Acton-Boxborough School Committee Meeting 5/19/22

001noting the hour in the presence of a quorum i call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order we are in person tonight and uh members who do wish to view the meeting may do so excuse me using acton tv's youtube channel which is found at the top of the agenda this meeting is being recorded and will be posted to the actin tv's website at actontv.org welcome everybody especially welcome to rebecca wilson who's our new member from acton thank congratulations and thank you to jenny crimmer who was also revoted to on her re-election our new member from boxborough will be joining us at our next meeting i also want to thank our town meeting members from both towns for passing our budget and a special thanks for to john peterson for representing the committee in acton

002all right as usual we have a packed agenda so we're going to move right into public participation so per policy b-e-d-h members of the public are invited to speak for up to three minutes during public participation time regarding item regarding items that are not on the agenda for items that are on the agenda the public is asked to wait for that item the committee does not typically respond to comments during public participation i would ask that speakers be respectful and civil anybody here for public participation seeing none peter superintendents update all right so um first welcome everyone um i just want to recognize i see we have a number of school age people here but i only see i think a few whose last week will be next week so i just want to congratulate

003our seniors because they are coming to the end of their time here at ab this is 13 years of education they've been working toward and they are headed toward commencement and graduation so congratulations to all of our seniors over the next couple of weeks um you know for school committee uh just as a reminder graduation is june 3rd friday night so you know if you are available we always love to have our school committee members be able to be there and participate in that as well and kind of just get an opportunity to see the kids walk across the stage because it really is probably you know one of the most impactful moments in terms of what we do in schools on the note around graduation we do need some volunteers and i'm sending out

004a call for help on behalf of project graduation we sent that out earlier today i'm going to send it out again in the note to families tomorrow as part of the full package but project graduation desperately needs volunteers to man that night if you don't know what project graduation is it's an incredibly important event in our community it's an all-night substance free and all-inclusive event that offers our graduates one final event to celebrate their time as acton-boxborough students the event truly does rely on the participation of many and we're asking people to consider offering a bit of their time to that event as a way to continue the pay it forward model that has served our community so well when you know our families children attend project graduation in the future our hope is that

005family members members of younger students step up so we know we can't rely on the families of seniors to staff project graduation it's really critical to have uh the families of our younger students kind of in that pay it forward model be able to step up and provide some help and supervision and guidance and assistance during that night so we would encourage people to volunteer some time it is also on friday night june 3rd and it starts at 9 30 pm um coveted cases i want to give a little bit of update on those we're continuing to see a push in cases and have seen quite a few cases of covet in our schools over the last month we do continue to meet with our health advisory team bi-weekly to review our cases we have

006fielded a number of questions over the last week or so asking if we intend to implement a mask requirement during the surge at this point we have determined as an administration to align our coveted mitigation strategies with those of the actin board of health and any other guidance that we might receive from the state this is in recognition that although our cases are higher than we would like we have a highly vaccinated population which is helping to keep the severity of illness low uh sure either of the entities that i've mentioned previously uh begin to require indoor masking at that time we would similarly have to follow suit but we do not intend to independently pursue any requirements as a school district we will continue to report cases to families through our covet 19 tracker

007so that families can make individual decisions about appropriate precautions for their family i would encourage families to take precautions that balance risks on a personal level that include both health and safety considerations but also possible opportunities lost due to absences related to covert 19. we know five days out at this time of year can be challenging and so i think at this point of the pandemic thinking about opportunities lost may be equally important to thinking about you know health and safety protocols so i think you know we want families to be able to independently balance those two things and consider them family surveys about climate and culture next week we're going to be sending families a survey that's focused on various aspects of the student and family experience at acton-boxborough this year earlier this month

008i distribute a different family survey that focused on questions inviting families to briefly identify school-related topics most important to them so the school committee and i could potentially identify various patterns and themes within the community this survey that we're going to be sending out includes categories and questions that are targeted to families and their child's school experiences this year it's asking for their views about school climate engagement learning opportunity environments and roles and responsibilities our goal is to have information that we can review as a leadership team to identify important themes and patterns to guide our ongoing work uh both at the school and district level the survey will likely require about 15 minutes of people's time and the questions are all multiple choice while the results can be organized by school and some questions

009around services your child might receive the responses are completely anonymous the survey will be available in 17 languages and the options can be found at the top of that survey page we just want to thank people in advance for taking the time to complete that survey i want to recognize our staff who just are completing their 20th year of service at acton-boxborough so last thursday may 12th we recognize 30 staff who are celebrating their 20th year working in our schools the recognition event took place at a ceremony sponsored by the acton-boxborough education association this is a fun event that includes each staff members colleagues speaking briefly about their contributions to our schools this is an event that is uniquely a b and is a great reminder that our district is a special place i want

010to congratulate all of the staff who were recognized this year they include jenna bardsley martha bethel amanda bromberg david bouchard kathleen bauer peter cacciola excuse me margaret callahan uh maura cedrone sarah clinton catherine cattini aaron doherty aaron foley alexandra gantz genevieve hammond nicole janat christiane kelly paula sage kathy loebs kim luongo amy maciel colleen mcgovern melissa meek allison morrell kristen olson gene oviatt rothman karen i'm going to say this name wrong and i am so sorry karen karen for cuio susan spencer rory sweeney aaron sweeney and deb trench uh so thank you to all of those individuals for all of they've given to our students and families over the last 20 years we look forward to many more it is almost moving day for the boardwalk campus this week marked an important milestone in our

011building project as moving boxes are beginning to get delivered to the schools and classrooms i'm sure there were some mixed emotions for our staff and those probably included excitement for the new school coupled with some sadness of saying goodbye to their current buildings and then certainly a realization that getting classrooms and offices packed and then unpacked requires a tremendous effort on the part of our staff the good news is that our building project continues to be on time and under budget and the school is taking shape quickly over the last few weeks and months we've conducted staff tours of the schools so they can better understand the spaces they will move into if anyone would like to learn more about the building project we certainly encourage uh people to visit our you know bi-weekly update

012page where people can see kind of the history of the construction taking place and activity on that project i also just want to end by thanking all of our staff and administration at douglas gates and our preschool for all of the planning and work that goes into making that move successful for students finally i want to thank the members of the acting and box proton meetings on behalf of the students staff and families thank you so much to those who attended the recent town meetings and acting in boxborough for their continued support in passing our budget i also want to recognize that while the budget was passed we also we did hear concerns from both communities about the sustainability of budget increases and the impact of increasing taxes on families especially when coupled with rising

013inflation this is certainly something we need to consider as we move through the next several years budget processes and cycles but i want to thank both communities for the continued support of our schools so thank you very much adam and i will turn it back thank you peter any questions for peter um could i just say one thing about project graduation the first time i volunteered to work on that i think my girls were in elementary school in junior high and it is just mind-blowing what how the high school gets transformed it's such an amazing event there was a casino there was a restaurant i mean it was it was amazing um so parents of seniors are not allowed to be there because no no kids want their parents at that all-night party um and

014it's shifts so you wouldn't have to stay the whole night i think um if anybody has any time even a couple hours to help to set that up and then to break it down the next day is an amazing amount of work and and then just to hang out that night is something that that they need so if anybody can can help out it would really really be appreciated thanks thanks june any other questions or comments i'll send my appreciation to those staff as well who completed their 20 years at the district personally i haven't lasted more than six years at any company so i don't know how 20 years happens all right moving on now to our first presentation of the evening which is the acceptance of the official abrsd mascot and with that

015peter i'll turn it back to you all right so thank you adam so you know i just want to you know take an opportunity there is a memo in your packet um as you remember from the last meeting uh we you know provided an update with regard to the school mascot and tonight we're going to talk a little bit more about that you are going to hear an opportunity to hear from some of our students and staff on a video that they created to be able to present to you and then hear from a couple of members of our subcommittee specifically to the mascot so you know without further ado i do want to introduce chris lynette as well as meg spring who have you know dutifully served on the mascot subcommittee they're here to

016speak with you tonight but i think they want to kick it off by showing you a brief video of some students one of the reasons i want to be on the mascot working group is because i've gone to all the act boxer schools elementary school junior high all the way up to the high school and you know being here for so long i really wanted to leave a lasting impact on the community and the school district here and you know really be a part of something bigger after all the school is done for me um i think the process definitely took a lot of work and you know there were definitely times where you know we were kind of stand still but i think those times were you know some of our most productive we

017really worked through things and um you know it we we looked at all the options everything really narrowed it down and i think you know ever you know everyone was part of it and i think that's really important and i've lived in acton for nearly a decade one of the reasons that i wanted to be on this committee was because my own high school and college each recently changed their mascots as well and i wanted to make sure that we chose something unconventional i brought a minor league baseball team name aesthetic to the proceedings revolution was not my top choice but i think the fact that my personal preference didn't win speaks to how very student-centric the process was one thing one valuable lesson that i've learned as an educator is that as adults we

018have to be willing to lose on some things to our students we don't compromise on the quality of their education or the health and safety of our community but can we let kids move on from a problematic mascot and choose one that's new and feels more representative of who we are and who we want to be i think so my high school and college alma maters are no worse for the wear for being bears and mammoths now and i think we'll be okay too go a b just wanted to say it was a joy to watch these young students work towards a new mascot i watched them take a charge from the school committee discuss their values they wanted represented in a new mascot collected data and used that data to name the new mascot

019they were incredibly thoughtful throughout the process they spent many hours meeting and discussing the pros and cons they listened to feedback that the subcommittee provided they questioned themselves they had difficult conversations and made an incredible decision watching this process take place this year has been an honor and i will be proud to call the school the revolution um the process of selection was completed through a series of meetings throughout the year where we all got together and were able to discuss our opinions and come up with ideas on how we should continue on selecting a new mascot and it was really nice to get together and just hear different opinions and express your own opinions the interaction with a b community was very helpful throughout this process because we were able to you know look

020at people's ideas and understand their opinions and take it into consideration when selecting a new mascot and i think it's really important for the community to have a say on what our new mascot was going to be which was very helpful bye i have to admit i was a little bit sad and nostalgic when i found out that the colonials mascot was going to be retired i have a lot of great memories from being a colonial and i thought when we moved back to acton my daughter would be one too but i recognize colonials doesn't have a positive connotation for everyone and i wanted to be on the mascot committee so i could honor the past and look forward to the future this experience has been a little bit of a microcosm of democracy there

021are a lot of ideas a lot of big feelings and a lot of hard work especially on the part of the students but we came together and out of many came one and that is the revolution and i couldn't be prouder of everybody's hard work and i can't wait for my daughter to be part of the eb revolution go revs as somebody who had tremendous pride in their high school and college sports teams i was a college coach in track and field i know how important it is to kind of feel that camaraderie and that atmosphere that you get that comes from having spirit around your mascot so i was really excited for the opportunity to actually be involved in a very unique process of being able to select a school's mascot to be now

022from now till to who knows how long maybe hundreds of years so that was my motivation knowing how much i loved being part of sports teams and being involved in athletics and the camaraderie and atmosphere that was created when i was a college athlete and high school athlete what a great opportunity it was to have to be able to do this with av and the students here and to guide them in their exploration of something that brings some great pride to be honest in the fall and being new i didn't really know what to expect 15 students and eight staff members got together every week from november through april to try to determine what our new mascot would be we came to the table discussed complex ideas different perspectives and what a mascot would mean

023to this community i can only describe the entire process as inspirational in particular the students were able to coalesce together around one mascot the revolution positive change honoring our past present and future difference makers innovators barrier breakers i couldn't be more proud of the students congratulations go a b revs i decided to join this committee because on a daily basis i hear a lot of different opinions about art mascot and how it should be changed i also have a lot of opinions myself i have a lot of opinions on the process um i believe that our community should have a big say in how our good and how our mascot should be changed because our community cares it's a community it's a community icon and i was very proud of our community our committee that

024we decided to make sure that the community had a voice i thought we made a good effort to make it a fair voice a fair amount of of input to our to our decision so um thank you guys thank you thank you community and i'm proud of our committee and the process that we made i wanted to be in the mascot committee because i wanted to be a voice for international students immigrated students and non-native english speakers at ab i think it's not about the original intention of the old mass god it's about the impact it had towards members of our community this is so important to me because i care about working to make everyone feel welcome and included community input was so crucial to making this change however at the end of the

025day it was about picking a mascot that represents acton foxborough's progressive students to me being the revolution means we are united strong change makers and leaders thank you to everyone who helped make this change [Applause] hi i'm chris lynette i was on the subcommittee i have two children in the acton-boxborough high school and the experience of being on this committee working with the students strictly in an advisory capacity was unbelievably heartwarming to see them come to each meeting every other week sometimes they look defeated and we would talk them through the process and they heard everything that we had to say and it wasn't so much on making a decision it was really guiding them through the process to make that decision and to see them do that and to see them use the data

026that they gathered the voices from the community to make this decision was really an incredibly proud moment especially when they came to us and they said this is what we decided we heard what you had to say and this is who we are and the fact that they came and they said we are a b revolution it was a very good moment it was a very proud moment and you could see it in their eyes when they were speaking to us about it and it was a very heart felt moment and one that i know i'm going to cherish and i was looking at some of my notes and the first meeting was december so and we've been meeting basically every other week since then helping these students and towards the end there i could

027you could see it on their faces that they were they had long days long days of not just being in this in their committee they're incredibly involved students so they had that stuff on top of school on top of work and they were still so dedicated to the process and what they found it was a truly remarkable experience good evening my name is meg spring i'm the low talker on the video i'm a 1994 graduate of acton-boxborough high school i loved my high school days and i loved being part of that community i was vice president of the student council the national honor society and co-captain of the varsity football and hockey cheerleaders and i also did the musical so i was involved in everything during the high school period and i have to admit

028that when i first heard that um the colonials mascot was going to be changed i felt sort of nostalgic and sad but i recognize that the term colonial has a different connotation than it had in 1994 and so i decided to join the committee because i wanted to be part of the process to see if we could bring the community together and i didn't know what to expect and i cannot even articulate how amazing the students were and how proud of their work i am um i'm a mom of an eighth grader my daughter lizzie's in eighth grade at um r.j gray so i don't want to get all mom on you but these students um the hard work the passion they put into it the fact that they took it so seriously and the

029fact that they really wanted to bring the entire community along so with respect to the data that brought them to the revolution there were surveys they took the data they crunched the data they spoke about it they brought it back to us we had conversations about concerns we might had we had questions about how they were doing it they answered all of those questions and they brought it back so i don't know if you could hear on the video but i said the whole process was sort of a microposium of democracy itself because there were a lot of ideas there was a lot of passion there were a lot of people who had a lot of different opinions and over the course of time due to the students hard work and the scientific mechanism by

030which they brought along with them out of many came one and revolution was what we came up with and i think it could not um better articulate where our community has been and where we're going so it honors our history and it's inclusive and i am excited for my daughter to be a revolution and i really appreciate your time um for listening to us and talking to us about our process so thank you so you know again you know i want to recognize you know both of you thank you so much chris thank you so much meg um i know you know for all the other committee members and they're in the memo um there was a lot of time put in by various committee members um i also just want to recognize you know

031we have a few of the students here tonight so thank you so much for coming but i you know want to thank all of the students and staff who were involved in this process um i think you know from everyone who i've talked to from an adult perspective who was part of that student meeting they were just you know really in awe of the work that our high school students did to lift this process and carry it through so incredible thank you i know it was also tough because i know you know just like we understand i know you also recognized that there was a significant part of this community that did not want to give up the colonial and i know you saw it in your survey data you saw it come in you

032saw it come in consistently we've seen the same thing i think we all we all know that and i think you know it's important to recognize and that you know from our student perspective you know really coming out of the the discussions we had as a school committee you know or you add as a school committee and me as a superintendent really it was about you know moving forward and selecting the next mascot um and so you know i think students you know you did a good job recognizing kind of where the community was and i think that was a factor that played into how you ultimately chose to move forward and trying to choose something that could honor both the past and the present and future as meg said um you know i think

033you know i just want to say you know this is a tough road for a lot of members of our community um and it's been a long road for them you know that is hard you know and i want to recognize that and in moving forward i think the number one thing you know from an administrative standpoint we've all said and i know i've talked to you know the principal athletic director other administrators in the district and i think the subcommittee felt the same way in a lot of our students this was not about getting rid of the period of time where abe was the colonials we can still celebrate that period of time and we can recognize it and all the great things that happened in our community during that time but i think

034you know the recommendation moving forward is now about looking to the future and how are our students going to be represented and what will happen next in our schools and i think you know just recognizing that tension i think is an important part of this process and it needs to be said um because you know i i think you know what we've heard from our community is there was a feeling that parts of the community didn't have the voice that they wanted to have we have to recognize that and be able to name it in order to you know at least from my standpoint making that final recommendation forward from our subcommittee it was something that we talked about and we just don't want to lose sight of that even as we you know make

035the recommendation to move forward so you know with that i'll turn it over to you um but we are formally recommending um that we become the acton-boxborough revolution or a b revolution and again the uh description that our students wanted to you know make sure was front and center was the fight for positive change and equity never ends it's the voice of the people a revolution it acknowledges our past but speaks to our future we are innovators barrier breakers and difference makers a revolution represents a show of ingenious strength challenging outsmarting and overwhelming the status quo thanks peter thanks megan chris uh all right at this point i am going to take things a little out of order i'd like to give the public one more time to have their chance to comment on this

036and then go around the table and have the committee discuss and see if they want to take the vote so i would like to ask that the public does rep refrain from any audible recognition of support or otherwise during the public comment period our goal is to give everyone an opportunity to make a statement and as such public comment for this agenda item is going to be limited to 90 seconds with that'll invite members of the public to come up hi i'm korean hog seth an indian village now we know this was never a student-led initiative alumni started the absence group and wrote the petition to get rid of the colonial then worked with the progressive staff members to force the issue into classrooms we've heard from at least a couple ab said that at

037least a couple numbers of absence were controlled by peter into presenting the petition being told to just do the presentation and the school committee will take care of the rest we have heard and read accounts of bullying not only among students but by teachers against students who supported keeping the colonial the district's naming policy ff states the community believes it should not be influenced in its decision by personal prejudice favoritism political pressure or temporary popularity your entire handling of this episode shows that it was all about your personal prejudices two of you have already been caught violating the district's technology policy and in doing so violated open meeting law your texts prove that you are heavily biased towards one outcome your open and enthusiastic support for representative gouveia who has pushed legislation regarding offensive mascots

038suggests you brought your own politics to the table as well one of you violated conflict of interest law by not disclosing your relationship with one of the absence petitioners and a few of you are still subject to ongoing records requests by my account this administration and this committee have lied to the community manipulated kids violated two state laws and three district policies this is more corrupt than the events that led to the railroading the pre of the previous superintendent out of town you don't care because the end of ends justify the means um three of the four people that actually hoped to keep that vote going in october are gone unfortunately but i hope the one that remains has the courage to admit he was wrong and vote to not change the name of the

039mascot christine casebolt boxborough at boxborough's annual town meeting last week our select board presented a slide entitled fiduciary responsibility duty the first bulleted item said people with fiduciary duty must act in a way that will benefit someone else the second bulleted item read members of boards and committees appointed and elected have an ethical and legal obligation to put the town's interests ahead of their own personal interests speaking for myself and others with whom i've discussed this we have difficulty understanding how it's all possible to reconcile retirement of the colonial in favor of the revolution while upholding your fiduciary duty to our towns christine marlowe boxborough we believe that the process was illegitimate and caused great division anger and hatred throughout this our towns and at a level that has never been seen before you can't

040take away or erase the true heroes of this town the ones who fought and died on april 1970 75 1775 which is what the colonials were named after you said that the cost is going to be net zero however we know that you have spent at least around 20 grand in legal fees preventing us from getting the um uh texts and emails that you sent to each other and we're missing three months of legal fee bills and we still haven't received everything that the secretary of state said you should be sending to us what are you trying to hide and and i really i have to say the process was so flawed if you really wanted to know what our community want you should have given us all an opportunity you started this in 2020

041the fall of 2020 when half we weren't even in school full-time and people were struggling with death illness and their financial situation um so i say to you please stop saying that the colonials are worth something to you because you really showed that they are not thank you alyssa nicole acton i want to thank once again all those who made it possible for this district to retire a problematic mascot and adopt a new one that more inclusively represents our past present and future i also want to offer a reminder of why we went through this process i read from emails sent to the school committee in the fall of 2020 from one of our faculty not a small percentage of students expressed they do not want a mascot that simplifies and possibly glorifies a complicated

042portion of our history while i do not think student voices should always be a determining factor the mascot is for them meant to be a symbol around which the students can form community and bond from three siblings alums of 2015 2020 and a current student my grandfather fled his birthplace of ludiana for newly created pakistan when one of these arbitrary borders bisected the muslim community and violence and mass immigration migration ensued a mascot that does not trivialize the violence against our asian american black american and indigenous american classmates and community members is the bare minimum in creating a more inclusive act in box borough from a student now a senior i am a proud native american the colonial regardless of intent embodies the era in which my people were systematically killed tortured and erased from

043the history of our nation it is offensive and incredibly insensitive to place this symbol of white oppression on a pedestal for students thank you all thank you hi jennifer campbell boxborough one thing i find really strange about this is that the um argument to uh honor our history by using the word colonial when the people who fought in the revolution were literally fighting against being colonized so i feel like revolution is a much better name for honoring those people but most importantly we have a very diverse population and some of whom have come from or have family have come from nations that are dealing with their very complex and difficult history of colonization and we need to put their needs before any issues that we have about our past and and what that means to

044us um this change will really respect our current population and their concerns and i'm grateful that we've found a way that we can move forward but also recognize our history thank you thank you hi nijaan dattar windcliff drive we just finished a town meeting in acton where an unheard of 40 thought that the school budget is unbalanced and needed to be amended though the amendment failed i hope you recognize that the fiscal situation is not stable if the experience of other towns is to be believed we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this change this is not petty cash level of spending and the budget should have had its own line item but you did not want sunlight directed at the true cost of this change throughout the country schools have

045diverted their attention from educational basics and gone into unnecessary political and ideological waters as a result public school enrollment has plummeted nationwide with parents opting for various forms of alternative schooling we here have lost 472 students since regionalization and perhaps we'll lose more when this year's numbers come in but let's put all that aside and just look at the fiscal situation and recognize that this expenditure should be put on hold until you have a true grasp of the total cost of this name change we cannot afford an expensive override next year and given that monday's amendment did not attract two-thirds to oppose it the town may not even vote for an override then the cuts will have to be much larger i hope calmer heads can prevail and a pause instituted for mainly fiscal reasons

046as you really cannot afford it as proven by the need that you're dipping into free cash for 1.5 million please delay this name change until the fiscal situation is under control minimizing layoffs and maintaining educational priorities is more important than changing the name of the mascot right now thank you stellaco gustwood road acton i just want to say thank you again to the school committee and to all the students who worked on the mascot issue and [Music] really appreciate that they were good listeners and i hope that we as the adults learn from our students thanks thank you jim carrey gustwood road um in preparing for the town meeting this week i actually looked up the ab high school diversity and i was astonished that the population that i went to school with is now

047only 51 of the total population of the school i think that's actually a testament to the work that's going on here and at other places to improve our inclusion and this is just another step in that direction i applaud that activity i want to see more of it i think it's a reason to live here in acton and thank you very much hi good evening martin benson 21 deacon hunt drive um first revolutions often incur extraordinary loss of life property opportunity and culture this name promotes the false implication that all revolutions bring about positive social change however revolutions in other areas of the world have it all led to the progressive outcomes which are experienced here in massachusetts perhaps more time is needed to explore this concern secondly there are ethical issues which need to

048be addressed before a vote occurs this evening miss wilson cook miss christa murphy and miss mckinley have all admitted in a written oml response to exchanging text messages with each one another during the october 15 2020 meeting to retire the colonial mascot these text messages are public records these individuals have disregarded multiple orders from the secretary of state's office to release these records in accordance with the public records law as this legal matter is still ongoing they should recuse themselves from the vote this evening third another member has a family relationship with an individual who is active in the colonial mascot retirement movement it would be ethical for her to recuse herself to avoid a conflict of interest lastly superintendent light your behavior throughout the entire colonial mascot retirement has been shameful process matters and

049by disregarding it you have divided a town for a generation while erasing its cherished history which was evident which was evident in acton's cancellation of patriots day this past year you have blatantly disregarded the public records law and have been untruthful to the secretary of state's office on through separate occasions your own emails acknowledged that you publicly blamed the colonial mascot supporters of the zoom bombing as revenge for the records request which submits which were submitted when you were asked publicly at a meeting when the records would be produced good evening madeleine cruz acton as a woman of color who is equally represented not only by africa but also by europe and the caribbean i am proud to say that i support the revolution i say that it's time for change and i am so

050proud of our town because on tuesday night acton voted to support the flag in the seal of massachusetts to be changed and for all of you who are against the mascot being changed you should be ashamed of yourself and you should educate yourselves a little bit more the only thing the colonials did was fight off the british otherwise than that they committed massive murders they raped and they stole land and that as a person who's equally representative by all these races and ethnicities i can say that if i can acknowledge what one side of me was affected by i can also acknowledge that the colonials did a lot of damage and it's time to put it to rest we need to equally be represented by a mascot and as having a mother who has three

051children and one is privileged and to or not i am proud to continue raising my children in a community that can stand up to bigotry and that can stand up to the racism thank you thank you all right thank you to all the members of the public who came to comment on that at this point we'll turn back to the committee and i'm happy to hear comments from the committee evelyn thank you adam i wanted to start by thanking the mascot committee and all the students that participated in this process for all the time you've invested in it and if in case people were wondering who that family member was who had a family member on that mosque on upstairs is me i am evelyn abaya issa my daughter kabura issa is sweet upset when

052i sit here i represent myself and the town of boxborough i do not represent my family here and i do my job as i prescribed but i have to say that i have two girls who played hockey and they were the master the the colonial up until a few weeks ago i actually have the colonial sign on my mantle my daughter son was number 14 on the team signed in her locker room is on my mantel this is not to cancel the colonials and pretend that it did not exist this is to move us towards a place of inclusivity and equity and equality for all and i hope that the issues that this school committee this school district is experiencing like equity for kids of color we the the energy with which we're putting in

053this mother if we put it on all school committee matters and school issues we will move this school district forward we sat here and listened to a mascot presentation and when data was being presented a black and brown kids are failing in this school district everybody got up and walked away black and brown kids are failing they're not doing well in this district people got up and walked away you cannot care about one thing and leave another thing black and brown people are human beings in this district we belong here and this is not about any white supremacy white privilege if you don't see what you want yeah you can stand up at the mic and accuse people and lie but when things are not going right you cannot come up to the mic and

054say superintendent light tell me why black and brown kids are failing in this district why are they constantly behind nobody has asked that question i've been on the school committee two years nobody has looked at that packet and said why don't we have black teachers why don't we have black counselors in this district why are the black babies in this school district so disproportionately and disadvantaged why are they suffering why why i had a mom call me yesterday crying about her kid and how the kid is being treated in high school and how the kid is not being supported nobody has come to this mic to ask about that statistics show that black kids have a higher incident of suicide than any kid kids of any races in this country you're feeling the black and

055brown kiss in this district and the passion with which you put on this mascot i hope that you will put it in the people in the community that you see in the grocery stores that you walk your kids play with that your kids driveway that you say hi to thank you ben thank you mr chairman i'd like to take a moment to thank my fellow members of the mascot renaming subcommittee for their work during the last few months in particular i want to recognize our three student members tara ryan and will for their steady leadership throughout the process thank you guys as student leaders these three young adults navigated seamlessly both the subcommittee and the and working with the ab school body excuse me student body for whom they represent as a whole their thoughtful

056hard work and consistent attention to detail while working with the student working group should be lauded furthermore i'd like to reiterate this process was driven and led by these dynamic young leaders who conducted themselves with professionalism grace and dignity especially when emotions dr uh when emotions were driving charged responses from a group of individuals from within our community we as adults can learn a lot from these brave students in closing i'm grateful for the work that this subcommittee has engaged in let's support the naming of the acton-boxborough mascot as the acton-boxborough revolution let's go revs thank you ben yevin thank you so first of all i will i will express my gratitude to all the uh the work has been done by our student group and the screening committee and also the summer committee i

057mean i i would have a full face in the due process i mean to to come up with new mascot so by looking at the language we developed as a fight for the positive changes and equity and so on that's i say this is a wonderful language and but but i was uh when it's it's hard for me to make connection between this word and the revolution so i always say these words are positive side of the revolution but this revolution has a negative side there's a dead dark side okay i totally just i'd like to share my personal perspective so forgive me i'm not a native speaker so i have to check dictionary to understand what revolution means to the native speaker okay so let me bring up the definition i checked the wikipedia

058and also the dictionary i just make some examples so what is a revolution by dictionary.com first so it has six meanings one an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political systems by the people governed number two radical and the pervasive change in society and the social structure especially one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence third a certain complete and marked change in something force is a related mechanics revolution okay rotation so i guess that's a nothing it's a neutral so i just wanted to i'm just looking into this uh so wikipedia expressed a similar i would say there's a social i mean there's a bunch of things i mean so let me give you some example right so when when i read the revolution what's going to my

059top of my head is american revolution world great that's actually i totally will see you guys actually it's uh it's our past and also it's a uh it's connecting the future also so that's a great but on the other hand that i mean like french revolution great russian revolution 1917 right so question mark chinese revolution in 1940s probably not chinese cultural revolution of 1960s and 70s but it eradicates totally chinese traditional culture and make millions people die so that's also on top of my head is industrial revolution first generation second generation third generation we are in the first generation those are great so technic also the movie matrix revolution great movie all right so so i mean so those are kind of my top top of my head i mean so it could be a

060bad thing also it's not also always we can't just paint the revolution uh [Music] so rosy and always thinking about the positive side but this could be called bad consequences you know in in 1950 or 70 80 whatever if it's anti-revolution you you got a death penalty in china so totally it's my just personal perspective okay i just wanna with that all those being said uh last one there is no doubt uh in the deep of my heart our students have the freedom to pick what they want but it's it necessary to choose such a provocative turn i'm not so sure okay thank you thank you evan anybody andrew then amy thanks adam and then thank you again folks you know earlier tonight someone mentioned april 19 1775 and that that was the day that

061the shot heard round the world was made and on that day brave folks from acton stood up on that day with that shot the revolution was begun on that day with that shot those colonials threw off their rulers on that day with that shot those colonials became americans this this came from students they made a change they brought this to life they stood up for their beliefs they looked to us at our community and now better than anyone understand who we are how we are what we were and how we can become more they came together for hours for days dozens of pizzas and focused our community's core personality attributes ideas and aspirations into a single solid concept change is hard it means recognizing not just where you're from but where you want to go

062it means moving forward it means standing for growth even when some don't want to grow improves your character as you bring something new to the world as you take every day thereafter to make that which was new into that which is normal you know that's hard this is not just a name it's what we do we spark change we create a new way to look at our community we created a revolution i want to thank the students the subcommittee superintendent and everyone in the community who will be able to show how strong we have been how strong we will be this is a revolution acton-boxborough revolution i think you guys have done a fantastic job coming together around this and i want to thank you for it thanks um i i wanted to kind of

063address what you said yeben i you know this was not my choice i i when i saw the options i i didn't vote for revolution i sat in i didn't sit in i zoomed in on the last meeting of the mascot well i the one when they kind of announced the name the revolution i was so blown away by these kids and what they the energy and the positivity and the just the the way that they they really put themselves out there to make a choice like this and i know a couple of you from when you were teeny tiny little kids i'm i'm so impressed i'm so pressed i'm so proud i'm so proud to be part of this community i understand change is hard i understand there's still going to be people who

064believe you know lies and conspiracies and you know what you can say no it's not true but you know it doesn't matter thank you so much thank you so much for being willing to step up and take this huge challenge on i really i am just in awe of your bravery and your dedication and i mean the time i know i know how busy i've got you know three going through this there there is no time to breathe and i wanted to say peter thank you so much you have led this committee and this community and this district through some very difficult times with a tremendous amount of balance and understanding and caring and honesty and really true dedication and i really i want you to know i i not only appreciate it i am

065proud that you are here and thank you thank you amy i'll go next so first of all i i want to reiterate what i said last week it's clear that colonials alumni feel great pride in the colonials mascot and they can should and will always be colonials but it is time to move forward as a community and i hope that everyone will join us in supporting the revolution and as we move forward with this we will continue to find opportunities to both recognize our past and celebrate our future and you know i in reflecting on what was presented to us tonight there were a couple couple words that just kept coming up and i wanted to to share those with you what i heard over and over again from everybody i heard the word community

066i heard the word voice i heard the word honor i heard process student led pride and most importantly i heard revolution and so i am fully in support of this and i thank everyone who participated in the committee to come up with that i am so grateful for the time and the care that you've given to this your love and action for your fellow students and for you the alums the adults who have led this you have done so much you have endured so much along with us so i want to start this by saying thank you for that so on april 19 a multi-racial group of acton-minutemen marched into dawn to answer an urgent call to liberate themselves from their status as colonial subjects of a far-off monarch and to embark upon a revolutionary

067path that ultimately led to the formation of a new independent sovereign nation in the cold and in the dark in the face of bullet volley unto death they fought for what we take for granted 247 years later the opportunity to create our own future we are blessed to see our community change morph and grow our students have been given the extraordinary gift to feel grounded in our community's history and to use that foundation to reach to risk and to realize their destinies two years of this conversation this personal visceral conversation confirms that the restless spirit that was present here centuries ago still lingers and it presents us with a tension that this town has so often needed to confront a tension between the push for change and evolution on one hand versus the pull of

068traditions and long time norms on the other a tension between two forces that must both be respected we've received many emails from a b alum who have told us with their full throats that they will forever be colonials i honor that and to those of you who have told us that my reply is i is this which is and i offer this earnesty and it is this i am not asking you to change by all means retain that identity for yourselves if you so choose but we also received many requests to change the mascot and i honor that too with my vote today and i will be voting today i affirm the current students of ab i tell them that they too have a voice and a place in the story of acton and boxborough

069i serve to affirm this student body this diverse student body this restless able impressive student body and if a future generation of students chooses to change the mascot again i hope that today's students tomorrow's alum will affirm that choice too i hope that when the emotions calm as time goes on our collective restless spirit will take on a bit of the grace i tried to keep in this transition i accepted angie's show's friendly amendment to re recognize the bravery of acton's minutemen i applauded and accepted adam's suggestion of recognizing the positive attributes of our town's history in our students let there now be grace to allow our students to take on this new identity of revolution to make it their own and to share it with our greater community grace to welcome our current student

070body into the long history of our towns and their school grace to hear their voices and make space for their contributions grace for them to feel grounded in our support as they reach as they risk and as they realize who they are destined to become thank you very much kyra with that i'll ask is there a motion to accept the acton-boxborough revolution as the new mascot of the ab regional schools so moved second thank you all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed any abstentions one abstention thank you very much we are on to our next order of business as we switch over i'll again thank the naming subcommittee for their diligent work on this and i'm very pleased that we can move forward with this process oh yes so we are going

071to take out like a three-minute break since we've got to switch over to an amazing cadre of elementary principles cadre is that not the right word dana's giving me a frown presenters please say the kira the writer six right dana cadre is a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession you frowned at you were looking for me incredible that should be fun all right i'm going to try and regain control of the evening so we can move on if it weren't clear i lost control a long time ago but i am glad to welcome our elementary school principals for an update peter would you like to give an intro sure um i am so pleased uh i'll let the elementary principals introduce themselves um but i'm just thrilled with the

072work this group has been doing together this year uh we gave them a choice um this year of how they wanted to present whether they wanted to do kind of individual school presentations or whether they wanted to just come and present as a group um they've been working together all year on a variety of initiatives and so they decided they wanted to present as a group it doesn't mean that they don't all have very individual and unique schools that have you know their own cultures their traditions things like that that they work on every day as a huge part of their work and they'll share a little bit about that throughout the presentation um but they also wanted to be able to come and talk to you as a group about some of the work

073that they are doing across schools um since we have an opportunity to embarrass one of the members lynn why do you think i'm going to talk about you i do want to just take an opportunity and recognize and thank lynn newman who is retiring at the end of this year as the gate school principal [Applause] and congratulate her not only on her retirement but something even far far far more important the upcoming wedding in her family yeah and lynn as i always know you like to go shopping today i think you took it a little too far going shopping today and instead of going out and buying her something really nice she came back with a cast yeah so you know lynn is also presenting as being injured in the line of duty walking across

074a parking lot um so lynn thank you so much for the dedication in all seriousness for everything you've done for the district over the years thank you so much you are a stable voice you are thoughtful you you know just run this incredible school and we are all going to miss you very very much so thank you thank you thank you peter um it is with very mixed emotions i'm not going to lie i've been at gates for 14 years and it has changed it's grown and it is truly a very special community and i think what brings me the greatest joy is that we've always considered ourselves to be a family and i know that that's important to all of the families that go to gates so and working here in acton with peter

075with marie with with all the team my amazing colleagues it's been truly an honor to be here so i'm excited for my next steps but i always will look back very proudly to have been the gates principal so thank you well good evening i'm going to start i'm dana lab i'm the principal of blanchard and as we introduce slides we will introduce ourselves we wanted to start out this evening by sharing that we we felt like this is a first for me in terms of coming together for a school improvement plan together as a team and we felt like we wanted to do this together because we wanted to highlight the work in in that we've been doing together all year and so we really appreciate the autonomy that we all get in our individual

076schools but we also understand that we need to come together on some goals and so we've spent a lot of time together talking about the district and strategic objectives engaged learning inclusive practices and equitable outcomes and so tonight we want to share some of the specific strategic initiatives in where we started and then we want to highlight a few things that each of our building that we've been doing with our hard-working staff and then we want to close the night with talking about where we're at now and what our aspirations are so that's where we'll begin so i wanted to highlight the first strategic initiative which is 3.1 which talks about mtss prior to this year schools were in very different places with mtss different phases throughout and we've had opportunities since coming together in

077august to talk about shared goals in ways that we can expand our conversations we can visit each other and have observations around tiered instruction principals developed large instructional leadership teams that they're building to talk about data in roles and responsibilities and to include more leadership schools structured schedules to include wind blocks and tiered instructional blocks at all levels and provide opportunities for instructional meetings using norms and protocols we've done peer observations we've met together in small groups and breakout groups and tonight we want to share with you unique highlights that reflect some of these district goals so the strategic objective for inclusive practices ensure that all students staff and families feel welcome and included by strengthening school culture and climate and intentionally culturally responsive instructional practices and materials the inclusive practices that have emerged as

078important school improvement goals for all of our elementary schools and what as as dana has mentioned what makes them unique are action steps the steps that we decide to go forward with that will allow us to achieve these goals so and with those actions takes a lot of cohesiveness with your staff and to take actions that sometimes are not very popular but at the same time we know that they're in the best interest of our students good evening i'm julianna schneider the principal of miriam school it's an honor to be here this evening together and to present to all of you i will just speak briefly about the strategic initiative around social and emotional learning um this school year it's hard to believe we came back together after nearly a third of our students had

079actually not stepped foot in the building for almost a year and a half and so we came into this year anticipating the need of building warm and welcoming communities recognizing that students would have lagging skills in areas that would have typically developed around their ability to interact with one another to regulate all sorts of the um social emotional learning that happens in the classroom and we knew that the connections that were established between children as well as between adults and children were going to be incredibly important and that taking the time to do that in our schools in our classrooms with our kindergartners our sixth graders our adult communities was the investment that we all needed to make and so that was a commitment that we made across all of our buildings we also each

080use elements of different curriculum including responsive classroom open circle social thinking and really came in with a tool box um teachers who are trauma informed as well and like many things there's variability within buildings and across buildings and so that's been something that we have examined throughout this year and worked together to think about how to meet the needs of our students that we actually anticipated and some that we didn't anticipate and so a lot of our energy this year has been in um responding on the ground but also thinking forward for the future which christie will speak to at the end so a couple of things that we're really proud of at blanchard i'll try to speak quickly some of it focused around culturally responsive practices in dei um three highlights that we had

081this year was mr vado mike vado who's our ap he and i worked together with the librarian the reading specialist and the literacy coach to figure out ways that we could refresh classroom libraries including more graphic novels in picture and chapter books we spent twelve thousand dollars out of our school budget to give each educator including special educators and specialists 500 each in order to refresh those classrooms and we got input from families as well who provided a lot of information we also embarked on teacher dei drop-in sessions on wednesdays when we had some free ones available and i think we're most proud of the dei family advisory that we put together with over 20 families participating as a great representation of our school population we've had three sessions and that work has helped support

082our anti-racist action plan we do problems of practice and really help each other out as a community and we're working towards active ways that we can include voice student voice at our school in decisions that we make the other big highlight too is around our building-based professional learning we try to provide a robust offering to all the educators so in k-2 we had melissa orkin which came in and did a lot of work with us in a workshop series around how to plan instructions and use evidence-based routines to help support our science of reading gail walsh who was retiring this year as our school counselor and she took a third of the staff to work on sel practices and they discussed a lot of strategies together and looked at trends and really worked hard to

083develop tiered instruction for our mtss in terms of seo and behavior and figure out ways that we she could change her schedule to help support all the tiers in sel and then finally mr vado and i worked on some plc work with our the other third of our staff around how to really support our instructional meetings with our staff at the grade level but also how we could support each other as a larger instructional team we used a lot of the work out of the um the leadership leadership academy thank you in terms of how we were going to move from a collegial building which we are to more of an accountable and so how we could come up with norms and protocols to really support each other and be really efficient in how not

084only we work together but really get to the basis of what's best for students and the data that we're looking at in order to inform our instructions so we were really proud of that good evening thank you for having us tonight i'm val granzowitz the new principal at conant what i first want to share with folks some of the work that we've been doing at conant are the concrete steps we've taken to grow our culturally responsive practice foundational to culturally responsive practice is really explicitly creating space to respect and value all that children bring with them into their classrooms all aspects of their identities this could be identifying windows and mirrors sliding glass doors and curriculum in literature for us this year what we did is for each child in each classroom they created an

085identity web a snapshot of how they see themselves right now in this moment that web will travel with them as they progress through the grades and hoping that um eventually they'll be able to look back and reflect on the evolution of their identity sort of how they saw themselves and how those pieces evolved over time we also had an opportunity to invite dr kim parker to our school for some professional learning dr parker's expertise lies in the intersection of literacy development and cultural responsive practice we invited author karen parsons of the sweet blackberry foundation to come read to all seven of our grade levels after those read-alouds she was able to visit individual classrooms we had teacher teams develop lesson activities that were based on the themes in the book that connected to wherever they

086were in the curriculum for example bessie coleman who's the first african-american and indigenous woman to earn a pilot's license they did a connected activity on force in motion in airplanes another highlight that i'd like to share is some of the successes that we are seeing in building out our mtss and coaching practice at conant our kindergarten team has engaged in some ongoing coaching with our literacy coach supported by our reading specialist this team has utilized data from our early bird and dibble screeners first to expand and grow our tier one instruction in phonemic awareness really targeted if there's 73 of the class who needs more support with deletion explicitly we're growing that instruction in that area and also to develop targeted group instruction for those skills at a tier 2 level with the progress monitoring

087tools from hegerty we're seeing great growth after that targeted instruction in tier two and several students many students the majority at this point no longer require that tier two instruction so for folks who are really um engaged in those early literacy skills and how critical the pa skills are this is really wonderful progress to see in the kindergarten level so really excited to share that thank you hi i'm lucia sullivan i'm the interim principal at douglas and i wanted to talk a little bit about our work creating a multi-tiered system of support at douglas this year because that was really one of our primary foci so we did focus on social emotional learning and diversity equity and inclusion but this feels like it is the thing that has come to the most completion at this

088point in the school year so we were able to as as all my colleagues did develop a school-based leadership team we visited blanchard and looked at their model and sent over teams of teachers and other folks to have a look we created schedules as did my colleagues with intervention blocks and really helped the new coaches and specialists find their footing in terms of what their role was in the school and the way that they could be helpful as we're looking forward to the second half you know as we've begun the second half of the year and looking forward it's really heartening to see now teachers are having regular data meetings the teachers the specialists the coaches they're planning together they're planning interventions the work that people were asking about in the beginning of the year

089because they didn't understand is now becoming part of the culture of the practice the way things are done it was really heartened to hear that one of the teachers was at town meetings speaking about it and that was a surprise but wonderful and the leadership team has been planning professional learning to support that work so we've we've worked on a distributive leadership model so that the teachers are doing uh like a summer book club they each got to pick books either focused on diversity and equity inclusion and justice or sel or mtss and all the things are really connected so we're going to be doing the work in all three areas but they're able to lean into the particular practices that they're most engaged in and then they'll be working with their colleagues to plan

090professional development that is teacher teacher developed and teacher grown and we're really seeing uh the learning growth is really measurable in terms of the impact so that's exciting and then just a couple other quick highlights just having everyone back and reestablishing community has really been heartwarming we were doing um identity work that was led by our art teacher lauren gould so similar to what they're doing at kona but different the children were making identity circles and that sort of culminated on wednesday with students sharing their identity circles with the whole school at a community meeting and then finally just really a focus on effective instruction and joy at school like helping kids reestablish routines and practices and predictable expected days and to feel really good about being at school and you know re-enter sort of

091more normal life so we're looking forward to more of that next year so this year what i'm going to be highlighting are some of the culturally responsive activities and events that we've had this year this year the gate school faculty our professional learning was guided to designing culturally responsive teaching practices we partnered with the conan school which was really awesome so we were able to bring the two communities together and so we have some similar activities the identity mapping was really a real highlight and to see that done with kindergarten through sixth grade they were really awesome you can go into the classroom look at their maps and the kids were just so proud to really explain you know who they were and so that activity in its own way they learn about themselves but

092then the students learn about their their their peers and so that really develops a nice respect and begin to see these are my friends these are who they are and to to gain that understanding we also did some recording so being able to pronounce somebody's name is extremely important and so we made that another initiative so we recorded the students recorded their their name and then we were able to put those into into a power school so when i call a family if there is a spelling or a name that i want to make sure you know we all the staff want to make sure that we're saying someone's name correctly so but i do know that at conant you guys have a a code right a qr code that they've done so that's something

093that sounds really exciting so we'll have to lean in on conan and see what that looks like so we've also are very committed to developing our classroom libraries and we've discovered that they really needed to be bolstered so we want to make sure that our that our libraries really are relevant and reflect the diversity of our students so that's something we've been working on and i would thank sharon ryan and doris sanchez for their help they did some r d work this summer we were able to import some of those books into our collection this spring we had we have book buddies like most of the schools do and our kindergarten second and fifth grade classes came together and they had a multi-cultural book buddy book tasting and so what they did is they were

094tasting books from different cultures our fifth graders were reading to our younger students and we were able to invite ab seniors to come that day because it was the senior community service day so a big cafeteria full of all these students past and present celebrating the books the students voted on the books they want and we're going to be buying those books for our new library at the in the new school and finally after a two-year hiatus because because of covid the pto was able to host our cultural showcase and i was really wondering would people come you know it was our first event and i i think i said to the custodian i don't think we're going to need all the tables well by golly we needed all the tables we were just full

095200 families you know all in there together so it was great and so when you have that event it started small but it's one of those activities that's grown so we ended up having a variety of performances we have the youngest to the oldest in fashion a fashion show walks across the stage and when you see a little kindergartner walking across let me tell you it's just too cute we had tables and booths so that everybody would be able to participate and it was really wonderful the students leading up to the event had created international art pieces and we were able to merge them into one piece of artwork which will be going to the new school so and in addition to those of course our flags that are in the cafeteria will also be

096coming with us to the new school and i can't help but but thank my staff for enduring two years of building construction holy mackerel mackerel um we're ready we're excited and we've been able to in our old school meetings include that building project with us so it's been a tremendous effort and the kids everybody's really been committed and with the eye and the price that we're going to be moving into a beautiful new school so thank you good evening i'm christy neal and i'm the principal at mccarthy town thank you for the opportunity to speak with you all i'm very proud to talk about some of the successes this year at mct the most important goal we had was reconnecting our community and i'd like to start by just thanking our ptso for their partnership

097with carrie lewis our parent coordinator they have done a tremendous job with ptso celebrations really bringing back our entire community into joyful events and in addition to that we've done some work with our staff and our students to make sure that during school we've reconnected the community as well the first piece we did with staff was to create vertical teams when i entered in september the staff really talked about that during covid they had become siloed into their own individual grade levels so building vertical teams that met regularly with different grade level teachers special educators related service providers created teams that got to know each other and share their own stories and share their experiences really built and connected the culture of staff we also did work with dr liza talusan who helped us gain

098tools and capacity to have courageous conversations in order to connect our families we also worked with our ptso to develop a dei subcommittee that group is going to have many purposes moving forward one important one is to look at all of our celebrations and our community events and our school-wide events to make sure they're matching some of our school-wide values and district-wide values to connect our students we brought back assemblies they were virtual this year we kept really hoping each month they would be in person and then being like not yet but the virtual assemblies are just a space where each grade level can share what they're learning we also brought back learning buddies which are a chance again to create some of that vertical alignment vertical community but this time with our students as

099always at mccarthy town we use art integration as the basis for our community and our learning and this year we really tried to articulate the social emotional learning that happens within art integration the problem solving the persistence the getting to know themselves as learners the next really important goal at mct was exploring our data culture as the foundation for mtss so knowing that we want to move into a more robust mtss system this year we really focused on how do the adults work together when we're looking at assessments so we built data norms and data protocols that help us unpack what are we looking at the big themes of the data what are we looking at with the small individual data for each student in our kindergarten and first grade teams piloted mixed groupings and

100interventions that's something that will grow for next year in our mtss system the last thing i just want to say is a huge thank you to my staff and our ptso and our families and our students it's been a challenging year and the third year of the sort of triad of challenging years and they've done tremendous work on all of these things and i am so so grateful to be part of that community so i will take this opportunity to highlight a couple of things that we are proud of that we have accomplished this year at merriam school and i'm actually going to start with the second one that is on the slide which is re-looping the school you may know that miriam is a looping school and we have always had kindergarten as a

101stand-alone grade and then first graders looped to second third to fourth and fifth to sixth staying with the same classroom cohort and teacher over two years because our school was so disrupted during the pandemic every loop was broken and so when we brought everybody back together it made sense to take the opportunity to change the loops so that k would loop to first grade second to third fourth to fifth and sixth would be stand alone which really follows the development of children early it supports early literacy in kindergarten in first grade and allows for sixth graders to build independence and even as content gets more heavy have some departmentalization so we started the first year of that this year it also allowed for an opportunity to really examine the curriculum resources we were using to

102teach content area so our teachers worked with doris sanchez and sharon ryan our curriculum coordinators to look at the books they were using to support curriculum and were able to get rid of quite a few books and we allocated a tremendous amount of money from our budget to purchase books an example would be in fourth grade we bought a lot of books to support indigenous people and the content and integrated that into a project so we reorganized our book room spaces and with looping there's a lot of organizational pieces so that work really came together and it will continue next year as teachers teach the second half of the loop we also in an effort to support mtss and the data culture and all of the work that we're doing across schools continue to build

103out our projects with our project-based learning model with the steam lens and really focused on access for every child a couple of examples that i would like to share um this year is we had fully integrated steam weeks for both fourth and fifth grade so over a five day period children were fully included in their classroom every child was fully included to go through a learning process in fifth grade to build lunar modules and in fourth grade to build kinetic sculptures and so there's a lot involved in that but it is it's an amazing learning opportunity it's fully based on standards and it's just really engaging for the children in addition to that we had our first solstice stroll it was hard to find ways to bring the community together this year with so many

104covid restrictions and our steam coach had been doing monthly steam challenges k-6 with children in our december challenge happened to be building lanterns and a beautiful organic opportunity to display those lanterns right before we left for vacation we served hot chocolate and it was just a really welcomed event for family embodied steam and community and really a wonderful community event that i'm highlighting among others so thank you so as we look forward to next year we are excited to continue working together on continuing to support and build multi-tiered systems of support to support social emotional learning and culturally responsive practices in regards to mtss we're continuing to support the coaches and specialists as they support the teachers to build capacity to use data-driven decision-making in their instruction and as a district we're working on a

105shared playbook that will support ongoing collaboration so that all leaders in the district can benefit from a collected sort of album of resources another goal that we will continue to work on for next year across all six elementary schools is the continued focus on sel we're excited to have the use of the panorama data to help us make groupings and make data-driven decisions about curriculum and resources that will drive all of the work across all six buildings andrew is also going to talk more about the sel plan and his presentation so i don't want to steal his thunder and just to share some plans around our progress toward growing our capacity as cultural responsive educators and next year i know you've heard this but each school will have a team of culturally responsive teacher leaders

106that will collaborate to really target the needs of each building and where the entry points are and what our work needs to be at each building we'll continue to collaborate with the curriculum department to identify natural opportunities to reimagine our curriculum juliana's example of the fourth grade unit the regions unit and thinking about that from an indigenous people's lens is a great example of that um we're also growing our body of seed leaders we currently have eight seed leaders district wide and we're growing that to 17 we have nine folks joining the seed new leaders week this summer so those are some examples of our crp future and this ends our presentation our collective presentation we'd like to thank all members of the school committee for your support detention and we're available for any questions

107you might have can i add one thing that i didn't say i just wanted to say as we look toward next year we expect to continue to close achievement gaps in our continued collaboration and ensure that every student and ap reaches or exceeds grade level expectations so before i asked adam if i could just jump in i intentionally didn't do this at the beginning because i wanted to really highlight lynn and thank her for her time but i also want to take an opportunity thank you juliana for all that you've given as you know juliana has accepted a position much much closer to home we're going to miss you tremendously i appreciate all that you've given to the team i appreciate your thought i really appreciate you know how you've had to navigate that tension

108between thinking about how to preserve the uniqueness of miriam and the special place that it is with also having to really think about how can we coordinate to you know for the benefit of all of our students district-wide so thank you so much for all you've done thank you peter and thank you to all of you my eight years here in acton-boxborough i feel like i could never have imagined the learning experiences that i have had the opportunity to engage with through my work with students my work with families um teachers and the community and i am forever grateful and feel prepared for anything and look forward to having an eight minute commute after i live in ipswich so it's it's bittersweet i will miss miriam tremendously it's a very special school and i hope

109that people advocate to keep what it is that is unique about um the culture in all of our schools because passionate teachers allow children to learn in the best environments and we have a lot of passionate teachers so thank you all thank you all right i want to keep an eye on the time it's 8 45 and we've not even gotten to our ongoing business so i'll ask those who ask questions to make them brief and i'll also ask those who answer questions to make them brief amy and then evelyn i just wanted to say i love this i love the presentation tonight i love the fact that you are all able to highlight your individualities as your schools and yet the the way that you lean on each other and you um have have

110shared your strengths and reached out to each other to just really make each of the schools even better than they are so thank you very much so i wanted to echo some of what amy said and say thank you for all the hard work you're doing i was listening to each one of you presented and i was hearing things like inclusive practices d and i val read my mind i was going to ask about how you're bridging the achievement gaps in each school but you know as an african they always say to us that there's no education you can get if you're not a better person so the foundational blocks that you're helping these kids build now they're going to take it up into element middle school into high school into colleges they'll be better

111people we have very intelligent people that are worse people in this world we don't want them you rather be you'll be so smart and be a good person you add value to life so thank you so much for taking care of everybody and building this inclusive environment so every kid in this district can thrive i just want to congratulate you because i've been on the school committee for this is the end of my fifth year and this is the first time i have ever ever ever heard an elementary presentation where you actually sounded like you were all part of the same district so i totally and completely appreciate the uniqueness of every school but this presentation highlighted that you can be unique and different and have your own way and still be reaching for the

112same goals in the same ways and so i think that bravo i'm going to backpack on tesla because i've been here for a while too and while i'm i'm so happy to see a consistency across what i was really happy to hear were words like data and success um and i know in particular in this year to have such success when we wanted so hard for things to be back to normal and they weren't and so i want to congratulate you and thank you for making the amazing progress that you did this year in what continues to be an extremely challenging environment so thank you for that any more questions from the committee comments devin thank you all for the hard work i guess i cannot imagine as a outsider of that education community i

113can imagine how much work is you guys have to done has to do to make this happen so i have a two kind of a small question why can't so if i remember correctly for the mtss we have a nine coach to support uh whatever i thought it's uh each grader has a two coach support all school six schools each grade so there's three literacy coaches that work across they each work across two schools and there's three math coaches and they are steam coaches and they each work across two schools and then there's a math specialist and a reading specialist in each school as a full-time yeah so yeah then i i got the impression like each coach needed to take care of uh to school right so does that do do they feel too

114stretched that's why we understand the financial constraints that existed the motivation of mts is to address a disproportionate issue so when i'm excited i'm ego to see the outcome how do uh when do i do we expect that we can do data presentations for you next year but i don't know we can send you information i don't know they might all be like why are you saying that so yeah but i think you know one of the things that we're very aware of is you know we're coming from a district that had never collected um ongoing benchmark assessment data that was consistent across all of our schools we solely relied on mcas to be able to you know compare what we were doing with progress and that that could be really challenging because mcas the

115analysis happens so far after when you can give an assessment um the you know the first year we used panorama was to try that on understand the assessment tool get some initial data but it was also during a pandemic year where kids were in hybrid you know instruction or remote and so it wasn't really a great indicator of what to expect so this year was the first year of real consistent data collection that happened three times over the course of the year and i don't want to say that the only data we use is panorama we actually have a whole variety of data but in terms of benchmarking panorama is kind of designed to be that benchmark assessment so i think once now that we've gone through a year of understanding the data and collecting

116a fairly stable benchmark we'll be able to actually start to shift a little bit um you know there's there's a lot of data and information that goes into how students make progress and i don't want to also exclude the information that our teachers give us based on their observations in class that's incredibly valuable but i think in terms of what you're looking for the hard data i think you'll expect to see that over the next year or so excellent thank you very much for joining us this evening staying late we appreciate it thank you everyone all right up next on our agenda is a very special project presented to us by our very special director of special projects and and you know i'm a little sad that andrew didn't wear a vest tonight to match

117me because i purposefully wore one to match him oops good evening everyone i hope everyone's doing well including you adam let's see we go to view the presentation oh yeah slideshow there we go it's good to see everybody um i think this is the first presentation since transitioning um so it's nice to see all of you i think i've worked with you in different capacities it's it's nice to transition into a role where i get to work with all the schools in a different capacity but i will also say i still and i hope you'll forgive me have a soft spot for the junior high school so so glad that you saw the presentation that jim marcotte gave at the last school committee meeting although i would still like to note that he went over

118his a lot in time just you know he's got some growing to do and then he kindly uh made a phone call last week because the their administrators were out last friday so they asked if i would actually uh reprise my role as principal on friday the 13th so what could go wrong and within half an hour of getting there half the bathrooms had a sewage back up so i think he plotted that i'm pretty sure but it's uh it's good to be in this role i'm actually here on behalf of myself in deb bookis we um were i'm supporting deb in the mtss work this year at the district level and so i'm providing all of you a very quick summary of the work around mtss which you've all heard about not really going

119to get into the details of what the what the outcomes were but really to provide you just with some overview of how we pursue the process because i think as you've heard from the principal presentations this is a core element of our work both at the individual schools and at the district level and as several of you mentioned whether it was adam or tessa or even you care previously the tension between the importance of valuing sort of tradition and things that are important to preserve because they are good for an organization or community as well as finding ways to move forward on areas that you identify that you want to be doing better or different things in how do you how do you marry the two and how do you address the tension between the

120two and that's an important area so i think what we clearly felt like we needed to do was create a committee at the district level that tried to wrestle with those issues because i think aspirationally it's easy to say those things to actually put those in practice where people can feel comfortable and excited about sort of the decisions and and the trade-offs that are made is a whole different thing so we created a steering committee uh towards the the late fall that comprised various administrators school-based administrators and educators from across the schools 14 of them and really were viewed as the stewards and shepherds of this work to try and wrestle with that tension of what are you know as we think about the philosophy and the goals of mtss what are we trying to

121implement what are the areas where consistency really is important for us in terms of meeting those goals and where are the areas where we want to preserve the ability for individual schools to identify the ways that they can meet those goals in the ways that are unique to them and we eventually identified for rolling out ntss there are four categories or sort of four areas that we needed to work on how do we understand data developing a robust and good data culture what are the roles and responsibilities that people have in this process how do we make sure that people sort of understand kind of their place their entry points not only with each other as colleagues but with students if and when they need certain services and supports what are those supports how do

122we define what would be a tier one tier two tier three and the importance of consistency in that regard and then of course the the all-important operation the nuts and bolts of things schedule schedule schedule time resources how do you marry all of those issues at individual schools in ways that you can actually implement them with the resources that you have so we broke up into four groups and then we invited another sort of cohort of educators from all the schools to represent the schools in total we had about 40 45 individuals from across the elementary schools in the district to divide themselves into those working groups and try and wrestle with those issues had several meetings throughout the winter and spring in terms of sort of establishing what are our priorities why are we

123doing what we're doing the way we're going to do it sort of keeping our eye on the prize if you will in terms of what is the objective that we have for mtss what is the what is the driver for us and as many of you already mentioned you know around ensuring success for all students addressing more specifically and more thoughtfully achievement gap areas disproportionality and then also identifying what are the implementation challenges that we'll have next year and so we have working group meetings that work through those pieces both in terms of the logistics but also just in terms of philosophy there are lots of different moments where we would spend time just sort of saying why are we doing what we're doing you know why why are we reimagining these areas and we

124sort of had to regroup and then re sort of reassess and then kind of come back to the importance of of of the work that we're doing around supporting all students as i think lucia mentioned ultimately kind of the deliverable that we wanted to come up with at the end of this year and we're very close which i'm very pleased to say is is a playbook an album if you will of of guidance to all schools to all educators around here are the areas we call them loose and tight here are the areas where we think that consistency is critical this is where as we commit to this model of mtss these are the non-negotiables at which each school sort of has to commit themselves to in terms of the services that are provided the

125frequency in which certain services are provided and then also the way that we approach um data and the benchmarks that peter talked about so not only is what is a multi-tiered system of support but what is the road map to actually implementation at different schools and understanding that different schools are at different places and so those pathways will be different but the destination really has certain features that would be the same the the um as i said you know those groups talked about kind of the logistics i think what we wanted to make sure that we did as a playbook that was not just aspirational but actually was functional that somebody at a school a an ist team or an ilt team could look at that playbook and actually get guidance and reminders about the

126steps that they needed to take to implement mtss next year until and to work through it what i want to show you here not necessarily get too much into it but maybe to start socializing this image because my speculation is that over the next year peter or others might start using this image a little bit more frequently to try and help articulate mtss and services around not only the different tiers of support and the different levels of support but in the different arenas in which we would view tiers of support and i think for this particular presentation i think what we're trying to remind ourselves is mtss is not just about academic support it's also around the social emotion and behavior support so we know that it's not just about sort of identifying what students

127need around their growth in areas that i ready might measure but also in the other areas that we talk about in terms of their social emotional learning and behavioral supports because those are all necessary in terms of students who the students having all students flourish and so i'm just showing these aren't things that i'm going to get too much into but these are just graphics that i want to identify as kind of what you'll see in in sort of future presentations is when we describe kind of universal supports what are the supports that we would provide all students in in a classroom setting what are the supports that a smaller cohort of students would it be identified as requiring whether it's from a math specialist or from the general educator themselves and then the intensive

128supports for the students who again are identified as requiring a more significant level of intervention the playbook you know as i said again the playbook we really want to emphasize as being practical and useful so along with kind of direction our work this summer and i actually just sent an email to the working group to see who might be interested is actually developing some materials that will be useful so people don't have to build the plane and fly it at the same time next year templates for letters that we would send to families to provide them guidance around the services that are being suggested for students what about frequently asked questions what about links to public and staff sites to provide a little bit more guidance and so that's kind of our work this summer

129and then next year we will continue to have a district-wide mtss team to again analyze the work that we're doing and the progress that we're making analyze district data and compiling sort of uh just school-based self-assessments around where they're going whether things need to be changed the schedule continues to be something that i know people are working hard on and will take a lot of work and to live the schedule for a year and see where adjustments need to be made and we of course have to provide professional learning for our teachers that's ongoing that can help them feel successful and and empowered in this in this work um i do want to mention some of the work that's being done that speaks to some of the pieces that you said you know evelyn beforehand

130separately you mentioned in sort of the urgency around you know making sure that we embed and we institutionalize those questions that you're asking what about the students for whom have not experienced consistently success in our district what about the disproportionality of students who are black and brown in our community one of the things that we've committed to is in our protocols and actually we just wrote it the other day when data teams are meeting and they're going through the data there's actually explicit questions that ask them what are the subgroups what are what is the disaggregated data in which you might identify areas that are of concern in the through that lens that's great and and i think that's step one step two is obviously then developing practice and confidence and asking those questions and

131then being okay with uncomfortable answers you know so i think we can build worksheets all we want but then how we actually engage with them and and the ability to feel vulnerable in some of those answers i think is the next kind of adaptive piece but we are building those into it and then of course the next piece is providing data comfortably to to the teachers who are doing this work right now because we don't have a fixed system we all live in sort of this this swamp of google spreadsheets that just sort of kind of reproduce on their own and it's just confusing and and and overwhelming and so peter just mentioned panoram i think you actually meant i ready when you're talking about the benchmarks but panorama which is up here is a

132platform it's a data platform that we have now um sort of bought into for lack of a better term and we're excited and we're on boarding the information where teachers and teams will have all of that information in one setting and so the i ready data mcas data qualitative data that they can upload attendance data the scl survey that we have those are all in one place and so instead of trying to search through different folders we're hoping that we can streamline it so that there's more accessibility and therefore hopefully a little bit more comfort with engaging um more dynamically with it so that's uh the quick summary much shorter than mr marcotte and andrew could you just go back to the tiers and the proceeds of students to expect you know i think one

133of the things is you see this that you may have a question on is you know how does this intersect with special education and students with disabilities i think you know one it's really important to recognize that mtss is not a substitute for students who need specialized services and it's really important to recognize that we have a population of students who need specialized services through an iep or need accommodations through section 504 this is not intended to replace that this is a general education environment that's available to all students regardless of disability status and so even students who might have services related to an iep also have access to the supports and structures available through mtss as well so you know it's not either or and it's not one deters the other they're actually designed

134to work in concert with each other as a more effective way of supporting all students who have complex needs thanks peter no not at all thanks andrew all right questions or comments from the committee andrew if you can turn your mic off thank you sir questions or comments from the committee go for it i'm just glad that you qualified what panorama is because i'm sitting here thinking i thought we did i ready when did that change what is he talking about i haven't missed that many meetings i i want to thank you um i i do have a quick question let me see if i can go back and see where it came from i think you you touched on it a bit and you know it's really as a committee we we talked about

135the data early on we had concerns about the disproportionality we we agreed that mtss was the route to go and then we got a lot of feedback from from teachers in the classroom that this was going to be hard and i guess i'm curious to hear in your working groups and then maybe from some of the elementary principles as we've started to put the data in place as we started to roll out some of that practice our minds changing is there you know what are the concerns and what are the what are the sort of moments of aha that the the teachers have had that's a great question i i can probably offer it from a very general view i don't know if any of the principles here i don't want to call on any

136of them although i will say that mccarthy town i did attend some of their meetings where what did you call it this year playing i played with the idea of falling in love falling in love with data and sort of really kind of entering the shallow end of the pool and developing some comfort so i don't know if you want i feel like i've been listening i can't move the check so as i spoke about a little bit mccarthy town took this first step towards mtss by growing our own data norms and really looking at how do we as adults approach data and what's scary about that what's exciting about that and what's awesome about that and really looking at that there's an opportunity when you look at data that helps you find the next

137steps and prioritize and make sure we're not missing blind spots um and so our hope in that framing that first year was that teachers would have a sense of psychological safety as we looked at data together the second part of your question is are mine shifting and i think they are but i think as we wrote the playbook we talked about a multi-year process and making sure that we're leaving space for staff to enter the shallow end of the pool and walk together into like a safe place where we can have courageous conversations and we can enjoy the data so that we continue to have it be sustainable thank you adam the other thing that i would mention is i think that i feel like i can contribute to is in the conversations with the

138working groups and then i was part of the data protocol subgroup is there's also an ongoing recognition importantly so that um to sort of borrow that phrase that you know not all things that count can easily be counted and so acknowledging that there is a place and an importance to identify sort of feedback that may not necessarily show up as easily in a numerical metric but how do we create space and honor that in a way that contributes to sort of our our portrait of a student thanks any other questions or comments from the committee before i go to the public madame public there we go yes still here um so thank you peter for making that point for me but that wasn't actually where i was going to stand up but thank you um

139the only thing i would add and i know that folks here know is that mtss is not a reason to delay or deny eligibility valuation for special education we know i'm really glad andrew that the family communication templates are being developed and i'm going to channel bill guthlein for just a second you and i remember who that is how will data be shared consistently families um it used to be that families wouldn't necessarily know if a child was working with a reading specialist they'd stumble across their kid in a hallway while volunteering we don't have homework and i'm glad we don't have to fight that battle personally but it's hard to know if a kid misses a skill you know that report cards some buildings have three some buildings have none and the reporting can

140be opaque and can mask missing skills the stack of paper comes home at the end of the term but it's out of context so while you shore up your pre-referral and guidance for the ists i strongly encourage data sharing consistent notification practices because if we don't know when our kids are receiving tier three or tier two we can't help them and we can't partner with you in supporting them thanks amanda any other questions or comments from the committee public go ahead i'm just going to echo everything that amanda said because she's a genius thank you amanda um and i would like to expand that and say i would love to see i would love for you to come back because i'd like you to be here with some data right with some answers for evelyn's

141questions um and to turn this graphic it's a lot of graphic into um something just maybe a touch more readable that we can then share with the public and start normalizing this and normalizing the data um not just visually but but conceptually so we can see we can know what's actually happening happening in the district so um you know i love this and i'm glad that we're doing this toward the end of the year but you know i hope that next year when we do an agenda that we see you more than once maybe three times you know hit us once with this again hit us the second time with this is where we're going and then at the end of the year this is what we've done if that makes sense thank you sir

142great thank you andrew all right next item on our agenda that's right they're clapping because they get to go home uh kirsten nelson our food services director is up next to talk about food services program so while kirsten's getting set up i just want to say you know i don't know if you know kirsten but she is one of the rock stars of the district who doesn't not ever get the public attention that she deserves or any of her staff deserve this has been an incredibly challenging few years for food services kirsten you have been absolutely amazing not only in what you've done for students but what you've done for the community as well so as you recall and we've shared you know our food services program served almost 300 000 meals to the community

143during the pandemic in addition to feeding our students right and making sure they did that so i just can't give you enough credit for all that you've done and i'm glad that we're able to hear from you a little bit and talk about kind of where things are at and food services so thank you thank you okay thank you and i also want to thank our staff because they have certainly worked hard for the last few years um so for those of you who don't know me i'm kirsten and thank you for inviting me to speak tonight we thought we'd give a brief summary of what we've done over the last year we started off the year with a few audits that we had we had a few scheduled from the department of ed we

144had an administrative review we had a procurement review and then we also had a district financial audit with powers and sullivan all three of the reviews reported positive results all good feedback and so that was just a little bit of extra work that we had on top of the regular norm this year but it all went well some of our accomplishments were currently serving a substantial number of meals over pre-pandemic numbers in 18 and 19 we were serving on average 200 meals 200 breakfasts a day we're now at about a thousand per day so we're definitely seeing a huge increase in numbers for breakfast our lunch participation has gone up as well in 18 and 19 we served about 2 500 meals per day and we're at about 3 300 meals per day now we

145do consider ourselves to be the busiest restaurant in town i always say that um and with the federal waivers obviously this allows universal free breakfast and lunch so that's why we're seeing the increase in meals for students additionally we provide meals for the victor school and the case collaborative in act in for those of you that might not know and we've been able to bring back some fun things this year we brought back the cooking club at rj gray which is something i'm passionate about and know that the students enjoy we noted about the reviews we've been the recipient of some grants we had a supply chain assistance grant we also applied for a grant for a refrigerated van because we're moving food around a lot more than we normally do and we're also very

146thankful for the towns of acton and boxborough for the cares act money that enabled us to serve the adults in our community during covid we have implemented half day lunch meals for all of our students where we didn't used to do half day lunches so now we are we also have an online ordering system that's available to the community uh let's see what else as peter mentioned we served over 300 000 meals to our community during the curbside meal program so that's something we're very proud of so basically in summary the ab food service program has survived the pandemic so financially back in fiscal year 18 our ending fund balance was around 680 000 we had a dip with the pandemic obviously and then we've been able to come through this year pretty strong stronger

147than most and we are looking at a fund balance of 838 000 which includes a reimbursement that we're just waiting to hit the books on but that's where we're looking for the end of march so it's a it's a substantial fund balance at this point for us and below you'll see a nice breakdown of the federal reimbursement versus the paid meals and catering sales blue being the federal and state reimbursements so you'll see in 18 19 and 20 our reimbursements were lower and our cash payments were much higher and then once we were allowed to have the waivers and have the free meals then in fiscal year 21 and 22 most of our revenue is from the federal and state grants that we've received for reimbursement so some of the challenges that we're still facing

148obviously the supply chain has been a huge issue for us the availability of goods continues to be a problem we spend most of our time trying to find food or trying to find paper to serve the food on we have had a lot of driver shortages which means we have backlog deliveries when we first started school we had a good week out before we would receive the food that we thought we were going to receive so if we had an order that was supposed to be in on a tuesday it might not show up until a week you know seven nine days later so that was pretty challenging for us we were able to bring in a freezer at the high school an additional outside freezer so we're able to store and stock up a

149little bit so that we could be able to serve the students with the food that we could get um let's see we also had a shortage of staff because we were doing more meals we looked at projecting based off of what we're doing last year when all the kids returned and we knew that we had some still remotely but even at that we still managed to to serve more meals so now we're in a pretty good place with staffing as far as that goes and then i think you know we just have the uncertainty as to whether or not we'll have the waiver for next year the federal government has decided not to approve the waiver universally for all but it's at the state level now so we're optimistic that hopefully that will pass but

150we do have a requirement federally to adjust our paid lunch meal pricing which i'll speak to on the next slide and then the other thing that we're potentially facing is seeing the increased level of food and security in the community so for us lunch prices we are required to meet a certain price point due to our program being federally funded and currently as i said the meals are set to expire free meals are set to expire on june 30th unless the state picks up the reimbursement so we're not sure if that's going to be extended or not and we might not know until june so we will get the word out as soon as we know but we would like to propose meal pricing for the 22-23 school year currently we are proposing breakfast that

151there's no change in rate it would be 1.75 we're looking to increase the lunch rate by 75 cents to 350 for students and adult meals would be breakfast would be 275 plus tax which is a 25 increase and lunch would be 475 plus tax um which we currently charge between 350 and 5 this tiered pricing for adults but um and that again is just to be in line with where we need to be with the federal requirements so i'd like to thank you for the opportunity to serve our students breakfast and lunch every day our motto is a well-fed child is ready to learn and we'd like to just thank all of you on behalf of baby food services so if anybody has any questions i think i'm happy to answer and otherwise we need

152to have a vote on lunch prices thanks kirsten if you could turn your mic off it's a little ringy and then i saw a number of questions we'll start with rebecca this is my inaugural uh statement or question here um prior to being sworn in i did meet with a representative from project bread and she was hoping that individual school committees around the state could uh voice their support for the bill that's currently in the um i don't know if it's in the state house at the moment and then second point is prior to moving here uh when i was like 9 or 10 i actually grew up in vermont and one thing that we had a really strong connection with was local farms supplying the schools and i was wondering if that's something that

153we'd we've looked into or we could look into thank you yes thank you so we do purchase from cost of fruit and produce which we do get some of their produces local we also work with harvard in harvard carlson orchards so we get fresh apples from them on a regular basis weekly basis and we also are working on some more farm to school initiatives we had we had a grow rack that we did with our second grade level students as well as our high school students where we grew lettuce and basil and allowed them to be part of that program and then we then fed them at lunch with the lettuce that they grew so that was pretty exciting and we're going to be bringing that back for the fall yeah thanks for the great

154work i i remember last year i guess we served half a million or 1 million right so so this is only two three thousand three hundred thousand the three hundred thousand was for curbside meals okay yeah so thanks for the great work uh so one one procedural thing i i remember when i was a i mean subcommittee policy of subcommittee we we i also saw you right there so at that time we reviewed the whatever something also related to the meal i just wonder why this time we come to the committee directly there's no uh no preview or no read on the subcommittee i can uh because the increase in the lunch price is a federal requirement we actually just have to do it we don't get a vote in it like we vote it

155but we don't get a vote marie just i think the question is what she came to policy about was actually the policy about lunch and this is the price of lunch which is a school committee vote not a change to policy so school committee votes fees and and lunch is a fee so that's why she'll come back any time we have to change the lunch price directly to the school committee so how do you come up with that number like 75 percent or whatever so do you do you have a data so i have a my sense about the inflation right right so but but i would like to know that the number sure um so whoops is that me okay um so we have minimums that we have to meet because of the federal

156requirements so the the government doesn't want to have us ha if we have students that are paying for lunches they don't want us to have the students paying less than what the actual reimbursement would be for a free student because otherwise they're they're somewhat filling the gap right so we have to meet the minimums and that's why we're setting the price it's based off of what their minimum requirement is microphone so the price actually doesn't mean the increase doesn't may not necessarily cover enough to cover the expenses um i think oops sorry i think we're financially in a place that will be okay um we've looked at numbers and i i also think that the the amount that we're requesting is a pretty substantial increase we were going to increase it a couple years ago

157because then cobot hit and we weren't able to do that so we've looked at numbers and i think we'll be fine with what we're doing um we also regardless of whether we go to free lunches for next year we still just have to approve this because if somebody's buying a second lunch or whatever we still have to have the right rate in there other questions or comments evelyn so my question is around the online ordering system for the community you highlighted that you know this am i echoing oh you you mentioned food insecurity in the community so that this was my first time of hearing that there was anything like this some you could order lunch online or something for community members how do we publicize that so people who need it can get it

158so we're currently only allowed to serve meals to students um it was during the pandemic when we were not in school we were allowed to serve well we were only allowed to really serve to students but the town of acton and boxborough gave us money for the cares for the cares act to be able to fund adult meals and i think actually evelyn i'm sorry i think the what you might be referring to about the online ordering is we offer things like red's best seafood by the pound that people can buy and we offer that at pretty much a wholesale cost it's just something that we offer that is probably once a month or so that we put out there to the community so that might be what you're also thinking of i just thought

159of that after sorry quick question should the federal waiver expire and the state not decide to pick up the tab what will be the impact for students and how will you ensure that no student will fall through the cracks because again we've seen a substantial increase over 2018 to 2019 compared to today from 2500 students per day to 3 300. what will be done to ensure those students who can't afford those lunches do not fall through the cracks that's a great question we have what we call a virtual gateway where we upload all of our students into a database every month and that spits back to us if anybody's on snap or parts of mass health so there's an automatic match there so what we've seen when i first started 16 years ago our numbers

160were at two percent for free and reduced and now we're at about 11 and a half so we've definitely seen an increase but it's it's because i do believe of the virtual gateway and the fact that people don't always have to come and fill out an application to be found right um so that's been nice for us to be able to have that at somewhat seamless and we also do have online applications if somebody weren't on snap or or parts of mass health so they can go online and it comes right into our office and we would approve it that way and if somebody is really struggling we also have ways to help great thank you thanks ben i'll just read from policy edf which is the one that you haven't mentioned one of the

161paragraphs in there says the school district will provide a meal to students who forget or lose their lunch money or who have a negative balance on their account no student will be denied a meal so we've already codified that in policy for sure kirsten i want to express my gratitude to you and your team i think i shared with you earlier in this year my son at blanchard gets a breakfast almost every morning and he's not a fan of change in one morning because of supply chain shortages there were no bagels and cream cheese and the staff at blanchard were absolutely amazing they emailed his teacher his teacher emailed us and we prepared him for that and he went into school so happy knowing that there was going to be something for breakfast but it

162was going to be a change and it was just an amazing bit of teamwork from your staff through the entire staff in the in the building so again thank you for the amazing work that you and your staff do if you're not already following ab food services on social media please do so there's been some great staff highlights there so again thank you for the amazing work thank you for pl the plug on social media we're trying to highlight our staff on mondays so please do feel free to stay tuned because we're finding some interesting fun facts about our staff to share can i just add one thing first of all thank you kirsten um and your team we one thing we haven't talked about this year is at the beginning of covid we started

163a food security task force with representatives from acton and boxborough and that still continues so kirsten and i both participate in that we meet tomorrow we went from weekly to bi-weekly to now monthly but it's the active food pantry community supper open table in maynard us and a few others sometimes the senior center folks and there has been so much partnership and exchange of ideas and materials and grants and storage and refrigeration and you know supplying diapers i'm sure tomorrow we're going to be talking about baby formula like whatever's come along the united way is a part of it as well so i just i want to thank kirsten for her work and this teamwork and um things like the supply chain issues things like when the boston greater greater boston food bank wasn't able

164to come as often like there are these things that come along that impact families ability to provide food and so it's really been a powerful and positive experience i just want to remind everybody here that the the budget the state budget has not been finalized yet there is still opportunity for us to get waivers get money get this help so you know if the federal government waiver lapses which would be extraordinarily disappointing there's still opportunity in the state and we have legislators legislators who live in our towns and we see them at the coffee shop so say hi and remind them that the babies are hungry and thank you so much you are amazing and your team is amazing thank you so is there a motion to set the fy 23 acton-boxborough regional school district

165lunch prices as presented seconded all right so we'll give that move to andrew this time and the second to kira hey i'm the chair i get to choose and you guys didn't turn your mics on all right so all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that is unanimous thank you so much thanks for staying so long thank you yeah all right we're going to move on to our ongoing business uh superintendent's annual evaluation so um as we presented last week uh our schedule for the evaluation as peter gets set up um we're going to see his presentation today of an update on where they are in the goals and then i'm scrolling and scrolling anybody remember what day it was that you needed to get your evaluation information to me july 1st i think

166kiera just volunteered to help me write the evaluation june 2nd please uh we will have um the review this evening and then we've got june 2nd is when i need to have you all uh submit your um evaluations of the superintendent i will also make the call out now that members of the public may also send their input to both myself and beth petter our email addresses are in the agenda so if any members of the public wish to provide some input on the evaluation of the superintendent please email myself and petter same for the evaluations of the superintendent for the school committee beth will be sending those out to you in an editable format please fill them out online or digitally and then submit them to again me and beth with that peter i

167will hand it over to you to present okay so i'm going to do a presentation that is designed to be sensitive to the length of the agenda tonight um so i'm not going to spend a lot of time on a presentation um i want to highlight that included in your packet is a cover memo and a bit of a reflection that i did on the year i'd like to point you to that i'm going to talk through a little bit of that tonight i also provided you a second update on the district goals i took the same template that i gave you mid-year and added two additional columns for an end-of-year status and then some comments so that you could actually see how that flowed throughout the year and it also was in the similar

168format to what you saw at the beginning of the year there's also in the packet a pdf of the evaluation template that you'll be using so you could get a sense of that and as adam said uh there are two documents actually that will be emailed to you directly one is an editable version of the evaluation template and then the second is a copy of the massachusetts superintendent rubric for evaluation i just want to point out i pulled a couple of things off of the rubric because i wanted to highlight a couple of things for you first up top the image that you see is actually a screen grab of the actual evaluation template and this is the section on goals that you can see and so you'll see that i identified as a stu

169the student learning goal what i did is i went through the rubric and i pulled off sample indicators that you could look at as you were thinking about the student learning goal and so the description of the goal is exactly as you saw in that district improvement plan that you voted at the beginning of the year and you actually heard our elementary principles talking about that and andrew talking about it which was 3.1 develop and implement in the line district-wide pre-k through 12 multi-tiered system of support right so that was the district goal that was our student learning goal and one of the indicators that i aligned it to was 1-c-2 and so now if you look below when you get the superintendent rubric this is what you might see for 1-c-2 you would see

170a rating for unsatisfactory you would see a rating for needs improvement a description of what proficient performance looks like and what exemplary performance looks like and so that as you're thinking about those goals and what we did it also gives you a sense of my overall performance um for the year so that you can correlate the two but i wanted to really clearly draw this concept of a focus indicator back to the superintendent rubric and show you how those two are related in an example um some tips for you you know evaluation should consider but are not limited to goals all right other aspects of a superintendent's performance should certainly be included in your comments and your ratings um evidence that you might want to consider presentations and updates that we give throughout the year

171uh personal observations of my work feedback that you receive about me and updates that i provide or the the administrative team provides about various goals so all of that is fair in a superintendent's evaluation but ultimately for whatever evidence that you're looking at it's also about your judgment about that evidence and so really it's this is a judgment piece and all evaluation is judgment right and so i would ask you to take a look at all of that look at the evidence that you have but ultimately this is your role to be able to you know put that judgment label to it as guided by the rubric so the rubric is not gospel the rubric is there to guide you in your thinking some other things you might consider obviously progress toward the goals and

172i pointed you to the the document that's in your packet which is our end of the year goals update but what i also wanted to do was highlight some of the other work that was my responsibility or our team's responsibility over the course of the year just to peak your thinking about ways that you can expand beyond goals so you know we welcomed multiple new school and district leaders and we're beginning to build a high performing team we are continuing to manage the covid pandemic including the impacts of delta and the various omicron variants and the impact on our schools we had to address some urgent and complex needs of our students as we emerge from two interrupted years of schooling we were managing the dissolution of the edco collaborative structuring a process by which

173our students could lead a mascot renaming process engaging with families through monthly superintendent coffees and various written updates managing a challenging budget process and working to increase end-of-year turnbacks to mitigate the impact of declining in reserves on future budgets monitoring completion of the boardwalk campus building and returning to full education programming and a resumption of activities for our students this year so that's not a full list but i wanted to give you some examples just so you could think beyond just the district goals and get a broader picture of what what a superintendent and team might do i want to also just highlight a few things that i thought went well this year and a few areas that i would identify for my own personal growth hopefully this makes it a little bit easier for

174you as a starting point i actually think that our principal and staff efforts that they had on a daily basis to meet the needs of our students were absolutely exemplary i'm so proud of the work that all of our educators did you know they persevered through some staffing shortages and supported students with both urgent and complex needs at a level that we simply have not seen before in schools or at least in our schools i'm also proud of the work of our mtss steering committee that brought together educators and leaders from across our elementary schools to develop a common vision for a multi-tiered system of support the vision provides a foundation for a district-wide approach to the work and also allows for the individual personalities and cultures of each school to personalize implementation of the

175system i'm proud of the courage and perseverance of our students involved in the mascot renaming process and grateful to our subcommittee for their ongoing support of the students students led a process that provided for significant community input into the selection of a new mascot and while we recognize that the final selection could not please everyone they continued to engage the community and selected a mascot and that in their words acknowledges our past but speaks to our future i'm also pleased that through the coaching relationship with the leader leadership academy we have started to gain a deeper understanding about the needs of our students from historically underserved populations the leadership academy has helped us by conducting focus groups meet focus groups meetings with student groups help facilitate connections between student groups and school administration has provided

176ongoing support to our school and district leaders and managing problems of practice and aligning policies and practices in our schools with a portrait of a culturally responsive school district and this information and connections through the leadership academy will help us to deepen relationships with our students in the coming years some opportunities for growth i think we can better engage our community around complex issues related to our schools learning from community feedback about the process used to retire the mascot for example we put in place a plan to ensure our community had multiple opportunities to provide feedback to us through the mascot renaming process we also heard feedback from some people in our community that they wanted more input to propose changes to the high school curricula our schools will continue to face several complex issues

177over the next few years including the development of school budgets within constrained resources and our goals around equity and inclusion both of these are going to require us to have ongoing dialogue that engages stakeholders throughout the processes and we need to think deeply about appropriate forms of engagement for our staff students families and the broader community around the complex issues we need to make a shift from thinking that we can engage people toward the end of a process into making sure that we engage people at the beginning middle and end in multiple different ways that they can access based on the needs of the stakeholder group we also need to find ways to increase educator voice in our decision making particularly in areas that directly impact students and teachers the last two years have seen

178unprecedented disruption to education and our schools have undergone tremendous changes you just heard from some of our elementary principles and our secondary principles a meeting ago you know because of this i think many educators that i've heard from are feeling a loss of control over their work some of the disruptions are simply beyond our control we did not create covid and we certainly don't control covet as we can all attest to but you know and i think in addition though we've also shifted some of our educational models health and safety restrictions have been shifting throughout the pandemic you know there are other changes that have been specific to our district with a focus on universal design for learning mtss implementation of new literacy and math curricula and high school schedule changes we need to help

179find ways to have our educators have increased voice in these processes and some of the decision making as we look to the future i also think we need to think deeply and strategically about our students social emotional behavioral health and mental health needs pandemic has taken a significant toll on many of our students and this has led to a sharp increase in the number of students demonstrating complex and acute needs in this area i don't know if you've seen the recent surgeon general's report that came out but it's now estimated that just about 45 percent of adolescents could be diagnosed with a mental health disorder that is a stunning number and that is across you know um you know the entire nation it's really a significant issue and we've begun planning for that and i'm

180looking forward to coming back but that certainly needs to be a focus of our work going forward i think we need to be prepared to address our students needs both in the short term and thinking about a longer term strategic plan around social emotional learning mental health and behavioral health needs we also need to think about how we can grow our goals in order to focus on student outcomes where appropriate so our district goals as you know have traditionally focused on the inputs and outputs ie professional development or program implementation across the district now that we've begun to develop a robust set of data sources to better understand the needs of our students in a systemic way we can actually leverage that opportunity to focus on student outcomes it's important to recognize that not all

181educational outcomes for students can and should be measured in quantifiable ways so we need to maintain a balanced approach as become more outcome focused and then finally and this is the adaptive work that we actually all need to do together um as we move forward into the next goal-setting cycle we need to carefully consider in other words we need to limit the number of goals to which we commit and evaluate the appropriate number of action steps that can reasonably be accomplished within a year as stated earlier in the memo that i provided you you know as the superintendent i work directly with you and our leadership team to create these goals but it's actually all of our building leaders and the staff who have to then work to execute everything and if we continue to

182create you know too many goals with way too many actions we are going to you know really frustrate a lot of our educators across the district because they're being sent in too many different directions these things take a lot of time there's adaptive work that's included in this in addition to just some of the technical changes we want to see and so we really have to be cognizant of the number of goals that we're creating so that we don't overwhelm all of the educators in our district so you know i hope by highlighting a few of the areas that i think i can continue to grow on my own and work with our leadership team and also and work with you that helps provide you know some seeds for how you might approach you know

183an evaluation this year so i'm happy to take any questions thanks peter questions from the committee evelyn so i really like that last goal peter and you know i've always been concerned about the number of goals we have and whether it's feasible to achieve those so i like the fact that we need to think strategically about the goals that will move this district forward we don't need to have a whole laundry list of it but come up with the goals that will really move us forward but that are achievable and that will not bend out our staff so i really like that thank you no i appreciate that and i will just bring us all back to i think october of this year if you remember our initial goals discussion i think the first one

184i came to you and i had six goals and then i tried to come back and i said i needed to take one off and we voted six goals we weren't successful in reducing the number you are not going to see me propose six goals again nor five goals um we're really you know we're going to limit these what i think you'll see from me moving forward we will certainly have a student learning goal of something in our students learning that we want to improve i've been thinking a lot about that i believe it will probably target the area of disproportionality and disproportionate outcomes among student populations is where i'd like to set my student learning goal i'm not sure of it yet but that's my thinking the professional practice goal you'll see will be

185specific to my own growth not for all of our educators to have to work on but what am i doing and then i will probably propose three district-wide goals um just to kind of frame how you might anticipate something coming forward for for next year's goals but we'll we'll talk more about that at an upcoming meeting i'll just share that for those of you that are new to this it's like completely and totally overwhelming i'm absolutely positive but having sat on the school company now for five years i have to say like i know you felt overwhelmed by six goals but when we have presentations like we did from the principals today i mean you know i don't have to write anything to you adam a plus like i never thought when you and i

186sat for two years and talked about all the things of like rowing in the same direction and like trying to not all be islands and you know there there is some perspective that comes from doing this for more than a year and so i think that we all do have to take the perspective of some of these goals or longer term than just what you could accomplish in a year and that you've been obviously all the steps are laid out and it's you know in the in the document and all those specific things but as someone who's now sat here and seen many of the things that you walked into our district and noticed in your you know entry plan and everything else like you've accomplished a lot um there's like a lot of stuff

187that obviously there's plenty that still needs to happen and i understand that you know these these goals are longer term but it it's important to also look back and say where were we like a couple years ago and where are we now and you know i don't think i thought that we'd be having successful conversations about mtss because it didn't seem at the time like there was literally any way to get there so you know just as everyone approaches this if you haven't been on the committee for a long time and some of you rebecca will not have to do this until next year but um you can just sit back and say woo-hoo i'm so glad i don't have to do this but um you know there there is some perspective to be taken

188because these aren't just you know stand-alone year-to-year goals they are longer term than that and they and they take a lot more work no thank you i think my hope is that you know even starting with next year's goals we make a little bit of shift so rather than a goal being something like we're going to implement mtss what i would like to do when i've started talking with our leadership team about is shifting that to we're increasing the number of students who are meeting or exceeding their stretch goal in literacy and math in a given year and so it's actually you know mtss we had to work on the framework first but the the purpose of it is actually to help improve outcomes for students and that's where i really want to see us

189shifting so we're not there yet um and you know we've started to make some of the headway that i want us to make but i'm always also cognizant there's a huge gap between what the school committee gets to see the superintendent gets to see what our principals get to see and what the daily lives of our educators look like and the daily lives of our students look like we can never forget that as we're implementing this stuff there's actual work that has to take place with our educators and our students to actually make a difference for kids and it takes an incredible amount of time and energy to teach on a daily basis but then to shift practice while teaching is also another thing so tess i absolutely appreciate that i just want to make

190sure we keep that eye on the prize of it's actually about the work between teachers and students and ultimately about the outcomes we have for students all right any last questions for peter any last questions about this process before we move on evan probably some confusing questions i just wanted to wonder uh so we have a elementary junior high high school probably different school different levels they have a different goals uh so so peter you are setting up the goals i guess across the district trying to generate the impact over the over all district so i wonder [Music] is any goal i mean it has to be a district-wide impact or can be related to the so mtssic it's actually a it's a long-term emphasis on the students and i mean the elementary school but

191what about the others uh so like high school will is there any ghostly link to that that that's a great question um at the last meeting not tonight but two weeks ago um joni dean the high school principal and jim marcotte the junior high principal actually presented their goals and you actually saw how their goals related to the framework that we had as a district um so you know that certainly is something that we've thought about and yeah we do they look different in every school in fact even if elementary schools share an mtss goal the work that has to happen on a daily basis is slightly different in each school and then similarly as we work on culturally responsive practice or social emotional learning it will look different for the high school than it

192looks for the junior high different for the junior high than the elementary schools so there's an overarching target that we're all working toward because we're all serving the same students over years but the action steps that schools take toward that have to recognize where each school and each group of students are at i understand it's com very complicated i just want to associate for example engagement social emotional learning probably to supporting in that perspective in that area maybe in the elementary may requires a lot of time and that's that's important but when when kids grow up towards a high school probably is that still the top priority or could be something else could be i mean just kevin i would i would suggest reviewing the video that that joni and jim presented because they actually

193talked about how they were putting scl learning into place through advisory programs at the high school and i think that combined with what we've heard around the significant mental health challenges at the at the secondary level there's definitely a you know there's there's room for improvement in that goal for those students at that level all right are you raising your hand to say something or can we move on excellent thank you very much peter uh we're going to move on to the next item on the agenda there's a memo in your packet that i wrote as you know we're all governed by policies here we have a policy bdea sorry bda which defines how we reorganize our committee this uh the policy says that the committee reorganizes the first uh evening or the first meeting

194that we have all of the members sworn in we do not have our member from boxborough our new member from boxborough sworn in yet so the policy states that it would be at the next meeting at which all the members are sworn in the next meeting on the 9th of june i will happen i happen to be out of town and kiera will be chairing the meeting at that time and so i'm requesting that uh the committee consider postponing that meeting now to postpone the meeting means to postpone the policy and to postpone the policy there's a policy for postponing policies which is policy bgf the suspension of policies all of this is in the memo and linked to all of our policies so there is a motion in the packet and i wonder if

195anybody is willing to make that motion andrew i recommend we move to suspend policy bda procedure bda-rs requirement the abrsc reorganization occur at the first regularly scheduled committee meeting after all new members have been sworn in and to postpone the reorganization until june 16th 2022 when adam is back in town with gifts [Music] okay ah uh so uh just as a note this is a two-thirds uh we need two-thirds of the members attendance required to pass this so all those in favor say aye aye any opposed any abstentions that passes unanimously with gifts with gifts with gifts all right yep magnets like my kids my wife and my school committee will all receive airport gifts stickers from brazil or chile [Laughter] ah peter do you have a gift for us about the edco update i

196do have a gift so the edco board met today i am pleased to report that we are on schedule to be able to close you know as of june 30th it's a sad day from an edco standpoint but i think from a mitigation of risk standpoint it was certainly something we needed to do you know all districts as i think i mentioned previously have agreed to meet their financial obligations most districts have already paid and the funds have been received we have paid for the lease in full and the lease settlement through edco so that's one less liability right now the executive director is finalizing a letter to deci you know basically you know affirming that all of the actions that deci required for edco to be able to close have now been met i'm

197very pleased to report to you that you know now that we've paid the lease settlement costs there will be there's enough funds available in edco to not require any districts to pay additional closing costs if you remember we thought we might have to pay almost a half a million dollars in lease settlement costs uh plus closing costs we ended up paying just about a hundred thousand dollars in lease settlement costs so you know that came right down we will have zero in closing costs and there is actually going to be enough money uh in the edco funds once we close to then be able to reimburse districts after july first uh we anticipate it'll be in two parts um based on the available funds i'm you know i certainly don't want you to hold me

198this i'm going to guess we're going to get back somewhere between 50 and 75 000 dollars to a b because there's you know probably you know we have a couple of you know grants that we need to work through and make sure you know we've refunded any money that we received through the grants but um right now we have about 1.5 ish million um in assets in the edco checking and gift accounts so um those will be distributed to districts you know as the auditors feel comfortable closing out and refunding money so that's some good news so you know all said and done the net expense for closure was probably about twenty five thousand to fifty thousand dollars somewhere in that range that's new to dave too when he looked very excited thank you exactly

199thanks any questions or comments for peter on edco one subcommittee update this evening from the community engagement subcommittee andrew thank you the abr sdsc cesc also known as the active box for our regional school district school committee community engagement subcommittee met on may 6 2022 our discussion topics included the town meeting support where the abr-sdsc cesc will review their town meeting to better understand how to develop opportunities to clarify communication between the community and the committee in 2022 and 2023 engagement planning the abr-sdsc cesc will focus on creating consistent connections within the community and existing community groups to facilitate the discussion within the community of school focused topics and issues our schools are the center of our community our efforts in this group can provide venues and vehicles for conversation and connection the next meeting

200will be the friday after our next school committee meeting wherein we will compare our airport travel gifts thank you thank you all right on to our consent agenda items on the consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion and a separate vote i'll read each item name and if any member would like it held please say hold on it is so before i read these down peter's going to make a comment about one of the items which is our bus lease so we are presenting a bus lease to you we lease buses annually it's cost effective the school committee has actually seen this lease multiple times they go out to bid you know we accept the low bid um

201and there's a process involved in that um you know jd and i talked i did not want him to have to wait here till 9 30 10 o'clock at night just to talk about this because it's pretty standard so i am happy to answer any questions he's excited to come back to you because he is working toward an electric bus initiative that we want to see in the future right now he's actually in the stage of trying to do some procurement um to possibly be able to lease enough land or purchase enough land to then put charging stations for electric buses because that's going to be an important element of of being able to convert to electric so you know there's more to come on that next year the it's just not ready yet for

202us at this point but it's certainly the direction we're headed but we still need these bus leases um this is the low bid so we're presenting it to you for your approval as part of the consent agenda thanks peter all right item number one approval of the abrc meeting minutes of may 5th 2022 item 2 the recommendation to approve the bus lease agreement and addendum between net leasing corp and abrsd dated july 1st 2022 and the recommendation to approve a donation of 1800 from miriam pto is there a motion to approve the consent agenda okay uh tessa and kira would be the second on that all those in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that is unanimous thank you all very much on to our statement of warrants and recommendation to approve as someone pulls

203this up to read them off i just want to make a call out here to thank those members of the warrant signing subcommittee for their fast response to the warrant signing that needed to happen john historically was the number one replier on that and uh we've we've filled his shoes nicely there so if everyone has reviewed the warrants uh the motion language is found at the end of the memo would someone like to make that motion i move that the school committee vote to approve number p p2223 dated 5 5 20 22 in the amount of 2 million 724 388.57 payroll deduction warrants as follows number 22 oh 23 pr dated 5 5 20 22 and the amount of 548 thousand 855 dollars and 52 cents vendor warrants as follows number 22 oh 23 a

204dated 5 20 22 in the amount of 407.16 and number 22023 dated 512 2022 in the amount of 1 million 898 196 dollar seconded ben got that with his microphone so uh all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that is unanimous thank you peter is there anything in the fyi that you would like to highlight we have covered just about everything i can think of tonight and then some with gifts so is there a motion to adjourn so moved seconded uh we'll go with tessa and ben actually get it and amy all in favor aye any post any abstentions thank you all good night