Acton-Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 6/10/2021

001to get in welcome to all of our guests who are in person with us it's so nice to see you can i start noting the hour and the presence oh that's really loud okay sorry it's like really loud noting the hour in the presence of a quorum i call the acton-boxborough regional school committee to order this meeting is being conducted as a hybrid all of our school committee members are here in the auditorium without masks along with our presenters and any members of the public that choose to join us here ginny and and yevan will be joining us late but um evelyn abaya isa diane baum adam klein jenny uh amy christian murthy john peterson nora shine angie so yep uh nope kira kira and myself kyra cook myself we'll be late the script is

002wrong in an ongoing effort to make our meeting as secure as possible members of the public who wish to comment virtually during the meeting were asked to register 24 hours prior to the start of the meeting using the link also found at the top of the agenda members who are here in person may stand up at the public microphone as we have done in the past members of the public who wish to view the meeting virtually may use acton tv's youtube channel that at the top of the agenda this meeting is being recorded and will be posted on actin tv's website at actintv.org um i will remind everybody about public participation that if that there will be a section for public participation for things that are not on the agenda but if you wish to

003comment on things that are on the agenda you need to wait until we reach that agenda item so welcome everybody in person it's nice to see everybody's faces um and to see our members that are presenting to us in person is super exciting as well um so i welcome everybody we do not have our student rep i believe tonight is that still true okay see look i was flexible it says that he was here and he's not um okay so the very first item on the agenda is public participation so if members of the public who are here in person or pre-registered would like to speak about an item that is not on the agenda would they please raise their hand so they can be recognized to speak for three minutes each nobody in the

004audience there's nobody online who's raised their hand either super okay peter it's your turn okay we're going to just promote larry and dory and david crane momentarily here i'm waiting for my q welcome david how are you i'm terrific how are you it's really it's good to see everybody sitting around you bring larry into the meeting as well yep larry you are a panelist and when you're ready you can go ahead and turn on your camera and mic i'm just renaming myself um i was my wife for a moment so um thank you very much i agree with david it's wonderful to see um people back in the in the room and sitting together and certainly see some of those masks off and and face his presence so thank you very much absolutely so you

005know one of the reasons we wanted to bring larry and david up um we want to just take a moment tonight and recognize and thank our departing administrators at the end of this year so we have three administrators who are leaving us in a couple of weeks here larry dory is retiring after 27 years of service to the acton-boxborough schools during his time here larry served as a counselor at abrhs an assistant and associate principal and as the principal of the high school for the last four years so larry's going to be greatly missed and has made an absolutely tremendous impact on students and the community during his time here at ab so larry thank you so much and david crane is also retiring and has served as the principal of the mccarthy town elementary

006school for the last 12 years david has brought a passion for social emotional learning reading and maintaining the uniqueness of the mccarthy town elementary school community we will miss david's leadership and strong voice for children the choice program in our schools and for his school community so david thank you so much thank you too peter and finally debbie dixon is also leaving us at the end of this year as you know she has been here for the last two years as the interim director of special education i remember giving her a call um about two and maybe a quarter years ago and i said come on debbie what could go wrong and two years later in a pandemic she's still with us but she is leaving us at the end of this year so debbie

007thank you so much for joining us for the last couple of years and so we do have a small token of appreciation for each of you um and so david and larry i will see you tomorrow and i will come around with that and debbie i'm gonna just come over and give you that and while peter does that um not every person on staff touches every family um but larry dorey has in fact touched my family so i have privately thanked him and i wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank him thank you john i don't know if any of you have any parting words of wisdom for for our committee tonight but you're welcome to share anything don't tempt me [Laughter] i would like to take this opportunity though if if i could

008just briefly to thank the committee and to thank the leadership team for for 12 years of doing something that's really not really allowed or permitted in other districts and that is to have the autonomy as an elementary school principal to innovate and to choose a path that we could go on knowing that we'd have the support of central office i think that's an unusual circumstance and um not many elementary school leaders in the commonwealth get that opportunity so i want to thank everybody for allowing that to happen for for me at mccarthy town school and for my staff and also for my colleagues at the elementary level so thank you very much for that i i don't want to make your meeting any any longer than it may be but i'm going to take this

009opportunity since since david did to um really just look at the last year and a half and and um thank peter light and the central office um staff uh for their support of the high school i really thank the school committee for their support as we've gone through this time and certainly the towns of of acton and box bro um i want to recognize and give a special thank you to someone who's been very important to me over the years and that's mariel thierry um i've learned a lot from her in in in terms of working with people and approaching things with with um and um a fair mind so thank you again all thank you debbie um i i would just like to say thank you for the opportunity to work here it has

010been my pleasure the one good thing i can say about the pandemic is that it allowed me to stay here for two years not one and it really has been my pleasure to work alongside a team of brilliant administrators fantastic parents and a parent group a wonderful school committee a wonderful community and the best of all are the kids and i look forward to checking in on what's happening within special education i'm excited for the future of special education in the district and thank you all right so thank you everyone david and larry you are welcome to take off because can i just say a quick thank you to larry please absolutely so larry i'm not feeling well but it's because of you i'm here tonight i didn't want to miss a chance to say

011thank you to you and i would say my thank you privately but you're one of the people that really touched my family's life in acting foxboro and you've worked with us in so many different instances so thank you for your leadership and for being such an incredible person i i just want to say thank you to david uh for creating such a wonderful community at mccarthy town i've also said my thank you um privately but i just want to say as a mom who was doing the school choice thing like so many other nervous moms i walked into mccarthy town and i found a school that i knew would make my two boys feel special and known and seen and that's because of the community that you made so thank you so much david for

012your service and what you created it's it's meant a lot to me and my family and i'm sure so many others in mccarthy town thank you kyra i really appreciate that thank you so much everyone so we will uh let you take off now so thank you and i know larry you're hanging out for the high school handbook in a little while so we'll see you back in a few goodbye all thank you again so couple other uh updates for you um we are sending this out tomorrow but our teaching and learning department just recently launched an elementary summer family resources website and that is linked in the update that will go out to families but it includes all sorts of ideas for families to support social emotional learning anti-bias resources physical exercise the arts

013literacy science technology engineering math history social sciences digital literacy and some virtual summer camps that people may be interested in so thank you so much to the teaching and learning staff for creating that valuable resource for our families also our community education department we want to make sure everyone knows that is fully back up and running for the summer for in-person programming uh so we are going to be sending home the brochure for all of the various summer programs that students may be interested in and want to make everyone aware of that a little bit of a vaccine update as you're likely aware all of our covid 19 vaccines are now available for ages 12 plus some of our vaccination rates are absolutely tremendous so at blanchard we have about 64 percent of eligible sixth

014graders who have already received their first dose conant about 78 percent of eligible sixth graders have received their first dose douglas is 66 percent gate 64 percent mct 64 miriam six sixty percent those are great vaccination rates considering that vaccine is just becoming available the junior high continues to be about fifty six sixty percent and the high school is nearly eighty percent of students have received at least one dose so absolutely fantastic also to continue on some of our summer covet 19 protocols so the department of education has asked school districts to continue with school year protocols through the summer when students are present for in-person activities and so what that means for the summer is that when stu when we're working with students indoors students still will need to wear masks outdoors students are

015not required to wear masks pretty simple for that for staff when staff are working directly with students indoors they are required to wear masks at all times and outdoors masks are not required if they're fully vaccinated and they're encouraged if they're unvaccinated outdoors um and they cannot maintain distance however when adults are working together only or in adult settings at that point it is the state guidance then so masks are no longer required for adults if they're vaccinated and they're recommended if they're unvaccinated so very similar to the state protocols but when we're working with kids we still are being asked to maintain the you know pretty much the school year protocols we do want to just keep telling everybody that as a reminder desi has indicated that all of deci issued covert protocols will

016be lifted at the start of next year it is possible that dph may issue some additional guidance for schools over the summer the one area that they've hinted at as a possibility are masks for elementary school students because vaccinations are not widely available they haven't hinted at anything else yet so it feels to me like that may be what we see but um you know certainly more to come as summer progresses so happy to take any questions about those updates um nora actually circulated a very interesting blog post that relates to your comment about summer learning resources you know and sadly education is not immune apparently to phishing kinds of attacks where people will try and lure you into something that is apparently educational but actually is not and i wondered if um the school

017you know had any resources or guidance with respect to questions parents might have you know about you know resources that they might come across sure deb do you want to speak to that i think there's quite a bit of that information on the digital literacy website that is also linked to that site and we can certainly make it more prominent before that goes out just to put you know an alert on that but that is something that the digital literacy team has been working hard to make sure that people are aware of how to protect students their identity and all the other kinds of things that they can come across yeah on the internet i i do um with regard to the summer rules um will those also apply to community ed activities yes community

018aid activities will fall under they fall kind of dually under summer rules and as well as kind of the early child care rules set by the state so they're in the process of taking a look at how those two merge but they're relatively similar okay doesn't look like we have any other questions so we will move right into our presentation so we are fortunate enough tonight to have amanda bailey and carrie weaver join us from the cpac with their annual presentation thank you madam chair and members of the committee our names are amanda bailey and carrie weaver alongside abe gutierrez we are the co-chairs of the acton-boxborough special education parent advisory council or cpac for the 2020-2021 school year after cpac elections last night abe and i will be joined by carol lafferty in the

019co-chair role next year while kerry steps into the position of standing committee chair for outreach we're here this evening to update the school committee on the cpac's efforts over the past school year and to tell a partial story of how the pandemic impacted families we have a couple new school committee members attending remotely so by way of introduction the cpac is a state-mandated volunteer-run organization to advise the district on matters pertaining to the education and safety of students with disabilities this is whether they have an iep a 504 or neither per mass general law the cpac also participates in the planning development and evaluation of the district's special education programs this matters for the school committees impacts the budget policies procedures community representation and advocacy the cpac works on two levels individually and collectively in

020addition to advising and providing resources for families we use information gleaned from these conversations our business meetings forums and surveys in an advisory capacity to affect district level change we find what benefits students with disabilities benefits all students we are fortunate maybe to have one of the more successful working relationships in the state among the cpac the school committee and the administration to accomplish this it's all much easier when we're not in a pandemic for those who recognize this slide it was almost five years ago i last used this parent advocate kristen lind developed care mapping as a tool to convey to clinicians what it's like to be a caregiver of a child with complex medical needs this has been described as a picture that tells a thousand words at the center is the child

021in this case a non-disabled six-year-old surrounded by family and the web of supports or needs the family uses to care for that child school health recreation this collapsed during the pandemic onto the family a reality familiar to everyone here this care map depicts the supports around an autistic six-year-old with what we'd know as an asperger profile who served in a general education classroom if you mentally corrected me to six-year-old with autism i'm making a deliberate choice to use identity first language this illustration looks different for children with other disabilities complex medical needs would make the left side of the map expand motor or other therapies would blow out the right even for a child with less significant care needs this is still going to be more than a non-disabled peer whether it's executive functioning coaching

022and homework help or academic intervention and counseling in school these webs also collapsed while there have been heroic efforts by the school to re-establish the supports in the upper right we still have many families struggling to approach their baselines pre-pandemic with regard to support particularly respite because parents and caregivers were thrust into the role of providing a free appropriate public education the department of elementary and secondary education underscored throughout its guidance this year with the need to listen to families anecdotally a b did better at this than many other districts in the commonwealth while we don't have survey findings to present to you this evening we look forward to capturing those experiences in the fall the state advocacy organizations and the cpac also worked to get tools for data collection communication documentation etc into parents

023and guardians hands to support an eventual return to the classroom by most reports this spring's transition back was well supported we will open a feedback form as school let's out as we did last summer to capture some of what worked ahead of a formal survey in the fall but we need to stress that while the return was by and large a success we're heading into two and a half months of little to no structure for many the regression window is far from over to support families through this year the cpac monitored and continues to stay abreast of the technical assistance advisories and guidance to disseminate information to families regarding compensatory services basic rights in a pandemic transition to in-person learning etc we continue to use our social media page with 500 followers and newsletter with

0241400 subscribers to share low no cost workshop training and support group opportunities some in languages other than english we continue to field calls and emails one theme that has emerged is that of isolation of caregivers and students alike thinking beyond re-establishing connections and there was a robust discussion about this at our meeting last night we look ahead to the classroom the district's emphasis on universal design and inclusivity means we also need to think about how we will educate non-disabled peers to actively include classmates who think walk talk and interact differently the onus cannot be on the students with disabilities to always develop skills to successfully be pushed in this meme on the left is particularly obnoxious we can't take credit for the correction but it illustrates the point that everyone benefits from true inclusion not

025a high five in the hallway but belonging within the school environment the research bears this out we also need to do more work among the adults to stop talking past cultural understandings of ability and disability at the district level the tiered focus monitoring process and the special education director search took up a chunk of the year we continue to advocate as issues and opportunities arise such as desi requiring districts to consult with cpax on the student opportunity act plans we've also closely followed the conversations around the development and implementation of the general education multi-tiered system of supports mtss cannot be used to delay or deny evaluations for students suspected of having disabilities further families cannot work effectively with schools unless they know when students are receiving tier two or tier three interventions and for what

026purpose the state's been clear on the importance of this while commitments may be made in the design and rollout here in a b we must ensure that integrity and transparency remain in the court at the core in years to come we've maintained and expanded partnerships with surrounding cpacs and those around the state this was critical as cpac leaders thought to stay on top of guidance accurately convey information and advocate this has frankly been like running on sand current conversations are focused on the esser funds ab also has a presence in a number of broader initiatives including the iep improvement project the regional family engagement coalition and a project abe gutierrez and i contributed to to exploring how to better support and train family leaders there's a note here at the bottom that an ab parent

027laura mello also helped with the new state dyslexia guidance we've been incredibly fortunate as a district and as a cpac to have a number of champions regarding reading instruction and intervention for students with dyslexia another among these voices loud and clear has been that of diane baum diane has served as the school committee liaison to the cpac for a number of years proactively seeking the cpac's input on policy working to understand the disability lens on any number of district initiatives and bringing that perspective back to this body on an ongoing basis she's worked tirelessly to advocate for both evidence-based literacy instruction for all students as well as to bring the concerns of families of students with dyslexia to the fore as diane steps off the school committee the abc pac is taking this opportunity to

028present her with this award for her service with gratitude our sincere thanks also to debbie dixon for her leadership over the past two years during the most trying circumstances administrators have ever faced in an incredibly trying field debbie has been a sounding board attending our meetings to share information has taken very much to heart families experiences so debbie we've brought you one more thing to take care of and as always our thanks to this committee and the superintendent for your time and collaboration our meeting scheduled for next year hinges on your own so we look forward to sharing that with you soon and we welcome any questions thank you guys that was very nice you did fine amanda does anyone have a question diane i just want to thank you for for the recognition um

029and i also want to recognize you amanda you and i have worked together and since i got here on school committee a long time i have never stopped being the liaison to cpac even when there were three of us you know i was one of them so um i've just i've learned a lot from you um and i really appreciate the way that you create liaison ships so that the work is not really transactional and when things get rough you have those relationships to build on you've been just a tireless advocate and i i just want to thank you for for your service i will miss working with you thank you to you and carrie thanks see you answered all the questions in your presentation so no need to answer any more thank you guys

030thank you thank you all right so our next presentation is um from the diversity equity inclusion family advisory and we have lucienne and dawn to join oh it us hello good evening we are very glad to be here with you tonight and present some of the work that our amazing family advisory has accomplished this year so we're going to talk a little bit about the membership some of the understandings about our work and sort of what we were thinking about and our mission we're going to you're going to hear from four of our amazing subcommittee chairs and then we'll give you some time to ask some questions um i should have introduced my co-chair here lucienne who has been a tireless partner this year and i just want to thank all of these folks who

031dedicated a lot of time over the last few years we started in this room on october 21st um and we were really excited and then i think we had one more meeting in person and then poof we all went home for a while so um it was it'll be really exciting to get a lot of folks back next year to work in person here again so i'm going to turn it over to lucian oh no i'm not um so these are the areas that we um these are the areas that we are we focused on and we sort of highlighted the verbs of all of it so really thinking about diversity inclusion belonging through all sorts of mechanisms we were really interested in facilitating conversation so whether that was about input to some of the

032policies that came before you this year to you know for peter and i to be able to ask some questions as the advisory as different you know things came up in the community from zoom bombing to other you know race-based incidents and to also serve as sort of a liaison which is a big role to for any parent to play they also did a lot of collaboration this year with our subcommittee chairs and each one of the subcommittees was able to connect with one of the four assistant superintendents or superintendent or deputy soup in terms of collaborating on some things and you'll hear more about that as we move forward we have some some data we have to look at for sure and then also for us to make sure that as we're thinking about

033in our diversity equity and inclusion goals as a district that we have a a sounding board to help us understand and think more deeply about the topics in ways that people who are white like me um can't and haven't had experiences to do that and to think through lots of different lenses but also to create additional accountability for implementing those goals so hi my name is lucian schmidt i think i've met all of you guys virtually or through email i'm just here to give a huge thanks to our family advisory um i want to take this opportunity to thank all of our subcommittee chairs who are sitting right behind us jane archer um heidi kells dr ninny wright and veronica barnes um and also i want to thank all the superintendents well not all the

034superintendents superintendent light and all the assistant superintendents that um maria terry and that bookish and don who's sitting right next to me i want to really thank the members who are probably joining us virtually tonight and i want to thank your hard work and participation in our family advisory over this past year we've only been able to meet virtually but we've gotten to know each other learned from each other and supported each other during this challenging time together we analyzed policies and procedures worked on proposals and i know one group actually ringing the new year together writing surveys before we move on to the presentation that our subcommittee chairs have prepared for you i want to say a special thank you to all of the children big and small who have made commute appearances in

035our virtual meetings the hill will climb is a challenge and we all get discouraged from time to time seeing hearing our children remind us why we're all here today and what we're working for we want to build a better world a world that's in a more inclusive world with equitable access to opportunities for our children so i am going to yield so good evening everyone my name is dr nanette wright and i will be porting out on the subcommittee for hiring practices when we got together as a subcommittee there was a group of us and we started thinking about what would our goals and responsibilities be as we went forward in this effort but before i go into the goals of our committee i just wanted to thank our subcommittee members gabby avila bronte samantha

036gold joe rossella pilard alexandra surry amy walter eric wong and our liaison marie altieri so thank you so much to everybody on the team who was participating we had a diverse group of people which made our committee i think one of the best sorry the rest you guys but but we we had a very diverse group and when we had the subcommittee title of hiring practices we said you know what hiring alone is not going to solve the problems that we have we need to think about hiring the uh recruiting and the retention and how we measure our success so when we came up with our goals we said we're going to attack all of these things we're going to look at how do we recruit how do we hire most importantly how to retain

037a diverse group of teachers and staff to make this work um next slide please thank you you want to drive okay thank you all right uh so the recommendations that we came up with in recruiting uh the first step we wanted to take is you know in order to get a diverse pool of candidates you have to go to diverse sources so we we made some recommendations on how to reformulate the job postings because you want the postings to review to remove any biases that could be in it when you start to read the advertisement for the position then we also went out to more diverse sources of where people might be looking for jobs and opportunities so we went to linkedin and the bay state banner to get a more diverse group of candidates

038to uh to come into the school system the other recommendations we had are on the hiring practice practices themselves we took a look at the interview questions and we said you know some of these questions could probably be rewired in order to take out some of the unconscious bias in the question itself because how you ask a question people always have a perception of what it is that you mean by that so we worked very hard to get some recommendations on how to take the bias out we also made some recommendations on how you uh conduct the panel interviews itself and the people who are on the panel doing the interviewing if everyone looks like one subset of the population a lot of times people who are coming for a job will be intimidated by

039that so we made some recommendations let's try to get more diverse uh interview panel but not just anybody on the panel people who are actually qualified to be a part of the interview panel so you get the best of both worlds and then also we ask uh that there be some anti-bias training because we all have our implicit biases that we carry with us and so if we could get this training out to people who are on the panels they will be able to go into the interview removing some of those biases making the interviewees feel more comfortable and it makes it a lot better from that perspective now after the interview is over one of the things that trips up a lot of companies and a lot of people doing the interviewing is how

040we go about scoring the interview process and so we made some recommendations to uh actually have a rubric for the uh interview evaluations to make sure that people are scoring everything on themselves and you don't get the group think as you're starting to score your interview candidate so we made that recommendation and that is being used and we're finding great success there and the other things we had a chance to look at the hiring policy the wallet was in its draft format made some recommendations on that policy including making sure you have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and making the recommendation to put actually in the policy to ensure you have that diverse candidate slate because that i mean diverse candidate interview panel and the diverse slate which makes it a lot more fair and

041equitable and then retention the part that so many people forget about when they're trying to hire and recruit people of color into different positions it's very important to take a look at what is the strategy to retain individuals when once you get them into a position so we made some recommendations to develop some specific metrics on what the hiring strategy is going to be how you're going to keep the people in the pipeline as they come in for the interviews and then how are you going to look at your retention numbers as you go forward and then also made a recommendation of you know we have uh district goals of what we want to do in these areas but having a look at what are the metrics by school and look at those because we

042want to kind of see how it all comes together instead of just at this top macro level some of the future work that we're looking at is we'd like to continue to do research on what kind of grants we might be able to get from the private sector or from non nonprofit grants to encourage diverse applicants to come into the school district and then also work to strengthen the paraprofessional program to continue to make that a pipeline for more teachers in the school district so those are the things that our group has been working on and with that i will pass it on to our next subcommittee member thank you thank you nanette going to pass it on to maria veronica barnes thank you um just like the other committees we had a big diverse

043group of people and don and deb were our liaisons with the district and i would like to start thanking them for giving us the space to find our way through this work which for us was really important so asthma staff melisa sid elizabeth lucian and she were members of our group and when we got started we it was important for us to figure out what the goals that that we had ahead of us where and to define them and um the the district was key in this but they also allow us to like i said before find our way and uh think about what we wanted to be what we offer to the district and we created and it was established since the beginning that we wanted some kind of measure of how is that

044the district sees the work and the people in the district sees the work and what is the people in the district want not necessarily to define the work that happens but to have an idea of where we're standing and what is the work that's needed so and that was one of the goals to create that survey and also to understand what's happening in the classrooms right now in terms of curriculum what are the things that are still needed and in which ways what kind of support the district needed to make those happen we had this it was hard for us to focus exclusively in curriculum with a the knowledge that for the curriculum to get implemented the district needs resources so you know there there were times where we had to refocus okay this is

045this is not what we need to be thinking about especially when it came for us for when we were talking about resources and then we will go back so um there were a lot of conversations uh between the relationship of what the curriculum says in theory and how it actually gets to the children and so the products that we deliver at the end was a survey like our goal was for families and caregivers to learn about what are their perceptions of the curriculum and the students maybe in relationship with that curriculum we finished that and that survey was sent to parents at the end of the spring you know like a couple of couple of weeks three weeks ago and then when we had that we realized that what was really important for us and

046for the administration is to hear and know the voice and the thoughts of our students whereas we didn't have yet the skills to design a comprehensive survey for all of our students we realized that we could easily design one for our seniors our exiting seniors and graduating seniors and include that in the survey that they do at the end of the year so we adapted the survey we had and they also um they also are or have feel that um and then we will look at the data that that brings and uh be starting that's a future a future job for our subcommittee and the other thing that we went about is to make recommendations from the subcommittee to the district with actions in terms of curriculum and we decided to do that work dividing

047short term medium-term and long-term actions basically a big a big part of our decision process was what is more accessible what can we what decisions or what changes can we make that have a bigger impact and they're easy for us to make right away so [Music] we came with these four general recommendations and have a big list that the district can make available to you and it's to continue the substantive k-12 curriculum work that includes the history of indigenous and black americans specifically as well as other marginalized groups and we think it's very important to start early we know that in high school history we our kids see some of this but we really want to emphasize the importance of starting with young children and then to continue professional learning for teachers staff and school

048leaders to continue establishing anti-racist foundation across the district in the curriculum an expansion of the of uh of the structure of the i administrations the staff in the district so that the great work that don does can be implemented in all the schools and a comprehensive dei climate assessment of the district by an external evaluation team and using not only quantitative methods but also qualitative information to gather data from students and parents and also faculty so that's our work thank you maria veronica we're going to move on to jane archer thank you all right all right it's been a long time since i've talked at a meeting so i'm doing archer and subcommittee thank you of the uh family engagement and i'd like to thank my fellow group members we have deepika sananda and charmaine

049who fingers crossed our home watching and a big thank you to don as well who kept us me very sane helped us go from here to here and keep us focused so thank you so much so basically family engagement what is that about basically for us it was to help to increase the family engagement district wide and we had so many questions that helped us narrow things down how we were going to start so we started off with um how does dei connect with families and why does dei matter to our families how do we engage all our families but especially the most marginalized families within the district which families hold the power and the space within the district and what district policies or procedures support or discourage family engagement thank you so our group

050is small in number but as i said we are mighty in voice dawn is laughing because she knows what i mean we're very passionate and we have a huge amount of ideas or i thought it'd be nice for you to know where we kind of started and then how we whittled everything down so our initial thoughts were to encourage to have active welcome committees in each schools and some ptos have them and some did have them and we thought that would be a nice idea where new families would come and they get linked up with a family within the school also how do we share what dei is and the work that we're doing with our families how do we get the message out do we use social media do we use school emails do

051we use the ptos how do we do that and we also looked at and would would have really liked to pursue this but it was kind of a bit too big for our group to do to do a time-wide body system where families would move in say like myself from ireland and we would be twinned with maybe another irish family or an english family or whomever within the district not just the school and so i think that's possibly being implemented by some of the community groups within the town so we gladly left that to them and we also thought about perhaps doing a book list for families as well that um new families into the district or for the incoming kindergarteners could be given a list of books that were maybe of interest to them

052that would have the values of the district that we could hand that out so those were kind of our initial ideas after much debate and much thoughts and lots of zooms we kind of narrowed things down to two tasks that we knew we could complete this year which was important for us to have a little win and also to have something that we hope would help the kids next year so our first thing was the cultural sharing program and this has been going on within conan for 15 20 years i was kind of championed by one of the teachers and my children went to conant and during the kids second grade families are invited to come in as part of the geography maps project and they discuss um an important tradition to their family there's

053a map up in the wall the kids put a little pin where that country is or the state if it's in america and they discuss something so my family we um we discussed a folk tale from ireland where the giants in scotland and ireland fought and who made ireland um other families talked about chinese new year um other families come in in their traditional gear some brought food some played music some talked about christmas decorations and it was a really nice way for second graders to feel connected connected to their classmates connected to the families then when you write at roach brothers or doing sport or whatever you saw people and it helped to build sense of community within your school so our aim and our wish would be that that would also be transferred

054to all the elementary schools within the district it creates a kind safe place as such for kids to talk about their traditions and feel comfortable with their peers so we have submitted that with photographs and i should say in kona we do and the teachers do like a photo album and they take a little photograph of the family and they do a little write up the kids get a passport and that's stamped throughout the whole time where they're doing that as well and there's a whole lot of other things that go with that so we submitted that anyway to the curriculum coordinators and we're hoping that they will agree to roll that program out over the summer the next thing we did was a welcome video to ab so we thought it would be a

055nice idea with dawn's agreement that we could do a welcome video where we would invite families within the district to say to be videotaped at home to say welcome to ab those families would be from all over so we sent a survey out to ask parents and families to be involved we've got over 80 families who speak 48 different languages within the district i should have said that sorry that each family could say welcome to ab in their language that they use at home we also have multiple families we have blended families grandparents lgbtq pull-off families and um two moms and two dads so vivian birchall from acton tv is helping us produce that video and don can fill you in a little bit more on that but she's going to do all the putting

056together for it um school-wise it was fairly even with the distribution of families i think there were 17 in the high school 16 in the junior high and the elementary schools were pretty even and i think the plan is to have one for high school and one for the elementary schools with the wish that would get sent out to all new families when they join the district and also be on each individual school as well as the district website and that's all that right yeah i had to thank because we did so much okay thank you all right heidi this is heidi colt she chaired our police and district interactions team hi everyone thank you so much for making time for this tonight um i would like to thank all of my subcommittee members kira

057um krista frey um liz mcgovern nav preet singh and gail townsend everyone contributed a really immensely important perspective to this work um i also love to thank lucienne who contributed i think was in every single meetings um and of course to superintendent light who was really invaluable um in helping us see the the bigger context of um of police and district interactions and connecting with us with all the right people thank you so much um so our goal was to you know we realized we were starting out um not entirely understanding as many families in the district um i think experience the you know the purpose of the school resource officers within our schools um why they're there and what they do and i think you know we learned a lot um that you know

058they are tasked with um student and staff safety and building security um and they cover all our events but they also do an incredible number of things wellness checks truancy support they train staff and administrators in de-escalating situations they lead all of the safety drills and they they co-lead the building safety committee at the high school and of course they are intervening in and investigating any criminal offenses having proactive and reactive involvement around the use of any controlled substances and just as importantly they're doing a lot of educating other students in terms of digital literacy the i safe classes also educating students about cyberbullying um and dating violence so there's they have a very broad role within our schools and they have a lot of opportunities for um for interaction with students um so the

059questions that we started out asking were you know i think that sort of safety lens and the safe in the sense of keeping schools and students and and the individuals safe from physical harm is what we we tend to think about when we think about school um resource officers in schools but we were really evaluating the sick you know trying to say how can we evaluate the success of this program specifically through a lens of diversity equity and inclusion because we know that um the in this country in our climate of uh you know racial inequity in in policing the very presence of police officers in schools does not affect our students equally and that is a really important thing that we um that we wanted to just bring in in our um perspective we

060wanted to bring into our findings so we talked we looked at what feedback might exist about the program there is an official memorandum of understanding between the acton police department and the district and we wanted to look at those those state mandated you know objectives to see whether those are being met but we also wanted to look at how positive relationships between the sros students and parents are being fostered how they are being part of our community i think one of the things we found was that this this role is is very um it it depends a lot on the individual who is the sro i think that they you know we have seen uh the the the two detectives we talked with we have seen the ways that they have stepped up in their

061um private capacity to coach teams and do you know and do and be involved in a variety of ways but it's really something that isn't maybe necessarily formally part of their of their role as an officer we weren't able to sort of look at this work without also looking at discipline and the broader disciplinary context within our schools in terms of those situations that might escalate to sro involvement and so we needed to talk with a lot of people about how discipline is normally handled and we also wanted to we felt it was important to talk about how student mental health challenges also influence um specifically student interactions with police officers um so in terms of our our work we broke it into two phases the first was gathering information um we took a look

062at that memorandum of understanding and we also had conversations first with acton police department deputy chief jim cogan and later with school resource officers keith campbell and tyler russell and we also talked with some district administrators um including of course superintendent light who was in most of our meetings um also principal dory uh principal shen uh dana lab and and david crane and they were all very helpful in helping us see um how that looks at the elementary and the the junior high and the uh the high school level we also looked at some wide field um uh interviews um with with vivian burchell um the youth panel on racial relations and and she had also had a conversation with local police officers that contributed to some of our perspective taking so what we produced

063was a report that we delivered just a short while ago to the district with some a great deal of observations and some immediate recommendations ranging to longer term so our first priority was just to make sure that our we educate and um inform our community about the purpose and the role of sros and all that they do within our schools and why they are there so we created a just an faq that the sros and administrators are having input on to be able to put up on the website over the summer and we're also recommending just that they do a brief video introduction as well as make the most of opportunities to meet families in person as we return to in-person events we also one of their primary recommendations was a regular formal evaluation of

064the sro program i think this evaluation has been happening verbally but without without particular documentation as to how those objectives are being met and one of the things we found was that everyone we spoke with the administrators the sros everyone wants wanted or was eager to have more feedback to make sure that their impact was matching their intent and we kind of felt like they're operating in a in a in a space where they they would welcome more feedback as to how how they can how they're doing what they're succeeding in and also what they can improve um so a regular sort of evaluation could be very helpful in that we think we also want to recognize the the role of all of the staff um who become involved in student discipline and and uh

065we recommend anti-bias and specifically cultural awareness for all of the different backgrounds um that that families i mean that that our students are coming from in our schools um so just additional training around that for anyone who might be a um a recess monitor or you know someone who might have a role in that disciplinary process and more than that i think you know we just wanted to encourage more opportunities for the sros to interact with um with families with marginalized communities with students with parents with community members i think the more we get people having these conversations and knowing each other as people and as individuals the better the outcome for this program will be that's it thank you so much what questions might you have i just want to say thank you because

066don and i got to participate in a masc school committee forum where we were asked to share all of the work that our district is doing in dei and of course don was able to answer like the vast majority of the questions because of course she's been participating in all of this and i was just sort of there as i don't know but to talk about school committee policies and everything else and um it was really remarkable because we were one of three school districts asked to share the work that we were doing and there was a whole lot of other school committees there just to listen and to take this back to their own districts and hearing this work you know in person and getting to listen to the real depth of what all

067of you have been working on is really truly remarkable i mean it was proud to be sitting on that panel and sharing what we were doing because when you put it all down in writing and don and i spent a little over an hour kind of going through the questions that they had asked and we were like wow wow we actually have done like quite a few things and you know when you start to list all the things it it it does and and then when you're sharing it at that kind of capacity and there's all these people typing in the chat and saying like wow wow we never thought of doing that and you know it just it was a really proud moment as a school committee member and sitting here listening to everything

068that you've accomplished makes me even more proud because it's astounding that we've had so many parent volunteers who have sat and done this work and really brought this forward to the district and you know you all speak so eloquently about the things that you're doing and you're not even looking at notes and it just it really it really speaks to the amount of work that you've done so thank you do you guys have questions evelyn i just wanted to thank the committee as well you guys have done a tremendous job i didn't even expect that would do half of this giving covet just listening to you i'm just flawed at how much work has been done you know you we all just thought time flew by and we didn't really think about what we're doing

069but we've been able to do a lot over zoom and i'm just like flawed at what you guys are doing and you're digging into the right the things that really concern people in this community right the hiring practices the school resource officers the curry club like these are the things that are worrisome to people in this community but i had a question for the net i don't know when you were looking at hiring practices was there did you guys dig into any historical reasons why we have not been able to hire people of color in this community and also as we move forward i think that we need to i would like to see that the committee works towards disabusing the narrative that when you talk about hiring a diverse group of people it means

070you're hiring unqualified people um into the district i like to say that one thing that we know how to do in this district is hire qualified people what we don't know how to do is higher qualified people who are diverse but i think that is a switch in people's minds that is hard for them to grasp and i would like to see the committee do a little bit in this abusing that notion just by having a black person lgbtq plus person at the table it means suddenly our curriculum is going to go down and that they're not qualified enough to teach in this district yes so i think one of the main things that we looked at is to get qualified people people of color to come into a school district you have to open

071up the net you know you have to cast a wide net to get the type of qualified people to come into the school district if you only advertise in your local area and your local area has no diversity then you're not going to get any any diversity in your pool of candidates so that's why we said let's open it up on linkedin let's let's maybe go recruit at hpcus uh historically black colleges and universities you know let's open up the aperture so that you get the qualified candidates and the other big piece of that is how you write your job descriptions how you write that requisition if there really are um there's lots of research out there that you can kind of uh have bias in your requisition so it looks like you're only trying

072to hire women or you're only trying to hire men or you're only trying to hire one set of groups so you have to go through and look for the keywords and take that out that's what a lot of the big companies are doing now so that's what you know we try to help the school district do as well by making those recommendations and there's software out there that does it it's not like just people deciding software that can go recognize those things so that you can get it going but i i i believe the most important part of getting those qualified candidates getting the people hired in the school district is one cast the net wider and then two when you're doing the scoring you need a diverse set of thoughts as you're evaluating the

073criteria of who should be hired to make sure you don't get the biases in there and it disqualifies people that might be a good fit john before then it sits down um the the first thing you know it's um unusual to see a really spectacular presentation it's even more unusual to see four back to back so i do want to thank you know the teams that of course make it possible for you to be here tonight and for you all to bring this to this and i wanted to come back to um the point that you made in your presentation with regard to retention so it's great to get people in the door um but i and i think this ties to your pipeline commentary that um bringing them in the door you know is

074only the first step and then you know having a good onboarding process providing supports um showing the love and then saying and why don't you bring your friends um is you know the way to long-term success so i wanted to make sure that didn't get lost in in the shuffle and then the other thing that we say from time to time your budget reflects your values so with respect to that support question you know for retention you know if we see in our future budget money set aside to make sure we have a different kind of supports than we sometimes have for our beginning faculty you know i think that would be very worthwhile yes agree 100 two parts of that budget and the support is a one when you're trying to recruit if you're

075trying to recruit from an area where people need to come and get housing massachusetts is quite expensive so you know trying to be able to adjust to that or having transportation if you're in the inner city and trying to get out to act in you know you got to figure out how to work the t which i still haven't figured out yet moving here a couple years ago and so it's those those kind of equity type issues of transportation what's the what's the support system that's going to be available to you whether it's going to the hairdresser or a haircut or all of these different things kind of go into that retention pool that you have to kind of think about to make that support system thank you can i just add to that one

076thing you know we this was our first year where we actually started an affinity group for black indigenous persons of color and so that's been going all year so actually as some of the ideas have come out of this we've also been talking with that affinity group about their ideas um in the same manner and one of the things we started talking about that i think some members of the affinity group also have an interest in is actually helping to lead some of our efforts around developing some retention process some of these other you know recommendations that are coming out of the family group uh we also want to support our current educators in helping us to develop those so um that's certainly something that's in the works and we've been trying to make sure

077that you know we're connecting the dots behind the scenes great thank you norah and then diane um thank you so much for these presentations and i'm just really struck by the amount that you were able to accomplish in this year and the question that i have for the different subcommittees is um you know when i first learned that there was a dei family advisory group being created i have to admit i was a little concerned that this was going to be an answer to problems that were raised that was going to be well we'll create a committee and we'll study it and that maybe it would linger in sort of just studying and researching for a long time and change wouldn't happen but one of the things i'm really struck by in your presentation is

078how much you were able to accomplish and i'm wondering if that is how it felt to be on the subcommittees if it felt like changes that you identified that you wanted to have made were they made and did you feel supported in that because the impression is that you did and i'm wondering if that's true and then i'm also wondering if there were things that sort of stood in the way of changes that you hoped would happen and what those might be so to answer your question on frustrations and were we how do we feel they were as such i guess for most of us because we don't work within the school system where we're not high up within the school system the main frustration that we had in our group which was pretty minor

079to be honest was just the length of time that we had to wait to get an answer so we were quite keen to get the cultural sharing up and running and in our heads we're thinking it's a great idea we'll get it done we'll be out in schools really quick and it'll be great but i think that was just the only frustration we had was just learning for us how the public school system works and that it's not just a great idea don says great idea go ahead and do it that has got to go through certain procedures and go through the curriculum people and once that's done then hopefully you're good to go so i think that was the main frustration is just going from our backgrounds i guess in corporate world or whatever

080to public school and the difference between that but once that's explained and you understand how that system works then you're fine if that makes sense does that answer that a little bit okay thank you um yeah i would like to answer that question too because i think the administration was work with us which is the best thing that they could have done they didn't uh and it took a while to to find that dynamic right like you know they didn't talk to us or or want it from here only from us it was a team effort so i'm really grateful to for all the and our group too for all their support and space that we had to figure out things and uh we proposed some or brought some solutions that were short-term and we

081had all the support to implement them and we also made recommend recommendations that we knew they were working on already they frustration and it's not a frustration it's it's it's part intrinsic intrinsic part of this kind of work is that you're going to have things for which you have big obstacles and i think one of them is that understanding that for things to get implemented and get down to the children we need more resources and you know budgets are already approved and where are we going to get those resources so i think it's very important for this committee to hear that when we when if we really want to make a progress in the ei issues we're going to have to re-look and review where is that we're putting our resources and what things are

082going to have to let go of because we're going to have to let go of certain things and support this work this work is not for now it's not for a year it's not for five years this is work that has to continue to happen as long as the school exists so we really have to re-switch the way we're looking at it and starting to when we're assigning resources to this understand that there is a lot that has to go in there because it's work that has to be continued and that requires a lot so you know don cannot do it all herself and she's done a lot um i actually would like to answer part of the question as well i'm actually a chinese-american my i'm an immigrant so i know that on our

083advisory group we have a diverse present representation of the school community and parents now there's one really big challenge at least for me that is to not only you know overcome the barrier of language like english and chinese but also a lot of our parents came from foreign land with different school systems different term knowledge i remember one of those times that i was working with superintendent assistant superintendent mario terry i had to raise my hand and ask her i'm sorry but what is central office i all here right i want to say that the administrators here have been very very supportive you ask the questions they will always answer it but i think that um there could be a challenge that is that for a lot of immigrant parents they don't know what question

084to ask us yet so that would potentially cause some of the slowdowns right yeah but we are on our way so i hope that everybody can be patient and so will we be right and i just i'm so sorry diane if i could just add one thing you know one one tension that certainly was there where there were so many good ideas that came up through the process there were certainly times when we had to say jeez there are 25 good ideas on the table we need like six of them um that we can actually take action on and so you know there really is i mean there's a tension when you go through that process and that's a normal piece of that that iterative process that you go through to kind of ferret out

085what are the real priorities that we want to move forward and so i just don't want it to go unsaid there were certainly tensions through the the work process around how much can we do covet is happening if there's a curricular idea like the the project at conan we love the idea but we were like yeah we can't give that to our teachers this year um and and ask them to do something new so you know there are certainly things that that took place and i just you know i everyone's so polite i just want to make sure i say oh yeah no we had tensions in the group and we had tensions around how do we navigate this these waters so i just want to make sure that's recognized too so i've been on

086the committee for six years i've been going to family advisory workshops and seminars and this and that with the department of education in person when we were able to do so and zoom the last couple of years and this is i mean strong work strong work it is it is an incredible honor to have you come to us and it's the work is evident that the the camaraderie is evident and we really appreciate this um we really look forward to to following this in the future um i had an observation and um maybe actually a an advocacy or maybe this is more for school committee but um i i happen to jump on um the department of education has a workforce diversity subcommittee who met today and they um they have so that the department

087of education has been you know needing teachers so they put out an emergency um issuance of cheater licenses and the findings were stark today that i they're apparently the amount the percentage of minorities is about nine percent generally in the state and just because they just to offer some complexity of this the emergency waivers resulted in a fourfold increase in the number of diverse candidates that they attracted and it really spoke to the the things like the the testing and the you know there's these are systemic i mean it's it's the housing you're spot on about that and i mean there's so many things to work on and and we're we are a diverse community but we're not attracting the diversity that we need but it's the problem is very very complicated it goes all

088the way up to the state the training programs and and it's just it's keep doing the work because it's it's really it's good good work the other thing i wanted to say was about policing i was really interested to see what what was going to come of that because i know worcester just got rid of their sros there's just no sros in their schools anymore and the only the only experience i have is is through another volunteer commitment that i've made over about five years to the communities for restorative justice so i only know sro speak in my capacity as a white person and having disabled children with the truancy thing that was at play but um i only know them as people who provide exit points to the cradle to prison pipeline through c4rj

089and so i i for one i think that the education piece is a big deal and and that need you need to educate not i'm not putting it on you but we need to become educated educate ourselves and find ways to become more knowledgeable about the sros and the limitations the drawbacks of them and the merits of having them and the last thing i want to say and this is more maybe just for the school committee is i hate the discipline policy and i i know it's the law and i think it should be replaced with a restorative model and i i think it's something that either you know this school committee could take on or or the advisory group could take on thank you i think i'm supposed to call on you deb i

090just wanted to follow up on the curriculum piece and first publicly thank you for the proposal and i don't know if you know sort of the outcome of the proposal and so it did go to our literacy and our social studies curriculum coordinators who then put it out to our teachers as a research and development opportunity this summer we have 12 educators from across the schools classroom teachers english language educators special educators to collaborate together to be able to create a unit to be able to be put into our social studies curriculum across the district so thank you very much for that and maybe normal times we could have done it a little bit sooner but it will get done this summer so i just want you to know the outcome thank you um i

091as the liaison to this group i i i just want to say how in awe i am um of the entire group um and and i want to say for the record um especially for these sub-chairs who are are women who are working teaching mothers um you you did all of the things this year you did it with grace you did it with patience um you did it amidst tension you you did it and so i just want the record to show um that that what you've seen here is the product of not not a little bit of labor emotional labor um physical labor uh intellectual labor it is everything um and so y'all are here so i can say thank you um and thank you for letting me witness and take part um but

092for y'all who are in the audience um or who will watch this on replay everyone who was part of this group participated in that labor and you should be commended so if you see anyone on the facebooks on the zooms in person say thank you thank you well since there were four presentations i get four questions right no i i only i only have one in in its form maria so um one of one of the things that was in the uh the news recently um was that germany had decided to apologize for the genocide in namibia and i mentioned that just because the examples of human bad behavior are essentially endless so you know as we try and decide how we should teach you know the younger children in particular about history there's a

093part of it that is these are the particular circumstances we're going to talk about and there's another part that relates to what is it to be a person and to accept that each of us individually will do some good and bad things and that we collectively will do some good and bad things and how can we come to you know understand that and try and improve ourselves so that the the history is there but of course the history can't change but what we would hope to change you know is our future so can you tell me a little bit about how that informs what you would like to see in curriculum well i'm not sure of uh what you're asking but what i can tell you is that you can do that with three-year-olds and

094you do that through to reading through critical thinking and when you know what you're teaching is critical thinking and what you're teaching is um i don't know whatever that book is about but in the context of oppression so you you you look for developmentally appropriate material and then you have conversations about what happened in history and at the same time you have a social emotional curriculum that you know it's it's working with the ability of for children developing ability ability in children to hold two things at a time right and to hold that they are great uh loving children who sometimes lie and you know and who sometimes hate their neighbor and who turn who's sometimes like the in the cookie jar um so those things are really easy for children to understand and i

095do that and so i i know it i'm not just saying it i know it i leave that every day and um and children can understand that what has happened in our history it's true and that don't need to happen again and that they are actors in changing it every day in the things they do and i will tell you something that one first grader said to me last week after we were ending our unit in slavery um he said well you know his uh his ancestry is chinese and he said well you know what marie veronica the united states is a really young country there's so much hope in that right it's like we we know that yeah we've messed up but but we're young like we're learning to do this thing i i

096was floored by that because he said it really casually i mean it wasn't it wasn't a big deal for him to say it but so kids are able to hold duality and they're able to understand that the mistakes that humans make humans can also fix thank you i also think the other place that that will continue as we continue to unpack the social justice standards both the early childhood ones and we start to embed them within our curriculum across the district we're talking about diversity and the fact that we're different and that some of our skin is lighter or darker than others to really make our kids from very very young ages they can talk about those things they can understand them they can recognize them and and sometimes it's us that has the hardest

097time having those conversations um and you know moving all the way up to justice and to action where we're teaching our kids how they can you know be better humans so i had more of a comment than i like the diversity of the family advisory committee look at them different shades oh great right but where are the dots it's i mean i'm looking at we have dad and it's all we have dads everywhere oh yeah they were dads but the women outnumbered their dads right yeah so they need to get involved that's all i'm saying okay it's mirrored on our own committee i look forward to our new members from acton joining thank you all for this opportunity we're excited in the the fact that at the end of all of this as peter and

098i shared the district strategy draft with them for feed with this group for feedback and input that they really could see how the things that they were recommending were aligned with the things that we were thinking about and looking at moving forward so thank you for this time thank you and if i can just highlight because the strategy is so fresh you know one of those pieces under building inclusive culture was listening to stakeholders right and so i just want to be really clear this was one of the largest explicit moves of really going out and engaging a broad range of stakeholders to help give us input about our practices and so you're seeing the product of that come forward um but i don't want to get lost that this is amazing work thank you

099so much for everything you've done and it's really strategic to where we want to be thank you all all right so in new business tonight we have a first read of the fy 22 acton-boxborough regional high school handbook um i think we're pulling more in adam do you want to bring lauren they're both already there all right look at that and i'm just going to say ahead of time john you don't get to ask any questions during this segment non-debatable good evening everyone okay can you hear me okay yes we can thank you so um well that is certainly a tough act to follow there um but i just like to take the time to run through a couple of the proposed changes for um next year's student handbook for the high school and with

100this year being kind of the the year it was um we've done a lot of thinking about i think grander scale changes that we'd like to make as we move forward but with it being a transition year where we're going to be welcoming a new principle we didn't make extraordinary changes just just yet um because we certainly want her input and value what she she wants to prioritize as well um so the first the first change that we would like to make comes from our world language department and they have in in the handbook um the world language honor society requirements and previously the honor society requirements for the world language society required 10 hours of community service they would like to increase that to 10 hours of communist community service per year the reasoning

101behind that is they found that those service hours are really what is extending the passion for the learning of the their chosen language and the sharing of the knowledge beyond the classroom as they kind of connect with the um the wider community the hope is that by increasing the community service require our requirement that it will um make being part of that language honor society more meaningful the second proposed change actually the second and the third proposed changes are um are more more just to kind of update the book um and reflect what we have at the high school and what we basically don't have but it was still in the handbook so the second one is the writing center we we won't be having a formal writing center next year but we have increased

102um the number of academic support centers that we have so those academic support center opportunities will supplement the writing center um services for students um it also happens that it just so happens that our um our staff person who did run the writing center for so long is retiring but we've noticed that the students are accessing a lot of the writing support through their learning centers and their academic support centers in addition to some of the peer tutors that we have available for students third is removing the reference to sad students against drunk driving are students against destructive decisions on page 17 simply because we don't have a sad club anymore that has morphed into our peer leader organization that we have the fourth proposed change um is regarding our after school time in the

103high school we're asking that students if they are in the high school after school hours that they are in um a supervised space like our library or um the the main lobby area students who are usually in the high school after school hours are either awaiting rides before or after practices um or using our library or meeting with teachers for extra support and by waiting in the front lobby they are in a more centralized location so that they're either in a supervised location or in the main lobby which actually does have more adult supervision with um folks kind of passing through and they're also able to see where um the rides will pick them pick them up the fifth one is regarding our physical education policy um previously all students were required to change into

104appropriate clothing um and if they weren't in appropriate clothing sports where then they um they would lose credit um we found that students that that that wasn't that wasn't helping students or motivating them um to participate especially those students who are uncomfortable with changing in locker rooms or uncomfortable in certain styles of clothing so we are not um requiring it but we are encouraging it for safety purposes footwear appropriate footwear will still be required lastly we have changes to the format of our graduation requirements it's important to note that the requirements themselves are not changing it's just the um the format and and we're proposing this change for readability purposes um the class of 2022 2023 and 2024 those um requirements are all the same they are not changing but for the class of 2025

105and this this has been previously approved they um the class of 2025 students will be required to complete three years of science no longer two three years of mathematics and two years of a world language in this formatting just like i said it's for um readability more than any anything else are there any questions that i can answer or comments that people would like to share does anyone else have a question besides john amy i just have a comp oh i just have a comment um thank you for removing the pe uh change requirement that's i i i know that that that can be a very delicate situation so thank you thank you i agree excuse me may i just say um one one quick follow-up to martin's opening in in that um you know

106she talked about things that need to be looked at in the future these these items are very large items that um really we're going to need just to um i would i would recommend that um they start to form committees and look at these very early these are things that um are kind of going along with a lot of the changes that we're seeing in in in the school a lot of it related to you know equity diversity and inclusion but um we need to study our attendance policy absolutely we need to continue to look at our grading practices and assessment and diane is right we need to continue to look at our discipline practices and we've started to move more of our discipline issues to a restorative model but that needs to um that

107needs to grow and those aren't things you can just write in a book and are going to happen those are things that that need to be studied those are things that are going to require professional learning and training to to do it right but i think over the next two or three years those are the big um things that that need to evolve at the high school in my opinion thank you i i'd agree with that larry at the discretion of the chair thank you morin and larry thank you so we'll look at this again from for a second read june 17th when we um are expected to vote which is next week kevin did you have a for question for the far fall changes uh suggested suggestion to after hours let's say i wonder

108so now students ask to wait in the front lobby only so i just wonder if that's going to affect the traffic pattern around the high school that's a that's a good question i don't think it will um impact the traffic pattern only because this this policy is more for after students have left to go to practice or the buses have already left this is this is really for um the students who are receiving um extra help after school or waiting when practice lets out so it's not the entire school population it's usually a handful of um students at a time yeah but it's a it could now it's a long waiting time it's a very long queue to pick up the kids but i think she's talking about this is really just like after all

109the kids have left for the day yeah this isn't that release time at the end of the day it's not dismissal time it's more for the students who stay for that extra hour or hour and a half or even two hours after school for extracurricular commitments or like i said extra help so it's not at you know 2 47 through 3 15 it's more 3 30 and on okay thank you but that that's a good question thank you okay i don't think i see any other questions so thank you both for hanging around the meeting to wait to present that to us i appreciate it thank you thank you very much everybody have a nice night thank you both yeah all right peter you're next the msba not that i know so i'm just trying

110to not have your picture up on the big screen yeah that's a little better all right so the next one um this is something that you know we've submitted to you uh annually for the last several years um you know when the district engaged dorne whittier a number of years ago to do a feasibility study of all of its schools um you know obviously douglas and gates came out as two priorities but conant was also a very high priority of a school needing some further study for either a renovation repair replacement we don't know what that looks like but we know that we want to stay in kind of that msba pipeline i took an opportunity when we did the placement of the last steel beam we had the executive director of msba out on

111site and i publicly thanked him for the continued partnership and future partnership for conant so he's looking very much forward to receiving our statement of interest on that um this is the same statement of interest largely that we've submitted in the past a couple minor updates for enrollment purposes marie and jd contributed to that we've also done some of the initial repairs from the door in whittier study to make sure conan is still a viable building but we do want to stay in that pipeline we're not sure if you know i would doubt that this is the year that the msba comes back to us and tells us it's time to go into the pipeline for conan typically you only get one building project in the mspa pipeline at a time and so i don't

112anticipate that we're going to be accepted by msba until after the douglas gates project is finished and off their books but we should still keep submitting it so that when it is time for that we can rise to the top of the pile in past years we have given you also a blanchard repair statement of interest the msba stopped funding last year the things that we need to do at blanchard so we're not submitting that this year we're hopeful that they will open up in future years to some of the things we need but right now that's just not on the table so we're we're pausing for a year on blanchard but uh we'd like to get your vote on the conan statement of interest um and then we will submit that to msba move

113to approve the cut specifically oh damn i'll go ahead i don't know yes before i start this very long motion i i think are there any other questions about this before we all right because i know we resubmit we resubmit and you know it's the same speech like they're not going to accept us until this is off the books what is actually the merit of doing the work every year to do this then and not just wait and then when we're off the books just apply again um you know there's a process and procedure to every organization um and then there's also the relationships that you develop with organizations over time um and in all honesty i think it's really important that the community continues to put forward the needs of the school district to

114msba because that really stays in their mind they they do take very seriously when they come out to districts and they visit places that makes an impact so i i actually think it's something that we just want to continue to do just so it causes continued conversation between the state and our district around the needs that we have for capital yeah just to follow up on that so one of the practical things that comes out of our submission is then they can roll all of that up so when they go back to the legislature and say this is what the need is they have actual real data on which to base that request as opposed to saying we know that there's a bunch of stuff that hasn't come in because we don't have any money

115right i move that having convene in an open meeting on june 10 2021 prior to the soi submission closing date the acton-boxborough regional school district of acton and boxborough in accordance with its charter bylaws and ordinances have voted to authorize the superintendent to submit to the massachusetts school building authority the statement of interest form dated june 25th 2021 for the luther conan elementary school located at 80 taylor road acton massachusetts 01720 which describes and explains the following deficiencies and the priority categories for which the application may be submitted to the massachusetts school building authority in the future for priority two which is the elimination of existing overcrowding priority five which is the replacement renovation or modernization of school facility systems such as roofs windows boilers heating and ventilation systems to increase energy conservation and decrease

116energy related costs in the school facility and priority seven which includes the replacement of or addition to obsolete buildings in order to provide for full range of programs consistent with state and approved local requirements and hereby further specifically acknowledges that by submitting this statement of interest form the massachusetts school building authority in no way guarantees the acceptance of the approval of an application the awarding of a grant or any other funding commitment from the massachusetts school building authority or commits to the regional school district to filing an application for funding with the massachusetts school building authority and this is the best part of these meetings all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions super that passes unanimously i know it's the best if you'd like we can have them put that through a readability calculator

117well i was going to object to that word in the acton-boxborough regional school district of acton in boxborough that felt very redundant to me sorry john okay so in your packets we have a proposed calendar of meetings for next year that i won't be chairing and so right okay so um there was one question um that that came up and that was that this year we did um for covid reasons we did um a virtual budget meeting um but we didn't do our traditional budget saturday um and there was many of us that felt that that was preferable we were able to really target the things that we wanted to talk about and not spend a lot of time talking about things that we didn't need to um but we could have a budget saturday

118if people preferred that so there were two options on the calendar just so that we could get a general consensus and it wasn't just me making that decision um so they're both on the calendar so you can see what those options would be either we would have a meeting on a thursday like normal but we would have the option of dinner if people wanted to attend and the meeting would then be from like about six tonight is there a general consensus yes amy uh yeah i i would definitely agree to the evening meeting i do like the fact that we will be starting an hour earlier i think that's a important but yes i would definitely vote for that over the budget saturday i think that worked really well this year i'm sorry i'm going

119to actually let that go the the comment that i'll make is you know i continue to believe that it is in the interest of the district for actontown meeting to be moved later which will have an impact on the development of the budgetary schedule through the year and how that relates to the governor's budget so i mentioned that just because in looking at this calendar you know right now it doesn't seem that it's likely that we would not have april town meeting last year but if it does obviously then this should change in response to that okay i agree i do think acton should move their town meeting later but you know that is what it is so um we have to vote this bathroom now okay and so the only other thing that i

120would note actually because it hasn't happened in prior years since many people have been on the committee is that the november 2nd meeting is a tuesday because the masc conference is actually happening this year so those who have not attended the masc conference it's held in hyannis massachusetts and you get to go away for a couple nights and leave your kids out so um but we have the meeting on tuesday so that members that wish to attend can um go to the conference which starts on wednesday and ends on saturday you don't have to save the whole thing but can i say a note on that yep um you know just one note on that conference um there's very you know when you're elected to a school committee oftentimes you're very much kind of just

121set out making very very impactful decisions for school districts but without a lot of development that can go into that and support for your own kind of professional learning into that role that conference is really one of the only ways that school committee members have access to really good quality professional development sessions it's an opportunity to hear from other school committee members across the state make connections understand what's going on in other districts hear about best practices hear some keynote speakers and really kind of take a couple of days and delve into the educational world in education world in a way that you just don't get to so um it's a really good conference to attend if that's something that you're interested in beth just received the information so i think we're going to be

122sending that to you shortly um you know along with some information about to get back to beth if you want to be registered for that but just something to put on your radar because it is a good opportunity you can meet other superintendents as well yes a cohen science with the with the superintendent's association conference as well so um it is it's a really good opportunity for professional development it's a really good almost like a retreat sort of for for a school company to get to spend time outside of these thursday night meetings so highly recommend i was just going to make a motion to approve the uh regional school committee meetings as posted in our packet with the um option of either a friday uh a evening budget meeting or the january 22nd my

123birthday budget saturday no no second so i think that there was there was consensus that the thursday night was the preference so it would be the january 20th budget meaning and no we won't celebrate your birthday on budget saturday that would stink so i'm going to amend my motion to just nix the budget saturday in this calendar second all those in favor aye any opposed any abstentions good that passes unanimously diane okay let's move right to a vote on these policies yeah okay so tonight the policy subcommittee is bringing forward two policies for a second read the first one is evaluation of instructional program we haven't had no feedback on this so i'll take questions if there are any and i don't do you want to do one at a time right call for a

124vote okay any questions it's good solid policy i think so so i would move to approve a policy file il evaluation of the instructional program second all those in favor aye any opposed any extensions well evelyn's not sitting here so she didn't vote but okay that passes okay the second one is policy k um casey did i get that right kcs yeah i didn't look right i've only looked at that like 90 times i should know public gifts to schools so just to note on the process um this if i had to use one word to characterize the process would be iterative this has gone through several drafts and it was extensively vetted by all stakeholders meaning this was brought to the ptso pto ptf roundtable twice they looked at both drafts and we incorporated

125their input the principals looked at it the district leadership team has been a major part of of this so it's been well well vetted i'll say that and i'm i'm very proud of the vetting process we've had really really good input on this policy i'm going to talk for a minute about the intention of the policy so you know schools are are micro communities and donations supplement and enrich these communities and 501 c3s especially the ptos they function as kind of co-culture builders along with the building administration and this policy encodes that private funders engage in their work to support our schools and the school committee wants to be able to identify when these donations become an equity issue so in other words when is it appropriate to scale a donation target whatever that target

126might be for the educational benefit of all so to accomplish this task um i've there's i might the visual that keeps popping into my mind is a triad i keep trying to kind of come up with this powerful visual um that needs to and the triad is the ptos the principles that they work with and the leadership here in the district level they need to start embedding and they already are doing this but they need to be embedding conversations about equity into the existing infrastructure so we're not building out anything new the ptos meet they plan we want them to embed equity conversations in that existing encounter and and infrastructure when they work with the principals who work with the school councils and come up with the goals and then work with the ptos to

127support those goals for the uh the idiosyncratic things that come up um that characterize whole schools like outdoor learning at blanchard or project-based learning at miriam or art education at mccarthy town those conversations we would like them to embed equity into those conversations and of course on the district level i mean this is a district goal so um you know other to just to accomplish this the policy subcommittee you know we looked at a lot of policies and there are a lot of districts doing a lot of different things around equity and and pto funding so we we would we don't want to create more work we don't we don't also want to cap what ptos can can fundraise or raise funds for and we don't want to neces i don't we don't want a

128pool and these are all like suggestions that are floating around out there we want to do the work of creating a culture of equity here and this policy applies that to donations so we want the private funders to think about the question basically that the school committee asks every year when we consider our budget how do we allocate resources in a way that strikes a balance among considerations of fairness expense in administration i hope that helps with the intent a couple of changes to current practice of note at the end of the policy is the the acton-boxborough regional school committee we will no longer accept money to pay for staff positions there is a pre-approval requirement for fundraisers there's a form on the kcde in our in our policy manual and we are requesting some

129middle of an annual budget that identifies planned donations including fundraisers from ptos why are we doing this not to micromanage we're not interested in oversight or micromanaging but that's really the only way that we can flag what which initiatives might be worthy of scaling for the benefit of all in the educational program of all students the last one is as of september 1st 2022 no fundraising will be permitted during school hours this is not that there are some exceptions that are noted in the policy it is the belief of the policy subcommittee that no student's sense of belonging should be tied to a family's economic status or personal philosophy so that with if there are students walking around who don't whose families don't believe in that or they don't have the twenty dollars in their

130pocket they should not feel like an outcast or like they don't belong that should just never happen in our schools and that was the the thinking beyond the behind that that was also vetted with the ptos at the round table and with the principles so i just want to assure you that all of this has gone through the process that it needed to go through and we're bringing it forward to you tonight for a vote does anybody have any questions john this is such an important activity um you know and i've commented previously that you know equity is easy when it's just words and equity is hard when it's money um so your effort you know to build you know that discipline around these activities you know is very much appreciated um and then the

131other thing because i i have to say it one of my favorite parts of the meeting so far was the question what is the central office and i hope everybody who sits on the policy subcommittee when they read these documents reads them with that question in their mind because that was a much more eloquent statement than i will ever make about plain english policy duly noted john thank you move to approve policy kcd any other discussion all right all those in favor aye any opposed any abstentions awesome that passes unanimously thank you all [Applause] okay so i'm slated to just present to you the report a quick review of what we did this year um so i i just i want to thank um the members of the policy subcommittee um evelyn jenny nora yebin

132you were awesome partners to work with this year every single one of you brought so much to the table really diverse opinions and takes on things good robust discussion and a lot of work this year we had five new policies come through policy this year several were in regard with covid like the masks and the face coverings and what else did we do we had to suspend we suspended well we chose to suspend the homework policy and um we had to come up with uh public participation at school committee revisions based on some of the things we were that were happening during covid equity was the theme this year basically and just right from the beginning dawn was absolutely instrumental marie was absolutely instrumental and deb was absolutely instrumental in pushing our thinking around equity

133and and how to apply that to policy it is just really it's really challenging work it you have to think very deeply about the work and we would not have been able to even come close if we had not had the leadership as such strong leadership in this district on that end and i also want to thank peter he he like showed up for everything so thank you very much i do want to just point out some of the things that that we did and that you approved that had to do with equity one was um the commitment to an inclusive and representative education education educator workforce that is a new policy and i was happy to see the person from the dei here who facilitated feedback for that this this is a policy that

134states that every student deserves to learn from educators who collectively reflect diverse diversity within our district and it's a promise to adhere to the equal opportunity act um and that means taking specific action to counter to counter bias and build a more representative workforce and i just want to just acknowledge evelyn and her contribution to that policy that just kind of blew our minds and opened our minds so i just want to thank you for that also the adoption of new programs and courses of study these were embedded in these are are our beliefs about being culturally responsive and to continuously adapt so that we can grow as a district that's just really instrumental so just lots and then tonight the two policies were also very equity-based so you know i won't go on um

135and on but i i just i think the work was so important and it really was my honor to lead the policy sub so thank you so much and i um you know i hope that you can some you know all of you or some of you i mean we have to do some changing up but really strong policy members and i hope you continue the work i just want to thank you diane for your leadership and all of the work that you put into um this it was a huge heavy lift this year with everybody having a lot going on so instead of feeling like you know we were just um treading water i think we made a lot of really really important progress so um you know your leadership and your your um

136i know what must have been a lot of time spent talking to district leadership is what made it all possible so thank you very much i also just want to say thank you diane because you and i have worked together for four years and one of the first things that we ever talked about was assistance so um i like to tell peter all the time that i can like quit now because this was like the one policy that i really want to change because my first year on school committee i asked that question do i really have to vote to approve 80 000 from a school to pay for staff and i just the amount of time that you put into this policy and the amount of outreach and the back and forth of of

137going back and taking feedback and looking in a different way and and helping through joint pto to move minds um along this i i don't think that when we started four years ago you and i thought we'd be sitting at the table and like voting on this policy definitely not um it's been a lot of work along the way and so i just really want to thank you for leading the policy in this direction policy subcommittee in this direction and getting this done it's awesome nora still being relatively new on school committee i'm now getting comfortable with new people coming in and embracing that but i feel just tremendously sad at your leaving school committee and just wanting to say also thank you i enjoyed being on the policy subcommittee tremendously this year and i

138learned so much from everyone who was on the committee and i always was um just wowed diane by the knowledge that you brought and the amount of research you put into everything that you brought forward from studying others you know districts policies to history speaking with people really taking in feedback from everybody that you could find to speak to about what we were doing and such an incredible amount of work and i think that a lot of the policies that that came forward this year are exactly the work that that we need to be doing and i just feel you know energized by the movement of the district and how hard the whole administration worked together but i want to thank you for for making it happen actually two things first of all five people

139by the way is just like that's the perfect amount of people so like never changed that because like we never had cancel and yeah it was it was really just perfect and we could really have some good discussions um and i i think that one of the reasons that i mean policy is one of the things that we we do that's kind of our thing that's our purview but one of the reasons it felt so gratifying and relevant was because of the the work that peter and his team has have done on the long-range strategic plan it you know we we were connecting to things that we knew you know we were a cog in a larger you know kind of wheel that you know we're we're pushing along the very what's really culture building

140in this district so you know anyway i just wanted to put that out there and hopefully that will continue well just wanted to thank you as well diane for leading the policy committee this year i have to say that was one of when i joined school committee rather than preparing for this monthly meets or bi-weekly meetings i didn't know how i was going to really be effective and nourish my soul and sitting on the policy committee really gave me a sense of purpose being on the school committee and contributing significantly to changing things and making concrete changes and it's due to your leadership and i think we'll miss that whoever takes that on has big shoes to feel but we'll miss you or miss out friday morning 8 am dragging in front of the computer

141but we get things done so thank you so much for your leadership all right thank you thank you all right so in your packet there are town meeting slides that adam really kindly put together so he gets to speak about them there's there's not much to say other than thank you to john for being a sounding board to put together the slides you'll see them in the packet it's what we'll use as our template to present to the two town meetings coming up this saturday for boxborough and sometime in the future after i black out for acting june 21st thank you and if just as an fyi tomorrow i will be over at acting tv taping the school presentation for upload so that people who want to watch it before uh town meeting can can

142do so we don't do fancy things like that in boxing so i will say that you know this this presentation is really meant to um sort of both introduce our communities to the committee and the work that's that's happened over the course of the year so we do talk a little bit about what it was like uh going through a a hybrid and a pandemic school year and then we do give a quick update on where we are in the school building which i see i'll be doing later on this agenda tonight as well um and then we spend some time talking about how we developed and came up with the budget that we're presenting to the to the two towns for their approval so that's really the gist of this and as i mentioned

143in the email um you know our our pre-covet expectation was that everybody attends both town meetings i understand that this is sort of like last-minute notice and it wasn't necessarily for those who are new to the committee knowledge that that's that that's generally what we do but um the school budget generally comes up near the beginning of both meetings and so it's not like you have to stay for both in the entirety of both town meetings box pro starts at 9am and there's indoor and outdoor seating and the location is the regency in boxborough so the next thing is unless anyone has any questions about that consent agenda um 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

144discussion and a separate vote i will read each item name and if any member would like it held please say hold approval of meeting minutes of may 20th 2021 recommendation to approve a gift of 836.45 from the mass cultural council to blanchard for banned equipment a recommendation to approve gift of twenty one hundred dollars from the abptso and four thousand dollars from the society for science and the public the regeneron science talent search to the high school is there a motion to approve the consent agenda second did you get that bath it was kira and then diane all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions that passes unanimously oh it's so much easier all right uh adam do you have a quick building committee update sure uh building committee met in fact last night and

145progress continued it continues to be made on the school building for those of you who are in that area you'll know that the boardwalk is in the process of being replaced one of the things that i learned just last night is that we're going from a four foot wide boardwalk to an eight foot wide boardwalk so a big upgrade there and it's really nice looking the one thing i will share we continue to be both on relatively on budget and schedule as those things get measured a really nice fact that i saw last night in the update was as you know we applied to the msba just this evening or voted to approve our application for the msba to support us in the conan school we are partnered with the msba on this project as

146well and as part of that partnership they do reimburse um a portion of the work that gets done and so to date um we've submitted reimbursements for over 26 million dollars worth of work we've received reimbursements of over 11 million dollars so our effective reimbursement rate to date is 44.9 percent which is really amazing um that is obviously due to change as items get submitted to them and and identified as both reimbursable and not reimbursable um but it is a great partnership and you know to answer the question why do we continue to put our uh interest in for conan because it's a it's a great benefit to our community financial support from the state to continue to improve our facilities peter do you have anything else to add from the meeting last night no

147i think you know the only other thing we talked about briefly was that the budget continues to be very favorable for the building project we had a brief discussion and a couple questions around whether or not we projected that we would need the second borrowing so for those of you that might remember we borrowed 75 of the 78 million that we were authorized to borrow so that leaves about a three million dollar gap we asked whether or not the project manager felt like he could project whether we would need the borrowing or not he feels it's still too early because we're you know the project really doesn't get closed out even until probably a year after um if we move in so he was cautious in that there's a lot of site work that has

148to happen when we demolish the the old schools so the closest i got was well it's very favorable now it's possible you won't have to borrow but we have a long way to go before we can predict anything while you're getting the warrant organized um so we talked a lot about process tonight so i think you know this point that you just raised about um contingencies what could happen and how decisions would be made as to whether certain things would or would not be done and i thought it might be worthwhile to spend a minute to talk about the fact that that primary responsibility rests with the building committee and the composition of the building committee you know is diverse you know it's not just the school that's sitting there it's finance committee it's people

149from the towns so that um the decision about whether something you know is appropriately used for the contingency you know will be made by a diverse group so that it will come back to us the school committee not for a decision about what we should do but simply as uh we need x additional dollars or we don't need any money however it comes out but the actual spending decision rests elsewhere sorry i was trying to do four things at once and one of them was not listening to what you were saying so not you i wasn't listening to what peter was saying which is why peter was like there's a question sorry okay the warrants are in your packet i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrants as follows number p2124 dated

150five 2021 and the amount of two million eight hundred thirty two thousand eighty dollars and eighty two cents number p2125 dated 63 2021 the amount of two million eight hundred five thousand four hundred ninety dollars and seventy five cents payroll deduction warrant as warrants as follows number twenty one dash zero two four pr dated five twenty twenty one the amount of one million one hundred sixty three thousand five hundred fifty one dollars and thirty five cents number twenty one zero two five p r dated six three twenty twenty one in the amount of five hundred fifty eight thousand six hundred twenty two dollars and eighteen cents and vendor warrant as follows number 21-024 dated 527 2021 in the amount of 1 million 677 thousand dollars 677 thousand one hundred five dollars and two cents second

151all in favor aye any opposed any abstentions awesome that passes you nicely oh sorry yep um so the lg did meet after our last meeting to decide how to modify the lg plan um in light of the double counting associated with the fire station that will be inside the budget and accounted as a separate item the finance committee recommended that that be used to reduce the tax rate and that was accepted by alg so that's the way the the alg plan sorted out sorry john i didn't intentionally mean to skip you adam i i actually have a question about the the warrants so as part of the the new normal for kovid we are no longer passing and signing warrants at the meeting and instead we're reviewing those in advance and voting them on a

152voice vote and my question is is that something that we believe is worthwhile for keeping are we allowed to keep doing that or will we go back to physically signing warrants in the future and i asked this question because really dave's been here all night and i think he needs an opportunity to speak well so are you giving me a vote on the matter you are i think it works great um i actually thought about this before the meeting that this will be the first time that you're all back and not shuffling a foot and a half of papers among each other and trying to listen to presentations and doing whatever the other two things tessa was just trying to multitask it seems to me as though that if i were you i'd want to

153have spent my time before meeting after a meeting if there are questions but not during a meeting so if from our standpoint it works great i wa and so i was not intending to go back to pre-covert procedures thanks were you timing dave's comment no it's 9 19. it was the time for the meeting to end oh great peter was there anything you needed to oh did you want to highlight the retirees or okay yeah i just want to um highlight in your packet we listed the retirees for 2021. um i just think it's so important that we recognize the retirees because the quality of our schools is built on the work that all of our staff do on a daily basis for the benefit of kids so um i just want to make sure

154i thank all of our retirees for their service we are working on um you know some tributes to the retirees things like that through the process a little different with covid than what we traditionally do but we do you know have a lot of thanks and we're very very grateful to all of our retirees for all of their work um one other thing just to put on your radar because some of you may see some things from me we are working now on our second annual report that we will mail home to all homes if you remember two years ago we did that as a way of kind of communicating directly with all stakeholders in the community about what's going on in our schools we didn't do it last year because every waking moment was

155spent trying to plan for reopening of schools however we do want to resume that as a regular function those of you who were new to us this year and our new members will receive a request for a very very short bio um and a photo uh so that we can introduce you you know through that annual report to the community we'll also do kind of a school committee photo um after retreat on july 20th so plan for that you know appropriately and then um we will also um you know really the focus of this is this annual report is telling the story of the pandemic and what school has looked like because i actually think beyond just communicating with the community it what a great story to archive uh and be able to go back

156to so that's that's what we're working on next and i am so thrilled to pass that off to andrew shen as of until i won [Laughter] it's amazing how many things we've found that fall into the category a special project well and and unless unless peter has extra special things planned for july 20th what he was referring to as a workshop and not an actual retreat yeah because you looked a little confused because peter called it a retreat oh just a workshop sorry yeah it's a workshop you just voted it too so uh it's on the calendar yeah we'll do dinner at five and then the workshop after move to adjourn all in favor you