Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 7/23/2020

001noting the hour and the presence of a quorum i call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order this meeting is being conducted both in person and remotely via zoom webinar members nora shine kiera cook yemen wang and amy krishnamurthy are participating via zoom and the remaining seven school committee members are in the auditorium for our remote participation policy bedja public participation is possible via the zoom link or call in phone number our school committee meetings are also live streamed on actin tv's youtube channel although public participation is not possible with 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 actin tv's website at actintv.org per our remote policy all votes will be done by roll call

002i will call each member's name and they will state how they vote thank you for joining us welcome to everybody after what has been a very exciting week i was fortunate enough to be away for the first half of it but um i've been catching up and seeing all the commentary and everything and i know that there are many people who are eagerly awaiting our discussion of um what we're what we're going to decide upon tonight the first item on our agenda is public participation so if you are in the public please use the ra hand raise feature to participate do not use the chat according to our policy bedh members of the public may speak for up to three minutes on items not included on this agenda comments regarding items that are on the

003agenda should be made during that part of the meeting typically the committee and administration will not respond to comments during public participation is there anyone who would like to participate tessa i do not see anyone oh i do see one person with their hand up kevin kevin so i will uh all right kevin you can you could speak he has to unmute himself yeah i'm sorry i want to participate when we get to the part about the school reopening all right thank you thank you okay so um we have minutes in your packet from july 1st um they were lengthy minutes thank you to beth for putting those together these dual uh committee meetings are even more difficult to take notes on so i appreciate your efforts i moved to approve the acton-boxborough regional school

004committee meeting minutes of july 1st 2020. i second it is there any discussion all right seeing them we will do our roll call vote i'll do the members that are in person first and then i will go around to the members that are participating via zoom john yes jenny evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes kira yes nora unmute yourself nora yes amy i think you're muted she's frozen she said yes okay yeah yes and myself yes all right that's unanimous thank you um all right well so then the moment everyone has been waiting for peter your opening update please all right well thank you tesla so you know first welcome everyone um welcome back from different breaks things like that i hope you all have had a nice summer so far you know

005we do have several meetings coming up i know we typically do not meet as a school committee during summer months but given the nature of the pandemic and planning for school and re-entry processes we do have a number of business items that the committee really needs to participate in so the purpose of tonight is to bring you up to speed in terms of our transition planning process um you know a lot happens in a very short amount of time in this environment and i think we last met on july 1st and that feels like about three years ago at this point um you know i think on a daily basis we're getting new information that shifts thinking on you know big and small topics and so you know i think um what i've learned at

006this point is i expect that to continue that on a daily basis we'll have to shift our thinking based on new information that comes in i listened to a great um interview on npr a couple of weeks ago and it was with a medical expert who has been you know doing a lot of communicating at the national level around the pandemic and you know the interviewer you know probe the question and said well you know your thinking keeps shifting around this you know what would you say to someone who questioned why your thinking continues to shift and he said well you know when i get new information and data that's available to me i leave open the possibility that it could change my thinking what do you do when you get new information and data

007and so you know i thought that was just a great response but i think we're in an environment where we have to continue to be open to exploring new possibilities even if we feel like we've reached a solution so with that said i just want to recognize and this is going to be a challenge i think um to project because you're also seeing some video but that's okay um i i want to recognize members of our different working groups who participated in this planning process uh we had four working groups as you recall from our late june presentation and we had one focused on the instructional core and social emotional learning one focused on operations one focused on stakeholders in communication and one focused on human resources and finance and then in addition to that

008we also had uh one coordinating group uh steering committee that met on a weekly basis to make sure that the plans that each group were talking about in the working groups were coordinated speaking to each other and there was cohesion among those plans i just want to thank all of these members for all of the individuals on this page you know these people were meeting three and sometimes four times a week in addition to other types of meetings and things like that and that really started in you know early june and has continued right through july and in all honesty i anticipate it will continue right through august as well we intend to keep these working groups formed really as long as the pandemic is going on we've tentatively planned at least until after thanksgiving

009but i do anticipate that in some form or fashion we're going to have to continue to plan and adapt well beyond that as well so i just want to briefly mention something called the parabola project this is a project that is going to be released publicly tomorrow and it's a partnership between brigham and women's hospital and the chan school of public health at harvard university and they have been partnering with the massachusetts association of school superintendents to continue to provide good relevant information that can supplement the guidance that's been provided by desi so that as schools and districts across the state we have access really to very very strong relevant information i would have loved to have shared several pieces of information direct from this with you tonight but it has not yet been released

010publicly and i in deference to that organization i'm going to have to hold off probably for another meeting um i am excited to be able to bring it back to you but um it's the two major organizations are uh ariadne labs and as i mentioned that is a partnership between brigham and women's hospital and the chan school of public health at harvard but also the learning accelerator and they really understood that the nature of the pandemic is the intersection between public health and education in order to be able to open our schools so some of the information in our plans actually is informed by some of this work but i just simply can't release the actual slides and the data behind it to you yet but i will be doing that as soon as it

011is made public so we started um the planning process by developing a set of guiding principles that we believed were key in providing structure to our decision making process and what we decided were that safety and health needed to be our top priorities we would keep planes realistic for all of our stakeholders we understand it's going to continue to be an extraordinarily stressful time through the next six months so it needs to be realistic for students it needs to be realistic for families for staff and the community we will create warm and welcoming environments in our schools that prioritize connections with and among students and staff we're going to support students social emotional well-being equity will remain at the core of our work as we plan for students our focus is on students as learners

012and individuals not just about the unfinished teaching and learning we recognize there is unfinished teaching and learning that has to take place but we need to also consider students as individuals as they return to school and then communication is critical to maintaining trust i want to speak briefly and um i spoke briefly to this on the webinars and i don't necessarily want to repeat myself but i'm going to every single time that we speak between now and the time school opens just acknowledging and balancing risk because i think it needs to be spoken about frequently and often this is the setting that we're in nationally and it certainly paints a picture of concern at a national level in addition though we need to think more locally when it comes to the pandemic just like in

013a snow day it could be snowing in acton but not out in western massachusetts or vice versa we need to make decisions based on local information and so when we look at massachusetts numbers it does tell a very different picture from what we're seeing nationally and however we do have some pieces of data in massachusetts that we are going to continue to need to watch over the next month i highlighted one the daily new cases per 100 000 population uh that's actually a new piece of data and thank you john for forwarding that to us um but we do monitor or i'm at least i monitor this website on an almost daily basis because it does give good relevant information about covid across the state of massachusetts one interesting thing in the bottom here and

014you can if you go to the website you can click into this but one additional piece that we do need to watch is that massachusetts has moved into the higher risk excuse me middlesex county has moved into the higher risk area again we need to watch those numbers not all of the data available in all three of these scenarios is available at the county level so it's a little bit of a challenge when you click to that level but it does bear watching however on the very positive side are cases in acton and boxborough and i apologize i don't know what happened somehow i deleted what i was working on but in massachusetts in acton i believe as a publication of this we had three cases we might have six at current i'm not that's

015unconfirmed but in boxborough it's zero so just to put that in perspective community transmission enacted in boxborough is extremely low right now and that bodes well in terms of how we could think about opening schools but we need to watch county state and national information we also know summer is a period of high travel for a lot of families in our community and we have to be thinking about what possible impact that could have on our opening i already talked about this but i wanted to just make that point i also want to make sure we talk about safety precautions that we're taking so there are three critical safety precautions that we need to take as a school district and that is to make sure that all of our students wear masks the if you

016recall desi guidance actually said that grades 2 through [Music] 12 were required but um highly recommended in kindergarten in first grade the information from the parabola project actually is indicating that they are highly recommending very very strongly that best practice is all students should be wearing masks so our goal here is that all of our students wear masks coming in we do know that there will be certain students as well as staff members who for medical reasons may not be able to and we will work with those individuals and families on a suitable alternative a second element to the guidance is hygiene we will make sure we're actually starting hygiene videos that can be published to our website to make sure students and staff know what's expected when they return in addition we you know

017we're going to be posting a lot of information we have sanitization stations at all of our entrances you know students and staff should be sanitizing hands as they enter school if they're taking on and off their mask uh times of uh if they're eating mask breaks things like that so um that's a key element and then distancing um you know we are going with the six feet of distance as our recommendation it's interesting the desi guidance had said there was a minimum of three feet however the school district should aspire to six feet we started looking at that and fitting that into our classrooms and as we looked at the desks and we started to look at conflicting medical research around the transmission of covid we decided to go with six feet as we also

018learned more about the parabola project they are also recommending that best practice is to go with six feet of distance they are not recommending the three feet um so our distancing is consistent with some of the recommendations that we're now seeing again coming out of the medical community um this i went over i'm not going to go over this in detail but this is on our website the specific guidance around all of those protocols and we are encouraging everyone to pay attention to that um i know many of you were already on the different webinars some of you both so i don't feel like i need to to go over this in detail with you again one thing we did we needed to look at learning spaces very carefully because a key part of the

019decision making process as soon as we established that six feet of distance was going to be the standard for the district we needed to examine the learning spaces and so we reviewed the square footage of every classroom and learning space in the district and we have multiple spreadsheets for every school to make sure that we accurately accounted for each learning space and then we looked very carefully at how many students could fit in at different distances and what's interesting when you start to look at the square footage of classrooms the square footage does not tell the whole story because you have teacher desks you will have bookcases often that are fixed into classrooms you're also going to have univents which are the hvac system for a classroom that protrudes in you also have built-in sinks

020countertops things like that that can't be easily removed so even just seeing you would think if you saw a 600 square foot classroom you could just divide by you know 36 which is the square footage for six foot of distance and somehow you'd get to the right number it just doesn't quite work that way in addition you have to provide ample room for the teacher to be able to teach at the front of the classroom so that does take you know a couple hundred square feet out of a room so it's not an easy calculation and what we needed to also do is actually model out what this looked like in each classroom because we have some classrooms particularly at conant and gates that are not standard shaped rectangles for classrooms they're actually diamond shaped

021i don't know who thought of it i'm sure it was very cool at the time and innovative um they were not thinking about covid and the needs of our our schools and so it was really challenging to fit the right number of desks into those classrooms and maintain our distancing but this gives you a little bit of sense of the process that we went through we did model out you know a floor schematic and some pictures for different classrooms across the district and you can actually find those right on our reopening website and that's posted now i want to talk a little bit about ventilation because not all of the meetings i've been in we've been able to talk about it as in depth as we are now but the district is fully compliant with

022recommendations from both the cdc and ashrae our classrooms are typically designed to replace 20 percent of the air with 30 people in the room sometimes it's as high as 25 percent or even 30 percent but 25 20 is the minimum code requirement and all of our classrooms do meet that um that 30 people assumes that classrooms are fully loaded and in the hybrid model we're actually operating at just actually under half capacity because if you take 20 percent of our students out that we anticipate going into the distance learning model um and then you divide the rest in half it's actually you know 40 percent of total classroom capacity so we are really replacing the air in the room at a very strong rate our district has used mirv 13 air filters as our standard

023for several years now merv 8 is actually the current code for what we should use merv 13 is what's recommended by the cdc epa ashrae during covet 19. so we are already at that standard and have been our filters will be changed five times during the school year the recommendation is four but we're planning to exceed that just to be extra extra safe or very very special whichever one you want to look at buildings the air and buildings will be flushed in ending classrooms for two hours prior to the first person's arrival and two hours after the last occupancy of the building and in addition the exhaust fans which are located throughout the buildings will be running 24 7. we do not anticipate that our facilities and operations department will qualify for too many green

024buildings awards next year um which you know because this is really you know uh running your buildings full on i expect utilities to be higher because of this um exhaust i said exhaust fans but windows and all of our classrooms and buses should remain open whenever wherever there's a fully functional window we have gone through the district and all of the operable windows in other words the windows that are designed to be operable have been checked for functionality to make sure they do work prior to students and staff coming back and in addition all of our classrooms actually does everyone know what a univentilator is it's the typical like this is a univent along the wall um all of the univents in our classrooms go direct to the outside so even if a room were

025designed not to have operable windows i think some of the rooms at the high school because of the air conditioning there's a period of time they didn't design operable windows they were just fixed for looks the univent actually goes direct to the outside to be able to bring in that same fresh air so we are meeting all the recommendations from a ventilation standpoint i'll go over our recommended plan and again not to repeat myself from the webinar but i want to make sure everyone has the same baseline information so that you feel that you can ask good questions um we are required by the state and we've been planning to offer two programs to our students and families when they return this fall one program is an in-person program and then the other program is

026a remote learning program we based on the survey we conducted in early july where we asked families whether they anticipated wanting an in-person program or a fully remote program about 80 percent of our students and families responded that they intended to return in the fall about 20 percent of our students and families i think it was about 19 overall as a district uh indicated that they wanted a remote fully remote program it is not a perfect balance across all grade levels in schools there were certain grade levels that were either higher or lower in terms of percentages the lowest grade levels were actually 11th and 12th grade where we saw most of our students about 90 plus want a fully in-person program um or as much in person as possible similarly kindergarten had greater interest

027in an in-person than they did in a remote program i think it's that's for obvious reasons i would suspect that the older grades it's really driven by college and the need to be thinking about finishing off high school in person to the extent possible in terms of schools it widely fluctuated the percentages which is a unique planning problem that we've had to take into account the highest schools that we saw were gates and conant and then in addition blanchard was the next after that blanchard gates and conan were about 25 26 percent of students indicating they were thinking of a fully remote program blanchard was about 20 percent and on the very low end um was douglas and i think it was about at the low so we did see fluctuations among how families responded

028to that survey and that's something we need to keep in mind as we plan for appropriate cohort sizes so if we tried to bring all of our students back at the elementary level douglas would be in a very different situation than gates when trying to plan for a full cohort of students so that was certainly a consideration that we had to think about what we did notice is that there were no single schools that had a big enough cohort of students to be able to offer a fully remote program just for that school so we could not create a class of fully remote students at any one school it didn't work so we had to create a district class probably the closest school to being maybe able to do that would have been gates however

029we definitely don't want to create one situation for one school and then a separate situation for everyone else that's not really the model that we have going forward i want to talk a little bit about the in-person program and this is something that we want to keep talking about as well with our community the in-person program is designed to be as in-person as we can get at any given moment during this pandemic that will need to operate along a continuum in the most advantageous of situations that would be a fully in-person program for all of our students in the least advantageous of situations or the worst circumstances we might need to be fully remote with all of our students in the middle is a hybrid model and so as we have been watching public health

030data and looking at the the current setting in massachusetts it certainly favors an in-person return to school we have generally favorable data across the state our communities in particular have extremely favorable data with very low community spread but there is a level of uncertainty uh associated with that and we are seeing case numbers slowly creep up in massachusetts when we took all of that into consideration um and the priority of maintaining six feet of distancing our admin team just decided to recommend a hybrid return to school and what hybrid return to school essentially means is that students would attend school in smaller cohorts on alternating days so sometimes students would be in person learning with us and sometimes they would be remote in terms of their learning so it is alternating and that's essentially what

031the hybrid program is half time in half time out specific schedule for hybrid we would divide our students into two cohorts we would have a blue cohort and then a gold cohort as a sample for everyone the blue cohort would come in on mondays and thursdays and be in person with us and be remote on tuesdays and fridays on the gold cohort would have the opposite schedule so they would be remote on mondays and thursdays and then in person on tuesdays and fridays and then on wednesday we wanted to have a scenario where our students had an opportunity to meet with each other all at the same time in their cohorts and so on wednesday we actually have a where a day where everyone is remote and the teacher will engage with the student synchronously

032during the morning and then we have a contractual requirement of a half day particularly at the elementary level so the afternoon would be teacher meetings that's our time to continue helping faculty learn instructional strategies particularly in the remote environment we also know that collaboration between regular educators and special educators is going to be absolutely critical as we come back and we need to make sure that we're providing time not only just for our elementary schools but also for our secondary schools in this environment to make sure that collaboration time is protected because it's such a new environment for everyone we felt that that was a priority i already went over this but the one area that i will highlight on this we've looked at a number of different ways of potentially cohorting our students we

033settled on an alphabetical cohort for a couple of reasons one family structures were our top priority so we wanted family structures to be preserved because we know that sometimes or often older siblings might be providing child care for younger siblings and in addition when we looked at the high school schedule that is by far the most complex schedule because of the number of different courses any given students might take and you know we asked larry dory to really take a deep look at how he needed to cohort the students and the most functional way and realistic way for larry to be able to cohort students was by alphabet because he could essentially split the alphabet in half and figure out which alphabetical split led to the closest approximation of balanced sizes between the two cohorts

034so for example what we didn't want to have happen is one cohort ends up with um you know there might be 25 students in a class but we didn't want to have happen is one cohort ended up with five of the kids the next cohort ended up with 20 because we couldn't fit all the kids in safely so larry needed to really figure out where in the alphabet he could plan that to happen so you know essentially what we're doing is a through l i and then l o through the through z would be the second cohort that's our plan however we may need to adjust it because we do not yet have final student choices and if the choices change the cohorting may need to shift slightly it's really has to be driven by

035the high school schedule because of that class size need and cohort size at the elementary level you know we will start by preserving the alphabetical cohorting however elementary principles will also have the ability to look at what those two cohorts look like and make some appropriate adjustments to make sure that their appropriate peer relationships in both cohorts to make sure that there's appropriate gender balance looking at other demographics for balance and just make sure that the cohorts seem right when they when they come into school i think that's going to be important i don't anticipate that we're going to take or be able to take very many parent requests to switch cohorts um we already know that those are coming in the principles i think that principles might be getting flooded with them um but

036this is going to be extraordinarily complex and it's one of about 700 decisions that the principals need to make between now and when we open school we're going to do our best to make sure kids have peers and cohorts that make sense but i don't know how much flexibility we're going to have for family choice we did look at some other models of cohorting a suggestion had come in about maybe thinking of neighborhood cohorts because it might provide nice peer cohorts as well for students to be able to play after school again when you at the elementary level that could make some sense but when you get to the secondary level that's nearly impossible to then balance your your class sizes so that's why we did settle on the alphabetical cohorting some key features of

037the elementary and secondary programs for the remote learning program at the elementary level it is a district-wide grouping it is not school-based so if students choose the remote learning program that is now a district level school on its own essentially that students choose into it will they will be able to go back to their home school after one year so that's that's not the problem so if you know students decide that they you know excuse me at the end of the year the pandemic ends kids go back to their original school they don't lose their place in their originals home school just because they went into the remote learning program that's not going to happen homeroom class each student will kind of have a homeroom class from a social emotional standpoint to be able to

038have morning meetings come back to each day make sure that they know who their kind of peer class is classroom teachers and district coordinators so our curriculum coordinators and coaches will also be assigned to this that actually helps us from a staffing perspective we also know that some of our curriculum coordinators and coaches really could not go into classrooms and serve as coaches in the coming year however they have some extraordinary expertise in specific subject areas so for example our you know literacy coordinators and literacy coaches can actually take on teaching literacy to our first and second graders in this model which we think will be a tremendous benefit to the students we had originally put out in both of these models that people would make a year-long commitment we're actually actively studying ways that

039we can reduce that commitment time we want to provide as much flexibility to people as possible one of the challenges though that comes with flexibility is our ability to maintain six feet of distancing is particularly in the in-person program so if we have 20 percent of our students who select the remote learning program and then students start to want to return we have to really think carefully about where they're returning to and what classes we're putting them into because some of our classes may just make that six feet of distancing and so that class would not be a good choice for that student so it will pro the more flexibility we provide families the more challenging it is to maintain some of our safety standards and then similarly if students start with us in person

040but then want to go remote we have to think about what is the appropriate class size for a remote learning program and if we put too many students into that then no students are getting a good experience we know from the spring that remote learning is incredibly hard to really feel connected to your students and what we don't want to end up doing is you know putting 35 elementary students into a remote program because it feels safe because that's a terrible learning environment for the kids so we have to balance flexibility with the need to make sure that we have good learning experiences and safe learning experiences at the secondary level the instruction is generally from the same educators that would also be teaching uh in person that doesn't mean that students are just zooming

041into a classroom that's already there what it means is that teachers at the junior high in high school there'll be a group of teachers that have four in-person classes and one online class that they also teach the in-person classes are in the hybrid mode when we return to school the online class is the fully remote learning program we did have some questions that had come up along the way about why can't we just have kind of a regular class that kids zoom into there's a very distinct and set very distinct set of instructional strategies that's proven to be effective for in-person learning there's also a very distinct set of instructional strategies that are effective in a remote environment they are not the same you know students in the remote environment need appropriate instructional strategies for

042a remote environment similarly students in person with us need the right instructional strategies there we can't just think that you turn on a webcam and all of a sudden it it just provides that access it just doesn't work that way from an educational perspective so i just want to you know make sure we note that because that was a question from some of our community members school calendar note this is pending your vote but we are proposing to move the start date to the tuesday after labor day so that we can have additional professional development days initially we when this was planned we thought desi was going to give districts three additional days uh we are now understanding that could go up um to maybe five so we already moved our three professional development days

043to the start of the school year um so with this plan we would actually have six we do have the potential for as many as eight before it starts we won't know but i do think moving it to the tuesday after labor day makes sense from an instructional standpoint and then we could work um with the teachers association around you know looking at if we do get additional days beyond what we think we're going to get then we can figure out how to move the professional time around and allocate that i think we we could have to come back to you but i think um my goal tonight would be to ask you to vote for the tuesday after labor day so that we can get that out to families and let them start planning

044for that because i think that's important um i don't know you know marie um i don't it's it's so this is so hard in a kind of mixed environment um you know this is a great opportunity though um well i'm seeing if marie pops up on the screen here or not just to note uh i'm very very thankful for the rest of the admin team who's here tonight because they are actually on their vacation weeks um zooming in and you know deb don marie and dave um you know dave has been in and out but um deb dawn and marie have been away uh and they've been just in hours and hours and hours of meetings through the course of the week and i you know that's a challenge and a hazard of the job

045in this type of environment but i just want to make sure i acknowledge and thank them for all the dedication um i'll talk and marie if you're there and you want to jump in please feel free because i can't see you right now um i'm here there you are i'm here do you want to talk this through or do you want me to sure um absolutely so um we've been working closely with staff we've received individual requests from folks who have um one reason or another that they might not be able to come in the building uh generally medical situations and so we've had some staff who really need to work remotely and as you know we've kept close track of the students who in the original survey indicated that they would likely be remote

046so we've been matching the students up with the staff members who would go remote we're trying to do so in a way that we're not increasing our costs any more than we have to um so we we've looked at the remote learning program really we've separated out k-6 and 7 12. i'll start with 7 12 because it's a little bit easier um in from 7 through 12 we have a few teachers who will be working remotely but not very many and for the most part the students will really still be part of the junior high and the high school they will have um their classes that they are signed up for some of those might be limited a little bit in terms of electives but they'll have their classes set and the teachers who normally

047teach those classes will teach one section of students who are remote so a teacher who teaches five classes might teach four to students in the building and the fifth would be to a group of kids who are remote in the case six environment we are um we're pulling together a group of teachers we are also using our curriculum coordinators and our curriculum coaches who specialize really in specific academic areas and um they will all be teaching remotely so by doing this we are not having to hire new teachers to replace the teachers who are in the remote learning program um so about half the teachers in the remote learning program are coming from the curriculum coordinators and curriculum coaches and the other half will be teachers who we had set up to teach in schools

048and for one reason or another they need to teach in the remote learning program to the extent possible we will be reducing some sections in schools where there are significant numbers of kids who will be remote um so we're not having to replace too many teachers i think right now i met about five or six teachers i have to replace so that's how we've sort of set up the staffing and of course we're looking at meeting student needs and making sure that we have subject area experts for the subjects that are going to be taught so peter is that what you had in mind that is and i'm just i want to make one comment because when we started our planning process we started with this idea of trying to bring everyone back and you

049know our first impression was great well if 20 percent of our students want the remote learning program then great it will reduce the rest of the class sizes and we can fit everyone back the problem was twenty percent of the teachers then had to be teaching in the remote learning program as well and when we staffed the remote learning program the way that needed to happen what we found is our class sizes actually would have gone up from what they were pre pandemic just because of the balance across schools that you know one school might have more students um staying in person like douglas their class sizes would have gone up because they wouldn't have the right section numbers it was really a challenge and that was another piece of that decision that led us

050to the hybrid model we looked at the potential of adding enough staff to keep the class sizes low in bringing elementary students back but it was not feasible marie i think the number we came up with was somewhere in the order of three million dollars to try and bring everyone back and keep the cohorts at six feet yep the first time we looked at this we had 40 teachers on our list um so yeah we've brought it down quite a bit but you're right it would have been over three million dollars to try to accomplish that um so i don't know if you want to talk through you know these next couple of slides these are some of the details behind it marie talked about it a little and i apologize i wasn't i wasn't

051forwarding it but um just so you see some of the numbers it was about 15 total teachers that needed to be dedicated to the remote learning program and again i have to emphasize this is an estimate right now because we have not done actual student enrollments so this could shift um but it's six curriculum coordinators and coaches and then nine of our current teachers so of the nine teachers that are being reassigned to the remote learning program about four to six is what we're estimating need to be replaced and again it's pending actual student enrollments and then at the secondary level i think marie already talked about this but of the teachers being reassigned totally we would need to replace three to four of them so of the five to six that that would be

052going to the remote learning program and marie said it but sometimes i think it's easier to see it at the same time um so marie you want to talk through budgetary implications of what you're thinking sure so um when you take a look at the whole k-10 staffing it looks like we're going to have to hire seven to ten additional teachers as i said when we first looked at this we were counting 40 and we knew we weren't going to be able to make that happen on any level um so now we're at about seven to ten i would emphasize that these numbers are changing every day we're trying to do what we can to sort of puzzle this together without hiring any more teachers than we need to um and so if we had

053to hire seven to ten we're looking at five hundred to six hundred thousand dollars of total additional costs for staffing above what we had budgeted um we do have some savings in certain areas particularly around us not being in the buildings on wednesday and um so right now i'm conservatively estimating that at about 200 000 it could be better than that and so that leaves us with about a three to four hundred thousand dollar increase in budget for staffing related to covet thank you tessa um obviously when we presented our budget to town meeting we didn't include any incremental staffing because we didn't know what we were going to do so i wondered peter you've been very clear that and marie has been very clear this is an estimate um so if you think about

054how this issue and other issues we talked about the fact you expect our hvac expenses to go up you know how we will recognize you know both in our expense process and in our communications with the community with the finance committee you know how we're going to do that um through the year that would be great i want to make sure i'm understanding the the question just what mechanisms do we have to be able to communicate well i i think everybody wants to know what the answer is lots of questions and my sense is the way this is rolling out is going to be the way a lot of things roll out first we're going to say we've identified something that's different right then there's going to be an estimate that says and this is

055our estimate of what it might be and then at some point hopefully we'll get to the point of and this is the answer for fy21 um you know and then we'll make whatever adjustments because obviously everybody wants to know that you need to know it just operationally the school committee will be interested in it so that's the process that you know i both want to make sure people understand that you we can ask these questions right now we can't answer all these questions right now but we're going to do this in a real deliberate way yeah that that's correct and i think uh we want to be very deliberate about it and we obviously have to start with estimates based on what we think we know and then as we get more information that starts

056to firm up and then oftentimes the next day it has to change just because new information came in so you know for example if we get to thanksgiving and all of a sudden we have to close our schools for some reason all of these cost estimates will change again more likely to the favorable side so there's just a lot of uncertainty and even when we think we have the final answer that really won't be the final answer i think it's going to be an ongoing process of monitoring the budget as we go throughout the year to make sure that we're making adjustments as needed all the kindergarten considerations and maria i'll let you talk about this again but i'll just um i'll introduce it and then i'll let marie talk as well because she really

057has worked hard on the nitty-gritty side of this um so this picture is not what anyone expects of a typical kindergarten environment um you know and we started talking about all-day k as a leadership team and in in our working groups about what type of educational experience we want students to have because as much as we have to support and make sure the finances of the district are sound our primary consideration has to be the type of educational experience students have the more we talked about it we had a very very strong belief among our leadership team that five-year-olds need you know special considerations educationally and we thought about what this picture meant in terms of an all-day k experience and five-year-olds don't sit in desks all day they don't sit in rows they don't

058learn that way we didn't feel that an all-day experience was going to be appropriate for that age so you know our recommendation to you is that you know as part of this plan we go to just the half day program for next next year we think from an educational perspective it's much more appropriate for this age group what that would mean is we would likely split our classes into am and pm cohorts so that we can maintain the six foot of distancing what that does is it actually allows the kindergarten students to come every day for the half day as opposed to on some kind of a hybrid schedule that you know really remote learning for five-year-olds is is not wildly successful and i don't actually think it ever will be there are certainly some

059things you can do with them but most types of activities don't lend well to kindergarten so this would allow our kindergarten students to come all day every day maintain the six feet of distancing the caveat here is we need to make sure we plan enough time in between the morning and pm sessions to have those kindergarten classrooms cleaned and sanitized each day we do believe that we have the ability to do that it seems like a lot across the district but it's actually only three classrooms in general at each school sometimes two in one case four so that that really is doable in an hour it's probably 15 to 20 minutes to clean a classroom uh by the time students leave and then you're bringing in the next cohort um so as long as we

060leave ample overlap um we should be okay which actually lends itself also to bussing so just to kind of give that sense marie do you want to take it from there sure thing um so you know this this recommendation did not come lightly we looked at how could we possibly do all-day kindergarten in any all different ways um the idea of having kindergarteners come all day for four days in which case we could then charge tuition for those who wanted all day first of all we would have had to add teachers and classrooms so that we could spread kids out into the six foot distancing not to exceed 10 or 11 kids per class and the idea of having them there for for six and a half hours a day that included lunch generally includes

061a rest time so much of the kindergarten curriculum is age developmentally appropriate play and many of these things we can't really do in the covet environment so um after really looking at it where we're highly recommending that we go to a half day option we would not be charging tuition and so when we started to look at hybrid for kindergarten rather than say come two full days a week group a and two full days a week group b we thought it would be much better for kids to have them come four days a week either in the morning or in the afternoon so that's how we ended up with this so it would be a half day program kids would be either morning or afternoon i've been talking to the teachers about it they're very

062supportive of this model they think it's best for kids lunch would not be served at school for kindergarteners so that takes out a chunk of time that we'd be spending in school trying to keep kids safe having lunch and we will make lunch available on a to-go basis to make sure that everybody has what they need to eat but this is our recommendation the 800 000 we're doing what we can to offset um in different ways um i'm looking at numbers of sections we're looking at numbers of hours um some of the wednesday not being in school is going to save some money so we're looking at that um but we don't see how we can charge all the kindergarten tuition in this environment and the other piece is if we ever do go remote

063we'd be reimbursing money and keeping track of all that so for all those reasons we're recommending that um we not have all day kindergarten this year we're going to our plan is um assuming that you all support this plan to notify families tomorrow um and you know we're happy to answer any questions you have about it and i i think everything united maria i can't remember whether you had said this but we were already seeing some of our kindergarten families opting for a half day and coming out of the full day program anyway because i think families felt like it wasn't the right environment either so yeah we definitely were seeing that can you clarify if the revenue loss will be reimbursable with the covey impact from the state dave maybe you want to comment

064on that angie just asked would any lost revenue yes from the kid i got the question peter um i'll defer to you for a second do we want to talk about all the funding sources and i can certainly include the answer to this a couple slides from now okay sounds good dave thank you diane how realistic is it to keep kindergartners 66 feet apart even small cohorts and maybe deb wants to talk to that um hi um it's challenging um having taught kindergarten in my past um it's not an easy task kindergarteners want to engage with each other they want to make connections um but a smaller cohort of seven or eight students will be a whole lot easier and much more manageable and making sure that students have their own supplies to work with

065making sure that there's certain parameters that are set up in the classroom it's certainly possible and doable i'm thinking about you know how they can all be listening to the same story they can all be doing similar things simultaneously side by side but it's not the kind of interactive kind of play that we'd be used to seeing in a regular environment for our kindergarten students but the smaller the cohort size the more manageable the more possible um it is so for the kindergarteness is there any alternative that we can look into rather than having them sit on desk so i think so i mean i think we can certainly have you know rug space i think the challenge is what you know and i think we're going to look at alternatives to have them moving

066around the classroom but we have to certainly plan also to have kind of a home base that they know is their personal space and i think that's that's the biggest challenge peter i would add that um we're also talking about taking the kids outside whenever possible and um there's all kinds of opportunities for for good instruction of kindergarteners if you can have them outside are you going to cover the preschool at all tonight do you want to talk about preschool tonight marie and where we're at we didn't do slides for preschool because it's a little bit different i don't actually have the most up-to-date information about that i don't know if you do either or somebody else you know the preschool has been evolving um our goal i can talk a little bit about what

067i do know i know um joe was actually in today really trying to look at the spaces and what goes into a preschool space our goal is to have the preschool in four days a week as a program we actually think that with our current cohort sizes we can do that we're actually you know so for example um we're going to give him room 13 that we traditionally use in this building so he has another classroom and he can actually take a group and spread them out into that space um and by doing that we actually think we can get the cohorts small enough to be able to get all of our kids in who need the preschool um the the guidance from deci i think is sound in that we want to be prioritizing

068our um highest needs students in the district and so in particular we're really looking hard at student ieps that in looking at the needs of students and there will be a cohort of students in special education that we will also invite in for all four days we might do that with some of our english learners it's not universal you wouldn't say that necessarily every student who has an iep would be in four days a week but there are certain some stu certainly some students across the district that need that level of consistency and we will provide that preschool is considered that that same population due to the needs of the students sure we don't have the specifics on it yet because that's really you know unfortunately with special education programs we still haven't received that

069second round of guidance from the state and so that continues to be you know for the most challenging planning that we have to do as a district it's really challenging not to have that that guidance we you know we have good common knowledge of what we think we need to plan for so we're doing that um but that's certainly an element that's that's a little bit uh up in the air the other challenge you know from a special education standpoint we talked about this in our webinar last night with families special education is so individualized at the student level that until we know exactly where our students are going whether they're going into the remote learning program or they're coming to us in person it's also really challenging to plan staffing and how we're delivering

070services to students because regardless of what choice a family wants and needs for their family we will be making sure that we can provide the appropriate services in that setting so um you know we told parents that they are the ultimate um people who will get to decide what's appropriate for students um if they want to reach out to us for our input we're happy to provide that based on what services we you know students need but what we don't want to do is set up a situation where families of students with disabilities don't feel like they have the same choices and opportunities as you know kind of the neurotypical peers have so that's that's where we're at so that's why some of the special education just like our class sizes and everything else are

071in limbo until we know where families are going sure i hope that generally got to the question sure it looks like there's an audience member that has their hand raised sorry i have to figure out how i'm going to see them while i'm sharing my screen well i'm going to stop sharing for a second and then do you see it i do not see anyone with hand raised really it just looked and what looked like oh maybe they put it down okay okay sorry so i'm going to return to screen sharing all right we'll talk about other financial considerations so dave i don't know if you want to jump in here at all yes just had to unmute um well besides the staffing in the kindergarten which obviously are two very very large financial commitments

072uh there are a couple of other items that we want to call your attention to the first is the desire to issue chromebooks so that all students k through 12 have them and as as it turns out uh the high school was in need comprehensively and i've been talking to you about uh the purchase of chromebooks um and that has that is in the works amy has also uh put in a put in a supply requisition for acquiring chromebooks for first grade and she's able to redeploy existing devices so that all of grades k through two now will have that technology these costs are eligible for cares act reimbursement as i've been saying for a couple months cares act is the town's allocation the the the third if you will wave of federal reimbursement and

073these would be reimbursable uh if the if the towns uh are in agreement to uh to reimburse us for these costs the second category is protective equipment you can see the types of things that we're all familiar with what this entails now we have we're working with an initial estimate uh for a three month supply as recommended by the state of three hundred thousand dollars it's a it's a significant amount of cost it's stuff that is likely more expensive now than it would have been if we bought it two years ago without a pandemic driving the economics the good news here is that costs related to ppe are reimbursable through a fema grant at 75 percent so i'll go over the numbers uh in in general and on the next slide to the extent that

074we they're not covered by the fema grant so the local share or 25 those would then be uh reimbursable through another source that i'm gonna get to the last thing we talked about outdoor uh opportunities for education and we've recently purchased uh tense 30 by 30 foot tents that'll be set up outside of each one of the eight building school buildings in the district and in order to support outdoor instruction etc and you see the cost for that what we're what we're trying to do is to is to summarize all of the financial considerations that we've that we've determined at this point there are still some things that we don't know what's the impact of of custodial overtime from having to do more effort put in more effort in the way of cleaning and sanitizing

075uh spaces inhabited by people students and as well as staff and there is there's always the impact um of of the prospect i should say of school closing again due to an outbreak of coven and the financial impact of that which as peter said before the financial impact of that would be positive the educational impact of that would not be as we've as we've experienced so these things which we've categorized as other would be a little more than one million dollars in net budgetary impact so that concludes a summary of the three areas where we've identified costs staffing for the remote learning program the decision to recommend no all-day kindergarten and the loss of the tuition revenue and these other items that i just talked about if you add all them up it's a total

076additional cost of between 2.1 and 2.2 million which as you know as we've been talking about we're not without some additional means to fund these costs so there's there's the additional costs we've identified to this point the next slide will talk about some of the areas that could be deployed to to cover those additional costs the first is our budget contingency we pass the budget that includes a half a million dollars of unidentified contingency that's a source of funding for for the items we've just talked about the esser fund was the first round of funding that was specifically made available to school districts it was done on a title one basis and so while the district did not get get much because we don't have a huge title one population uh we do have a

077hundred and fifteen thousand dollars committed to the district m my pl i'll i'll go through them and then i'll talk about some specifics the third piece that came about was the cares act there has been 1.2 million dollars allocated to the town of acton and a little less than 600 000 allocated to the town of box bro towns are specifically allowed to cover the car to cover costs of their school districts whether they're municipal districts or in the case of acton-boxborough regional districts we have requested and have had discussions with the towns uh regarding covering the cost of the chromebooks which which i've made mentioned to you on several occasions uh if to the extent that the fema costs are three hundred thousand dollars as as mentioned on the preceding slide 75 percent of that

078is 225 thousand dollars we would anticipate that would be recoverable under the fema grant and last at least so far is it's got an odd acronym c small v rf they've been calling it the covet relief fund this is additional money from the cares act that was allocated to the state of massachusetts but in this case as you may remember a couple of weeks ago the governor announced that 225 dollars per student would be allocated to each school district in the commonwealth and that that results to us in a little less than 1.2 million dollars what what i think makes sense is to pursue those costs that have no ceiling and so fema to the extent we spend money on ppe and other eligible fema costs there is no ceiling other than eligibility as far

079as i'm as far as my knowledge and so 75 percent would be reimbursable we should we should pursue that conversely the esser fund which was first to be made available to school districts i would recommend holding on to that at least at the outset because uh the eligibility deadline is the furthest out the esser fund can be spent as late as fy 22 whereas the cares act and the the covert relief fund both of which are more substantial under current guidance need to be spent by december 30th of 2020 so effectively midway through this fiscal year but a little less than midway through this school year i want to get back to angie's question about whether either the cares act or the let's just put it to directly the covet relief fund could cover the

080lost revenue lost tuition revenue for from not running all day k and the simple answer under current guidance is no what we're being told is these funds at least at this point in time are specifically not eligible for revenue reimbursement there is there's discussion it comes up almost in every conference that i've attended that boy it would be great if we could use this money for revenue reimbursement and i would put that in the in the category of the cares act the money that's been allocated to actin in box bro they could use it in that manner as well so there's talk about it there is some some people are saying that may uh that may ultimately be the case but i think right now federal and state governments are being conservative and and not

081wanting to blow through uh on a lot of money the state was was awarded 2.7 billion with a b dollars of which um they have not released uh half at this point and so we're being conservative they're being conservative and to that end i i just read today that um the state budget's unlikely to be revealed until september now and with that said additional federal money might be forthcoming and it seems fairly obvious that the state is waiting to see about additional federal money before it commits to a year-long budget and so in the interim uh they've they've passed two 112 budgets to get themselves through august so i hope i've made a clear presentation and i also hope that i answered angie's question john yeah dave that was great and i think that was

082um responsive to the the general question that i had about how we're going to work through this what i wanted to put on the table specifically is it seems to me that this is something that we should take back to budget sub so that we can figure out how to organize this information going forward because i think there's actually going to be a lot to do and to make a couple specific suggestions you know my expectation is after tonight um the loss of revenue associated with all day k will go from uh could happen to we are committed to this um so where and maybe the fema 75 percent is essentially also a certainty but some of these things are we think they're going to happen but they're not certainty so we should indicate that

083level of uncertainty um and then although you know this is nice in that it says that our position is nominally okay i'd suggest that we hold the budget contingency as the last dollar we spend not the first um so to treat it like true contingency is like only when all other things are exhausted aren't we going to put the budget contingency on the table i i completely agree with that john and i and i toyed with just saying that out of the box and saying that my preference would be to hold that for last but i think you would agree with me if i had said that this is marie can i just add one thing um john great minds think alike so adam has been serving on the hr and finance subcommittee twice a

084week we've been meeting through this whole period of time and the other day he suggested that we bring the budget subcommittee together one day next week and go over this in much more detail and then bring it back to the school committee the next time um so i think that makes total sense and we'll go ahead and try to schedule that i just want to say i 100 agree with adam thanks john jenny thanks um i want to just say that i watch both webinars and i know personally friends who are teachers i can't believe how crazy this is i wouldn't want to run like a lemonade stand right now and let alone a school district so i really really appreciate the amount of time and work and effort that's being put in by you

085guys by everybody and um and even the teachers who are clearly not having a normal summer and neither are our families because camps have not gone on and all kinds of normal summer activities are are just not happening this year and you know as a working parent to to job household i am thankful every day that my kids are teenagers and not elementary school students because i do not know how i would do my job and i just wonder what resources are available for either single parent households or households where two or more jobs are trying to be held down by parents who aren't necessarily able to work remotely and i appreciate you know very much the limitations that that are being placed in this historic uh terrible situation that we're in but how are

086families going to be able to i mean is there daycare available how are people going to pay for that how are families going to get back to work and in light of that are we trying to prioritize moving towards full in person for our youngest students who are not able to be left alone or able to manage alone online learning for whatever reason and as well our special education students who you know many or most of whom have bigger challenges with access at whatever age they are with accessing a remote educational program so you know well my children are certainly not going to be unscathed by only getting to attend school twice a week i'm not as worried about them as i am our younger children our preschoolers just from a socialization perspective and you

087know just so many things that i fear will cause long-term damage so as we are planning and um you know and in-person instruction is going to be so limited um moving forward are we thinking about prioritizing getting the youngest kids back and the kids with english learning and special needs you know when we are able to have more kids um will they be the first ones we have back or like how are we thinking about that yeah i think you know it you know what's interesting is you're actually also documenting the planning process we went through but in reverse because we actually started with let's bring everyone back and let's try and do that when that wasn't realistic the next phase and again this is how quickly things have moved from for us but the

088next phase we went through was to actually try and have just the secondary schools be hybrid and have the elementary schools be full-time in person and as we really looked at the spacing the only way to do that for us was to go with three feet of spacing and you know with with the evidence around how the virus is spreading shifting um and the [Music] still in all honesty it's still a bit conflicting evidence around what the appropriate distance is i know that deci had you know certain studies they were pointing to to say you know three feet is safe as a minimum distance but it even those studies don't say that three feet and six feet are the same you know we don't want to mistake the two um they were simply saying that

089you could go with the three feet as a minimum but six was better um and as we've seen more evidence come out and other organizations like this parabola project we're going to see indoors six feet i i really think we had to stay with the six especially where there's so much uncertainty around the virus right now and you know like we the first goal is like let's get people in and establish some normalcy and then we can think about how we could bring more students back but i do think we would certainly prioritize elementary we've been playing with trying to find other ways maybe even of thinking of first grade even or maybe maybe second grade you know the the challenge we have is the space available in schools the schedules that we have of

090needing to provide you know teacher preparation and make sure that they have time to prepare you can't take away teacher preparation in this environment either um so there's just a lot there are so many nuanced variables to all of those situations that we keep running into roadblocks um and right now what we we even had this conversation at um you know amy was a part of this dialogue um at two o'clock today right up to three saying could we get first and second grade in the biggest roadblock we're coming up against right now in all honesty other than the virus is time um you know we have to open our doors in a month and if we can't settle on who we're bringing back and what that's going to look like none of the details

091can flow afterward and it's so frustrating because we've tried so hard to to get those kids in and we just can't quite find a way to do it and we have to get students enrolled so that we can plan our staff tell our staff whether they're teaching in person remote so that the high school can actually start to schedule its students for the fall junior high similar so principals can develop their cohorts and make sure families know so i i think that will be a challenge to start but that's certainly a priority for us but i don't want to i want to make sure i'm being clear about just how important that was to us in the thinking process that we fully agree with you um that that that is the age that we're most

092concerned with and in all honesty the science supports being able to give the that age uh priority whereas secondary students you need to be really really cautious about what you're doing in terms of child care we didn't make this part of the presentation tonight but we do have a child care program that we're trying to work out we've been in discussion with teamworks actually in acton to possibly rent their facility for the year we're working on a contract right now we're at that stage of discussion but we didn't want to sign any and that's through community education so what we would you know we with in terms of comment here's the other challenge extended day programs really can't run the way that they had before um we used cafeterias we used gymnasiums to group large

093groups of students together and the challenge is we can't put all of the students in an extended day program into that large of a space anymore because you can't maintain the distancing we looked at spreading them out into classrooms but then you would have one cohort of extended day students using a classroom before school then you'd have to bring your whole you know your regular kids in to the classroom and then you'd have a third cohort of kids coming right in at the end of the day that can't happen but what we're looking to do is pivot our comed extended day program to be able to develop a child care program and to is part of that program to not only be able to provide an environment for kids but also some environment for distance

094learning and some support for distance learning so that on remote days there is a place that kids can go we also know that one of the fundamental challenges in a hybrid program is staffing it because even though your teachers have to be in every day their kids are at home every other day and so you know that was one of the fundamental issues that we early recognized in any hybrid program was any teacher who has elementary age kids was going to be very hard-pressed to be able to work the following year and figure out child care because child care programs have been decimated by the same regulations we have to follow so we're close to being able to say we can do that you know that's also going to be an area of financial risk

095to be honest because if for some reason we okay we're starting in a hybrid program we rent out this facility the costs of renting the facility are really based on a year-long rental of it um because of they essentially have to shut down in order to accommodate us and so if we rent that facility for the year and then all of a sudden you know a month and a half in all of a sudden we're remote we still have that cost but we don't know what the demand will look like um so there's that's an area of huge risk for the comed program now we would certainly have to charge for the child care program because under comed we have to be able to pay our expenses um and you know the cost of renting

096that facility is upwards of half a million dollars so then you have the staffing on top of it so that's not an inexpensive proposition for us um we're not doing that to gain revenue we're doing it to try and cover our costs and provide the service for everyone our teachers and then you know certainly community members who need it as well so i mean actually thank you for the question because we didn't put it in here tonight but um i feel like we're close enough to that that we can start to talk about it publicly we didn't put out false hope that it could happen if we weren't close sure sorry for the really really long-winded answer it's been a long week yeah i want to echo what all the things that you just mentioned

097and one clarification for the hybrid options are we looking at to start with hybrid then at a certain point we're going to transition into partial hybrid and then transition into info in person is that i just want to clarify that so i think all of those answers are going to depend on what the public health data looks like i think you know certainly if we end up with a vaccine our goal is to bring kids back right um as quickly as possible i also think that you know our goal and part of the work with this parabola project we're hoping can develop some key metrics around what would we look at to say okay now we can open up more or what would we look at to say we need to close down those are

098really two key metrics that are still undetermined so you know i think the goal is yes to start with hybrid watch the public health data i think if we can see massachusetts level off and become more favorable um you know i'd like to see some of those numbers particularly you know kind of the infection rate um start to come down again a little bit that would certainly bode better um just in middlesex county in a similar fashion and then we could start to have that conversation about opening up um but similarly if they get significantly worse we're going to be having the opposite conversation so our goal is to be as open as possible but we need to start in a place that we think we can manage and then work either direction from there

099so as you're thinking around that to do something like governor baker has done for the state where there was a phase reopening he'd start a phase wait a few weeks look at the metrics start another phase you know i i don't know i'm i'm interested to see what this partnership with the the parabola project can yield in that regard you know i think the first step i i i hate to say that because this is so frustrating for anyone in the community to hear but a lot of the planning is going to be have to be done as we're going for this um i i don't know as though we'll be able to come up with a clear phased process of look we're going to start here and if in two weeks it's the same

100or better then we go here then we go here then i don't know if we'll get to that point as a school district because uh you know i think one of the challenges is certainly managing risk and managing community expectations around risk and john and i have talked about that a lot um you know it's you know and you know one of the the really interesting questions the other night was you know and you know it was phrased in a certain way that we you know we had a certain conversation with larry and i resign if there was one case of covid in our schools right um and you know we kind of addressed the piece of it for what it was but there's actually a deeper conversation around that and that whether we open

101our schools or not one of our staff members will end up with coven whether we open our schools or not one of our students is certainly going to get covered like we can't prevent anyone from getting coveted whether we're open or closed what we have to do in terms of how we manage our district is to put the best safety measures in place so that the schools don't become the transmitters of that right but we know if people are living in the world people are going to get covered because it's just playing the percentages and looking at what happens and you know i think managing our community when we do have a case is going to be one of the the most important factors of of our ability to be successful when that happens because

102we are certainly going to have a student who gets a case or a faculty member who gets a case i can guarantee you that the first case that we get of covid did not develop in our school that's the one guarantee and i can unequivocally john maybe i'm wrong but our buildings have been empty there was no coven sitting in our buildings waiting for anyone to come back so someone's going to bring it from somewhere right and so how do we manage that situation and deal with our community expectations around that and that's a really important topic i think to get out and start talking about so that when that occurs we can take a really good rational approach to how we're managing it but so i think you know not to to become too

103long-winded but i think your question was a good opportunity to talk about that that topic because it's a challenging one um of you know because i remember dealing with kind of and if you remember we thought you know march 8th 9th and 10th were bad when when kind of the virus was starting to come and we couldn't you know we were thinking like oh my god the public pressure and what's going on and everything else we're going to have to really think about how do we react when we have to start dealing with this so it's just it's something that's important can i have another question you want to go around first well i did i did want to just note that um i'm the idea there's a there's a hunger out there for what

104are the metrics and we have we do the tracking um i'm i know i don't know what the parabola project it is it sounds extremely promising i'm hoping that we'll you know be taking the lessons that we've learned from other countries who've had successes in re-opening their schools and and failures and reopening their schools so um the united states as everyone knows is in a unique position because we're really starting behind the eight ball nationally even though massachusetts looks good so it'll you know i'm just there's a hunger for metrics out there so is that what the parable project provides additional metrics um they are taking a very data approach based approach to it i haven't seen all of the work yet and i'm i'm hoping that they can help us with some metrics you

105know i think the biggest challenge is we can create our own metrics as a community but you know just like a snow day if you don't have those tested well boy are you out on an island by yourself when you're making decisions and and on something like this you know we really need some help from the the larger entities to be able to do that thanks um you know first of all i want to say that i've really appreciated being part of some of the the inside planning meetings on this um and what it's led me to understand is that there's there's really no perfect answer for everyone um you know there are just so many unknowns and so many different things that the um the administration in the district is taking into consideration the

106one thing that i've noticed throughout all of this though is that there's been an amazingly strong focus on our core values around equity wellness and engagement for all the students of the district so i really want to commend the administration for keeping our core values sort of at the center of their focus as we've been going through this planning and i have a question and my question's actually for deb so peter gets a break from speaking um and it's curriculum related um and in its um as we look at the current proposal around a hybrid instruction it looks like we're only going to have about 50 of the in-person instruction that we would normally have had and so my question is do we expect or should we expect to see that the same amount of

107content instructional content is going to be delivered uh over the course of the time that obviously we're in hybrid but maybe even over the course of the year what what do we think we're looking at for outcomes for for our students by the end of this year hi adam thank you it's a great question uh came up the other night as well in terms of thinking around how much curriculum so the process that we're going to take is to take a look at what are the most critical learning standards for each discipline each course and especially by grade level in the elementary schools and the junior high last year last spring the state provided us with the critical learning standards and we were able to use that guide to determine whether or not those standards

108had already been taught if we were in the process of teaching them when we closed if we were able to review them during the closure time so we have a good sense of what happened last year for this year we can use that as a guide but we also need to use our own internal knowledge about what's important for the learning progressions whether it's within the content or from course to course to make sure our students are set up well for whether it's the content or the concepts they need to learn or the skill development and making sure that they either have that knowledge or they have enough practice with that skill in order to be successful the following year so that's the work that we're doing right now department leaders curriculum coordinators identifying what

109are the most critical standards for learning for next year so there will be have to be a reduction in terms of the vast amount of content and curriculum that's usually taught throughout the year but it's really about what is the most critical learning that has to take place given that we also have to think really carefully about some of the unfinished teaching and learning as we're calling it from the spring every child is coming in with unfinished learning there was unfinished teaching that also took place right so we have to think about what was the most critical learning from the prerequisite skills and content and concepts that students need to learn we don't have an extra three months to backfill that information that learning so we need to be able to pull that prerequisite knowledge

110into our current learning to make sure that we are continuing to teach students at current grade level at the current course level that they're in so there's quite a bit of adjustment to our pacing guides and our scope and sequence guides that's going to have to take place but again the most critical piece is that we are focusing on what our students need this year and given where they left off in the spring and then setting them up well for the following year um so there will be a reduction um in total coverage the one piece that is still sort of at the high school level would be the aps we know that we do need to prepare students for the ap exam those students will be taking that um but i will say last

111year the test aside because there were some problems with the ap test and the college board was very receptive to the reduction in terms of what was covered in the ap classes and i would imagine they would be doing the same thing again this year so we'll be watching that very carefully at the high school level they've done a really nice job preparing different modules for students for extra practice um but it will depend very specifically throughout the year on the discipline and the grade level that students are in for us to make a determination about what is most important for our students to learn this year i hope that helps thank you i just wanted to come back to this question of the community and from time to time i bought said that the

112secret sauce enacted in voxboro is the community um and i really feel that that's true you know having seen a lot of the discussion um on social media and heard other community feedback we're so fortunate to have a highly sophisticated community that i think really does appreciate the fact that there is no perfect path forward um and understands that you know although of course they're data-driven and are very anxious for metrics um that it does take time to try and do those things and roll them out and understands very well that you know while peter will put forward the best plan that he can we're going to find out that that plan has weaknesses and it's going to have to change over time so i really do want to recognize the community because i've heard

113a lot of voices in the community saying we appreciate what you're doing and as people have said tonight we understand how hard this is so of course we wish you know we could do it better somehow but this is fantastic and then i also wanted to um in that context mention that you know tessa has been very active you know in addition to everything else on facebook to help make sure that there's a good flow of information from the school committee out to the community and i think that's been also very helpful evelyn yeah my question was around the number of teachers based on the model that peter you presented to us this evening we need about seven to ten teachers i imagine that the communities around us are struggling with these same issues and

114also developing their own plan what is the plan and our strategy around getting these seven to ten teachers that we need to be able to backfill our model and make it what we want it to be peter do you want me to take that yeah i was just going to see if you wanted to um thanks evelyn that's a great question we have been actively hiring since february and um we've had postings out there for a long time we've done interviews so we do have backup candidates that we're going to be bringing back in and considering and we also have people in our paraprofessional workforce who are certified teachers who may be able to step in into some of those positions and we're also of course continuing our work around trying to attract candidates of

115color and we do have a couple of candidates in the wings that we're hoping to be able to place and we're also working with some of the local colleges and universities for recent grads and student teachers and people who are coming out of school so we're doing all of those things it is a big reason why we want to get the final enrollment and placement of who's going to be remote and who's going to be in person because all those numbers shift a little bit depending on where where the students are so um i appreciate the question and we've got several strategies in place all right um i'll note that i'm about to call two of our school committee members who are panelists but i just want to know to those attendees that are not

116panelists that we are not using the q a feature um during our meeting so if you have a question if you could raise your hand that would be helpful all right kyra you were first and then nora hi um i just want to say thank you so much peter and i've also had the great privilege of being part of one of these working groups so um being part of a team um and seeing all the thoughtfulness that it's gone through um to create this plan has been uh incredible frankly um we haven't spoken a lot about the remote academy or school um so i i want to ask a question about that curriculum piece for the remote side um i think we've heard from a lot of families saying you know hey remote learning did

117not work for our family it was just too much it was too crazy it didn't work for us um but i know for i i think that for me personally i think that there probably is a difference between the crisis that we were dealing with in the spring and the quick pivot um and now a more thoughtful different transition of what we're doing now um so can we speak a little bit to um the curriculum development for what's going to go for the remote learning um and if there's slides for that i can wait for it but if there's not can we just can we speak a little bit to um how that looks for the remote side please peter try to take that yep that would be great sure so you're absolutely right um

118the spring i like to call it we were in doing crisis teaching um emergency teaching we didn't have time for that kind of planning to take place with a little bit more time now to be a little more proactive but while thoughtful about our planning process and so for seven grade seven through twelve um as mentioned earlier students would be taught by that section's teacher by that course teacher um as one of their remote um sections so they would teach four in-person sections and then one remote so they would be the same curriculum and be delivered in a remote setting just a different setting one of the things that we know very clearly about learning is that it all requires the same kinds of essential components right students have to feel like they're part of

119a community relationships are vital and important students need to know the purpose why they're teaching something they need to understand that and have some maybe some choice in what they're doing and they have to have a sense of agency in that learning so all of those components that we know is important for in-person learning needs to be translated into a remote setting using different tools using different strategies and that's one of the things we're working on right now putting that together for our educators and we just recently registered about 31 educators and administrators for a phenomenal course that harvard is offering um starting actually on monday a remote course and we also have over 200 of our educators participating in what we call tech camp this summer to really learn not just about how to

120use digital tools but how to use digital tools to engage students how do you use digital tools to provide formative assessment for students all provide collaboration among students so all of those things that we know are essential to learning how do we translate that into a different set of pedagogical skills for our teachers and to make sure that they have those digital tools available to them and know how to use them appropriately for k-6 we have dedicated teachers specifically for the remote learning environment and as mentioned earlier some of these folks are our coordinators and our steam coaches these are folks who have taught previously have many years of experience teaching in the classroom and have been working with teachers to support their teaching of students and so they have a wide range of knowledge

121about all the different grade levels and so what comes before and what comes after a grade and also a very specific knowledge about the curriculum discipline that their specialty is in and they also were the leaders in the learning and the planning that happened this spring putting those learning boards together so really knowing what's out there in terms of what's available and useful for educators and along with some of our classroom teachers so what it'll look like if you're and we don't exactly have it we need to work with the teachers a little bit more to understand better what subject areas they are most comfortable in some of our classroom teachers but for example in first grade our literacy coaches our literacy coordinators for both literacy and social studies they're also in their previous roles

122were reading specialists so they'll be able to provide literacy and social studies and really do some really nice interdisciplinary work for students in first and second grade similarly for science and mathematics we might again have one teacher do both grades we might have two teachers each doing one of those grades that piece hasn't quite been worked out yet but because they have a very specific knowledge in those subject areas will be very able to be very precise in their teaching it also provides a nice collaborative group where they can plan some interdisciplinary work for our students which we think will be really exciting along with some dedicated english language educators and special educators like we did um over the spring to really create some exciting learning opportunities for our students so that's the planning right

123now and they of course are also engaged in the learning from harvard and from tech camp so i hope that helps you answer your question okay nora thank you um i have i have sort of a two-part question maybe a half for deb and half um for peter so parents now are um you know in this position of trying to make choices about what the best path is for their students for their children for the school year and one of the questions i've been hearing a lot from parents is just deb azure describing in the hybrid or more flexible model there's a need to really focus on the essential aspects of the curriculum for the year um and i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how that might be the same or

124different between the remote program and the hybrid program um i think people are wondering if the the remote program might because it has less of a demand to be flexible might be able to be a little bit more robust curriculum wise and i don't know if that's really the case or not um i don't i don't really think it'll be the case i think we're going to identify what those that prioritize what those standards are whether again it's content concepts or skills for students it's just the delivery will be different um but we don't want students to off i mean if we all have to go remote if we all when we all come back we want to be generally in the same places of course there's going to be some minor differences here and

125there but um i don't see one being so much further different than the other in terms of how we prioritize that learning yeah thank you i had to tessa can i ask a follow-up question yep okay um so peter i know that that you um for all of the millions of things that you have to think about for the school year and trying to have some sense of the numbers of students who will be um either in hybrid or remote is a really important piece of information to have for planning but you did mention that you're hoping that there might be some more flexibility and that parents might not have to make a choice for the length of the year and i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what possibilities

126might be for that or what would go into that so you know nora i think it's a great question i'll just get right to the punch line though which is no we don't have that information yet that's something that we're looking at as a team um and and what options we might provide you know one i will give a couple initial thoughts um you know where we are trying to be very careful about not putting too many students into a classroom of remote learning because it diminishes the experience for everyone one thing we know the state has talked about developing an online kind of a curriculum and they have a request for proposals out for that actually it probably should be looking at right now to determine which vendor they're going to go with it

127is possible that if we have additional students beyond what we could take into our own remote learning program we could provide that as an option for students who maybe start with us in person and then go remote the the challenge of that it sounds very promising but the challenge of it is the state version of the remote learning program is actually a self-paced program for students it's not teacher directed and so you know there might be some staff available to check in with students on their progress but it is really largely a self-directed program we didn't think that that was an appropriate program for us to run as a school district for our our version of it so you know that wouldn't be the same experience so that that's a a challenge we have to

128try and figure out how to work through um you know we are thinking that maybe in all honesty i think we're going to be reevaluating everything we do um probably in the december time frame anyway um and we anticipate that you know as the pandemic progresses we are have heard about a second wave potentially coming back you know i think in all honesty if the pandemic comes back the way we've heard a lot of the experts talk about the whole idea would be moot at that point um and so we i you know i i don't want to be you know i'm not a forecaster of viral transmission but you know i think you know the that certainly has been a topic of discussion um but we have talked about the either an opportunity to

129reassess mid-year or even just have a process where maybe we can look for various openings that we do have so maybe a student starts remotely but it's not working and they want to come back to us in person offhand i could maybe think of a situation where we could look at the classroom balance across the district and think about a potential placement in a in-person classroom i think the challenge would be offhand that may or may not have been the original school that they were in um if that school is already a capacity at a grade level it might have to mean we're thinking differently about that at least for the one year i don't even want to say that that's a plan because that's just speculation on my part but we are looking at

130all of our options and we're hoping to actually have something out to families early next week with what that's going to look like and how we're going to have that flexibility you know the other piece and it's a good opportunity to say that because the questions have turned to the teaching and learning side also early next week we're hoping to have sample schedules of days out to families for the remote learning program but also the hybrid days when students are in person and remote on the hybrid days so people know what to expect in either version at the student level i see that kira has one more question and then i know diane has a question and i see that there are two attendees that have questions so and angie has a question too so

131i'm gonna go through the school committee members first because that's how we do it and then i will get to the attendees but just know that i see you out there and i will call on you eventually all right kira and then diane and then angie i i just want to know if there's a is there a critical ratio where this might all get wonky again so i we keep saying 80 20. um but that data was taken a while ago um and and and that data was taken a while ago and the world changed twice since then um so you know what happens if we get this this new data and it's 70 30 or it's you know 60 40 or something like really what's is there a tipping point where where something else

132gets triggered have we thought about that are we trying not to think about that because that'll drive us really crazy um can you talk about that a little bit please sure you could if if i didn't have a mask on you'd actually see me chuckling at the question um i i wish i could tell you you know every time we blink we're having to reassess based on on what we're seeing i don't think we know that there's any one critical tipping point i think in terms of staffing you know if we see enrollments go up significantly in a remote academy you know in an ideal world they'd go up in 20 student increments or 20 23 student increments because then it's very easy to say we're taking a teacher out of the live uh or

133in person school and putting them into the remote academy and you can kind of get it to balance it does present challenges when you have six elementary schools certainly um the high school and junior high it's a little easier the numbers just work because it's one school um you know but but we're not going to see just 23 student increments so i think it's really going to have to be looking at staffing on an individual basis and really thinking deeply about the different classroom sizes across the district where can we reduce a classroom you know we already you know are predicting that some of the classrooms could have very different class sizes than what we had thought we were leaving school with so um we already know we're going to have to look at those

134class size balances but we you know we can't create too many different models until we just get the data so right now our critical path is to get that information out the additional information we promised families to go out very beginning of the week hopefully next week either monday or tuesday and we really want to open our registration window starting wednesday and hopefully have that open through that weekend so that we can get those students registered because until we see the data we're really stuck as a district so with speculation and we just we're with a month left where we can't speculate too much longer tess i know you hate two-part questions but i'm gonna make them really fast and i hope you'll permit it and um thank you for for that was um actually

135a third that i don't have to ask so the registrations starts wednesday that that's our goal but we know we're not asking families to register until we can get that information okay so my questions are programmatic and i'll make them quick and they're both for deb i think should be a best person to address both of these i've been getting a lot of questions about wednesdays how can we make that day since it's only a only but it's a 20-minute check-in but i think that it would be really helpful to understand what the genesis of that 20 minutes was and what the role of it is so that we can maintain engagement on those days that's that's one i just want to know what what is what was behind the 20 minutes and i know

136that the second part of the day is a much needed bulk of time for collaboration and professional learning and and um just getting up to speed on all of the various things that teachers have to do to launch remote and do this hybrid program the other thing is what types of professional learning are happening this summer excuse me and in the fall around race and racial equity so thanks diana and if it wasn't clear in the document we can certainly make it clear it's 20 minutes per class for seven through grades seven through 12. so students would be able to meet with all of their teachers all five six however many teachers they have for that 20 minutes of each for each class so it's a 20-minute check-in with the teacher for grade 7-12 with

137each of their teachers so that if there's any confusion around any of the assignments so that teachers have a touch point and get to see all of their students on that day so students don't go a day without making some kind of connection in contact with their teacher so that was the reason grade seven through 12. um for the elementary it'll probably be somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours perhaps broken up during that three hour period of time we certainly don't want students in front of a camera for two hours but perhaps broken up by half-hour 40-minute segments again the grades k through um six it'll be an opportunity for them to have check in with their teachers to talk through some things maybe do some um you know relationship building

138and some connecting activities again it's being able to see all their class together so it's it's more than just um the 20 minutes it is a good chunk of time um and it's really about maintaining those connections to our kids and answering any kinds of questions and concerns around assignments and around learning that have come up um midweek so we can course correct for the rest of the week um with us with our students and in terms of um the sel i might throw some of this to to don as i know she's been working on quite a bit of the anti-racist and the sel work as well and we have worked with our seed leaders we are they are going to be offering something this summer for our teachers um around having courageous conversations

139in the classroom it's a it is a something that we all need to get better at doing and having i've been working with our social studies teachers um seven through twelve and also at the elementary level with our coordinators we need to rethink how we teach holidays which is something that we are really working on at the elementary level we've been documenting where we are teaching very specific topics throughout our curriculum and working with the department leader at the high school as well and thinking about some of the changes that they'll be making to their curriculum um and so the curricular aspect is some ongoing work but that also requires some professional learning for our teachers as well um so i'll throw it over to donks i also notice some other specific anti-racist work that's

140been happening um sure the other piece that we're looking at at this at the moment we have um we're looking at implementing curriculu anti-bias curriculum pk through 12 and are currently looking at the um using the anti-defamation leagues three different pieces for elementary middle school and high school and the national association for the education of the young child and aeyc which has um fantastic standards for pre-school we're in the process right now our subgroup of sort of aligning um the anti-racist work with the social justice standards that teaching tolerance has um our goal being to really focus on the anti-racist work and um also be able to embed some other pieces in it so that teachers who are already really overwhelmed as we are about coming back aren't thinking that oh we're doing sel and

141we're doing social justice and we're doing anti-bias and we're doing all these other things without watering it down so that's what our team is really focused on right now is how do we really focus on some anti-racist practices what do those look like and what what should we expect to see in our classrooms so i'll also add in the curriculum piece um so having the anti-racist curriculum is important but it's also very important for us to embed this information these practices in our curriculum as we teach it throughout students careers at ab and so as we're redeveloping our new social studies units based on the new social studies frameworks we are embedding the social justice standards into each one of those curricular units as well as castles um the five elements for sel so making

142sure that it's all woven together that children don't see it separate and our educators don't see it separate it's good teaching practices throughout and just it's not a stand alone thank you both all right angie and then i see yeben has his hand raised yeah this is regarding the learning and the uh the academic part so since the uh pandemic started with remote learning well none of us are prepared so it turns out we noticed that some students are really can adjust really well and utilize the extra time to engage more learning and some are totally off track and lost and the class is the same some classes are really engaging and interactive and some others are given some extra sheet and let the student work by itself so i want to ask are there

143any plan that embedded for the fall so that we can find out the discrepancy among the students or the teachers because they may not know how to do well so we can better support our staff and students for engaging learning experience higher collaboration and better outcome so some of the work one of the subcommittees that we've been engaged in is identifying for case six the grades um well actually for grades one through six we already have a screening tool the early bird um that we are going to be implementing as soon as they make it available for us their beta testing pilot as you know has been delayed as well unfortunately and based on covid but for grades one through six we are looking at a universal screening tool for both literacy and then one

144for mathematics so we can really just get our arms around it's just it's a very cursory kind of assessment but it does give us some good indications of where students might be in some of the understandings of those disciplines it's not all encompassing certainly it doesn't you know won't measure mathematical some of the thinking and the practices but certainly some of the skills that students come come to the discipline with and so we'll be doing that none of which will be happening in the first few weeks of school we never want to be assessing students in that way in the first use we want to be building community and making sure they feel safe and comfortable back in school and at the upper grades we'll be using something probably more along the lines of classroom

145based measures which are assessments that are created by teachers so i'll give you an example one of the wonderful things that was an outcome from last year at the high school is they were building common assessments because of doing away with the mid-year and the final exams they were doing more common assessments throughout the year and so they have those assessments and it's something that they can employ within the first few weeks of school so that we can get a sense of where students are based on the skills and based on the knowledge that we would have expected students to come in with it gives teachers a good indication of where they need to again go back and do some of that unfinished learning is it the whole class that needs to go back and

146do some unfinished learning in some areas or is it a certain you know cohort of students and making sure that we get students in a place where they can then access the grade level content that we're teaching um in the moment so and we are looking at um various different tools right now we're investigating a couple for literacy and a few different ones for mathematics and the junior high has already identified a couple as well and some literacy tools for our reading specialists um that can differentiate so there are some you know um quick easy they're web-based kinds of tools so that whether you're in the remote school or you're in person all students can be assessed in the same way and give us that kind of information that we can use to then further

147investigate whether or not we need to uncover some misunderstandings or conceptual misunderstandings for students and so i think that answers part of your question the second part was around engaging students and yes we are that's definitely one of the things that we're going to be doing with tech camp and with the professional learning days those first six days that we were talking about one whole day is dedicated just to how do we engage our students how do we use again these digital tools to make sure all of our teachers are equipped with understanding how to translate their pedagogy from in-person learning to engaging students online i think one of the major differences for this coming fall is that again we have more time to plan but we also have more time to set expectations for

148students expectations about their participation expectation for their attendance expectations for completion of work all of that changes the game um for students um so i think there'll be a difference come the fall can i have one follow-up question yeah okay have we considered the student peer peer coaching because the online experience definitely can benefit from smaller group and peer coaching more interaction are you talking about i'm sorry the remote learning program yes so again so we are going to be reaching out to uh for the upper grades we're going to be reaching out for to our graduates ab graduates i've already even had a couple contact me already who are in college um and who are majoring in different disciplines like world language or mathematics and they'll they may have some time and they might

149want to support that kind of learning we also know that for the elementary we're going to be thinking about reaching out to perhaps even some of our universities and colleges we know during the pandemic that medical students were pulled out of their senior year and put right into hospitals there are going to be some seniors and some ed programs and some universities and colleges who have some time and so we think we could take advantage of their time and their expertise to help support our students in the elementary school so in a zoom session you know having 16 or having eight students six states that makes a difference and we want to make sure those smaller cohorts that students get that one-on-one kind of attention so we'll be thinking about all different ways that we

150can use students to support our students thank you yeah ben thank you tessa uh also thank you peter and your team i really appreciate i can't imagine how much work you have it done and to roll out of those the plans i really appreciated that so i i just have some follow-up questions about the say mario mary said that we experienced a shortage of the teachers and the divora also specifically say also uh in response to adam's question about the uh progress of the in-person learning and also remote learning uh possibly there will be less content so that's all a little bit concerned to uh say a lot of parents and also myself i just wonder so given that even content it will be a little bit diff i mean will be less do do

151we also do you expect uh see less choices of a curriculum and causes for for both remote and in-person learning so that will be my first question second question is also peter mentioned we are i mean we we there's a probability like we will see second wave strike again in the fall or in the winter so do we have a backup plan say to avoid in like the spring time we we were running uh remote learning in the crisis uh mode right so the user experience is not very that great so right now we're getting ready for like 20 percent uh remote learning for that i mean if the second wave strike back uh uh do we have the our team ready for that you have the resources and training yeah that's that's my question

152i think there are a few questions in there and peter do you want to start do you want me to tackle a couple of them yeah we can we can probably go back and forth and just fill in each other's blanks on this so you know i think the i i let me just talk because one of the pieces was about kind of choices and curriculum between the two different models um you know there will be um some limitations in terms of what we can offer for electives in the remote learning program uh we we just the challenge of putting that program together is that at the high school level in particular the students choices in electives are driven by their own course selections and when we looked at the survey results from the initial

153survey we put out there were really almost no electives that we could actually put together a whole class for what students wanted you know and that that was a really hard decision for us and then so i think the high school right now is looking at trying to offer some limited choices of electives but the the challenge is we can't run electives for two students in one course three students in a different class and four students in a different class we have to have a large enough cohort to be able to support allocating a teacher to that and that's something we're we're struggling with right now um and i think in all honesty until we know kind of who ends up in that program it's going to be difficult but i think the high school

154is trying to put something together so that that students do have some limited choices i think in terms of um the less content piece in the curriculum i do you know i think our goal is to make sure that we cover the most critical items but even with really good planning um either a fully remote program or a hybrid program of some kind is going to have some kinds of limitations and you know i think if i could make everyone feel really good by saying don't worry we've got to cover it it's going to be exactly the same but but that feeling would only last so long and i think we need to just be honest about it that we're still even though we have the opportunity to plan for it there are still going

155to be challenges to how we deliver content and curriculum to kids um so overall i just don't want to i don't want to paint too rosy of a picture because it will be hard um deb i don't know if you want to add to that i think um cutting cutting back on i think might even be a bit of a misnomer it's really identifying what is most critical oftentimes we might spend more time on something than is really necessary sometimes we need to spend more time on some things that we don't and so it's really again taking a real critical eye at what are the essential learnings that have to happen for this course or for this grade level and this discipline and then think okay what can we cut back on what have we

156done that might have been extraneous what might be we be able to collapse or consolidate so that we streamline that learning and it's more effective for students and and making sure that they do have adequate time for that practice so for an example you know when our students in eighth grade learn about ancient china and ancient iran it's two very important units that they do but maybe we can shorten the amount of time or maybe we can think about expanding one and the skills that students learn and apply then those skills to another unit perhaps of their choice and so that way we're building on those skills that students learn and so it's it's really making sure that we are identifying what are the most essential things that our students need to to have for

157the next progression and in that course or in that skill development um yeah i agree with peter i think you know we wish we had more time with students and not less something at some point has to give we have those three months in the from the spring that we need to be thinking about that unfinished teaching that also didn't take place and so um we along with i think teachers throughout the united states are really thinking hard about how do we make our time most effective for the students in front of i us think your second question um to go to that one was how are we going to be ready for this possibility of a second wave and will our educators be ready to pivot um and you know i think one of

158the i will actually say that there is and i don't want to call it an advantage of a hybrid program because i would much rather have our kids here but one of the well there's no other word for it an advantage of a hybrid program is that educators actually have to always be thinking about how can this be effective when kids are here and how can they learn in the remote environment um and so you know i know as we bring educators back and we think about those that extra professional learning time at the beginning of the school year a lot of that focus is on making sure and a lot of the work over the summer is on making sure educators feel comfortable in the digital environment and they understand appropriate engagement strategies for

159what works with students they feel like their their content can easily pivot because one thing we've stressed with everyone is that you know we know that at some point it's likely a classroom might have to quarantine the problem is we don't know which classroom and on what day and for that classroom that pivot has to be for the next day it does it can't take two weeks to be ready to go into that environment and so you know we're really working with um our educators as they come back to school to focus on making sure that they're they're working all the time in the digital platforms that we have available to us so either google classroom or seesaw so that in the event at four o'clock in the afternoon a classroom has to quarantine well

160at eight o'clock the next morning that classroom is back open in the new environment uh we don't want to have that same downtime that we had originally back in march so that's kind of our thinking around it i don't know deb if you have anything to add sure sure so you know as we think about students six feet apart all facing one way that doesn't really make for collaboration you know among students even in the in-person environment you can't turn and talk to a neighbor right you can't look at a piece of paper together and work on it together and so we need to be thinking how are we using these digital tools in the classroom in person so that gives everyone a chance to practice there are specific collaboration tools that are out there

161and feedback kinds of tools and so how do we use those in the in-person environment practice them so if we have to pivot everyone has a good sense of how to use them in the remote version so that is how we're going to start the year um so that we get everybody ready to go in the in the unlikely event we have to go that way all right thank you um i'm gonna have peter raise the people in the right there's two people that have questions and the attendees okay great so corrine um if you just unmute yourself you can go ahead hi thank you um i had a question about i guess the um the online stuff was any consideration given to using like techa or virtual high school to deliver the online to

162deliver content to people who prefer to be remote that's content that's designed to be delivered online it's probably more robust than what's going to be provided by ab teachers taking stuff that's meant to be tell um in person and then trying to do it online and doing it only two days a week um it doesn't sound like that was considered so i guess i'm gonna answer my own question but then why not make families aware of that option so you know that it's an interesting question um you know we actually do also use online platforms um particularly for summer programming um you know we've used edge annuity in the past as a district and we use it pretty actively the i will say in in in my other roles i've also used other organizations that

163do that i've used few lead i've used plato um i i can be honest with you that that the curriculum does not approximate what we would offer in the traditional public schools and i can say that having you know looked at multiple platforms over the course of my career teca is actually its own independent public school um and it's not some it's not an organization that a school district contracts with for kids to be able to take classes what ends up happening it's essentially you know techa could be westford um in terms of how the enrollment process works that someone would actually unenroll from a b and then actually re-enroll in techa so it's a little bit different of a process for that you know over the course of my career i've had a number

164of students that that go in that direction some students are successful some students are not it's really you know it's it's it's challenging and it's it's not necessarily for everyone um you know i think it's a great question it begs a lot of consideration but i think ultimately the the level of you know i always hate to say the word rigor because you know rigor and rigor mortis can sometimes be you know interchangeable but the traditional online schools do not have the same level of rigor that the acton-boxborough curriculum does i actually think our students are going to more closely approximate what we would traditionally offer by learning from our own our own staff we have explored the possibility of potentially partnering with some other districts similar districts to be able to kind of group

165students together and offer students more choice in the online environment i've had conversations with some other superintendents but that has not come to fruition yet and i know we're all kind of ticking on a timeline so i don't want to promise anything that i i couldn't guarantee and then um let's see kev kevin all right kevin you can go ahead and speak uh thank you uh i'd like to thank everybody for all their efforts to get this far it's obviously been a great challenge to get to where we are uh peter in particular i want to acknowledge your initial opening comments regarding the need to learn and to change plans based on what's learned along the way in that vein i'd like to point out the importance that's been given to the six feet of

166distancing and that so much has been planned based on that and asked that everyone keep a close eye on that and point out one thing in particular on that which is that the six feet of distancing originated from coughs from unmasked faces and recent studies looking at the distance something can transmit in the presence of a mask have shown much say much closer distances remain safe and we'll have to see if the guidelines over time evolve to take that into account but the question i have relates to it's a clarifying question initially you presented we have full remote and we have in person and in person is a continuum from full in-person through hybrid and onto full remote depending on safety and the clarifying question is at that point it seemed that that full continuum

167was available but later with budget considerations it wasn't clear whether it'd be possible to maintain remote for people at risk while allowing the in-person to go full in person and could you clarify that can you just maybe paraphrase i'm not sure i picked up that second piece of the question i just want to make sure i'm understanding yeah so the question is is it possible for acton-boxborough schools to remain to have some people remote and have the people that want to be in person go to full in person so five days a week you mean if you know the conditions warrant like public health conditions yes i think that that certainly is a possibility um you know i think the we we're looking at what that what the conditions are that would trigger that um

168and that's what we don't have the answer for and i know that's a an area that we're frustrated that we don't have really clear metrics um that we can point to i think um you know communities should be rightfully frustrated by the same thing but it's something that we're going to really work to try and develop so that there's some clarity for what people might expect but you know i think our intent is if we can find a safe way to do it we want to bring as many kids back the in all honesty it we could even if we could add the right number of staff to bring all of our kids back at three feet then we run into some space issues so really it's i i think i would love to see

169um kind of the guidance around distance coalesce to be honest because i still you know we're still seeing discrepancies in different organizations you know i think it actually comes right back to your first point of you know that there have been some studies showing that that you can go down as as little as three feet i haven't seen anything under that that says it's safe um you know i think the lancet study is is probably the most you know widely shared study that goes goes down to the three feet um but even that you know i think the challenge is you know the cdc is is is aware of that but it was really interesting to me that even when given the opportunity they chose not to revise their guidelines on that and i think

170that's what's causing us some pause as a school district is when we see that discrepancy that that major organizations are looking at things differently it only felt responsible for us in that scenario to maybe take the more conservative approach thank you okay so i don't see any more hands raised i don't think um here or um have or virtually we oh they just went back up oh okay uh well karin just raised her hand again and i'm trying to see the name vegan okay who would you like me to v vijay oh uh vijay just disappeared all right karen then we have a telephone no no how about kareem karen is fine all right corrine you can speak thank you i just wanted to follow on to what kevin had just said the state guidance

171says three feet so i had the same question as why isn't ap going by that i know other districts i believe i have a friend who works in bedford they're using three feet yeah you know i i unfortunately i wish i had a different answer than what i just had um which is there's there's still um we have not seen the different organizations that provide guidance coalesce around that three feet i know deci coalesced around that originally but but their their guidance wasn't three feet it was no less than three feet but six feet is optimal and we should aspire to six feet and cdc continues to recommend six feet wherever feasible and i think what we're going to see out of you know harvard and the chain school tomorrow in terms of guidance continue

172to recommend six feet so i think that's that's the piece that um we really need to see the medical experts coalesce around guidance if we're going to go less than that and i think personally i'd feel more comfortable pj looks to be back did vj next pj yep okay vj hi can you hear me can you hear me yes hi yeah thank you thank you for taking our calls so um we have a sixth grader in gates elementary school uh i know for a fact that all elementary schools are not the same in how they teach the kids and what they teach the kids and when they teach the kids we are interested in in the remote learning program and i know plenty of other parents from gates who are and would like to keep

173the kids uh with the gates teachers with the gates curriculum uh why are you not considering um giving elementary students the same benefit you are giving the middle and high school students in having them the remote kids have the same access to the same staff um as the same school and also why are you not considering keeping the kids from the same school together especially when they are in a remote environment they have already made those peer connections with the other kids that they have seen by lumping all of the elementary grades together they will possibly have for the first time a remote class with kids they have never seen before no thank you and that's a great question i i spoke to it a little earlier but one of the things we looked at

174when we looked across the district is we don't have a single cohort that we could support an individual cohort for each school to be able to do that and one of the things that we set out is we we're not going to do anything for one school that we can't be consistent with and equitable about across the district and so you know if say i know you use the sixth grade as an example and i have not looked at the sixth grade numbers recently so i i can't confirm how many students are thinking to opt for that but even if the sixth grade at gates could do that we still wouldn't create a separate cohort just at that one grade level at that one school because it doesn't mean that every gate student would have

175that opportunity third grade it may not work and it may not work for douglas it may not work for mccarthy town and you know one of our our core tenants was equity in this scenario and that means that we want to make sure we're allocating our resources fairly across all of our schools and districts it is one of the limitations of trying to provide these different opportunities for kids to either choose an in person or choose a fully remote experience and i i definitely hear you and empathize that the kids do have these connections but it really wouldn't be fair for us to be able to say well the gate students in that one grade can maintain the connections but the other students across the district or even within gates couldn't so that's why we're

176really looking this at a district level cohort i do anticipate there's going to be some opportunities for grade level interaction and so i don't think that the kids are going to be completely isolated from other students from gates in that school even though that you know they might be taught in this idea of a district school the other you know the other piece i would add is as we staff our programs we also know that we have just like we have students who cannot return in person for a variety of reasons we also have staff who cannot return for a variety of reasons and we can't um we're prioritizing staff for that remote learning program similarly uh to understanding that they may not be able to come back in person so that doesn't always work

177um just to say it's going to be one school and one specific grade level i have um following up on that are some of the gate staff going to be teaching some remote learning classes or all of the gate staff is teaching only the in in-person students and the remote students will get new staff that is being hired i think the answer is we don't know yet until we see student enrollments but marie do you want to expand on that a little sure we're likely to have you know one or two teachers from each school but we have students across seven grades from each school so we might have a second grade teacher from one school a fourth grade teacher from another school again a a lot of the remote learning will be taught by

178um a literacy specialist is going to teach literacy to one or two grades and a math coach is going to teach math to one or two grades so the kids will have three or four different teachers likely it could be two three or four um so we're we're working to really coordinate it in a way that provides the best instruction for the students they certainly will have some kids from their school in their cohort it just isn't going to be dedicated to one school so yes there will be a teacher or more from gates but it may or may not be at any given rate yeah and and lastly i just want to say the reason i brought up sixth grade is because um the sixth graders will be going into middle school next year

179and therefore will not have an opportunity to make up um in the elementary school program which is by i felt um maybe we want to take our sixth graders um and treat them a little differently from third or fourth or fifth grades or first graders um that was just again um as a parent of a sixth grader i don't want to see my kid um have longer-term implications of this one year um sixth grader is a preparation year um and just like you prepare your twelfth graders for college right you're gonna prepare your sixth graders for middle school so that was and um having had an older kid who passed through this same transition i felt it was a very critical transition no thank you i appreciate that feedback okay so does kevin have his

180hand raised again or kevin was your hand still raised or is that unintentional it was unintentional sorry okay no problem okay so we're like an hour behind where we thought we were gonna end and that's okay this is an important topic everyone needs um to have time to ask the questions and everything i will note that there have been lots of questions about why can't teachers teach both at the same time and this is completely exhausting to run a meeting just with like seven people here and four people over there and um i'm not even delivering content so um just wanted to make that note um so you're looking for us to make to vote correct you know you do not need to vote this tonight in all honesty the the desi guidance is to

181wait um we had put that there just as an option i think in all honesty what we'd rather see tonight is just general consent that we're heading in the right direction because you know desi wants you to wait until august to vote this um but yet if we wait until august it's just not going to be pretty as a school district to you know to put it bluntly um so we're really looking for your consent that that we're heading in the right direction you understand the reasons why we're making certain choices uh because we realize we're making significant strategic choices um you know when they're like thinking about like designing school there's no greater idea of policy than a complete redesign of your educational institution and requirements for how that's going to work so that's

182really what we're looking for tonight but not a formal vote okay so i just want to clarify though we don't have like another formal meeting until august 13th right yeah i think if you know we're meeting the 30th but it's mostly a training and we're having a very short business meeting at the end much of which is outcomes of the training and so not necessarily related to this so we don't have like a traditional business meeting scheduled until august 13th so i just want to make sure that you really don't want us to vote it i mean i guess we could vote it my feeling is we probably should vote it before august 13th because we're required to vote right yep so just have that all in mind we don't have to have a vote

183tonight but if there's broad consensus that no one's going to change their opinion all that much then we can do that that's how we felt like and that's why it's there as a possible vote like if you really felt like look this is where it's headed and we recognize the timeline gets challenging afterward you certainly can i just want to make sure i'm clear like desi really asked us to say wait wait till august but i don't think every school committee in the state has waited until august or will so lexington decided like three weeks ago right so okay uh adam he did yeah you know i i struggle with this because i think it's really important for us as a committee to show the community that we support the plan that's in place in

184the direction that it's moving with the understanding that it's continuing to move and and evolve um so i would be in favor of voting what we have today with the understanding that it's evolving for two reasons one i think like i said it's important to show the community and secondly i think if if we don't have the opportunity to vote prior to the 13th and we're asking for families to commit prior to that date i think we need to put a line in the sand that says this is something we support i would agree with that sentiment and also you know once we open enrollment things may shift and so we don't know but i think that um the thought process that the school district has put in today's has been incredible and they've been

185thoughtful about it and the leadership so i think that we should probably vote and contingent on the fact that things may change and shift and that we may have to convene an emergency meeting and look at the data and look at what what the outcomes are and and tweak it jenny um i don't feel ready to vote i'm still processing i i feel like it's way too fast um i'm extremely frustrated by the uh by the lag time of state guidance i think it's completely unfair i recognize that you know you really needed a vote a month ago in order to do this you know i mean you're just being put in an impossible situation i certainly don't mean to delay but i just personally am still processing you know what this all means and

186there are lots of people that i want to talk to about it so um i'd rather add this to the end of whatever meeting is on the 30th to give us a little bit more time if that's at all possible or doable that's my two cents john i i certainly appreciate jenny's point that there's a lot of uncertainty around what is going to happen about exactly what this plan is going to look like even you know by the time it reaches the parents and is finalized for their decisions but you know trying to weigh the two values the value to peter and everyone who has worked so hard to get the plan to this level of definition of knowing that the school committee is supporting this and you can move ahead against you know if

187we wait until the 30th we have a meeting not really focused on getting us more and or better information although obviously there's always the opportunity to get outside information i i just don't see that the value of the incremental time outweighs the value of voting tonight amy has her hand raised amy unmute yourself there okay i got it i couldn't find the unmute um thank you so i have been um sitting on the steering committee so i've been in the meetings where kind of all of the groups come together and discuss ideas i can't express to you how thorough the process has been and how every week the administrators come back with you know trying to face all of the challenges over and over again i i feel very strongly that we need to support

188this and vote it um tonight i i think that that the what has been done is is phenomenal considering the you know crappy choices that we have i mean this is it we don't we don't really have a lot of choices um this is we're in the middle of this um and so i think it stinks i mean it stinks either way any anything you choose it's not going to be fully back in perf in person where we're um safe from getting sick like this so yeah um yeah i think i'm i'll leave it there i i just i just think it's i think it's important and i i think well i'm sorry one more thing i think that you i think we can also trust um that as things keep going you know more

189and more stuff is going to come up and and this is all going to have to be tweaked over and over again and whether we voted on the 30th it's it's still going to be there still might be some issues that come up that will still have to be tweaked or we voted on the 13th i it's just we we have to take a stand at one point and then everybody knows kind of where we're where we're going so thanks kira uh i want to know if because this is my only my second meeting is there a way that we can have our cake and eat it too where we can we can vote with language that says that we super support this um but we uh but but contingent on some things i i

190would really love to see the registration numbers i would really love to see where the community lands based on everything that we're we've given them so far and based on the the um the schedules that we still haven't seen that we know are coming there there actually is key stuff here that that's missing that we we haven't delivered to parents and therefore we're not asking parents to make a decision um so it's it's not that i can't vote for this i've been part of this planning i really support this and i love this i just think that we're missing a very key element and that's the community's voice and so is there a way that we can say yes this is great thank you so much for this planning please continue to go forward with

191the data we have but also hold the breaks just a little bit until we get this last piece of key data okay nora unmute yourself unmute yourself um been really appreciative of the amount of communication that the administration has been sharing with us the school committee as well as with the community um and also the responsiveness to any concerns or questions that have come up from the community and um i think i'm seeing this as probably potentially a year of constant change and moments of chaos and i've been really appreciative of how the administration has handled this so i would be comfortable either with voting yes for this plan um given the amount of um thoughtfulness and consideration and expert opinion that has gone into this plan and i also if you know people are

192not comfortable voting yet and wanted to wait and just giving a vote of confidence um i would be good with that too john i'd like to make a motion i i move that the acton-boxborough regional school committee support the hybrid uh school reopening plan based on the assumption that approximately 80 percent of the community will opt for the the hybrid approach and about 20 percent of the community will opt for the remote learning approach is there a second i'll second but i also have a question that's fine i was going to open it up for discussion so that's fine okay so this is this is for peter i think when people took the first survey um i don't know how many people but more than a few people thought they were voting on five days

193back in school if there is a significant number of people who swing it like the other way like they go remote and it's just like way over capacity would that come would that significantly change the direction that you take this no i don't i actually don't think so at this point because we know there's a general staffing model that can be expanded or contracted based on how many people enroll in virtual versus the in-person program um you know and i and i say that that there's a general staffing model there's nuances based on the exact numbers and and how that has to play out in different classrooms and different schools and things like that um but but the general notion that you're staffing part of your district toward a remote program part of your district

194toward a and in person i don't foresee that changing greatly um you know there's always the possibility that as space opens up like say 60 of family said we're going into the remote learning program well space doesn't become any kind of a concern for us anymore because we have all sorts of classrooms across the district that we can now use for different purposes then money becomes the issue because could we add sufficient staff to be able to to use take advantage of that space and that would require some thought but um i i don't i don't know as though i seeing it shifting significantly but i'm open to the possibility you know i think the the one thing to me even voting for support what i don't want to also be constrained but constrained by

195is if we see an opportunity that we want to take advantage of then we can still pursue that to be honest like say we figured out a way to get our first graders in well we certainly want to still pursue that if we figured out a way to get elementary we pursue it um and we know that anything can change in this environment so that's the that's the piece that i even hedge on you know there's no right answer right now and there's no clear answer it's what do you think is right at the moment and so i just want to make it clear that what we're voting on is the model of a remote academy that mixes our six elementary schools and an in-person model that starts out as a hybrid and can go

196in different directions based on public health data and other metrics and that's what i was just going to point out is i want people to understand what we're voting on i mean i understand the reservations about us not having all of the information but the truth is the model isn't going to change that much so there will be additional details provided there'll be you know as peter has said over and over again the the in-person model is on a continuum so what we're voting as a school committee is we're basically saying yes we are supportive of having these two modes of learning going forward and allowing the district to continue their work on on these two modes of learning as opposed to saying like if we were a district that said no you know what

197we forget about everything that peter said we really think everyone should go to in-person learning so figure out a way to do it so that that's how i see the voting going not that we're like voting on the nitty-gritty details of everything that has been included in this plan but that we're really saying to the district yes we are in agreement or not in agreement or however we want to vote with your two plans that you basically put forward um okay amy you have your hand raised yeah um i would like to suggest i i i heard john's motion but i it wasn't completely clear what you just said tessa is what i would be willing to vote on i don't want to put any kind of percentages or contingencies i really want the administration

198to continue doing what they're doing and what they're working so a a broad vote of support to do and a remote program and an in-person program that begins with a hybrid and and that be that be our our vote okay so i'm gonna call on nora there's people in the room that have their hand raised but the way that this works is that we have to vote on the motion that was presented and we can vote negatively on the motion that was presented or john we can have someone make a friendly amendment is that what you're going to say someone can make a friendly amendment so before we get into the chaos of friendly amendments let's let everyone who wants to share share so nora go ahead you're muted thank you for clarifying that tessa

199i think that um you know when i look at other districts that are not able to offer a hybrid model remote only or hybrid only without offering a remote model i'm i'm very pleased with the fact that we are able in our district to offer parents that choice of of remote academy only if that's what works for them and that the hybrid model allows us to really try to get in person as much as possible so um yeah i'm in support of that i don't know the language for emotion but um yeah i would support that okay adam so far be it for me to be the picky one on john's motion because he's typically the one who has a very structured uh emotions um there are a couple things that i think are some

200language that we should include and i'm either happy to make a friendly amendment to the motion as a whole which i've written down to make it easy for beth and to share with everybody or we can vote john's down and i'll make another motion either way what's that right you could withdraw the motion or john could withdraw the motion um the the the the language that i'm i'm sort of toying with and and i i hear ginny's response too that there's a lot of information and for those who are seeing this for the the third time only this is still a big change from what we were talking about two weeks ago um and so you know where i'm leaning towards is having is suggesting that our committee vote uh to approve the spirit and

201direction of our learning plans that include both the fully remote and a continuum of the in-person a fully remote and a continuum of an in-person model with the understanding that the final details of those plans are yet to be determined so you know it from for me to break that down basically what i'm saying is we're not approving anything in stone we're saying that the spirit in the direction that you're making you're going is is the one that we want in that it includes both a remote fully remote and a continuum of in person from fully in person to fully remote with hybrid in there and then understanding that we've we clearly don't have all those final details yet so john what's the easiest thing to do well if people like what afton adam said

202then i'm perfectly happy to withdraw my motion and then you know we need to withdraw the second and then life can go on okay so either give me a thumbs up or not your head so that we can just yes okay okay so it looks like i will withdraw my motion okay do we need a second for that no we just need to withdraw the second which was diane's and i withdraw my second okay adam would you like to make a motion indeed i would i move that the acton-boxborough regional school committee vote to approve the spirit and direction of the 2020-2021 learning plan including both a fully remote and continuum of in-person models with the understanding that the final details of the plan are yet to be determined second uh angie okay is there

203any further discussion i would just note that that is an msba worthy length of emotion five years sitting on that committee i think i can tell okay then we will do a roll call vote beginning with people in the room and then i will go along to the virtual people john yes jenny um i can't vote yes at this time so no okay evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes amy yes kira yes nora yes yeben it's uh can do we have a chance to vote it down later do we have a chance to what to change to to get another vote opportunity i thought we are gonna vote for more voters next meeting um well what we decided was that the consensus of most of the committee was that they wanted to vote

204tonight and so if you don't feel comfortable you can certainly vote no or you can abstain but there unless peter comes to us with something substantially different from this then no there will not be another opportunity well uh yeah so that my question to peter is is that so what the chance of the changes the this plan substantially is how how big would that be so i think if the committee was uncomfortable with the plan i would maybe look for some direction from the committee about alternatives that you'd like us to try to pursue that would be probably the next step because i think from where our administration has gotten to along with our working groups i think we've gotten to a place where we're recommending this um and so that's kind of the we

205would we're certainly happy to go back and look at additional options but um that we probably look for some direction on that okay then yes and myself yes okay so yeses except for jenny who wasn't now all right thank you everyone for all of the discussion and um for the work on the motion um so marie has a memo right in our packet for item 3.2.2 i don't know i can't change it here because this is not my computer this is the school committee one um and i can't access that so okay so no no i'll tell you that's what's on my agenda so what's on my attendance that what we're talking about next is the school calendar change and that where else that they're also asking for a vote tonight so marie do you

206want to speak to that is marie here oh no marie's gone okay all right so the school calendar change um yeah i don't know where marie disappeared to um well i have a i have a picture well essentially we're proposing to move the thank you sorry that technology is not my friend right now um we're we're essentially proposing to move the first day of school to september 8th for students because we're anticipating adding additional professional days but one of the things that came up um going into this school year is that we have a state primary on september 1st and we really feel like it would be inappropriate to try and have you know people coming into our schools to vote while kids are there and we're trying to just start under our new guidelines

207so this actually puts it out until after labor day um that's one piece of a reason another piece is to provide additional time for us with our faculty to be able to prepare them to come back in and that additional kind of professional learning time and in all honesty a third piece it actually buys us some additional time to get everything ready for people coming back in there were just monumental changes in place and we think that this is an appropriate move to the calendar um maria's back if she wants to speak more to it hi marie welcome back sorry my internet went down for 12 seconds i don't know what happened sorry um no i think you've fully explained it adam yeah i just have a quick question how likely do we think that

208desi is going to allow us to reduce um total days of uh in school time from 180 to 177. well we're we're that's pending but um you know in all honesty even if we did that we would just add three more days on to the end of the school year we i think we would want to keep the start date at september 8th and that's the that's the biggest piece marie do you have any thoughts on that so i thought i think we're pretty close to them agreeing to it so i think the last day on the calendar um which right now is indicated as june 17th is likely to be the latest will end and i just have one other piece of food for thought which is around snow days definitely something we don't

209need to be thinking about right now but the likelihood of us having snow days and then not being able to provide instruction seems pretty low um but if you do look at the calendar it is possible that we go till the 29th of june if we actually take five snow days and have to have 180 days of school which obviously provides some concern to me but i think that that's something we can with triple h triple e before we did i was hoping we'd deal snow days um so you know just deal with them all in order i'm just hoping for cold weather you know i actually don't know why we would you know given everything that we've now been able to do i don't know why we would really have traditional snow days um

210technically desi has not waived the requirements of that kind of a thing but you know i think it's the writing is on the wall for that diane i know the town of acton just consolidated all its polling places or that everyone's going to be voting at the junior high so that does that take that i know i mean i'm fine with it i just wanted to it's kind of an fyi no i think um even then it's still the junior high and i think we'd want to be pretty careful about how many people we're bringing in i think because ann blanchard i'd be surprised if we weren't voting at blanchard again and that's not our normal polling place so yeah we've had a request to set up the um boxborough voting at blanchard on september

2111st and the junior high is slated for the act and polling place so we don't really want kids in the public all in on the second day of school or the first day of school so this works out well on many levels angie did you have a question i also have the concern on the june 29th as the last day so you're saying the snow day if there's a snow day then we'll automatically move to remote learning is that the plan or we're not there i can't give you a firm answer on that yet um you know because we would need guidance from the state to tell us that we can do that but i i have to say i personally don't know why the state would say that you're making up all of these

212days of snow days it just doesn't make any sense given that we're already working in remote learning mode i am a little uncomfortable too that we're pushing that close to the end of the day so because there's too many uncertainty that that may happen that impact another school day or something but angie june 29th is with all of the things not happening so it would be if desi didn't agree to reduce the number of days and if there was five snow days june 29th is like the contingency contingency after all those things marie what what did lexington go to september 14th something like that i know some of the districts are starting later than us um we're pretty sure that desi is going to waive the requirement and so we're going to be much closer

213to june 17th than we are to june 29th evelyn did you make a motion hold on i'm all set i i had a similar question whether we could pivot to remote learning for in the kids that would be in school if we have snow days but clearly um you don't have the guidance to be able to do that so forget my question yeah that would be our intent is to just use remote learning in lieu of taking a you know a day off uh but we just need to make sure desi says that yes you can do it before i come and promise you that that's the case are you going to make a motion well who asked that before yeah amy uh i'd like to move to approve the changes to the calendar to

214have the first uh day of school on september the 8th second second is there yes john i do as a point of discussion i just want to mention that um last year um people need to remember that we actually had school through um the break um which changed the end of the calendar so sitting at the beginning of the year there are lots of things that we could theoretically do to modulate the end of the school year okay are we ready to vote all right john yes jenny yes evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes uh norah yes amy yes kyra yes yeah ben yes and me yes okay good that passes unanimously okay so the next thing is me can i have my packet back i suppose a 14 shrimp paper okay so

215the next thing on our agenda is uh the new subcommittee and liaison assignments so with the exception of i know that adam suggested that the current budget subcommittee meet right before because if there's things to talk about this so that that may exist separately usually we don't even do this until september but um there had been a desire for there to be a new policy subcommittee and um people have moved off of that so for new members there is a memo in here that diane helped me put together that has brief descriptions of many of the subcommittees and the liaison positions and also some of the time commitment that there's something really loud outside the door okay um and also some of the time commitments that go along with those subcommittees so the way that

216we arrange things last year was that anyone that wanted to serve on one of the major committees the budget subcommittee or the policy subcommittee no one served on both so because we're an 11-member committee i'm trying to spread out the wealth i know that diane wanted to speak maybe if she will about the liaison positions because that's something that the two of us have discussed sorry there's a really really loud bird right outside the window a frog whatever it is um anyway um the liaison positions which up until now have sort of been ill-defined and haven't really served the people that have served as the liaisons have done the work but not really reported back to the committee and so um diana and i had some discussion about that do you want to share sure

217there are um there are at least several and and there could be more liaison positions if you've ever gone to a finance committee meeting you'll see that certain members have been designated as liaisons to boards and they report they they go to those meetings they listen to them remotely or they go in person when you when that was a thing and they report back and it's really it's not just helpful it's it's really critical to know what is going on um in other on other boards because it informs our work and our work informs their work so it's i think the liaison ships have gotten i mean our meetings are very long we're very large and i think that that when if something has to get pushed to the side because of the hour it

218that's what gets pushed to the side but it's really important that we know so we don't feel siloed and that they know that we're paying attention as well it's just it's good relationship building and it's good information sharing and it just really enriches everyone's experience as a school committee member so when you're thinking about liaison ships you know if there's something you're interested in if you're interested in the vote tech the minute there's always a lot going on at minuteman the border selectmen the finance committee it's real learning experience so i highly suggest that you just uh look over that list and really give it some thought there can be also more than one liaison there frequently there were one at one point there were three to the special education parent advisory council so i

219don't know that's what would be up to tessa but i encourage you to look that list over and think about what you're interested in and what your what your time constraints are um the liaisons are also a great way for you to just sort of dig into one aspect of what we do as a school committee i know that it can be so overwhelming as new members to think about all of these things and we talk about budget and policy a lot because those are the committees that meet the most often but you know when we think about what our roles and responsibilities are as school committee members a lot of those liaison ships really speak directly to the things that we do so the people that are liaisons to the or to the alg

220or to the um select boards often can come to a meeting with really important information about what those boards and committees are doing because we're in it we're in a regional district and so it's extraordinarily important that we have good relationships with those other boards and committees in in the town so um i want you to think about that there are some new things on here something that i didn't include actually um kira actually currently serves on the diversity equity and inclusion group that dawn runs and i suggested that that be a liaison to the school committee um she's already on that so i didn't include it because it wouldn't be something that other people could necessarily volunteer for this year but the other thing that was included on here was a mentoring resource a

221new position that would be held by one or more experienced school committee members who serve as a resource to new members seeking to become better informed on budget policy and agenda issues that requires historical knowledge to fully understand so mentors are not permitted to deliberate it's not one of those things where you get to have like a special inside conversation but we've talked about mentors before and um i think that having a person or or two people maybe that are really in charge of of just being a resource for for new members or for older members that have been here a while and still have um questions about things rather than directing them always to me and peter that that would be a good place for somebody to serve so my request is that you

222send me your interests um by august 6th and i will um put together some lists and balance things out and you know i may reach out to you ask questions and see where your priorities are and then at our august 13th meeting i would bring you a proposed list of assignments yes john i wanted to note that the debt strategy subcommittee is still listed and unless dave has some secret plan i'm hoping that we won't have a debt strategy subcommittee next year that's correct thank you and the other thing i wanted to say is regardless of you know what board somebody is formally a liaison to the more things that people can attend to broaden their perspective on what's going on and how other people are thinking about it the better off you'll be in

223our discussions thank you john i think that that's um important to know nora did you have a question yes so uh just in terms of planning our time is it a possibility that during the next school year we'll be doing some of these subcommittee meetings remotely the way we have been doing you know in all honesty i think that there is because we excuse me um even at this office we're allocating additional space in our building to the preschool so that they can spread out and reduce their sizes so i don't think we're going to have the same number of spaces available to us on a regular basis so i think we will probably still be doing some meetings you know either part in person part remote or fully remote just to make sure we

224can in we're also trying to reduce the number of people in our buildings at any given time it's been a real positive in terms of attending meetings i think planning for policy meeting for example has been much easier knowing that we can meet remotely yeah it's certainly been a benefit um okay so if there's no other questions about that send me your assignments and cc beth and i will work on putting together a list um so with with that we also have to um vote the membership update on the school building committee because maya is no longer on the school committee and then there's a couple other changes so i don't have a recommended i think the recommended motion motion is to approve the the building committee membership is as listed in the packet adam

225uh i moved to approve the acton-boxborough school building committee membership list as shown in our packet this evening second jenny is there any discussion no okay john yes jenny yes evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes nora yes amy yes kira yes yevan yes yeah and myself yes okay great that is unanimous and then we have a statement of warrants and recommendation to approve which one of you wants to do it john all right i got it i move that the school committee vote to approve gross payroll warrants as follows fy 2020 warrants number p2027 and 2028 dated 6 30 20 and fy 2021 warrants number p 2101 dated 7 020 and p2102 dated 7 16 20 in the total amount of 1 and 119.12 cents and accounts payable warrants as follows fy 2020

226payroll deduction warrants number 20-027 pr and 028-pr and fy 2020 vendor warrants number 20-027-027-f all dated 6 30 20. fy 2021 payroll deduction warrants number 21-001 pr dated 720 sorry 70220 and 21-002 pr dated 716-20 and fy2021 vendor warrants number 21-001a dated seven one twenty and twenty one dash zero zero one dated seven nine twenty in the total amount of six million six hundred seventy thousand nine hundred sixty two dollars and seventy seven cents second john yes jenny yes evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes uh amy yes nora yes kira yes yevin yes and myself yes great okay um there's no fyi listed so are we good i'm done okay what is that oh sorry okay uh john has an hit update through 12 months the actin health insurance trust had expenses of

22717.2 million dollars against income of 16.3 million dollars resulting in a loss of 0.9 million dollars the loss is in alignment with the planned reduction of the unrestricted assets of the trust as in april and may june showed a favorable variance of 144 thousand dollars related to reduction in services for members including elective procedures i have no insight as to whether or not this favorability will continue in fy 21 and trust will next meet on september 17th and i'll just note that our our next meeting is next thursday on july 30th which is um we're having a seed training um prior to the business meeting so the business meeting starts at seven um the seed training uh for us will begin at 4 30 and you can there will be details coming out from beth

228with regards to dinner and all of that and even though we um i know that there were some members that wanted us to hold it remotely because it is a training uh we really felt that it would benefit us most to be in person and we will be taking all opportunities to be outside when possible so i just wanted to note that i will take a motion move to adjourn second john jenny yes evelyn yes angie yes diane yes adam yes amy yes nora yes kyra yes yes yes and me yes thank you all i will see you next thursday bye dave have a good night