 7 through 12. our elementary students already have that um and have had that since the beginning of the pandemic um where they are checking in with assistance and they should be having an hour a day with

078the assistance um so we are going to be moving ahead to implement that also based on our family educator and student survey data uh we uh believe and that we should request a waiver from desi with regard to the 35 hours of live time over a two-week period we just don't see um that adding more zoom time is really going to satisfy the needs of what the community seem to be looking for i would much rather be planing for a full return from for our students than planning for um you know additional live synchronous time and i think with the vaccine on the horizon you know i think you know we we that could end up being a bit more of a reality um this year we just don't know exactly what the timeline is

079going to be because we don't really know the timeline for our educators to be vaccinated um and they do have to get both rounds of the vaccine they have you know take several weeks for it to take effect so um there is some thinking around that but we we are thinking about how we could try and return more kids into our classrooms um you know if for some reason um you know we don't get the waiver because it is not guaranteed that just because we think we want a waiver um that that's going to be granted by desi uh but you know our goal would be you know to integrate some of our students at home um on their you know remote days into um periods of the day such as like morning meetings read

080alouds uh daily possibly a daily closing activity um i'm i am concerned about that from an equity standpoint because a lot of our students are in various child care programs um that have schedules set around what we originally told people um i also know that you know particularly for younger students whether or not they can get online is highly dependent on how available a parent is to help them with that so um that does concern me a bit at the elementary level um at the secondary level um you know i think what we would look potentially to do is increase the duration of wednesday's uh the wednesday schedule by about an hour or so um and you know and then really think about adding time possibly to the beginning or end of the school day

081could be another possible solution which i think stays consistent a bit with our overall goal of maximizing the in-person time but that that would be another way to solve that what i will say is these are only given right now for examples um to be able to frame some of the solutions that we might uh put in place one of the goals of this week now that we got the data back and we were able to frame our own thinking a little bit we've asked all the principals to go back to their staffs with some of these general ideas uh to run them by them but also to solicit feedback from educators about other ways that they think we could do this should either you as a committee feel like we shouldn't apply for the

082waiver or should you think we should apply for the waiver and deci doesn't grant it we do have to have a backup plan by january 19th um so we are on a bit of a timeline um i will you know just highlight this memo or letter is in your packet um and we will also be letting families have access to this uh tomorrow um we'll be highlighting it for them but you know in in the waiver request we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the reasons why we were requesting a waiver other than just well we think this is good or people are happy with it but you know i think i appreciate where the state is at in looking across all of the schools uh but i think one of the

083things you know we know is kind of the danger of always aggregating data is you don't really get a deep dive into some of the unique experiences of each individual district and i think every district has some different needs so for example with us we've been working a lot with challenge success around ways that we can reduce stress and those of you that have been on the committee for a long time know you know some of the work that's been done to look at the structures across the district in ways that we can minimize stress um for our students you know and still keep high performance and i think we've actually been really successful at doing that we have you know had later start times we've reduced homework loads we have you know really thought

084deeply about you know no homework uh vacations long weekends things like that for our students and i know there was a lot of fear um that you know we would lose the performance edge with that um you know we are still the highest sat scores in the state we are still the highest ap scores in the state um you know and i'm not saying that because i think you know being number one is a badge of honor i think more it's a recognition that you can actually reduce student stress and have high levels of performance at the same time so um you know i think we've really thought about that and we had those as priorities uh when we created this remote schedule and so you know we said that we wanted to keep plans

085realistic for everyone we wanted to talk about the environment we wanted to make sure we saw students as humans and not just as people who lost learning uh over the course of a pandemic so just to keep that in mind i already went through some of the stakeholder feedback so i'm not going to spend more time on that you know it's really hard to just measure engagement but one of the measures that we did have was to take a look at our high school students grades from last year to this year based on quarter one grades so what was really interesting to us as we looked at that both years about 89 percent of all quarter one grades at the high school were a b minus or better um and that actually stayed consistent from

086last year to this year for students in the a range so 90 or better last year it was about 50 of grades given during first quarter or in that a range at the high school this year it's actually 60 um of all first quarter grades are in that a range at the high school we also looked at grades below 70 at our high school during first quarter last year about um one and a half percent or so of grades were below 70. and this year it's about 2.75 percent of the grades um are below 70. so that's obviously an increase what i will note is half of all the grades below 70 are in our remote learning program at the high school so we need to think about that um especially where the remote learning

087program only makes up 15 of our student population so we need to think about something about how we're supporting some of the students there but i actually worry more about some of our remote fully remote high school students than i do about the students in the hybrid program uh based on some of that data so i don't think we're you know experiencing this you know kind of the the disappearance of students that we're hearing about in the media uh necessarily an act in boxborough at the same rate that we're hearing about in some other places and so i think based on that we have a little bit different perspective as to why you know the types of things we might want to do with our asynchronous days and then finally you know i think one

088of the we had a long debate about this as a leadership team uh going into the hybrid program because we had considered uh adding zoom time on the asynchronous days very very early on before we launched our program and ultimately we really felt that the in-person time with our kids was so sacred during the pandemic that we felt the need to really protect that and we felt that if we divided teachers attention between students were who were fully in person and students were fully you know were on screen we were actually taking away a lot of that value and personalization that teachers can provide to students and what we've anecdotally heard from a lot of our educators is that the opportunity to have classes of eight and nine in front of a teacher for a

089period of time is absolutely game-changing in terms of the amount of individual attention they can give to kids when we're there and that was probably in all of my conversations with faculty that's the number one piece of feedback teachers have really liked about you know pandemic learning was this idea of really being able to know kids know them in the small environment and being able to individualize instruction i felt that if we decide we're going to start zooming into classes we're actually going to take away the one thing teachers feel like they really have a benefit of leverage for so based on all of that it's our recommendation um that we would submit a waiver to desi desi does not require a school committee vote to submit a waiver request or to make any changes

090to the program however i still believe that there's no greater policy decision than the educational program that we have for students and if we are going to submit a waiver for um a learning time regulation i actually think it's really important that the committee agree with that decision um and vote to support that because i i really value your opinions as parents as community members as people who are connected with our community so um you know what you're looking at is pretty affirmative language and that's because i shared with you a version of the memo that we will actually be sending to desi if you choose to proceed with a waiver request if you do not choose to proceed with the waiver request we will implement all of the strategies to meet those learning time

091regulations by january 19th so you do have some choice in all of this but we as a leadership team um felt pretty strongly to recommend for all of the reasons in this memo that we submit the waiver request so and i i wish this was a meeting that we got to deliberate things for multiple meetings um but waivers are due no later than the 11th um and then desi reviews them and if they decline the waiver we still have to implement something by the 19th um so deci has not provided us a very long timeline to do that so my apologies for the short deliberation window so i will stop sharing the screen and i apologize that took so long to go through but i wanted to to be thorough for you and for our

092community as well it's okay peter you've only put us 45 minutes behind already i'm just kidding single-handedly i'm just kidding all right amy yes thank you for that um i was wondering what does the asynchronous day check in what's it going to look like is it all the teachers is it a counselor what are you thinking about i wish i could tell you exactly what it's going to look like but again you know now that we had the data and we have been able to look at it and figure out as a leadership team uh what we thought we needed to do with it we actually are in the process now of trying to get a little bit more feedback from from some of our educators um you know i think andrew at the junior

093high has had a couple of different ideas so he's not 100 ready to commit um you know the the kids do have daily check-ins kind of with a home room or um you know a standard educator every day but he's also bantered around a couple of different ideas so that's something he's working on um the high school students do have an advisory class um scheduled that would likely be the landing spot for this type of a check-in uh because it's the most appropriate time um so you know and we just don't have enough counselors to be able to have check-ins just using our counseling staff so we're really kind of you distribute it yeah that makes sense that makes sense um yeah my kids are all in remote so but i still i see this

094idea of having to check in with them also it's i think it's a great idea uh kira thanks tessa um i i i like this plan i just wonder about um are there any are we missing any opportunities by taking by by applying for the waiver and taking it um to provide extra services for um students with special needs during their asynchronous days um is there i see all of this data um but i'm just curious to know um if if families with special needs um were were uh what's the word i'm looking for were were pulled out from some of this data did they did they are they in sync with everything that we say or are they are is are their satisfaction dissatisfaction levels um different and does that matter for this um

095yeah that's my first question and then my second question is about um sustainability for teachers so we know the teachers have been exhausted um and so i'm glad that teachers and educators are expressing general satisfaction um but i'm i'm curious to know whether or not um there was anything about their exhaustion level and sustainability um for the energy that they've been giving for the last couple of months and if that matters for the waiver yeah so you know this i'll just start by saying the survey was really specific to the proposed regulations for destiny so we didn't ask a lot of extra questions other than the snow request so you know in terms of students with disabilities unfortunately from a desi perspective um if even if we provide extra time for students with disabilities if

096it doesn't if it isn't required for all students it doesn't account for time on learning for this um so you know and i can say that because i had a conversation with the associate commissioner uh we just launched the new junior high school program this week where we were able to bring in um 75 additional high need students on wednesdays for in-person learning as opposed to remote learning um you know and you know andrew and his team really thought carefully about the you know how many students they could bring in uh how to make that work the high school is actually looking at something very similar on asynchronous days they're still in their planning phase the size of the school makes it a little bit more challenging in some ways in some of the mix

097of grade levels and at the elementary level actually a lot of our services are being offered on asynchronous days to students um and the reason we ended up starting with that model where some of the services were in asynchronous days is we didn't want kids coming in in a hybrid model um and and you know coming in two days a week and then getting pulled out of that class um as soon as they stepped in i mean sometimes there's an inevitable conflict where we have to do something but um our goal was to try and actually provide some of the services on the asynchronous days if possible so some of our special educators are already doing excuse me um we are also looking at ways that we can you know support some of our students

098with disabilities at the elementary level as well um trying to bring in additional students things like that i know our principals are always thinking about how they can fit additional students in on a four-day schedule as opposed to a two-day schedule um if they feel like they need that or just had a conversation with juliana about that recently um where she identified a couple of students um you know in her case the the problem was the bus they needed was already full uh so we've been working through that challenge um about how to how to navigate that but i think we'll be able to resolve that um because we don't want buses to be our barriers to kids coming in so just does that answer that question it does yes yeah and then again we

099didn't ask the questions about kind of educator burnout in this survey um you know it is real there was actually a great piece in the new york times um about educator burnout um that was really pointing out i'll see if i can remember to send it to everyone but it actually also cited trying to teach remote and in-person students at the same time as the number one source of learning for teachers jenny um thanks i was also going to ask about um families with with kids with special needs because i just have heard so many um you know anecdotal account of the struggles of those families it's just heartbreaking and i recognize all the work that's being done um but i i would you know would not be in support of this waiver if it

100was going to you know possibly deprive those families of a little more more time so i'm glad to hear that it doesn't um and and then with respect to general education students um you know i have kids in the high school and it's um they're kind of like little college students now you know with their days on campus and there are days where they have to kind of manage everything on their own which you know might be good training but it's certainly you know not something uh you know certainly has its challenges and you know every time their rules change or they go from you know from my perspective and i've talked to other community members about this to you know from hybrid to remote or you know something changes with schedules just it just

101feels extremely disruptive because everything is so bananas and um you know it's hard to just absorb even small changes i feel like now because um you you finally feel like you have the ground under your feet and you know what's going on and then you can get blindsided so i don't support um changes because desi thinks it's a good idea in any way shape or form so i would support this waiver um with that caveat about special needs yeah you know and i would love to to know more about that too but you know one of the worries i have for our students with disabilities um you know by providing the services you know again we already provide some pre-scheduled services on the asynchronous days when we're able to but if we change mid-stream um

102whether or not students get more education especially for younger kids is going to be so highly dependent on family availability um we know that you know my wife teaches at the district where you know there are kids in child care programs and they do try to they try to zoom in but the child care program couldn't get the kids to the right place at the right time um it was just beyond what they could manage so you know it i i don't know it's i i wish we had more information before we started the school year about some of the goals with this because then we could have had a plan going in that everyone knew but i do think it's kind of challenging to try and be changing things on people on stream evan

103yeah um i apologize in advance i'm going in and out my internet is not being too cooperative tonight but um i wanted to ask um peter if there will be opportunity at some point to increase the in passing days for at least the high school students to three days instead of two days and maybe that will create a little bit of consistency because to what genie said a little bit of a change in schedule can sort of throw them off schedule and even when everything going on a few of them have winter sports and so that then just throws a wrench into everything that is going on so um to the extent that we can minimize the disruption will be good but i think if it and it does seem you know hearing personally here

104in the community the people are probably open to the number of days in person and it may not be a bad idea to explore the possibility of adding a day or so even if it was a half day and that probably would help with the in the checkings and that i i think that's a great point that was actually something that um when i called desi the first time to get a little bit more information about this they actually suggested but one of the things i i pointed out to them is this is actually about the live learning time and you know the the desi person actually originally suggested that you know maybe we alternate wednesdays for our two cohorts you know and that might be a way of increasing some of that time but

105i pointed out that the problem with that is you're also then doubling the asynchronous type of kids because now the kids right now on wednesday all students are live with the teacher but if you alternate the wednesdays then you know one week they're they're live but then the next week very singles and they don't have any connection to the teacher and it actually reduced our live instruction i love the idea but it would actually work against us in terms of the deci requirement um all right it looks like we oh oh sorry diane you had your hand up and then it went away i did so um i mean i was gonna make a motion um um but i i i just have a quick um observation and perhaps a question um so i think

106that you know when i was i i was able to to go to part of the the board of education meeting on this and the entire infantis for it was the impact on mental health and that this would be providing more consistency but there was flexibility given it wasn't necessarily have to be time on learning i mean it was very clear that it wasn't like they were buying into this idea that more zoom means more engagement in fact there are plenty of people there to point out to the board that that's absolutely not true and so i i think that what we're doing you know lines up like aligns really really well with what the needs of and the desires of our community is and what we can do in terms of capacity in terms

107of staffing so i mean i i think it was a lot of work to do this and pull the data together and i really appreciate having the data i think it's the right thing to do for us um do you anticipate receiving um the blessing if we ask for a a waiver or do do you uh proceed do you think that we're gonna get pushed back you know right now the message i got was deci is not really sure of the standard they're going to use um to decide whether or not they approve a waiver um so my my feedback was that makes it challenging for us to know what the standard is either um and you know but it's frustrating it is for me because it's very frustrating i also have to have a

108level of empathy that they've never done this either um and this is new to them so um it's challenging for us the i would agree with you you know one of the challenges particularly at the high school is you know unless you're thinking about that advisory period there's no other mechanism in high school to increase like connections um unless you're just zooming into classes um and you know the feeling was that just burns kids out um and we kind of heard that from rick earlier um that if you're trying to zoom every day or zooming for six hours a day is just burn out um so that that was our our thinking so can i make a motion tessa you can i i am aware i don't want the person that's in the audience to

109think that i have forgotten about them go ahead and make a motion and we can still continue discussion okay so i move that the school committee support the district's request for a waiver from deci on structured learning time second okay and then john had his hand up and then yemen had his hand up and then we have someone in the audience so john go right ahead i um wanted to uh say you know i'm very pleased that you know peter brought this forward to us so that we could enthusiastically hopefully endorse the idea of a waiver and as peter pointed out and i don't want it to get lost just because we've asked for a waiver and even if we get a waiver that doesn't mean that as some of these other ideas are explored

110we can't make changes to our program that we think that it's better the other comment that i wanted to make is thank you peter for working very hard to put an end to average at a number of points in your presentation as you banded the groups you know and particularly pointed out the impact on some of the student groups and so no matter what we do and how hard we try you know to make sure that every student has a good experience this year um once again you know we're going to come to the end of this year and we're going to find that there are specific groups of students you know that have not made the progress that we wanted them to make and so i wanted to very specifically request that when we

111look at the fy 22 budget you know that fy 2222 budget is trying to support things where you know for whatever reason you know gaps have occurred this year and we're going to do something in fy 22 to try and close those gaps [Music] thank you tessa so thank you pierre for your presentation and for collecting the data sending out of the survey and also it's good to make up for the backup then so now that i like that but uh uh regardless about the dance is going to wave or grant us a waiver or not but i think we are still ought to address the the reality that uh only 30 of the high school students are satisfied with this right so do you have any idea about this so the high school i

112i think they actually might have launched it um already they have an extensive student engagement survey um that they either have just launched or are about to launch with kids um you know to really dig into what kids think is really working for them instructionally you know schedule wise what doesn't work so they're looking really deeply at that they don't have the data back yet obviously because it's it's it's very fresh um but that's something that that they're going to follow up on and take a look at you know and then the other thing is a district that we're going to be looking at is the amount of asynchronous learning that we are providing because that was a clear message from our families uh very consistently so we're gonna be thinking about that but i

113think one of the things of asynchronous learning is it gives a little bit more freedom to when that can take place angie yeah thanks peter and thanks tessa so i like jenny that i'm very supportive for this um this recommendation and i also at the same time i hear the need of in person especially for the special needs students so i i was wondering if um even if you support that deal because as you stated that the in person is what everybody are looking for so i was wondering that if there's will be any consideration to have more in person especially for the special needs students um yes so you know as i said andrew just launched a program at the junior high school to bring more students in the high school is in the

114planning stages of trying to launch something um to bring in some of the higher needs students on the asynchronous days and then at elementary school we continue to try and expand the number of students who are a four day program as we identify more students who would benefit from that so that's that's certainly something that we're continuing to do but not at a high school level uh we already have a number of students in a four-day program um and so when i essentially say that we're looking to bring kids in on the asynchronous days that takes them from a two-day to a four-day program okay thank you all right so peter we have two people in the audience that have their hands raised yeah um and so just as a reminder if you can identify

115yourself street and town please so kate yes hi peter um my name is kate and i'm from mohegan road in acton i appreciate your work in preparing that presentation this evening about this data that you collected i have a kindergartener and i'm new to the district actually um it's an honor to be here and so far my family has found our a home enacted and feel very you know happy to be here um one question i have about the waiver and um i had it early on in this discussion and appreciate that um you mentioned the consideration for wednesdays um i had been thinking about the kind of the rotation of the cohorts on wednesday as a way to increase to what i calculated to maybe be about 35 hours of in-person learning if you

116think about seven hours a day on the two days a week and every other wednesday um and then you know you you put out there that it would decrease the synchronous remote instruction on the on the wednesday lost um i i have to encourage or ask if if this could as an idea stay on the table as in our particular instance and again i'm talking from a kindergartener our remote wednesdays is a 140 minute zoom um my daughter loves her teacher it's nothing about um it's a herculean effort right now to educate kindergarteners and really all students of any age and i understand this the stress and the tax on our on the teachers and i can tell you that i will gladly give up our wednesday 40-minute zoom every other week for her to

117be in person every other week so i and encourage the committee and your administrative team to consider the impact that that every other week would do to the mental health of our student population and that's all students and frankly the learning outcomes for students at all levels so thank you i do appreciate i am a school leader i understand what you are are dealing with and this is a a really tough time and um and i i ask you as a committee if if this is what we're putting we're asking for a waiver um you know in in some ways this this could be a a backup plan for that would still maybe require a waiver but may may be incredibly impactful to our students so thank you thank you kate thank you um i

118think it's sorry i'm having trouble i believe amy yeah hi peter hi everyone my name is ami actually that's okay we're new to acton and we love it here my husband and i are both high school teachers and we have two kids at miriam elementary um they're having a great time they love going to school every day they come home with great stories and we're really so so pleased with some of the programs that they get to do including the book buddies program on wednesday we're really super happy with what's happening my question is we are both in high schools closer to the city who have been fully remote and we are both now being asked to come in to teach in different situations i'm going to be asked to be a part of a

119hybrid i work with english language learners and i believe my husband's going to be asked to come in for four days my question for you is just for teachers who have kids are there some accommodations are there some things that can be offered to try and help us as teachers who are trying to help support our own kids as well as our students is is there something that we can look for to try and figure out how to balance our kids education and our students education um as far as support with maybe more than two days in the in the classroom setting yeah i um if you also want to email me i can maybe talk a little bit more about your situation and how we can do that um we you know at the

120beginning of the year we started a community education program um where you know we actually provide some child care in each school yeah they help them connect um but i think i need to know a little bit about more what what your needs are and then connect you with the right person to be able to to think that through yeah i appreciate that there are districts i know that do provide the support specifically for educators and we do have a kid in the community ed program and they're doing great stuff it's just now that we upped the ante and we go into our own classroom settings i'm just wondering if there's support for people just like us not just our situation yeah thank you all right judy first of all i want to say thank

121you peter angel the school committee for doing a great job and coordinating all this with the colbit situation um and i had a just i understand the wave of peace um i just don't want something to get lost so you're talking about within the waiver piece uh with regards to the asynchronous learning days in the elementary schools and uh the piece that i don't want to get lost is um at least in my son's grade in his school there isn't a check-in on the asynchronous days at all with the kids um and i just feel like maybe that needs to be more consistent across the district so i i know you're talking about an hour a day or two check-ins or time the teachers that's not happening in my kids my son's school so i

122just wanted maybe after this all the the busy waiver takes place and everything else it's just to make sure that it's consistent across the district yeah absolutely if you could send me an email to that i want to be able to follow up with the principal okay okay thank you and so i see someone else i'm going to ask you to just identify yourself it looks like maybe someone from the children's behavioral health initiative um but i don't see your actual name so i apologize i'm not using your name but if you could just let us know who you are i'm so sorry this is amanda toby from mohegan road in acton i um i must be logged in under my professional zoom account there's just too many accounts to manage um sorry about that

123so just a clarification um you've alluded to it in various meetings about um a full return to in person that's everyone everybody's goal i i love hearing your sentiment but you know just in terms of the teacher vaccination so is that the bona fide plan that teachers have to be vaccinated before we're returning to more in-person days you know i think that's the most realistic path um to really getting to that you know if i i think if we had public health data that was a lot more supportive i know we haven't had transmission in the schools but we've also maintained a really strict protocol around six feet of distance um you know the i i think our most realistic path right now is the vaccinations um you know and then even then i think

124we're gonna end up having to work with a number of families because there might be some families that are still going to be uncomfortable with less than six feet um you know because that that's been something we've heard a little bit about too so um you know right now that does seem like it's the most realistic path i do know educators are you know on the that tier two a priority so sometime between february and april um to be vaccinated but i you know i'm also you know hopeful that we gotta watch the public health numbers too i think now is a really challenging time to be thinking about bringing kids back because the the health numbers are so tough that it's hard to justify why we would go less than six feet right now

125are there metrics or data that i mean when you talk about the vaccinations where that's that's next school year right that for any implications on the schedule so for this school year any so it sounds like unless something changes dramatically this is the plan for in-person learning what we have i think there's an opportunity to talk about um a potential return this year the vaccination schedule it you know could very well be such that it does provide an opportunity to think about this year um you know it wouldn't just be so easy as to say okay teachers have been vaccinated everyone can come back because i think we have to you know figure out some plans for various families um because kids will not have vaccines this year um you know they haven't they're not

126even on the list of anyone right now um and the vaccines are only available to people 16 and over uh because it hasn't been tested so you know it i think anything is a challenge to switch but i i do think there's you know potential for an opportunity of something this year i just don't have a timeline for that okay thank you sure um judy junior spoke oh judy okay that's right judy did sorry judy um uh john hello uh i'm from one minute picnic street on boxborough [Applause] okay so that is there's no one else um thank you for i hope you kicked that person out all right um did so in case anyone didn't hear that that was there was some profanity-laced music in there and i hope that person identified themselves in

127an address um so i hope that we follow up with that okay did anyone else on the committee have a question i know that we have a motion on the floor and um and it was seconded no right then we'll do a roll call vote um okay sorry evan yes kira yes amy yes evelyn yes adam yes jenny yes uh john yes angie yes dora yes diane yes and myself yes and i just want to acknowledge that this committee has already stated that we are not going to stand for any more of this uh harassment of members of our committee i i don't i mean that obviously wasn't a security issue because that person identified themselves whether that's a real name or not but um it's very disturbing and i'm sorry kieran evelyn that this

128is happening again i i just don't i have no words for what is going on and to be honest i i don't even i didn't hear any of it uh something must have happened on my end but um you know my apologies well it will be on the tape recorded all right if anyone else wants to say something please raise your hand and go right ahead i don't i don't want to silence anybody and i don't i don't want to brush over this because it's disgusting but i also don't want to give it more air time than than than is needed so i absolutely i don't want to silence anyone who wants to say something gary did you want to say something no but i do want you know it's first of all it's been

129two hours anyway can we just can we just take the minute and then also i you know again i just think you know there are um 74 people in town um you know i just want to i you know i just want to be really clear for those who are here that there are you know that that somebody chose to call to public servants in this town um the n-word um again in in our capacity of service and i just want you to know that so we just talked about neighbors two of your neighbors we're just called that in our capacity of service so uh you know i want to go to the grocery store i'm i want to raise my children here i want to serve your children um yeah so yeah i want

130to break the you know it's getting to a point where i don't even want to give it air time but if we want to treat each other with respect it's it's both sides and if this doesn't stop is how people you know say things that others don't appreciate so i didn't hear anything i don't know but so so the the caller that called in identified themselves identified an address whether that was their address or not and played an audio that included the n-word and so that that is what i don't know those of us that could hear it i don't know the audio did you want to take a five-minute recess is that where you're at absolutely and thank you peter for kicking the president now we don't deserve that not none of us in

131this group never care and i think it's disrespectful to everyone on this team you know absolutely but it's good that people are witnessing i just want people to witness bear witness you know bear witness yeah so you know do all the things and talk about neighbors and talk about how something important happened and that we you know we want to talk about our feelings and we want to talk about how sensitive this was and then let's talk but we also have to bear witness to the abuse um and that's what this is um so i'm going to take five minutes and then i'll be back to work we'll all take five minutes we'll get there look at five minute recess i don't know what time it is it's 8 47 8 48 8 48 back

132at 8 55 because that's easy okay thank you all right ah and just like yesterday democracy gonna keep going and her body's gonna keep working all right that's right she is right all right i gave everyone and i gave everyone one more minute guess that can i say something uh yep yeah just it's just impossible i don't know and well for me i don't i didn't hear the word i heard music i thought it's a kid play by accident but yeah after you explain it it's just impossible i just want to say that yeah uh so that everyone knows we are not going to entertain any public participation for the rest of the meeting so if members of the public that are watching have comments or questions they can email the committee and we will

133respond to them that way but we are not going to uh call on anybody else from from the uh public uh for the rest of the meeting tonight okay so it looks like at least most of us are back i'm not counting so i think we are um all right so so we we voted and we've moved past that and so now we have the first read of um next year's calendar which peter gets to keep speaking because maria is not here tonight so he will uh cover the the options that we have before us okay and you know i'm just gonna say i am so sorry that that happened um in all honesty i'm not sure everyone heard the same thing um when we recognized that person um all i heard was silence and

134then they disappeared and then so i don't know what's going on with the recording or not but i it sounds like nora had the same problem i don't know what other people heard as well um but obviously unacceptable um calendar i'm gonna share my screen for a moment here um so there are there are two versions of the school calendar in your packet um and we we put in two different versions this year because we didn't personally have a strong preference there were some benefits and drawbacks to each version um one thing we noticed um as we were looking at the calendar i believe it's rosh hashanah falls on the day after labor day next year and so you know one version that we had opened school on september 8th and the other version that

135we had um open school on september 30th and i could just point to a couple benefits and drawbacks and we can take a little bit of feedback um the version on september 30th i think from a traditional when do we want to start the school year um excuse me august 30th not september 30th um we traditionally would want to start around that date um but that what that does is it gives us you know a week of four days and then including the weekend we would end up having five days off and then we would have a three day week and then a couple days then another three days of school another day off and then the friday uh is a holiday as well so um we were a little worried that it was kind

136of a broken beginning of the year um from a continent sorry i'm sorry i don't want to interrupt um peter could you just make it a little bit bigger uh some of us have not the best eyesight is that better yes thank you okay so starting on the 30th we get a four day week and then a five day weekend then a three day week another weekend and then three days the holiday and then um the friday we're in so it was kind of a broken up beginning of the year from an instructional standpoint so we put out an alternative um look of the calendar where we actually didn't come back until after rosh hashanah um so we would actually start on the 8th so we would have you know the 8th 9th tenth the

137weekend 13 14 15 and it provides a little bit more continuity um one is obviously an early start the others later the difference in terms of the end of the year um if we start later the projected end date is the 21st which is a little later then we would like to traditionally end the school year especially knowing that snow days could be back in play next year and the 15th would be the end date if we start on august 30th so those are the two options and we're just kind of happy to hear some feedback and then we'll bring it back revise it um and come back to the committee all right anza went up really fast sorry what else peter um you know and you know based on the time you can either

138discuss the feedback or if you want tessa people can also email the feedback to me or beth and we can compile it and then you know bring that forward but um i'll leave that up to you i would say i think that tonight is is a night to bring up legitimate questions and ask them now and if you have um something to point out that may be helpful in other people's deliberations but please listen to each other and why don't this doesn't need to be the night where all like 11 of us weigh in i think unless you know so let's just listen for for what different people's comments are and try not to repeat kira i have a snow day question for option two so so given what we've we've been doing this year

139and we know that students aren't really delighted by it but if you know if we if we go with that later start um and then we say hey you know there's no there's no snow days or there's only one snow day so we can hold we can hold that 21st is that an option um we don't have any information from desi as to whether they're going to allow remote learning days next year or not in lieu of traditional snow days um you know that right now they're allowing it on a one year temporary basis because of the pandemic and the fact that schools are already kind of in this mode so um it's too early to project whether we'd be able to take advantage of it again adam yeah i'm a proponent for starting earlier

140um we all know that the beginning of the school year is disjointed no matter what whether or not we're in school for four days and take five days off and then have a broken first few days i think that that's um that's a better option than running the risk of going later we've had that we had that challenge a couple years ago um our teachers on contract i believe until the end of june so if it becomes a real nor'easter winter and we've got seven or eight snow days we come up against the teacher contract end date so i would be more in favor of uh starting on august 30th than starting later helen so um piggybacking on kiara's question if it was possible to use some of the you know what we've learned from

141doing things remotely these days um to support a small day and not cancel that's not the psa and that would help us end this video earlier i would be supportive of the second option so that it's not so broken up but the real reason why i wanted to speak up about this column is that i do want to sow a seed for the spirit of diversity and inclusion that we think about adding uh muslim health today on our calendar i think you know and i wanna disclose that i have a catholic muslim family here my kids are raised muslim but i think there's also a number of muslim you know the growing and growing muslim population in acting and box world and i think just giving what we're seeing and the intolerance these are things

142that we have to do and you know i think it will support it oh revlon froze um well come back why not it's easy for people to think about evelyn just so i can be clear are you suggesting we add a holiday as a day off or are you just suggesting uh a recognition yes if we need to give up one holiday to add another we should do that i mean i'm a krishna catholic we have how many of them were christmas we have easter we have this we have that we should think about a way to incorporate some oh you're interested it keeps going out so what i'm gonna say to that is what i have said before which is in a year where we decide that we're going to have a wider um

143calendar discussion i don't know if emily can hear me or not and i will repeat myself again if i need to be um is that when in a year when we have a wider calendar discussion that we again possibly consider that but before evelyn was on the committee and before carrier was on the committee and yavin um and maybe even nora we had quite a lengthy calendar discussion where there was an entire calendar subcommittee and we considered all kinds of things in terms of um calendar uh considerations and one of the things with holidays that needs to be understood is you can't have you can't take a day off as a holiday just because it's a holiday there's an in there has to be a reason that it impacts your school population and so the

144reason that the holidays that we have off currently as days off of school are because they would have a significant impact on either the student or teacher population if we held school and we had to consider um substitutes and things like that and i only know those because i sat on the calendar subcommittee and went through all of this for a long time and it was why we came to the um you know why we added holidays to the days of recognition in terms of not giving homework and not uh giving tests and i understand that that is not always at the high school carried out and that that's a whole separate issue but i do want you to understand that as far as being a public school district we are not allowed to add

145a calendar day off because of a religious or cultural holiday it has to have some impact on um on our on our on our day-to-day operations want to sort the seat for now until we have that conversation because i do think there is an impact i think we have a growing population that is something we should i don't i don't want to solve today i think it's something we should think about for when it is ready to be discussed [Music] noted thank you john yeah i just wanted to follow up um on that so that while we're collecting information um is it the may 3rd holiday that we should be thinking about of the different things that we might do evelyn john i'm sorry my internet is fading in and out i didn't hear your

146question completely could you please repeat it so if we're going to um consider in the future a muslim holiday is the day that we would first consider the may third holiday it will be one of the eight holidays so i don't know which is the mated one i'm not looking at the calendar right now but i know that logistically it's hot because it's usually decided by the wound and when the wound comes in and all that but there are other districts that are doing it and we can if we wanted to do it we can think through the best way to do it so that it doesn't it doesn't have to it's it's not impacting our operations that's what i mean we'll set it ahead of time but that's something that we can think about

147it will be one of the eat whether they eat in the future or eat it at her and the only one that happens during the school year this year is adoption but but but note it and and we will consider it when we take a longer look at the calendar is there anyone else that had a strong feeling one way or another about i know i said we weren't going to all give our opinion so i'm sure that everybody has an opinion of which but anyone that wanted to add anything to the discussion otherwise you can send things to peter um and marie for consideration okay seeing nothing else we'll keep moving um okay so this so we will we'll look at the final calendar and vote on the 21st um the student opportunity act

148plan peter this is just a first read and we've changed it was going to be a vote tonight but after discussing with peter i felt that it was okay if we send this in late because given the timeline that jesse gave us it was incredibly tight and not so much time to complete something that we could that needed some consideration i think from from the school committee and maybe other stakeholders so uh go ahead yeah so you know one i'm just going to start by apologizing for something on this in terms of the timeline um so we we got a reminder in mid-december from desi that this was due on january 15th and you know which was about the same time that everything else was taking place and so i have racked my brain about

149when this came out and i have nothing in my notes from my various meetings with the commissioner that take place on a weekly basis but i did find it in an email that they sent on august 24th that this was due along with a number of other items related to the reopening of school i've just since gone back and found that so i'm going to apologize the timeline piece i'm going to own um and say that that's on me um because it certainly should have been something that was done sooner and with a lot more input the other element that you know i want to recognize you know we with the student opportunity act you know a lot of just to give a little background on it it was obviously something we discussed at length

150last year where there was a bill passed at the state level to finally fund public schools in a way that was more equitable and kind of a distribution of resources with the idea that districts would gain additional funds the funds for active boxed pro you know last year we were projecting that it was probably around year five or six that we would start to see funds from this um you know dave thinks it's probably longer if ever based on some of the declining enrollment that we've seen um in our district so we're really unsure when we're gonna see money or if we will ever actually see money out of this um however we do have a responsibility of picking what you know target area or more that we want to commit to improving outcomes for

151our students so you know when we did this um we had known for a while that we wanted to focus on literacy desi has given target areas um you know and one of their recommended target areas was early literacy and we've done a substantial amount of work in that area and one of the things that you have to do is you have to identify specific subgroups that you're trying to improve outcomes for and so we actually pulled our data from mcas and also for our early work this year with iready and the three student populations that we are consistently most underserving were the ones listed in the the document um and i'm i'm just pulling it up but essentially the we we provided some of the data for the rationale there which you know we're

152we're vastly underserving black students we're vastly under serving our hispanic latino students and were vastly underserving our students who are economically disadvantaged our el students and students with disabilities were the next two categories in that data but the data nowhere was at the same level that we were under serving these three populations so you know we wanted to make sure we were targeting to these three populations clearly from a strategic standpoint the work that we're doing around literacy is much more encompassing because we actually recognize that our literacy work also has significant um you know areas for growth in terms of students with disabilities and our yale population but we had chose to try and be very narrow in the focus on this we have gotten some feedback feeling like that left out some of

153the work that we needed to do with students with disabilities and that's certainly something we're going to be looking at over the course of the next week but what we wanted to do tonight is bring it how we have originally written it seek some feedback from you um and you know you know be able to also allow the public to have a period of of of input into this so if there are people in the public obviously we're not doing the public comment um for the remainder of this meeting uh but people can certainly send um us feedback and i would ask that you email beth penner and myself and we'll send that out you know to families as well um so they know what the email process is going to look like and then

154we will incorporate any feedback we received from you tonight um and then i'll obviously bring that back with the revisions for the next meeting originally we were you know feeling like we were tied to desi's timeline and again i gave you the reasoning that's on me um for having missed that email from august and i i just sincerely apologize for that but um you know with that said we've kind of decided that we'd rather have a good plan than just rush it and meet meet desi's timeline so it's it's not like they can withhold the soe money from us um i'm not not so worried about that so with that said you know you you have the plan in front of you it's in the packet and we're we're happy to take some feedback kiera

155is there an opportunity for the um for the family the dei family advisory to um to read this and chat about it before before we do anything else as well but uh i don't have our calendar in front of us when is our next meeting february 1st so that's too late yeah so we could still send it to them what we could do in all honesty if we want we could submit something you know and then choose to revise it and resubmit um i don't think anyone would have an issue with that i think now that we're also taking some time we could also do the same thing with our cpac and we could think about some other different groups that we want to engage through this yeah i think that engaging with those families

156would be really really impactful and and very important diane thank you um and i appreciate the extension of the deadline um and the fact that this has now become a first read um so i am the liaison to the cpac and they met um last night and they um they had concerns about this so i'm also happy to hear that this will be floated to them as well as other stakeholder groups i'm gonna put a plug um really quickly um i did write something so um i'm gonna put a plug-in for adding students with disabilities i feel like i'm going to acknowledge right now that this is an unfunded mandate for this district but this is a heist this is kind of a high-stakes document um it's setting priorities um it's asking us to allocate

157resources to address inequities for our really our most vulnerable student populations who we are elected to serve um it and then i i don't understand why we would leave students with disabilities out of this when the data is is there to support the inclusion of their inclusion in it and when there is so much at stake for them so the soa asks us to say to ourselves we hold ourselves accountable for turning this inequity around and and it's for that reason i feel that that we really should only endorse this unless with the addition of students with disabilities as it stands i feel like for me it's i'm like turning my back on acting boxer or third graders who are struggling to read right now and who will continue to struggle to read next year

158and the year after that until the district is able to implement a literacy program that aligns with what we now know works and i i just want to acknowledge that deb did a fantastic job developing a framework for literacy instruction but the work of implementation is in its infancy and it is a formidable challenge in a district with a long history of allegiance to instructional routines that prioritized comprehension at the expense of building strong foundational literacy skills and it's going to take time and training to turn that around so i'm just going to urge my colleagues on the school committee to think about that and consider adding students with disabilities as a target subgroup to the cohort of black latinx and economically disadvantaged students currently in the plan thank you adam yeah i guess i

159i have a question and then a comment that the question is sort of a bit of a clarification so we diane mentioned this as an unfunded mandate and we've heard from dave that the funding that we would receive from this wouldn't necessarily come for a number of years from now so i guess my question is the the plan that we have to put forward here is this asking us to put attention towards these items now or is this asking us what we do when we start to get the funding from the student opportunity act monies um and then the the second comment i have is if it's possible i would say that we put something in now that is a view of our district's needs now but in three four years time when we actually

160start to get funding for this we would look to revise it and and third comment is i while we're talking about those students who are underserved in first through third grade students with disabilities may have those challenges following up way past third grade through to their adult lives and so i wonder if we're missing that part of the puzzle penny so pretty much everything diane said um you know i i feel like i have all the same concerns and she does super angie yeah so i agree with adam said which is um because the timeline is undecided and demographic and everything the data will change i was wondering if this will be revised based on the new data when we get the money so this is i believe what we're submitting is a two-year version

161of this and then we would have to update it after that okay john the um you know one of the things that we got in the email to the shell you know called attention um to the last paragraph on the first page which has a second sentence which reads we intend to reduce the number of students who require special education reading services in grade 3 and beyond after implementing a research-based early literacy program and my understanding of the way in which we operate is that we you know put programs or methodologies in place you know and then we monitor those things to see if we have in fact achieve the expected results and then we adjust and the way that this is written or at least you know the way it struck me as i

162read it it says that oh we already know what's going to happen so therefore we're definitely doing this um and so i'm hoping that you'll say that oh yeah this isn't really the way we want to phrase how we are actually operating but it we should read much more you know spiritually in the sense of a feedback loop and if our expectations are realized this would be an outcome but this is not um anything that's locked in um and and then i also want to um join with my colleagues in saying that these literacy skills you know are foundational to people's lives um and we need to make sure that we provide support you know as long as we have students in the district you know through their senior year of high school you know

163helping to make sure that we have provided them with the strongest literacy background that we can i just want to also echo what diane said in that i think what this document misses is the intersectionality between special education and foundational reading there's two different things here right so we are disenfranchising all of our kids by not having foundational reading services in place and we are addressing that and as diane congratulated deb i totally agree like finally we have a structure in place to address that but it doesn't ignore the fact that even with foundational services in place we still are going to have a significant population of students that are going to qualify for special education because they are indeed dyslexic and so they may require services beyond that and and and aren't currently and

164i can speak from personal experience being serviced by what is going on in our district at the moment and so even though this document speaks to k through 2 and what we will have put in place as far as assessment and screening and all of that in two years that that's fine but we have kids right now in second grade and first grade and you know hopefully some of those things are starting to be implemented but you know we have kids in third grade in fourth grade and fifth grade and even kids in seventh grade who are still far behind their peers and it is reflected in in mcas results so um you know i i hate the mcas as is the measure of what we're doing but i understand that you know that that's

165a metric that that we're using here and you know i i pulled the students with disabilities uh numbers from 2017 to 2019 and you know although we've made improvements we're still far far behind where they're if you just look at like white students that don't fall into any of the other categories they're they're still way behind and that's you know i just i agree with diane i don't think that this can can go by without adding students with disabilities to um to this uh evan uh thank you tessa so just a quick for q out of curiosity so how many students is gonna this program impact and i mean how many students are going to be benefiting from this and then and how many students below the so here i'm reading this students subgroup which

166require focus supported issue all students achieve at high levels so that mean so i just wonder how many students in the district are at lower level basically i just wanted to know this program how many so probably we have say 100 students are not at high level but by doing this program we impact how many if you want to answer that so i just got kicked off and came back on again so i just need to i just need him to repeat so uh okay so yeah froze again so you know i don't either dawn you can jump in or i'll i'll try to jump in but but i know david looked a lot i think the goal overall you know the very first thing that we have to look at when we're talking about

167systems of support is the the tier one instruction and what's happening in our general education classrooms and so you know ultimately yet and the i guess the answer is that it would impact every student in early childhood because the you know once we get in and implement all the practices and the screeners and other pieces um that you know ultimately it's going to improve instruction for all of the students in those grades sorry i got kind of kicked out the internet thank you don so yeah but i i think you know the goal you know we have about right now as a district we you know you can see in our demographics overall as a district what the breakdown is in terms of um population by some of the subgroups listed um you know for

168black hispanic latino you know students who are economically disadvantaged that's all available and those are three of the targets that um you know we think that you know we want to impact we've heard clearly that we want to add students with disabilities to this um and we we probably will look at uh english learners as well because they're actually the next in line of in terms of you know disproportionately impacted by the literacy program um but you know in terms of students with disabilities we have about 116 students right now diagnosed you know specific learning disability and about 116 diagnosed with communication disabilities one of the challenges right now is we're over diagnosing some of the communication disabilities and under diagnosing the specific learning disability um and in particular around the area of reading and

169that's something that that debbie's been talking about um for a little while and she's she's working on with our special educators so we don't have the exact number of students with disabilities because it's not clean right now in our data system so you know but what we do know is the vast majority of students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities are in the area of reading yeah i just wanted to know actually basically we would like to have a program which covers actually pretty much all the students which needed to say achieve at high level right needed to improve yeah and i think one of the challenges of what the student opportunity act is asking for is it's asking us to very specifically identify subgroups of students that we want to impact with this um you

170know we know and we believe that the literacy program is going to actually benefit all of our students but we have to actually identify the students that we think need the most support um and make sure we're targeting the resources to that thank you okay jenny and john i assume your hands are still up because you didn't put them down am i right okay all right so if anyone has additional comments uh send them to peter and do you want them to copy bath i don't know just you uh it would be great actually to copy beth because i get such a volume of emails that she helps sort that through um and again you know for people who are here that would like to comment on it as well if you email bethpetter um

171you know and then you can copy me that will allow us to take that feedback in and use it excellent okay the next item on our agenda is a consent agenda 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 and a separate vote i will read each item name and if any member would like it help please say hold so the first item is the approval of meeting minutes of 12 17. 2020 and also 1223 of 2020 and the second item is approval of a four thousand dollar donation from the friends of the active libraries to the eight school libraries of the acton-boxborough regional school district all right ronald retain a motion move to approve

172with gratitude second okay we will do a roll call vote uh john yes jenny jenny yes evan yes diane yes kyra yes adam yes nora yes amy yes angie yes evelyn yes and myself yes all right that passes unanimously okay um the next thing is me i have like 10 things of paper sorry different piles so the next thing is um our fy 21 operating protocols i believe that it was at our workshop with tony bent that we did a little bit of work at looking at our operating protocols and so we went back and included some of the feedback from that workshop into the protocols which you found in your packet um we did it there was track changes so you can see what the changes were but but the main changes just to

173bring them to everybody's um attention were in the first paragraph under supporting the educational welfare and well-being of all students in a positive district in climate there was two items that we changed it says create policies developed by budgets and assure administrative accountability to ensure administrative accountability to sustain continuous improvement in teaching and learning and the second one second third bullet was support the superintendent and staff and hold them accountable for their implementation of policies and operations that are inclusive and equitable the other change was under where we dedicate ourselves to establishing and maintaining effective communication the second bullet now says welcome respectful thoughtful input from the public and the school committee in shaping committee decisions um i think the only other change was adding a bullet and then changing the names to reflect the

174members of the committee this year so i don't know if there's additional discussion or if those sound good and people want to um approve them as is i'm going to say move to approve second adam did you have yeah i just wanted to make a comment uh you know i thought about some of the the things that we've been dealing with with with um zoom bombing with some of the the racist comments that have been directed towards our committee members and i wanted to pause just for a moment and wonder if there's something that we should add to these protocols and as i was thinking about that i also looked at the date when these were last voted typically these are voted right at the beginning of the year and here we are in the

175middle of the year already um and so i'm also cognizant of the fact that we want to codify these and have them available for us to refer to but i don't want this moment to go by without recognizing the fact that when we do this work next time we need to put more commitment in our protocols about how we will identify that systemic racism exists in our towns and that we there's work for us to do as a committee in the protocols that we um adhere to in running a meeting that um identify that that exists and that we need to that there's work to do to eliminate it so adam i'm not opposed at all to holding these and doing the work to add them i think i would just ask if there's one

176or two committee members that would want to take that on um and then and then bring it back um i i'm not i'm not opposed to waiting at all i don't think that there's any rush to go to find these i mean i think that this is this committee has been sort of working through these working by these standards um this year in any way but i agree with you that i think that that things have certainly maybe not changed but we've we've gained a greater awareness and so i think that it's totally appropriate to reflect that in our protocols um especially if if the committee feels that way so um i'll throw that out there if there if there's uh you know one or two or even three people that want to sit down

177and and come up with some things that would strengthen our protocols to better reflect um the things that we've been facing and the decisions that we've made as a committee and the statement that we agreed to and and um voted on at our last meeting i don't know i i'm totally open to that if i'm happy to help facilitate that work um particularly if amy will withdraw her motion to approve yes i i agree with you adam you make a good point so i would like to withdraw my motion too thank you norah what did you say i'm sorry um i was just saying i'd be happy to work on that as well um maybe integrating some of the statement that we wrote together as a committee great all right are we good with that

178you can just nod if you think it's okay so if anyone has some thoughts they can email those to um adam and um and then you and nora can work together and um to avoid any quorum just if you have a comment send it to adam alone and he will take care of um you know working working with them on that and then they'll send it back to me and peter and we'll bring it to a future meeting okay sweet nice job okay wow how did superintendent goals get all the way down this far off on the agenda this is the last big thing that i think we have but um although there is a budget update so peter europe so you know superintendent goals um hopefully you've had an opportunity to review because i

179think these have been in the packet for a month now um for approval so you know if you remember uh back on december 3rd we actually you know shared some initial thoughts around goals um for my evaluation for the year you gave me a significant amount of feedback about that and you know in the memo i outlined three areas that i tried to listen to how to bring together kind of 11 different sets of feedback um into some actionable ways that i could you know refine these goals so you know three things that i do one is providing overarching purpose or rationale for the goals uh to align with corresponding district objectives in our strategy that you know we're going to be finalizing this year a second area was incorporating the action steps that i'm

180going to be taking as well as the evidence of completion that you should expect to see um and then the third one is adding an additional goal in support of our third strategic objective equitable opportunities and outcomes to reflect work that we're actually already doing this year but i think in terms of raising the level of import of that work so um the rest is there and you know this is for your action tonight anyone have something they wanted to share or comment or feedback or emotion i move to approve the superintendent goals as provided in the packet uh diane will you raising your hand to make that motion or because you have something to share so i just had a quick question um if you don't mind sorry um about goal two and it's

181it's the it's the second to last um role in the table under increasing the number of certified staff who are black latinx and asian and then the goal is ten percent of newly hired staff will be black latinx or asian or asian all i really want is this clarity um because i know we have this as a goal and we met the goal and i think it might have been two years ago now and and i don't know what is the status of this initiative yeah so you know this is going to be an ongoing initiative for for a long time um you know i think one of the things we thought about this year is um originally when we had it we said we were going to increase the diversity of our workforce by

18220 i think that's how we had phrased the goal a couple of years ago um the i really thought about this year in particular um that that may not be an appropriate metric anymore for this year and the reason being a that's like a long-term metric as opposed to a short-term metric it's going to take us years to increase by overall by 20 but the other element of it is it assumes that we're going to have a certain level of staff turnover in any given year i mean i wanted to write the goal that could be more responsive to whatever level of staff turnover we have um it's very possible this year that we're going to be hiring far fewer staff members than we've hired in in recent years and the reason i say that

183is we actually already added you know we've hired 20 new staff members this year many of them are and i believe that's 20 on one year contracts because of the pandemic uh to staff our remote learning program to backfill our schools um for teaching positions that went to the remote learning program um and so you know if we are hiring staff we have a number of staff this year who have done exceptional jobs for us coming in um and we've had now actually been able to observe them do their work for a year it's very possible that if we have vacancies we might be able to keep some of the staff we've hired it's going to be hard to increase the diversity of our workforce if in fact that's the case where we're retaining really

184some of the top teachers we've hired so instead what i wanted to think about is okay if we have a certain number of open positions say we have 10 open positions then we want to make sure you know our goal is about 10 so we want to for every 10 positions we have open it allows us to think about growing the target i guess so to speak of what we're trying to bring on board is that it was that yes exactly yeah yeah john did you have your hand up or is that from before when you eat a motion you're good okay evelyn yeah so peter thank you for um incorporating all that feedback from 11 people into your goals i appreciate it but as i was looking at the goals and i was thinking

185if i should say something but i'm gonna just put it out there i do i worry just giving everything that is going on with colby how realistic is it that you're gonna meet all these goals and i almost feel like your biggest goal is here is getting school from start to finish and and i know you know these are ambitious goals and they're not easy to accomplish and i worry that you just have your hands full with the pandemic and and managing the school the kids the stuff everything that you have going how realistic is it gonna be for you because i don't want what i don't want to unless maybe some of these are already in the process and they're ongoing um i don't want us to get to the end of the year

186and and say oh we you know you didn't have the time to do x y and z and accomplish these goals and we know very well that you have your hands full dealing with other situations and i almost think should you think about scaling them down to something that is reasonable and and um accomplishable instead of you know what we have right now but it's your favorite if i just wanted to put it out there and see what your thoughts were around that yeah i mean i you know i can tell you just about everything we chose was work that was actually progressed um you know i'll be honest i don't know whether we'll get to all of it um i think that was one thing i was thinking of as i was trying to

187incorporate all the feedback um from the last meeting was you know are we gonna actually get to everything here um i can't tell you that but it doesn't mean that i don't think it's gonna still be you know worthwhile to try and work for it if that that makes sense so you know i i have always said that you know i i always value educator goals and you know for for people i work with that um might be a bit on the ambitious side with an acknowledgement that they may not yet met the goal but significant progress toward the goal is just as good as meeting the goal um often so you know i i i can't tell you that i don't have a level of anxiety over that myself um but i also kind

188of have a knowledge that if we don't pass these soon it's gonna end up being made before we have goals um so i appreciate that though john so i also have some uh concerns about superintendent burnout because you know just like all the rest of educator burnout that's not a a good path to go down having said that there's a lot of research on the psychology of goal setting and it all argues that um you it's very important to set goals beyond what you can expect to accomplish and that nominally you know a good goal uh you know if you're you're pretty successful you should get about 80 of the way there um so you know my view of this and i think this is in your cover letter um is that um you know

189you don't expect to get 100 if you really thought there was much of a chance you could get to 100 i would say these goals simply aren't ambitious enough and and that actually i wanted to make the point that this isn't just related to you and your goals you know this is related to educators and their goals and of course to students and their goals you know we want to set the bar a little bit beyond you know where we think they can get to and then they're going to get how far they get and then we're all going to say great you know victory this was a wonderful accomplishment and we're going to move on and do it all over again and so the psychology of it you know like i said there's been

190a lot of work that's been done and that's the right way to do it and you know it feels a little uncomfortable and you know people are actually structured differently but um i think it's fine to have these goals you know and if at the end of the year we say you got 75 85 of the way there we'll have a party and life will go on sure all right let's go john yes diane yes evelyn yes laura yes kira yes adam yes jenny yes amy yes angie yes yep yes thank you peter for incorporating that uh comments and myself yes all right those passionately thank you evan thank you peter for for writing them and so your mid-year update will be at the next meeting right we're going to have to look at that

191schedule i think right okay budget update dave thanks um tessa but you don't have any material from me and i'm not planning anything other than just that budget season's underway and we're processing the requests and in the middle of putting together the first presentation which will be at the next meeting and i think that that what was on our agenda and maybe adam was to speak to it is the reserves policy so adam you want to train in with that yeah so in our packet this evening we put in a copy of the reserves policy dk which was voted just back in may of 2019. we wanted to review this and we reviewed this policy both in the budget subcommittee but also wanted to bring it to the committee as a whole um because we

192know that in these difficult times uh we may be looking at additional use of our reserves the excess and deficiency fund to help reduce some of the burden on our communities so there were a couple things that i wanted to highlight in this because while there are some some physical or hard numbers in here there's also some language in here that i wanted to point out to the committee and and give anybody else an opportunity just to to make a comment here what sticks out first of all is that by statute we're no long we're not allowed to have more than five percent of our operating budget held in reserves um and when we put this policy in place in 2019 we said that um the committee recommends that we target our reserve between four

193and four and a half percent and dave has made many comments about um landing the uh the airplane on the aircraft carrier in terms of coming in on our budget numbers um and and so four and four and a half cents a bit of a tight um range for us to hit and we know that we'll be like i said potentially tapping those reserves for some of the um uses that we list in this uh this policy one-time expenses um and so just wanted to to bring this up again that it's a recommendation for a target level of funds in our reserve and uh if asked dave would be happy at some point later to share what our reserves have looked like in the past we've done an excellent job of building up our reserves

194over the past five or so years um and the point of the reserves as i think most of the the folks on the budget subcommittee agreed um were to be able to have a reserve for uh times very similar to what we're looking at now where where we may need to be lean and we may need to still fund some of the operations of the district so i'll leave it with that leave it at that and see if there's anybody else must make a comment dave just a clarification and adam i know you know this and probably the committee does too but when you talk about reserves plural and the statutory limit that applies just to end so the there are other reserves we have the capital stabilization fund and circuit break right consider a

195reserve but the the five percent cap is specifically diane just a quick um comment for adam um so i feel like you're setting us up for like a big ask like right on the cusp of budget season and um i just would ask uh that um if there's going to be a big ask that there be also a plan for replenishing yeah i mean we've not seen the budget information yet that's what comes at the next meeting diane um but it it's definitely something that i think we're preempting only because we've heard a lot of people talk about the fact that oh my gosh our certified e d is below our requirement of 4 and just you know as we start to talk about this we want to remind the committee and and the community

196that it is not a requirement it's a recommended target okay we're good all right um subcommittee member reports i don't know if i have anything specific that anybody wants to speak to um the the pto round table means on monday so we haven't met yet i don't know the policy no but just to announce that we are meeting friday the 15th at 8 30 in the morning yeah so budget will be meeting uh this coming monday um and also i was going to give an update on the building committee uh in the building project but peter did an excellent job of recapping that in his superintendent's update so thank you adam it's all right check me out the hot seat all right was there anyone else so so we'll we'll provide more time at the

197next meeting for any subcommittee member reports because it sounds like we haven't had very many meetings given the vacation and everything else so i have the warrants in front of me so i can read them unless you wanted to adam no are you raising your hand for something else or is it still up no okay good all right so tonight we have um the the warrants motion language just found at the end of this memo i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrants as follows number p2113 dated 1217 20 and the amount of 2 million 720 000 7.79 number p2114 dated 1231 2020 in the amount of 2 million 620 914.96 payroll deduction warrants as follows number 21-013 pr dated 12 17 2020 and the amount of 588 163.79 number 21-014 pr

198dated 1231 2020 and the amount of one million three hundred fifty two thousand seven hundred seventeen dollars and seventy two cents vendor warrants as follows number 21.013 dated 12 24 2020 in the amount of one million five hundred forty two thousand nine hundred thirteen dollars and sixty two cents and student activity warrants as follows number 21.013 sh dated 12 24 2020 in the amount of 12 hundred ninety seven dollars and fifty one sets is there a second second all right adam yes diane yes evelyn yes john yes kyra yes norah yes jenny yes amy yes angie yes kevin yes and myself yes and the warren sub committee i just want to remind you to check your emails for when um becky sends those out because it's always like me and john so everybody everybody please

199check your emails so that you remember to respond to her um tessa can i can i note that i was very thankful to you know my fellow subcommittee members you know who are willing to engage in a small amount of humor so that you know while we're still not reading poems during the regular meeting at least you know in email there's a certain amount of levity all right peter is there anything in the fya that you wanted to highlight let's see you know just i i think you know there's a donation in there of the election i was just going to say is coming up also there's information on you know pulling papers in the election calendar things like that um and then there's another round of qpr trainings um and there's a flyer on

200there for if if folks are interested in that great our next meetings are january 21st and february 4th and i will entertain and return second i'll note that budget saturday was previously scheduled for january 23rd and is cancelled so because of the schedule of everything this year so january 21st we're talking budget yes that's the big thing okay all right uh adam yes diane yes evelyn yes john yes kira yes laura yes jenny you made it all the way to the end your vote are you moving to you yes i said yes i'm sorry amy yes angie yes yes and myself yes and look see it's before 10 o'clock not so bad