Acton Boxborough Regional School Committee Meeting 1/21/2021

001school committee to order this meeting is being conducted remotely via zoom webinar promo participation policy b-e-d-j-a the following 10 members i think although i didn't count are in attendance via zoom diane baum kira cook adam klein jenny grammer amy krishnamurthy john peterson nora shine angie so evan wang and myself evelyn abayaissa will be absent tonight due to the two recent zoom bombing incidents at our meetings public participation has been changed for this meeting as noted on the agenda and we'll get to the specific specifics of that in a moment um our school communities are live streamed on actin tv's youtube channel the links and phone number are found on the posted agenda on theavschools.org calendar this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on actin tv's website at actintv.org for our role policy

002all votes will be done by roll call i will call each member's name and they will state how they vote thank you for joining us as part of tonight's meeting um peter and and i decided to suspend the traditional um public participation policies that we have in place and so you know you'll know in your um our agenda that we have a recommendation to temporarily suspend public participation policy but what i want people to understand is why so it may seem easy to run these meetings it's certainly easier to do it in person than it is to do via zoom but i'm human and i have to tell you that the last two meetings where we have had these kinds of interruptions are extremely jarring and although i was not the um target of of

003any of the things that happened it didn't make it any easier and i have to tell you that i've had a constant pit in my stomach before school committee meetings to know that anything could be could happen could interrupt us because the very first thing they teach you in school committee school is that school committee meetings are business meetings that are held in public they are not public meetings and although we certainly appreciate and enjoy having the public participate in these meetings this is not any way this is not being done so that we are punishing all of the public there are many school committees that accept only public participation through written comment submitted before the meeting especially in the era of zoo so i just want to make clear that this is not a

004punishment it is a break it is a break for me it is a break for members who are targeted and it is not permanent but i couldn't run this meeting tonight knowing that it could be interrupted again and while we get our policies in place and we make sure that things are going to work obviously nothing is 100 but i needed time to recover so i just wanted under everyone in the public to understand that there was a lot of thought that went into how we were going to handle public participation tonight and there's a lot of things on our agenda a lot of things we need to vote on and a lot of things that we really need to pay attention to and so to accomplish all of those things it was my decision

005since apparently it's at the discretion of the chair as how to handle public participation so i wanted you to know why i was doing it instead can i just add one thing sure because i know we have the recommendation before the committee but i just wanted to give you an update you know i've been doing some work uh behind the scenes to investigate ways that we can have public participation safely i've had an opportunity to communicate with several members in our community who are information technology and information security specialists um who have given us a few recommendations our tech staff has also been researching recommendations uh we considered reaching out to some additional firms um to consult with as well and to see how our practices were currently working but um as we learned more

006from some of our community members who were information security specialists um there is no food-proof way to present prevent someone from behaving badly during public speak um or public participation um the same holds true when people come in person um someone could come up to a microphone in person and you know not behave well um we can't prevent that however the level of deterrent when someone has to do that in person is significantly higher than online and we've learned that certainly firsthand similarly because we couldn't 100 guarantee that we are looking at ways that we can significantly deter that and we're continuing to investigate some of those i did speak with the attorney general's office this week um to see if they have any technical assistance they can provide they do not do that um

007and they don't provide that service however they did refer me to a couple of other sources that i want to investigate a little bit ultimately um i do think that some of the recommendations that have come forward from some of the information security specialists in the community um with a couple of modifications because we actually think that we could um apply a couple of other things to make it even more secure uh could very well be doable uh we just need enough time to investigate that test it and make sure that um the way we intended to work actually can work when we go live into a public meeting so um you know i would just say to our community you know we do not want to curtail public speak that is not our intent

008of doing this uh but we want to make sure that any solutions we put in place have been tested and you know can work to the greatest extent possible thanks peter so because the public has been asked to email any comments by two o'clock prior to this meeting tonight we'll not be taking any additional comments or questions at this meeting we'll need to temporarily suspend our current public participation policy bedh this is per suspension of policies policy bgf and requires a two-thirds vote from the committee it will also be reviewed at our next meeting that as i said before this is not a permanent solution it was a break and so um you know peter did his did his research and i also spoke to our masc mass association of school committees field director and

009this was a recommended route um while we are figuring out the the rest of everything else so anyway um there's a motion in in sample motion on page four of the packet if anyone wants to make that adam i moved to temporarily suspend public participation at school committee meetings policy b-e-d-h second okay we'll do a roll call vote adam yes andrew yes john yes norah yes kira yes amy yes yevin yes diane yes and jenny yes great thank you everyone um so the way it's going to work is that um adam has copies of all of the comments that came in prior today two to two o'clock today and just as we would do in a regular meeting uh each of those comments will be allotted three minutes so um this time i get to

010time adam as the public participant and he will read the um the comments from the community okay first comment is from elliot donald ladies and gentlemen last week i watched the acton-boxborough regional school district school committee's chair read a statement about the issue of the colonial near its end she included an email that i had submitted immediately following the 15 october meeting communicating a change in my position on the colonial from favoring retention to quote convinced that its retirement was the right thing for the school close quote the chair closed her statement with an assertion that the committee would not be reconsidering its vote and added a postscript that she hoped that this is the last we have to say about the colonial in late september i learned that abs ej had petitioned the school

011committee to retire the colonial as the mascot because of the racism the group felt it symbolized and of the school committee's solicitation for community comment of the 25th of september stunned by an effort to connect the colonial that i had always felt to be a fine representative of the town while no longer a member of quote the community i set to work on a letter to refute the idea that the colonial was a symbol of racism and or of colonialism i contended rather that the colonial hearkened specifically to 37 residents of acton who on april 19 1775 left behind the safety of their homes to join the fight against the best trained army of the day and take the quote action that took what the action they took was the best way they knew how

012to improve their own condition and make a better life for themselves their families and their community i submitted that letter on 5 october given rumors that the committee had already made up its mind on the issue i remember thinking that among the most difficult things to do in the world is to admit that one's initial position is wrong i awaited the zoo meeting of 15 october hopeful that many letters of a tone similar to mine would be persuasive in favor of the colonial as i watched the meeting i saw a civil exchange of ideas but it became apparent that the community's input had not been favorably persuasive but my sense of what the colonial stands for had not and has not changed the letters that had been submitted as represented by the school committee committee

013seemed to reflect a hateful tone surrounding the colonial and impressed upon me impressed upon me a sense that colonial that the colonial that i knew did not represent the town and thus should be retired that evening i mean emailed the committee reflecting this statement in the weeks that followed i looked for confirmation that my revised position was correct i listened for the hateful tone i understood that the community's written comment had carried at subsequent school committee meetings while i heard one commentator's remarks indicating that a deliberate month-long process had been employed to change the rj gray mascot in the 90s i heard much of the town's history that echoed my five october letters sentiment i did not hear the tone that had inspired my 15 october email when the letters that had been submitted attended

014the school committee's 25th september solicitation were released a jointed group of school district citizens who divided them up to look for indicators that reflected the racism of the town i read over a hundred of them to confirm the committee's seven january statement there were a good number of retained emails that were of the nature of a subject line that read um considering that the individual can't read the letter themselves that someone else is reading it for them can we extend the time a bit there's quite a few letters and honestly i i would you know we would have cut them off at three minutes if they were speaking to us so okay okay thank you yep all right go ahead adam the next email is from leo falkman write terrace west acton i've listened to

015all school committee meetings about the retirement of the colonial name what i heard from the chairperson was that email notifications were sent to stakeholders the community junior high and high school student according to the finance committee charts shown during the meeting of 1124 which can be viewed on youtube approximately 65 percent of the acts in acton's town budget goes to the schools also displayed at the meeting was the fact that only 21.5 percent of households enacted have children under 17. therefore a large majority of households do not have children in the school system since retiring of the colonial name is an expensive project were all taxpayers notified about the impact the decision will have a potential increase or reallocation of the school budget i'm only one taxpayer but i search my email archive and cannot

016find an email notification about the issue of the colonial name being retired before the vote some might say that enough people were notified that i sh that it should have been communicated by word of mouth but we are not in ordinary times because of the pandemic we are not socializing like we had in the past there has been less of an opportunity just to discuss town issues if this issue is not communicated to all taxpayers then i believe this is a form of taxation without representation the superintendent of schools has said that because of the high cost of retiring the colonial name it will take time to make the change also i have not seen any information about what the colonial name will be replaced with should guidelines be put in place should this issue

017occur again in the future if most students are really behind this why didn't they hold fundraisers to pay for the change i believe more discussion is warranted i brought up a few questions and understand that you do not want to respond to all questions but could someone out on the school committee please answer the simple question what percent of taxpayers enacted in boxborough were not notified directly about the retirement of the colonial name and the potential financial burden that the acton-boxborough taxpayer that's the end of the message included though were some charts uh from the finance committee presentation great thank you okay the next email is from corinne hogsett 61 seminole road in acton my statement is in response to the chair's january 7 comments regarding public participation over the last few months that statement

018riddled with obvious omissions wraps up with this gem quote the decision has been made by unanimous consent as if it makes it more right what it actually demonstrates once again is the committee's inability and unwillingness to properly resent all of you represent all views in acting in boxborough this is not about agreeing to disagree this is about a about a the incredibly poor timing of raising a topic that was bound to be divisive throughout all levels of our community this concern was raised in many of the emails sent to the school committee just prior to the october 15 meeting even from people who supported abs ej petition this is also largely about process and your process was a joke it went for months over the summer when only those who were agitating to kill the

019colonial and their supporters on the school committee amber supporters on the school committee the administration in e-cares knew about it the key petition whose authors were too fearful to go public with their identities wasn't even started until after the september 25th email to the community when the app's edge petition with the obvious support of the school committee was sprung on the a b community even though they had only a few weeks to respond that keep petition wound up with significantly more support than the kill petition the only one you considered official your process also violated every aspect your own naming policy which states the acton-boxborough regional school committee believes naming or renaming a school building structure space property program or other district asset is a matter of significant importance one that deserves the most thoughtful

020attention of the school committee and the administration and one that is an unusual occurrence or event further the committee believes it should not be in its decision by personal prejudice favoritism political pressure or temporary popularity there was a right way and a wrong way to go about coming to this decision you chose the wrong way you folks can keep telling yourselves that the decision to kill the colonial was fair open and thoughtful but we all know it was only as open as the chair and her progressive allies on the committee wished it to be the chair in a fashion typical of the a b school committee and some members of the staff and faculty bullied colleagues into a vote without allowing due process you choose to dismiss at least half the community the right way

021would be to consider this vote have a cooling-off period of 6-12 months after which a committee made up of stakeholders from throughout the community would define a thoughtful process allowing and encouraging all to weigh in discuss debate and come to a consensus even those who would disagree with the outcome would have to agree that the process was fair and open the original intent of public schools was to teach civics to ensure that america would have an educated imagery without [Music] okay the next one is from laura clasgoon dear superintendent light and school committee members i am appreciative of the efforts of the administration and educators to respond to and implement structured learning time changes per deci guidance over the past 30 days i'm hopeful that the additional learning time will be beneficial in providing incremental

022much-needed connections for all students while i'm thankful for the teacher to the teachers and administration for efficiently planning and communicating these changes it is concerning that the administrators administration and educators have never to my knowledge shared why desi changed their regulations an amendment over issued on december 18th jesse outlined their reasons they note that over the fall there has been a distressing amount of a distressing increase in the mental health challenges our students are facing the cdc has noticed an increase in the proportion of child emergency department visits for mental health related reasons such visits have increased 24 for children's age 5 to 11 31 for children aged 12 to 17 over the prior year they cite a literature review in the journal of the american academy of child and adolescent psychiatry on the impact

023of loneliness and isolation on mental health found that social isolation and loneliness increase the risk of depression and possibly anxiety at a time which loneliness was measured jesse's recommendations are based on the belief that one way to prevent the isolation and disconnection that many students are feeling is frequent connections and interactions with teachers and peers this is a well-intentioned rationale that supports the district's priorities of safety and health supporting social emotional well-being and prioritizing connections i feel desi's rationale should be acknowledged by the administration and the school committee by not sharing or acknowledging it permits a belief that desi is merely enacting unjustified bureaucracy that is clearly not the entire story personally my kids are experiencing an increase in anxiety as well as more frequent periods of anger and sadness the brief survey that was

024distributed about the learning changes during the holidays not only did not provide context it did not ask enough questions to really understand how families are doing we encourage the school committee to do a more detailed survey of parents and families to gather information on how families are managing during this challenging year what concerns they have about how this year is affecting their children and what they think would make the situation better sincerely laura plaspoon mom to a seventh second and fifth grader at miriam and a seventh grader at rj gray next email is from mike onigman the importance of in-person learning is well documented in a hybrid learning option in all honesty no one really wins the quality of the of education is degraded with less live learning time lack of connection leads to feelings

025of isolation depression and anxiety in students educators are stretched and staffing is nearly impossible parents are being asked to take on added responsibilities the solution is a safe return to full in-person learning a safe return to full in-person learning must inherently include risk mitigation measures such as masking hygiene and ventilation the safe return must also consider the perception of safety felt by students families and educators a july 2020 survey of active boxborough education association members found that 50 did not want to return to school buildings in the planned hybrid model the aba initially voted to endorse a remote only learning plan the power and influence of the aba abea on any change to learning model modes is apparent so how do we convince our educators students and families that in-person schooling is safe we need

026to look at steps being taken by many of our peer school districts to implement large-scale cova testing of their staff and student populations many districts are pursuing either their own testing programs or taking part in the free six-week pool testing program announced by dese on january 8. districts such as littleton concord carlisle lincoln sudbury wellesley weyland weston harvard and lexington have either implemented or exploring testing programs wellesley has been testing since october they have tested over 18 thousand samples with a zero point one percent positive test rating a goal of their program was to reduce the level of fear and anxiety among staff and parents surveys show that it is working only twelve percent of the staff surveyed stated they were comfortable being in person without a testing program after seeing the result of the

027testing program 82 stated they were reassured in the safety of returning to school acton-boxborough is consistently cited as one of the top school districts in massachusetts we are leaders i'm not aware of any discussion of a testing program to date and do not see the topic on tonight's agenda we are not currently leaders in this effort i'm asking the school committee and district leadership to build a plan to return to in-person schooling work with the abea to survey their membership and take steps to build confidence in the safety of in-person schooling by pursuing a robust testing program thank you mike the next email is from scott smyers dear esteemed committee members one i understand online virtual meetings are not ideal and subject to distractions and problems with unwelcomed interruptions however i suggest you require participants

028to pre-register for the meeting then you can allow the public to speak during the meeting restricting public participation to written comments is not true public participation and will lead to more problems and distrust two town committees and boards should have a uniform agreed upon standard response plan to unwelcome intrusions where someone interrupts a public meeting with inappropriate statements or questions this is not just happening in actin it's happening all over the state and country there are effective ways to deal with it any such comments should be immediately ignored and marginalized not highlighted and brought to the forefront however such infractions should be investigated and if warranted pursued legally this would allow us to participate and proceed with important town business without marginalizing public input free in the sc's decision on the colonial you did not

029consider three important residents of acton who all served as soldiers against the british during the revolutionary war and chose acton as their home john oliver william cudding and caesar thompson all nine all non-white men who fought for our freedom and served honorably and received pensions if you had simply reviewed the local historical society's recent blogs or asked about this topic you would have found this wonderful information readily available hosted july 2020 https eight www.actinhistoricalsociety.org blog slash acton's early black residents why not revisit this topic and add to the story of acting acting's colonials rather than abandoning the name altogether we now know that veterans from the revolutionary war included people of color that chose to live in acting acton didn't choose them why there was a reason why they settled on acton and had families

030here some for generations do you think oliver thompson and cutting were not proud of their service to the their country and what they had overcome rebelling against the british thompson was a slave before the war and was refreed after his service the more we can learn about these men and their families the better we can understand and be inspired by their stories i expect these men of the past would agree with me in comparing the meaning of the team name colonial to colonialism is like saying the word menu is sexist because and should be changed to women you both words share some of the same letters but have very different meanings all right and i encourage you to reconsider the colonial name and approach the review process at a slower place pace with an inclusive

031public committee scotts myers central street that is the last of the public comments peter i imagine you're watching the attendee list there oh oh well there was something of note that now has either been renamed or deleted that's fine um all right so your update is next so you know first thank you um you know before i get into a little bit of the business update i just want to talk a little bit about you know some of what we just heard and you know other things going on in our community around these discussions and so last week at you know one of our public meetings of the active leadership group the chair of the select board called on me during the public comment period issue clarification with the community about racist attacks on their

032school committee and to make this right with the community in addition the chair also stated that i must rectify the rush judgment and the impact it's had on those members of the community falsely linked to the zoom bombing at the start of our and to start our community on a path of healing committee and i have also received several emails demanding an apology for comments made or perceived that racism exists enacted in boxborough i've been thinking quite about this over the last week and want to offer a few thoughts because in the absence of what some in our community will hope for in the form of an apology i believe an explanation is deserved so our community understands why i'm so committed to this work to be clear neither i nor my leadership indicated that

033we believed any individual in our community was responsible for the attacks we did express disappointment that some in the community took the opportunity to criticize the targets of the attack for their reactions my mind is to continue to come back to the same series of questions over the last few weeks why aren't we hearing calls from the black and brown members of our community to retract statements clarify details and rectify the russian judgment similarly when we have had anti-semitic incidents in our district why have we not heard the members of our jewish community come forward with statements such as this is not us and anti-semitism doesn't exist in our schools and community who owns the decision to determine if something is biased racist or hateful or to make declarations that racism doesn't exist in our

034community and dismiss those who say it does what does it mean if only the white voices hold this view as we start our community on a path to healing whose healing are we speaking of as a community we're struggling to understand and hear each other on these important issues and we're confusing important concepts such as hate racism and bias they are close relatives but they are not the same i know we are proud of our history through comments shared in the retirement of the mascot we heard that acting was home to one if not now several of the first freed black men to fight in the revolutionary war this is something to be proud of but why did it take nearly 250 years for a black person to be elected to this position within our

035government more importantly why would asking this question um or a question like this so offend some and yet affirm the views of others we all have different backgrounds and experiences that color the lenses with which we see the world if we cannot recognize our own lenses and its limitations we will likely miss the opportunity to learn about how our neighbors and friends experiences may differ from their own the incidents at our school committee meetings have been isolated in that they came from far away but we have heard time and time again that bias and racism can and do exist everywhere even here as individuals we did not create racism or the first racist ideas in our nation's history these existed in our country from its founding that someone is the target of racism should have

036but we should not be offended by the person who shares that experience and we don't need to recoil at the notion that racism and bias exist in our schools and communities what we own is our response to racism and the opportunity to become more inclusive schools and communities let's not misplace our time and energy trying to prove we are not racist when we can instead focus on making our schools and communities better for those who are impacted by racism and other forms of bias for the first several hundred years of our existence our communities were predominantly white and centered in the european experience so our traditions and cultural norms naturally centered around these experiences but we've changed rapidly our incoming kindergarten class is now a majority non-white as a school system we need to rethink

037our existing norms and traditions and ensure that moving forward they reflect the community who we are as in the past we needed to reflect the community we were what would it mean if the traditions and norms that are embraced and centered around the experiences of the members of our very diverse community this doesn't mean that we need to abandon everything and start over but it means that we need to listen to some new voices in particular those voices that haven't been heard before and make sure that our schools reflect them all i understand that for some of us this means we will feel some loss that our community reflects us to a slightly lesser degree especially when we lose the symbols that we hold so dear but we also need to remember the voices of

038those people who have not been able to feel an equal part of our community or who have not had an opportunity to have their symbols represented in our culture superintendents and school leaders are taught to be keenly aware of the dangers around us this is often referred to as quote political awareness in fact the title of one of the most well read and talked about books and leadership programs by authors hyphens and lynn heifetz linsky speaks right to this bluntly it's called leadership on the line staying alive through the dangers of leading i'll come back to that in a moment to speak to the masculine i recognize the decision has disappointed some and angered others i understand and recognized that some felt the process was not open or one they felt a part of while

039i may disagree i'm not here to argue this point with you but this decision has now been made since the decision was made our staff spent hundreds of hours this year responding to records requests open meeting law complaints and ongoing calls for a return of the mascot and a new start to these discussions today we received another records request that will likely take our staff dozens of additional hours of time to compile we cannot continue to prioritize this distraction over our need to focus on other important issues like our students their educational needs and our planning for them to return to our schools and classrooms we understand our legal requirements to respond to the requests but out of respect for everyone's time and energy and regardless of continuing pressure for a different outcome we consider

040and i consider this issue resolved and i'm not engaging in a further dialogue about this we will begin moving forward to work with the high school to outline a process for determining a new mascot the process will be led by the high school and its students the process will be inclusive of all members of our community that will be determined by our students this includes those members of the community who believe we should not have retired the mascot to begin with i understand some may still be angry enough about the choice to retire the mascot that you do not want to be engaged but please know the offer will be extended i feel badly that there are members of our community who have been off put and offended by statements we've released and in some

041of the work in which we are engaged now but i cannot offer an apology after much soul searching over this year and at times a degree of self-doubt i've become comfortable with the idea that i wasn't hired to quote stay alive as i spoke about before through the dangers that may come my way i was hired to do the right thing right now at this time in this community for our students and their families the right thing is to continue to listen to them value and honor their experiences and make sure that we continue to work toward more inclusive schools and if that means as a white person i need to learn to share some more of the discomfort that other individuals our community of color and from different backgrounds have long felt that's okay

042and it's also okay for all of us i am pleased to announce that we have been in discussions with visions inc and organization a long history of helping organizations schools and communities successfully navigate work around diversity equity and inclusion the town managers have been working with dr don bentley and i in partnership to plan an initial meeting of town leaders with this organization with the goal of quickly expanding the work to have a deep community-wide impact i am also in discussions that have vision inc work directly with our schools and district to help focus and expand our leadership and implementation of initiatives that can make our schools more equitable and inclusive i invite all of our community members to come along on this journey toward more just equitable and inclusive communities regardless of each of

043our own starting places i was interviewed by channel 7 news about or a week or two ago as they considered airing a piece about the recent incidents here a question they asked took me by surprise is this community broken after applause my answer was something to the effect of no but we would all do well to better listen to each other particularly the voices of those who have not historically been heard but i left the interview feeling like my answer was incomplete and lacking yesterday though i heard my thoughts completed albeit much more eloquently in a line from youth poet laureate amanda gorman's inaugural poem and she said we have weathered and witnessed the nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished we our schools and our community are not broken but simply unfinished thank you

044tessa you're muted i see no one got me the mug yet right like um yeah so jenny was clapping for you if we could all applaud we would um were there other parts of your update update to be included and now as i said let's get on to some other business all right so i do have a few other updates for you um and i'll i'll keep these concise so leadership search updates um as you're aware we have three important leadership searches underway high school principal director of special education and principal for the mccarthy town elementary school we enlisted nesbik to help with recruiting applicants for both the high school principal and director of special education services the high school principal search team has been meeting for several weeks now the team underwent anti-bias training

045to better inform the interview process we've been very very pleased with the candidate pool for this position and we have multiple experienced high school principals who have applied the interview team has been conducting interviews with applicants over the last two weeks we anticipate several finalists will be selected for the next round of interviews once finalists are selected we will conduct yet another round of interviews where groups of stakeholders will have the opportunity to meet candidates and provide me input into the final decision about the next principle of our high school a special education director search committee is also underway members have on gone or are undergoing the same anti-bias as did the high school search team applications for this position close next week and the team will then begin reviewing applicants at that time we

046will continue to update our community on the status of the search over the next several weeks and then also we've officially posted the position for principal at mccarthy town elementary school and have begun accepting applicants uh the interview team has been formed and it will begin meeting in the next two weeks the team will also undergo the same anti-bias screening as the other teams uh prior to conducting marriage so more to come in that important search as well i also just want to highlight for you um that and this will also go out to our our families and community tomorrow but we have um some anonymous donations that came to us that you're going to be approving uh later in the meeting um which have gone into a fund that we established i'm going to

047say about a year and a half or two ago for students who are either homeless or food insecure and that we've been really really pleased to be able to start that fund we will gladly accept any other donations from community members who would like to give to that fund and they can contact dave berdolino um to be able to donate so i just wanted to get that out and make sure our community was aware that we have that fun that is for things that schools cannot traditionally cover they fall outside the curriculum so at times we're providing quotes things like that um and then my last one is just to you know remind people that tessa and i are resuming our superintendent and chair uh community coffees uh those will be up and running beginning

048again in february so um please stay tuned and we will be sending out more information with zoom links and an opportunity for people to submit questions ahead of time so thank you very much and i will turn this back over to tesla thank you peter did anyone have any questions dave you're not muted um did anyone have any questions for peter about any of his updates no okay i don't see any ants all right so next um on our agenda i'm sorry that's why you got to put the little hand sticker up amy it's much easier to see i don't find it fast enough i was you know i was writing everything down um i just wanted to say um thank you thank you for everything you had to say um from beginning to end

049i um feel incredibly proud that um there were quite a few of us who sat on the hiring committee um and just feel incredibly proud to have you uh standing at the helm you have um met our expectations at least you know quite a few of us so thank you thank you okay so next on the agenda we have seneca koski i don't know if i pronounced it right thank you to speak to us um about some changes to the world language program i'm just looking for her in the attendee list here we go and i'm gonna promote seneca missions okay welcome seneca oh i'm going to go ahead and share my screen so you can go through the presentation welcome and hopefully that's working okay and you can just say next seneca okay great

050so thank you for uh having me this evening my name is seneca savolkovsky i'm the world language department leader at the high school and i look forward to sharing a change that the world languages department is very excited about for the upcoming school year um next [Music] so briefly before we begin i would like to explain what we currently have and where we're headed as well as why we're choosing to move in this direction so currently most students enter high school after taking two years seventh and eighth grade language into a leveled spanish two or french two course so it's cp1 cpae honors and recommendations for placement are made in eighth grade for these particular courses what we're proposing for next year is a single entry intermediate spanish two and french two course uh intermediate

051low being the anticipated proficiency level of the students and this will be an unleveled class placements for future leveled courses are to be made at the end of the intermediate spanish 2 or french 2 and for most students this is at the end of their freshman year students never having taken a language follow a different sequence at the high school these advances lie next so why a single entry course in large part this is this is due to the pandemic so we recognize that students are not engaging in the same amount of material and skill work as before as a result of the interruption in learning in the spring and our current pandemic schedule students learning conditions have varied as well in their ability to fully engage during asynchronous days and we want to be

052mindful of this just for some background in order for students to move proficiency levels experts share that one needs approximately 135 to 150 contact hours these contact hours at the high school level after a few years of study and building proficiency looks different than in early language learning students at the intermediate level are able to interact with interpretive readings and listenings more proficiency based activities on asynchronous days so it's easier to move students forward in a proficiency focused manner as a department we have also observed that students is here in french 2 and spanish 2 are showing similar strengths and areas of growth and skill areas regardless of the level in which they were placed so considering this we feel it would be most advantageous to allow students more time more contact hours building proficiency

053to grow and more accurate accurately demonstrate their skills before being placed into a leveled course we also feel quite prepared at the high school to work with students in a heterogeneous environment due to the high school world language curriculum changes the abrhs department the world languages department at the high school has updated its curriculum over the last seven years from a grammar based model the conjugating verbs memorizing lists of vocabulary to a more proficiency based model that focuses on in on skill development performance assessment using everything in context and really makes differentiation of material easier i'm proud of the work that the department has done to develop thematic based units guided by can-do statements a more strength based approach and its usage of authentic resources articles podcasts commercials to support these themes the department also

054utilizes a common skills-based rubric for grading so students set goals throughout the year on skills appropriate for the students developmental level and teachers provide more individualized feedback based on these goals students also spend time reflecting throughout the year on their progress towards reaching these goals and celebrating what they can do with the language so the way that we teach that we teach now has changed quite a bit for the better and our focus is on real life communication we value what they can do over their knowledge of the language since it changed for example how we might differentiate is really taking a look at our questioning techniques which is something that we've done a lot of professional development on so after viewing a short commercial for example you may ask students to list what they

055see they might be asked to write a sentence then ask a question connect sentences compare and give opinions and in this way we can see students climbing the proficiency ladder and really if students are hoping to push themselves they certainly can i also would love to mention that we have a strong student mentoring program that will be helpful in supporting our students considerations that we believe support this change every year we collect survey data from our seniors and we have been involved in challenge success so data collected from our senior survey shows that leveling uh causes student stress contributes to a negative self-image a lot of times you'll have students refer to themselves as their level i'm a cp student and leveling results in less interaction among peers of different levels as they tend to

056travel together and we believe this change would contribute to less competition a stronger community working with diverse peers and better overall student wellness in their first year also noteworthy our 2016 challenge success survey data shows that on average 9th and 10th graders report more academic worry than 12th graders and we believe that less overall movement of classes no need to change levels in their first year would result in more consistency for freshmen in their first year and an easier transition to high school we also recognize and support the district's commitment to dei work and as the district engages in dei work research has shown that leveling plays a role in limiting academic opportunities for students of color as well as low income and english language learners so unleveling this first year we believe will help

057play a role in leveling the playing field it'll also add to consistency within the world language department because currently the world languages department offers four languages spanish french latin and chinese latin and chinese both begin with a single entry unlimited high school course so in a year where languages would become a graduation requirement again we are very excited about this this change would bring consistency to the department overall and encourage students to choose their language based on interest and not levels offered so it would help with their choice and finally we're excited to report that there is a hundred percent support by world language department members as well as building leadership at the junior high school and high school for this change um next so to review our intended impacts our hopes for this work

058uh more equitable equitable opportunities for students especially after this last year will be allowing all freshmen the necessary time to grow mature and more accurately demonstrate their ability and interest and we're hoping we can even further ignite interest and excitement at the high school level with more choices and an exciting proficiency based program easier mobility among levels we believe this first year will help build more confidence not defined by a level placement will be less of a content difference as students move on to three and four once students are placed they mostly stay in that placement so this change will delay placement for one year for all students and give the same foundation to all of our language learners more access to ap courses um delaying this play soon will allow students more choice in

059whether an ap track is something that they would like to pursue and i have a colleague in hopkinton who has made this change and noted more students have stayed in their program longer so we hope they see this as well so if an a b class isn't something that's interesting to a student staying in the program longer to build proficiency will give students access to the apple in the sale of by literacy in their senior year which is a celebration of their dual language achievement at the state level a stronger sense of community and easier freshman transition the adjustment would allow students to interact with a more diverse group of peers allowing students to learn and grow together inspire each other and model for one another and all this we hope will contribute to a

060stronger sense of community more consistency within the department and enhance teacher collaboration this would result in consistency of courses within the department and students being offered the opportunity to choose courses based on interest rather than level and the consolidation of first-year courses would enhance teacher collaboration with more teachers teaching this entry course next so our next steps will involve spring and summer curriculum work to prepare for these fall courses we have adjusted a lot over the last couple years but we would want to do some more work to ensure that we're providing opportunities to support all of our learners and we would gather and analyze feedback from students and staff continue to survey with the proficiency work that we've done we've surveyed both students and teachers throughout the process and we found the positive changes

061to be very positive we feel it's important to gather this feedback some of the feedback that we've gotten on our proficiency work has been that students feel the curriculum is more authentic real life based on individual growth and that they are becoming better communicators and that's what it's all about so we look forward to seeing how this change will benefit both teachers and students and adjusting the areas as needed next and in conclusion these two posters are ones that we share with our students the poster on the right is a reminder that language learning is a journey and both are important to remember that it is progress over perfection during this journey and mistakes are essential a change such as this is what we're proposing takes a growth mindset and a belief that all students

062can do it and this is something that we believe in our department and we look forward um to your feedback and thank you so much for your time this evening thank you seneca all right so does anyone have questions for seneca if you use the hand raised feature it's much easier for me to see john thank you and thank you tessa and peter for including this on the agenda because you know obviously it doesn't require action on our part but um related to the diversity of the community world language you know is very important to many many community members and i think communicating these changes and the philosophy around world language is very important but as striking as all of that was what was actually you know most appreciated by me was your candor about

063the fact that we simply cannot provide the same language instruction you know particularly for people beginning the study of languages in this hybrid environment and you know i think you know i'd love to be here and you know say that well we can do everything in this hybrid environment that we could do last year and that just isn't true um and i think everybody knows that it's not true but i think everybody struggles to say it out loud and you actually did you were very clear um so my question is you know and you particularly talked about in the early phases you know that the contact hours are important some of the nature of what goes on in world language so i'll ask a question in the form of the end of average so you

064can't just tell me that i think you know my students made 80 of the progress they would have i'd like you to to talk about you know the students you know who have more difficulty with language and how this has impacted them you know students that were sort of average and students that would be high achievers who you know progress quickly through language learning so i i think what we're finding is that with without the contact hours you're you're seeing that the communication you really the practice is so very important so the students are having a harder time um kind of making the language a part of them so it's i think what they're what they're really missing is that is the communication piece thank you tessa uh thank you seneca uh for your presentation

065actually i like the idea like uh change it for better basically uh you you guys really explore the other schemes to improve the to benefit the students right so so i have just a few comments one is so originally we have a four levels right and that's uh uh so there's got to be some reason to set up four levels and so now it's gonna be just one level do you think that's a gonna be i mean people don't probably need some time to adapt to these changes man uh also like you said uh the word language department is is gonna be busy in the spring and the summer to prepare the uh the change this changes so i i just wonder if do you have the confidence uh student and the team world language

066department have this uh i mean can adapt to this change this i saw this is a pretty big change like from four level to one level right so that's one second is a uh so i noticed that you're going to do better survey to sending out a survey to the student and the staffs so maybe i don't know if it makes more sense also to let the i mean community note like the parent sauce so that's just my comments uh so third one so i see a lot of goodness good good stuff about the changes right that's changes for better that's great what are the limitations thank you for your for your questions and comments um in terms of the confidence i i mentioned a little bit about the the work that we've been doing

067so we have moved from a grammar-based uh model in in over the past seven years have done a lot of work to move towards a more proficiency-based model and i think our um our common rubric that we use and the professional development that we've done has really given people the confidence to make this change i would say if i had asked and had this conversation with a department seven years ago i don't know that we would have been as confident that we would be able to meet everyone's needs but with the work that we've done in the ability to differentiate in the questioning techniques example that i gave to you to be able to give one activity and measure um or differentiate the activity for different students that's all work that we've done over the

068last seven years so i do believe that the department in is is very confident in this in this change um so i was i was excited to to see that um i do with the surveys we've made sure that we have surveyed throughout um the work that we've done because they we've wanted to make sure that the changes we're making have felt positive so surveying our students and our our staff has been very important to us and that's that's why we're going to continue to do that to make sure that we're you know making changes or adjusting as needed um and you know i definitely have noted the the community piece as well um the i'm sure there there are definitely challenges to every change and we're going to figure out what those are going

069to be but we wholeheartedly believe that this change is going to um that the benefits are are going to are going to far outweigh any of the drawbacks but i'm sure we'll we'll see those along the way uh you're you're up next yep thank you very much this was a really interesting presentation to read in the packet and and it was really interesting to hear what you had to say i wish we could do more uh with world language in the elementary level for sure um so i have two questions sorry i have to get up and take care of my dog and i'm like just give me a second um so is you are taking advantage of of something you've observed in the in the remote and the hybrid programs and and making something

070really happen that's important from that and i appreciate that is this something maybe i missed it but is this something you intend to continue beyond this year that was one of my questions um and the other thing is you know it made me think back to our the school committee meeting on june 4th and at that meeting we voted to align the high school graduation requirements with mass core tenants for middle and high schools to set um ambitious goals and i went into the math course site and it um it says that they want high schools in middle school to set ambition ambitious goals to increase student participation in advanced placement courses especially students from historically underserved groups and to address implicit bias and stereotypes about who takes advanced coursework and builds school cultures that

071entrench the belief that all students can benefit from challenging coursework and i was just so pleased to see that presentation because it lines right up with those tenants and that's what we all want um my question is um how you know you said you were your job now with your team is to think about curriculum through the lens of intermediate language skills and that's different from looking at curriculum through the lens of honors ae and cp and i was wondering if you could just talk briefly about what that means um so you have a couple questions there um i think your your first is whether or not we hope to continue this um in years to come i think you know kind of looking at the presentation we saw a need uh that this really

072needed to be done right now um it is something that we've talked about as a department for for some time as well because we do feel like they're you know as as i had discussed that there are other benefits to this as well we we feel like students are with this first year and all the students having the same um base uh it will it will certainly benefit all of them and give them more confidence and and open up more opportunities for them moving forward so we are hoping that we have more students stay in in our language program because of this as well um so in terms of the curriculum some of the work that we'll be doing i think we're going to continue with a lot of the proficiency work that we've done

073i think what we've seen um in the past with some of our our our coursework um some of our there our ap prep really does you know it begins mostly like when we head into the level three a lot of the the pre-ap work is is simpler and it can be done with with all students so we know that that you know that that ap worked for for students doesn't in a language it doesn't start it doesn't start in that last year begins from from year one right they're developing their proficiency all throughout um what we've noticed is i think sometimes we look at um and this is a change and i think in our mindset um we've looked at honors aecp as you know how much content we cover and we've really changed the

074way we look at it is is more of the skill work that we do and so i think that's what we're going to look at is is the skill work and really delving deeper into the thematic units in order to achieve our goals so it won't be so much covering content as really delving deeper into that skill work so that all of the students regardless of you know how many themes they cover have the necessary base to to move on and is this just this year or is this continuing going forward just just this year for this change or moving forward so i so i i just i think i'd address that first um so we are hoping we saw the need right now um it was kind of you know coming right at us

075knowing that the students weren't getting as much of the contact hours with the communication um you know building building their proficiency and but it is something that we see would would be worthwhile for the students moving on um just looking at you know building the base for them and and opening up more opportunities so we are hoping it's something that um we continue with but you know as we had mentioned we're gonna you know survey staff and and our students and to see if that is beneficial to them thank you all right angie i'm going to call on you and then after that i'm going to ask that anyone else hold their comments if you come up with something after angie asks because we're quite a bit behind in our schedule so um angie go

076right ahead you're muted yeah thank you tessa and thank you uh uh tanika yeah yeah and so we're gonna just clarify on diane's question so we're gonna evaluate do a survey at this the end of this year to see how this program works right yeah so i mean it is it is something that we've put in as a change we're hoping that that it's something that's beneficial moving forward um we weren't anticipating on on changing it back i think this is something that that will take the students a couple years if you're thinking about these students in seventh and eighth grade um you know moving forward they're going to need a couple years to really build um you know get the kind of proficiency work that they had had before but we do see that

077there are lots of other benefits to this change as well so but we will continue to to survey our students and staff to see if what we're doing is working for them okay so you mentioned about the skill work do is there uh like a evaluation and how do you kind of understand how this go how how good they learn their skill work that you anticipated yeah so that's all a part of the the work that we've done we've done a lot of um a lot of work over the last um seven years in in really kind of rebuilding reworking our curriculum into these thematic units um performance assessments how how well they can utilize uh what they're learning right so what they're learning about the language in context being able to communicate but one

078of the big pieces that we worked on is is building a common um proficiency rubric that takes the students throughout their high school career right so we're able to watch them grow in their proficiency and that's that's that's what we kind of build the the skill work off of so that's been all a part of the work that we've done over the last seven years it's helped us prepare for for this change okay so there's a proficiency rubrics that you use to evaluate for the evaluation yeah and it would be that would be kind of benchmark how how each student is progressing absolutely yeah and a big part of that is is you know the performance assessments that we give the kids but we also have them do a lot of self evaluating and checking

079in on the goals that they're setting and you know we're setting together it it has allowed us to give a lot more individualized feedback um i think looking at you know the old tests that we used to give where they had to kind of spit back content of vocabulary and grammar we don't test like that anymore it's really how they are able to utilize that grammar and vocabulary in context and and that's what we've we've done the professional development on over the last last couple years okay thank you thank you thank you so much for that great presentation that was really interesting and a nice break from many of the other things that we've had to talk about deb did you have something that you wanted to add yeah just really quickly and seneca was

080able to share with me um the results after talking to her staff her department um i just want to point out that it's a rarity to get 100 of all staff excited and eager to do this work and to make this change and i just want to say because of seneca's leadership and the work that she's done over the last seven years with her department so thank you for that it's a really terrific move thank you that was really enlightening and and makes me excited about some of the changes how this reflects some of the changes that we've talked about as a committee that we want to make so thank you for the presentation thanks for having me tonight thank you so much seneca thanks seneca all right so it's 808 and we had uh

081planned to start the next presentation at 7 40 just to give you just to give you an idea of of how long things take so just to give you some perspective the next thing is the superintendent's preliminary fy 22 budget and um after that there's a budget subcommittee update an alg update and a blf update and all of those were supposed to be over by 8 25. so just take that into consideration when we ask questions and i'm not suggesting that you you know don't ask questions because this is like the biggest thing that we need to tackle as a school committee i just want you to be aware of the time and listening to your fellow committee members and listening for questions that you may have asked and then you don't need to so

082um i think we're expecting i'm about 20 minutes is what we talked about with the slide so we can watch and see if dave and peter go over there 20 minutes but that's what that's what we had roughly planned for so um go right ahead oh thank you and i actually think we may end up being a little less than 20 minutes so you know before i start um going through the budget presentation i just want to acknowledge this is a little bit different um budget than some that you may have seen before um we felt like we wanted to take a little different approach for a couple of reasons one as we've worked with the committee over the last few years i think there was an increased desire to have more input earlier in

083the budget process um around what what things look like as they played out over time but then second you know we recognize that we're in a very unique position where you know from a school pressure standpoint we're looking at recovery from the pandemic with a degree of uncertainty around that and from a community pressure standpoint we're looking at a financial picture that you know certainly needs to take into account the understanding that one of our communities is closer at the levy limit and doesn't have the capacity to increase taxes we also really have to take into account impact on individual community members and their ability to increase taxes so um we want to take a little bit different of approach and you know hopefully walk you through that tonight and then solicit some feedback so

084i'm going to go ahead and start the presentation [Music] there we go so some of the goals we have for tonight uh we want to review the timeline in the process for budget adoption we want to make sure everyone is on the same page about what's happening and when we want to make sure there's an understanding among the committee met all of you as committee members of what the major budget drivers are what our fixed costs are and the implications of something called a level service budget we'll talk about that more we want to give you a high level overview of the fy 22 budget and this is only a preliminary presentation and it will change and continue to evolve over the next several weeks finally we want to hear feedback from you about the

085approach that we take um within the next steps of the budget because there are some options and in all honesty i think for us as a leadership team we need to hear from you uh who are obviously important link with the community um some general ideas about how you want us to think about the next step of development so just to review you know there is a series of five presentations that we provide to the full committee and there are budget subcommittee meetings in between most of these so there end up being quite a few different presentations that take place this is the preliminary budget overview we talk about our budget guidelines some district goals we'll talk about preliminary revenues and budget drivers um aspects of what's a level service budget looks like the overall

086budgetary impact on reserves and preliminary assessments this is not the presentation to get into the weeds of the budget that will come later certainly we'll come back to you on february 4th with the second round which then becomes the first version of my recommended budget so it's not preliminary that becomes a first version of a recommended budget you will be getting line item detail of the budget we'll be talking more about all-day kindergarten um and asking you to vote the tuition for that um you'll hear a little bit about it tonight but we will ask you to make sure you vote tuition for that um and you'll also hear more details about capital improvement projects and the funding of those projects we will then come back on february 11th with our third presentation which is

087another version of the superintendent's recommended budget that does evolve based on your feedback um and at that meeting we would ask you to take a preliminary budget um that needs to be at least 20 days before the expected final budget vote per the regional agreement so there are some timelines that are you know hard and fast based on different agreements we have the fourth presentation is on march 4th that is a comprehensive comprehensive budget and program presentation in past years that was the traditional budget saturday we recognized in the land of zoom the traditional budget saturday we've run may not be the most effective means so we are doing that on a thursday night um it is in lieu of this traditional saturday presentation but if you watched in past years you will expect some

088of the same features and then finally we'll come back on either march 11th or 18th with our fifth and final presentation and that is our final budget recommendation it's also our public hearing that is required by law on the proposed fy2 budget and we would ask him to vote that final budget at that time [Music] so some important dates we always work backwards on our timing of the budget process from various town meetings because those are our key benchmarks foxboro town meeting begins may 10 2021. we don't have any information that that's likely to change so we just want to make sure we're aware of that um that's different than usual um usually the dates enacted are the budget drivers um so one consideration that certainly is important for us is as we work through

089the alg process you know our representatives to alg are going to need to keep in mind that alg doesn't have the full normal time it might take to be able to come to agreement because boxborough is going to vote on this budget first and you need to respect their timelines act in time meeting will begin in june we don't yet have a date for that um and then as we do our budget timings we do count back from those two town meetings um as i said before you know we have the final budget vote can either be on march 11th or 18th with a public hearing on the budget and an opportunity for community comment that needs to be 45 days before the earliest time meeting and in order to approve the budget it is

090done by a two-thirds of weighted volts votes of the full school committee so that is where the weighting of of different members comes into play um and then budget program presentation we play march 4th in preliminary school committee vote february so that we can hit that 25 day before the budget and that vote in the preliminary vote is a simple majority of members from each town so before we start i wanted to frame a couple questions i would like to pose uh because i think we need some important feedback in these areas you're certainly welcome to stray from you know the beaten path here um but sometimes i think it's helpful to frame why we need some feedback so the overarching question we need to strike as a district i think is what is the

091right balance around meeting students post-pandemic educational needs and the financial impact of our budget on the communities um and some minor questions that come up not unimportant but minor questions to that are what are the post pandemic restorative needs our students will have what might need to be added or increased from what we currently have um what is the financial impact to the communities and what is the appropriate level of reserve usage so just um a couple of big questions to frame this uh we had more questions and then we said that's not gonna not gonna work for this um so budget guidelines i just want to review these um and you can take a moment to read along um these were adopted by our school committee um several weeks ago so it's important to

092just pressure on memory but we do want to develop a flexible budget that's responsive to uncertainty caused by the pandemic and allows for a variety of educational models next year we need times assume uncertainty with regard to state and federal funding for schools we will certainly hear that repeated several times we want to adequately fund education programs uh designed to expedite recovery from the pandemic and ensure effective services and supports are in place for all students social and emotional needs um and academic needs excuse me you want to evaluate opportunities to use existing resources to align services and supports across the district in a fiscally sustainable manner that is responsive to the economic needs of the community consider funding directly allocated to programs that support students of ieps english learners students who families may be

093income insecure students of color or other groups who may have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic in school closures prioritize anti-bias anti-racist strategic initiatives evaluate kindergarten enrollment projections carefully we've started to talk about that we want to evaluate all day k tuition in light of the presumed resumption of all day k next year we want to maximize opportunities to leverage alternate revenue sources including but not limited to state federal grants monitor the strategic use of reserves in light of economic uncertainty and evaluate strategies to replenish evolving accounts that have been negatively impacted by pandemic related costs reduced revenues and then finally we want to also resume funding of our capital improvement plan in order to fully implement planned improvements there's a lot of stuff um in two pages to keep track of i will tell

094you up front we did not get to everything in this first version of a preliminary budget we will continue to hone that but there were some items that we felt like we wanted to come to you first with kind of the realities of our budget to learn some more direction before we now go back and continue to progress for these these goals i'm going to turn it over to dave and he's going to talk about some revenues and budget drivers thank you i'm pretty sure you can hear me i apologize for unmuting before when i thought i did the opposite um pictorially this is what the revenue picture looks like peter peter had this slide last year so we've had a couple of slides that you may recognize from last year last year new revenues

095declined but there was still new revenue there was still a half a million dollars or more of budgeted new revenue at this point in time not so next year um you'll see in the memo and i'm i'm sorry we didn't provide that until today but the detailed breakdown of fy 22 revenue at this point is uh is in the memo and we're expecting less new revenue next year a decline in revenue uh next year versus this year primarily this is a teaser because i'll come back to this um the difference being transportation aid is expected to be significantly less next year i'll get into why a couple of years back we were nearly a million dollars more revenue a couple of things that that were the case then that aren't now we were in a

096period where we added transportation costs the prior year and the transportation aid being a reimbursement program we reap a benefit and revenue in fy 20. we were conservative in budgeting for chapter 78 the soa had not yet passed and we we took a conservative approach in new chapter 70 money and in addition we had been even more conservative in other revenue interest and medicaid and i used to use the phrase we're chasing those where they were not budgeted at all as revenues before i came to the district and they had been increasing for several years we bumped up we provided for and then continued to bump up the revenue budget projections and um i think it's safe to say that both of those sources of revenue have we've chased them and we've caught them from

097fy 22. reminder the re the reason that this slide should should be prominent in your in your head the change in the budget so what we propose is a change to the budget the appropriation minus the change in revenue and you can see that that the difference here is a negative minus the change in reserves that math equation results in the change in the assessment so all other things being equal a decline in revenues equals an increase in a test next slide we talk about the the impact of there are there are five basic categories which we call major budget drivers salaries middlesex county retirement out of district tuition health insurance and we've combined capital and debt typically personnel costs are that are the lion's share the biggest share of the pie what i've done

098here is shown between fy 20 and 22 and there's a reason i i picked a two year gap the relative slices of the budget pie of these major categories there are some there are some changes that look on its surface well you know 8.4 to 7.9 percent for tuition that's that's a positive thing because the pie has gotten bigger um as you can see pictorially and as a relative share out of district tuition is less and as the first first blush for fy 22 is out of district tuition hat will decrease next year something like the the purple slice so capital and debt i went back to 21 because if we look at 21 to 22 that slice is going to be relatively constant but 20 predates the bond issuance for the new school so

099you can see that as a relative share of the budget capital and debt has increased between the two years the disregard if you will the comment in the left margin i don't believe that's accurate um but the comment in the bottom right that these five budget drivers represent um a little less than 90 percent two years ago little more than 90 percent respectively for next year of the total budget so looking at these components you get a you get a significant handle on the overall budget next slide so we've we've taken again a slide that was in last year's presentation that peter did uh 20 versus 21 we kept those two components and slid in a column for fy22 you can see that the categories are in the gray boxes at each end the number

100inside them is how much in dollars each each year represented in the budget the blue green and red represent the percentage increases uh the blue we look as as a pretty no pretty normal uh increase and not not worthy of discussion uh here i'm gonna focus quickly on the green and the red so health insurance we had our second year of declining rates in fy 20. since then health insurance has done what it does for for governments generally and that's go up by four to five percent um mass middlesex county retirement we had an unusually large assessment projected for us next year i'm not going to get into the details here but that i troubleshot that increase and believe it or not that primarily relates to the increase in bus drivers and other staff in

1012019 it's taken it's taken that long to bleed its way through the middlesex county assessment formula but it's an unusually large increase uh from what's typically a six and a half percent increase capital and debt it's a six percent increase what that represents is our resumption of the cip program as we'll talk about where we only spent last year on the first year of the cip bond next year we're proposing to go back to spending new appropriated money on capital projects and out of district tuition has bounced around a little bit you can see in 20 the the cost was was down from the prior year last year it was back up again and projected for next year down again that's really good news uh a category of nearly eight million dollars had that minus

1022.9 and up to us 5.3 is in the prior year we'd be talking a lot more serious predicament um as far as what we do with this project while you're there can you comment on the you mentioned the 5.9 percent on capital but i'm sure a question is going to arise so maybe just a real quick overview of 66 and 105 because those are oh yes so 66 relates to a couple years ago when we were still in the process of ramping up our capital appropriation uh to to a million dollars and so between debt service and capital uh that accounted for the increase in that year on top of that for fy 21 is when the first year of the of the twin school came online so where we are paying that for the

103first time this year and so those two should be understood by people who who've been around who've been in town understanding that we were in a in a multi-year uh phase in to ramp up capital spending and then uh just the the unique piece was the new funding the funding of the new school that began this year halfway 21. yeah and one comment i'll just add on out of district tuitions for new members this is normally a very volatile area of the budget um you know we serve a large number of students in our district whose needs exceed the capacity of our classrooms and programs within the district and it's very very important that we continue to serve all of our students well uh regardless of their educational need so you know there are times

104when we have to place a student in a program outside of our district tuitions or out of district programs can range anywhere from sixty thousand dollars a year all the way up to three hundred thousand dollars a year or more uh based on whether or not the placement requires a residential component to it um so sometimes there could be a situation where we have two students move into our district um who need residential placements and we could see a six hundred thousand dollar split in the budget within one year so just keep in mind you know fluctuation within out of district tuitions is normal it's expected uh and it's really important to make sure we continue to honor the needs of those students so before if you can go back peter we just want to

105we just want to touch quickly on the yellow box that we added where do we have leverage so keep in mind the questions that peter posed to you before some of these categories we don't have leverage with health insurance is a function of who who's how many eligible employees do we have do they opt in to the insurance program what's the rate that's set by the health insurance trust out of district tuition don't have any leverage there we can we're estimating uh placements based on ieps that we know right now it's way in advance it's it's fraught with um uh with with uncertainty a year and a half from now when next fiscal year ends but there's not there's no leverage as far as uh making strategic changes to that number salaries we could make

106we could take action relative to positions that are that are currently in the budget and so there's some leverage there middlesex county uh i talked about the unusualness of the assessment increase for fy22 we're going to propose at some point uh a strategy for normalizing the middlesex county assessment and capital and debt we have leverage there because we did so last year we had we teed up uh an appropriation and by the time the final budget got voted all of the new capital appropriation had been deferred so we zeroed it out we're hoping that's not the case this year um but in addition we will present um a means of funding some of that increase that's that's not in here this is just the cost side so where do we have leverage should be a

107question that you ask yourself when you go back and think about answering the questions that peter posed before okay so as i said before you know what we want to share with you tonight is only preliminary and we're choosing to only show right now what a level service budget would look like um so i want to highlight some of those and in the next iterations we'll certainly be making revisions for this but we want to show this first because we want you to understand the impact of just keeping our services level with what we're offering this year um and to get feedback from you about next steps so to do a level service budget by definition a level service budget takes all of the services we currently offer and rolls them forward by a year

108so if we offer it this year we offer it next year if we project class sizes at a certain level this year we do the same next year we offer the same programs opportunities everything else that we would commonly be offering um in a level service budget we have to account for our major budget drivers which are cost increases or decreases as we detail and as you just saw we in this budget are maintaining the same services as we have currently however this budget does show a reduction of one um elementary classroom teacher which we knew was coming based on projected decreases in enrollment um that's been coming for several years it just worked its way through the system um and that keeps class sizes within the guidelines that we establish and projects for enrollment

109in addition we reduce one fte district position that position was eliminated this current year after our budget was approved so we had an opportunity to try to be more efficient in the district offices as we began this year we took advantage of that and that is now accounted for in the next year's level service budget already so otherwise though we return the staff levels assumed in the fy 21 budget and that means pre-pandemic staffing we did increase a number of positions just through the pandemic if you recall we added about 14 positions just for this year we are not carrying those positions heading into the next year at this point um we have no other personnel additions being proposed in this budget so overall what we're looking at is in addition to the one-year positions

110that we hired for this year right now we're looking at a net reduction of two ftp going into the level service budget this budget also resumes appropriated funding of the capital improvement plan um if you recall and as dave said last year we had a temporary hiatus from funding that we thought it was important in the first budget iteration to get back to what we said we were planning to do so you're going to see that also assumes 965 000 use of end which is a 180 000 reduction from fy21 we wanted to start with the goal of reducing our reliance on excess and deficiency to budget and if we want to add it back we want that to be an intentional decision that we make um it also assumes strategic results of some of

111our other reserves and we'll be talking about those later so if we do all of that that i just detailed that is a 3.6 million dollar increase or a 3.73 percent increase on the current year's project so we don't add anything new we reduce a couple of positions we resume funding of capital we use about two hundred thousand dollars less than indeed heading into next year um and we think about how we could use other uh reserves strategically so just keep that in mind because that's three point three on the budget 3.6 million [Music] dave i'll turn it back to you back to me so i won't beat this to death this is just in pictures the changes for the last couple years the blue the blue bars are added staff in fte the red

112bars are added cost in dollars um the the increase in cost in fy 22 while while fte is not going up as a result of existing contract adjustments that are that are built into the cost structural average average increase over three years 3.9 percent next next one's a little busy i'll try and explain and decipher the spaghetti there it's if if i do this right you'll you'll get it really quickly so i'm gonna walk through the four lines the blue line is the original cip plan and so it's so it's spending all the way back from fy 16. we started with only a hundred thousand dollars annually of capital appropriations we got to fy 20 and we were up to a million 250 and at that point issued the uh we issued the 10-year cip

113bond which is the green line in fy 21 but otherwise spent no more money on capital this year so so the blue line was supposed to go down to 500 000 in reality we zeroed out the line to pass the budget last year so the divergence between original plan and reality one year in is the blue line and the red line in fy 21 so the so my objective was how do we get back on track so that the total amount of spending that was called for in that cip plan over 13 years gets bet gets back on track and we spend the same amount of dollars and so you can see how we've it we've ramped it up and so the red line is the is the alternative plan if you will and it's

114a steeper slope than the blue line original blue line had been meaning that we're going to ramp up spending at a quicker pace to catch up and then go past the blue line and this works out mathematically but the area under the blue line and the area under the red line are the same meaning we by the time we get to year 13 we spend the same amount of dollars and for purposes of illustration well how much money are we spending as a district that's the purple line and so the purple line starts this year with um only spending on the cip uh on the cip bond but thereafter it's the it's the cip bond plus the revised plan so if you will the green plus the red going forward is the purple so once

115again blue line is our original spending under the cip and you can see that it was a modest increase it was expected to increase by two and a half percent or the or thereabouts per year and then go up significantly when the bond was paid off in fy 30. we got a year behind by zeroing it out in fy 21 the red line seeks to pick it up and revisit the overview of the plan the ultimate goals of the plan hopefully that's not sure if it's worth a thousand words but hopefully pictorially that's that's easy to grasp um you see these all the time the the balance in the end frames the discussion uh this element of reserves is decreasing a bit primarily because we've used more uh emd to to fund the budget for

116the last couple years couple of years we'll have more details during subsequent budget presentations of end and all the reserves and how they relate to the total budget two other reserves that were that we're talking about this year that we've not talked about before as far as as are actually funding the budget one is the transportation stabilization account it was approved several years ago but never have been funded we're looking at spending less money on transportation costs this year because of the pandemic ridership is down possible service is down the state aid for transportation is a reimbursement program so if we spend less this year will get less next year if you remember back at the in the revenue discussion i'm expecting less revenue next year that's mostly a reduction in estimated transportation aid but

117what we thought we would do is to take the estimate is 200 000 of expected savings for fy21 and transfer it to this stabilization fund and thereby provide a revenue source for next year to make up for the expected loss of state transportation aid we could do nothing and and that transportation surplus would fall to end but what we're trying to do is to be transparent and keep liked items the same and if it's if it's transferred to the stabilization fund it can only be used for that purpose the other one is the capital stabilization fund now this one was established two years ago and it was funded there's been a million dollars sitting there plus the amount that it's been earning in interest since that time um it was proposed as a mean of

118among other things obviously as a reserve for unforeseen uh needs but as a means of smoothing out funding wrinkles if you will in the cip plan we're proposing a restoration of 345 000 in capital spending new appropriations in fy 22. that can that can be done by adding 345 000 to our budget request or what we're proposing is to take to draw down 150 000 from the million plus in the stabilization fund and offset the budget impact of restoring the 345 to the plan we'll be we have i have developed a multi-year model of of drawing down from the stabilization fund and i'll tell you it says the revised plan would draw down from the stabilization fund over three years and replenish by 2026. the magic of that year is that the debt service for

119the junior high and the high school projects will have been retired and so there'll be a budget surplus a year-to-year budget surplus uh available to restore the capital uh stabilization fund to its original to its original status as of now so peter yeah so you know a couple of things talk about kindergarten for a moment um so if you remember from last year just want to go go back a year um we came to understand through a pretty detailed analysis that our operating budget just couldn't support an immediate move to free tuition free all they can regard uh we also looked at the notion that relying completely on excess and deficiency would compromise our reserves um and the school committee last year voted to reduce all-day tuition by 750 which ended up being a amount

120of 3750 so that was planned for the current year away we're in um but then covent and so we did not end up offering all-day kindergarten this year um and so we had no revenue for all day k this year so um what we are recommending for next year is to resume tuition um at set at 3750 which honors last year's school committee vote and kind of holds it there um we at this point don't believe we have any revenues that would be able to offset any additional decrease in that we will continue to offer scholarships as we always have to make sure that any family who wants all-day k but cannot afford it financially has access to it in addition we want to continue to just put on the radar that we want to

121revisit tuition levels in the future as economic conditions do allow [Music] so where are we at um again in the overall timeline of this this is the preliminary budget presentation we want some feedback from you tonight uh we will be reviewing that with our administrative team um you know beginning next week um january 27th is an important date because that's the date the governor's budget is expected to be released uh we will be coming back to on february 4th with the superintendent's recommended budget we also have a budget subcommittee meeting scheduled for february 1st just to note that um some other considerations um we will be considering that your feedback we will review our priorities with our leadership team we certainly are working um you know steadily to try and identify any ways that we

122can streamline our operations heading into next year and we also need to continue to work through various processes to understand the impact of our budget increase on the member communities assessments uh because that's ultimately the impact of taxpayers so again we want some feedback from you on tonight's presentation around kind of for our goals um it's that overarching question of what's the right balance around meeting our students needs coming back from the pandemic and the financial impact of our budget on the community communities if you can help us with that we will feel like we have a pretty good direction for our next steps um i went through some of the other questions and you know we'll be bringing this back obviously to any more work we do over the next week the budget subcommittee

123on february 1st and then immediately after that what we do we present to budget sub first get some feedback from the budget sub and then we revise it that day and try and post it that night or the next day for you um just so you understand how we work through a process here [Music] so the big picture uh dave do you want to talk through these numbers if you want me to the numbers can speak for themselves but i'm going to call back to something i said a few minutes ago and that is if you look at the preliminary level services budget third line percent increase from prior year 3.7 it's actually actually 3.73 for what it's worth um a 3.73 budget increase results in a preliminary assessment the last two lines of over

124four percent and nearly six percent for acton and boxborough respectively and that's because we of what i said before budget change in budget minus change in revenues minus change in reserves equals change in assessment and so if we're not having revenue growth and you can see revenue offsets is less um the the assessment goat will go up at a higher rate than the budget goes up and that's that's the predicament that that we are in everything that we've shown there otherwise are just the some of the charts didn't have dollar values on them they're shown here and i guess the last piece is for the boxborough members we have been we have been forecasting this that the uh enrollment has been trending toward increasing the proportion favoring boxborough meaning meaning a higher proportion the assessment

125is based on the historical average so the last three years by town and so the data would suggest that boxborough's share of the assessment will it will increase at a higher rate than actons at least for the next couple of years if i can just point one thing out to you if you look at the assessments from last year uh particularly i think these three numbers should stand out these in particular are driven very largely by that first year of the new school there um if you looked at the the percent budget increase without school that dave what we have last year it was two well the the school debt was three and a half million so that's a little over three and a half percent so it would have been less than three percent

126yeah for the rate for the other budget we've had some things really break our way over the last few years um and we've had you know outside of the school there we've had pretty modest assessment increases um that are way outside the norm of the history of assessment increases on the low side and so you know this for a variety of reasons is certainly you know primarily around the reduced uh revenues we're expecting is an increase on the other in the other way so we want to be we want to be talking about that um a couple other things that we just want to touch base on you know federal stimulus dave you want to talk briefly about this so the so this is just we tr we're trying two things in pictures for when

127we when we can just for uh just for presentation value and these you can see on the left are the five different funding sources we've had so far and how much money has been made available and it's it's to this point it's about two and a half million dollars worth of federal funding but it's all it's all spoken for it's not going to the bottom line it won't it won't reside in in end it's been it's been utilized mostly for technology and personnel um the the um costs relating to the remote program and the device costs related and other technologies uh needs relating to uh providing providing remote learning i'm going to go off script here because peter as earlier this evening i got an email from our fema actually our mima rep um and

128in the body of his email this will be quick looks like there are going to be some huge changes to fema eligibility he said that in his email and what was attached that i needed to i needed to log in to get it is is a report called national strategy for the covet 19 response and pandemic preparedness issued by president joseph r biden jr on january 20th 2021 so 200 pages long i i read a couple of sections where it talks about direct fulfillment with fully reimbursed takes for the cost of emergency supplies including emergency supplies like ppe for school and child care providers when last we met uh and by we i mean my female female rep and me the requirements were getting much stricter by female what they would what they would reimburse

129this looks to be uh a change in that regard and then the next there's a there's another one that talks about the level of spending uh a hunt at least 130 billion in funding dedicated to schools 350 billion in flexible and local relief funds that will help districts avoid layoffs close buzz budget gaps etc 200 pages where there's a lot of reading there but it looks as though uh the the incoming administration does mean business as far as providing overt related relief uh financial relief to cities towns district so more to come on that so we have to also because you know it's you know we're not completely out of 2020 at this point um but a few things you know we still have a lot of unknowns and with some potential impact on the

130budget uh and i don't know when these are going to get resolved but we have to be mindful of them uh first is additional stimulus funding and that this is a positive one um sr2 is being released and pending distribution from the state we don't yet know the amount uh we are anticipating somewhere in the 400 to 450 000 range possibly right in between those two numbers um so that's a positive um and that's direct to school districts we know that the federal stimulus package that's being proposed by the biden administration um includes a significant significant increase in uh monies for schools but that's only in the proposal stage right now and that has to make its way through congress be negotiated and more to come there and then the state would have to figure

131out what it's doing with the money and how it would be distributed um we have the governor's proposed budget coming up we have a question are we going to have a need for a remote learning program in fy 22 we still just don't know the answer to that right now um and that's something we're going to have to work through we don't know what our covert related costs are going to be we are enrolled and working through the state's program uh for the testing program um we also we've been in touch with numerous districts who have had some experience with that not all are happy with some vendors so you know we know the state's testing program would certainly save us six weeks of cost but um we also know other districts have abandoned that

132vendor because they don't think it's particularly effective so we have some some research to do around that and but we are working toward a testing program that we are hoping to have up and running within the next month or so um to six weeks so more to come on that and there are certainly costs but i do think heading into next year our ability to have students fully back in person is probably going to rely on us being able to have a good handle on you know how many students may be asymptomatic in school because they will not necessarily have access to vaccines um we also don't know what our final costs for summer programming that is currently under development will be we are anticipating a much more robust summer program um focused on you

133know academics enrichment activities for all of our students you know from our youngest students right through high school students we know from an academic standpoint we will likely um foot the bill for that type of a program for our students who need it the most because it's the right thing to do um so we don't know the cost of that yet that could be 75 000 to 100 000 right at the beginning of fy22 um and then we also don't know the costs for um the dei consulting organization that i mentioned um but we do want to use them for our own strategic development i've discussed the ideal leadership coaching with them as well so that our leaders have effective coaching access so they can continue this work in all of our buildings um and

134also on the community outreach portion you know we're certainly working with both towns but we will have some portion of that that we want to be able to put so we're waiting for the final proposal from them uh that we can now start to have have more firm discussions i expected in the morning they just didn't have it ready for tonight so uh those are the you know some of the big unknowns that we have so at this point we'll turn it over to you for you know preliminary questions and then again hopefully some feedback that can give us you know a real good sense of direction about what you'd like to see out of this next iteration peter can you stop sharing your screen so that i can see everybody you can thank you

135okay so peter's less than 20 minute presentation took 45 minutes good job peter so i just want to make everyone aware because we were 25 minutes behind and then the 20-minute presentation took twice as long as we thought it was going to take that's it's okay but we have an executive session scheduled at the end of the meeting so i just want to make everyone aware of that it is totally important for us to get the feedback that peter and dave are seeking um so that they have appropriate ways to move forward and start to think about this budget but if you are a new member and that was so far over your head and you have absolutely no idea what we were talking about it's okay just stay and listen and there is time

136for those kinds of clarification clarification questions after the meeting um kyra i guess what i want to know is if i do have 10 million questions it's within the rules to send an email to peter and dave yes and the feedback can go to peter and dave in an email yes yeah of course it's it's it's going to the group of us that can't happen like that that's the only concern no go right ahead and that's an appropriate way if you have tons of questions especially if they are clarification questions to do that you know my first year i had absolutely no idea amy are you also tessa very open to doing a budget tutorial for new members right and that's something that we had talked about with dave that's all i wanted to say

137is that dave is planning uh one-on-one or one on three people to discuss the budget okay i just wanted to frame it and so i appreciate that i see that adam and john have used their little hand raised features um so that's the easiest way for me to see everybody i am going to stick you to one question and that includes comments so no five comments and then a question at the end of it okay adam go ahead mine is a brief comment just to share with the committee and the community as a whole that um you know this is ongoing work of the the budget subcommittee this presentation um was reviewed by both myself and john prior to coming to the committee as a whole we're definitely under a compressed timeline this year and

138so we're trying to do our best to make sure that um we meet our timeline but that the budget subcommittee gets some opportunities to review it as well so uh that's my only comment john and i have looked at this already we've provided some feedback and i'm curious to hear feedback from other members of the committee as well john you're the only other person with a handout so go ahead i'll um if you're really serious about a single comment i will make one single comment um and that will relate to the issue of reserves so you showed a chart of reserves which showed in 2014 and 2015 the budget you know proposed the use of a million dollars of reserve and yet you return 1.6 or whatever because the e and d position went up

139so it's simply you know nonsensical to talk about the reserves that are in the budget without the talking about the net use of reserves that we're going to hear and so the things that follow from that logically are that before we get to fy 22 we will close that by 21 and we were to return something back between zero and some number you know which we should estimate um and you know i think that's the context you know in which we should look at reserves i'm impressed john that you could actually limit it to one thank you i appreciate it does anyone else have feedback i mean that was a long presentation and there was a lot in it and i totally understand but um this is our biggest job so if people have thoughts

140i don't want to completely scare you out of out of sharing you know we have planned for about 20 minutes of discussion so if there are things that you want to share or questions you want to ask you know feel free to ask them diane sorry it just takes me a while to navigate around my screen um yeah so thank you for the presentation i think this year more than any other year i'm just feeling like i don't really know what's going on with the budget and i think a lot of that is just covet related stuff and um and just everybody's been very busy we just haven't really gotten the information um kind of on a on a minute not minute by minute but you know definitely more frequently than we've gotten it so

141i i'm i'm a bit lost um in terms of like the wheat the the weeds and i know this isn't a weeds type of presentation but i'm looking at i'm looking at the percentage um that were that we're hitting taxpayers with i'm trying to find it was it 3.75 is that right 3.7 the assessment yeah 4.4.3 sorry four point four exactly five point almost six in boxborough okay yep so i i just i you know i hear i i'm i hear what what you're saying about you know it's tight and you know there's a lot of unknowns but i just feel like that's a that's a big ask of the taxpayers i also have a concern about end um i this happens this happens almost every year um i i don't remember what e d

142is i i forgot to look it up where are we at e d um are we are we within our guidelines or where we blow our guidelines but i know that you know mass general law uh chapter 16 says that if we have more than five percent then we need to apply it to reduce the amount of the assessment on the member cities and towns and so we have not achieved a as far as i know we have not achieved a savings in our a d in excess of five percent so to take the 965 out of end um i think would probably would be in violation of our voted policy guidance and for you know for six years now that i've been on the committee act and fincom guidance has always been to avoid

143reliance on reserves except for one-time expenses so i'm not sure i just want to have a better understanding how level funding end is even a thing um if when i look at you know what what we've put e and d toward and so i went over like some some past years so in fy 19 it was seven we took seven 775 and we put it towards single tier busing that was a one-time expense and fy 20 we had we put 60 000 toward two buses um it's just because of the single tier busting we needed two more buses we put it toward capital projects we put toward the operating budget which we were doing for years and then in fy 21 we took one 180 and reduced adk tuition for at least the first year

144although the rest was going you know subsequent years was going to get um absorbed into the operating budget um you know and so forth and so this idea of like level funding it just it confuses me because i i i don't think that's the intent here i don't think it's an acton's best interest especially this year i'm all for reducing the assessment um but not for relying on a replenishment that may not materialize to um and so i'm concerned so like what happens if we don't get the expected replenishment and i know that has averaged about 1 million dollars a year and and the the auditors come and they tell us a million dollars a year to send an end is very uh it's it's right on target and for a budget this big um

145and so about what happens if we are forced to sustain a one-time expense which depletes e and d um so i just feel like this is it's just risky to rely on e and d to take even more e d out especially for actin which is at its levy limit and we might be looking at an operational override some catastrophic thing happened and acting taxpayers are getting hit hard this year bearing the tax increase of the west african fire station and the new school building and they have the additional financial stress of job and business losses due to covid and some actin residents are kind of panicking because they've had increased valuation of their their homes um our tax rate is always already one of the highest in the commonwealth um and we have a

146very fiscally diverse community i think more than our comparable communities because of this you know the condos all along 2a which make this community more affordable um to a more wide diverse people of economic means so um i don't know i just feel like i just before we kind of level fund end for fy22 at 965 000 i'd like to see the team make make cuts i don't know if there's room to make cuts um it seems draconian to move to like a level service budget i don't think that's sustainable i've asked that question and it's not sustainable but i'd like to see us otherwise try to get under three percent and and it's it's hard for me to imagine how like we can keep sustaining these three million dollar increases every year so don't

147have good answers but um that's those are my concerns just at this stage of the game i appreciate you letting me go on for so long go ahead just just a real quick clarification of diane um characterizing andy indy usage in these preliminary numbers is down by a hundred and eighty thousand so in in needing to develop a model uh the active box pro piece of the alg model they go out for a number of years what i did is to try and re and and draw and lower the annual usage of end from last year last year was a million 145 not 965. so in that long-term model i've tried to bring it down gradually it would be nice but but unrealistic to think we could drop it from a million one back to

148the good old days of 200 000 in one year but just just so you know diane that that these numbers include a reduction in e d usage can i make one comment too diane hearing kind of that number is actually incredibly helpful to us um because that's the that's exactly the direction we're hoping to get it like what what do you think we need to kind of be aiming for um you know in terms of what we think we can do we've already have a list of some strategies we're thinking about um i you know getting to three percent or slightly under will certainly be challenging but i think we can probably get there without doing major damage to our classrooms um if we really think about going below that we're only interpersonal at that

149point um and you know i think so that's something we've been thinking a lot about but we needed to kind of test that theory with the committee tonight um you know because if you feel like even that number is not gonna do it then we're gonna have to really take a hard look at some of our personnel decisions and things like that um and that that's where we're trying to think about okay what do our kids need versus how do we make this happen for our communities um yeah diane i i appreciate the questions i uh with um with regards to the conversation around emd it's uh it's definitely a conversation that we have every meeting at budget sub and and the numbers that we saw tonight were the preliminary numbers it was assuming like

150dave said carrying over last year minus the 170k we struggle with this we we have the same conversations internally that you're asking us about one-time use and is it sustainable and are we meeting our guidelines and and all of that um so we will continue to have those conversations in the budget subcommittee and as we i my my hope would be that as we come with the the next iterations of the budget we'll have some more justification and thought around that um and then the other thing that i would say um is that all of your questions are great and i think um to peter's questions at the beginning and end of the presentation the feedback that we want from the from the committee is where do we put our priorities um one thing i

151noticed is our guidelines didn't necessarily when we when we created them didn't necessarily consider the ability of the towns to to handle a specific increase um and so that's something that peter added to his questions it's something that i think we need to balance with the fact that we've got a lot of learning loss that we need to recover um from the past year and a half of pandemic based learning and and uh we as a committee need to to um come up with our point of view on that and then be able to defend that as we go in front of town meetings to defend our budget so it would be good to get feedback from all the committee members around those types of questions well and i think i just want to add

152on to what adam said that it was important to me and in the conversations that peter and i had about presenting something so that everyone could understand where we would be if we just replicated what we did last year and so decisions about putting the end numbers in as they are now were really so that there aren't so many variables changing so that people could understand the impact of increased teacher salaries or increased healthcare costs or you know whatever it is um so that we can all be on the same page about making whatever kinds of decisions or making priorities that we need to have because it's it's important for everyone to have this sort of foundational understanding of what year to year spending looks like if you don't change anything john are you re-raising

153your hand or did you just not put it down yes go ahead because there was so much discussion about end i just wanted to remind everybody that when we presented to town meetings last year we included in our budget request a 500 coveted contingency and we said that one or two things would happen either one we would get through the year and either because we got money from other places or because things didn't happen we would return that money to end or we would use it because we did have covert related expenses that exhausted that 500 000 and i just want to make sure that as we go through this process and talk about um you know the net return that we're clear about what the fate of that 500 was because that's what we

154represented to the communities and you know just to to john's point too it made me think we're all so hesitant at this point to make too many reductions um because we don't know what the additional federal stimulus will look like i my gut tells me we're going to get some additional federal stimulus we just don't know what that's going to look like right now um and you know we know that once we set our budget we can't then increase it right um but we can decrease it so that's that's one of the challenges so you know i think you know one thing to to think about like even if the committee ends up in february voting a budget you know based on maybe some assumptions about some stimulus that we really don't have an idea

155the committee could always choose to lower that budget prior to town meetings but you couldn't raise the budget for higher attendance so that just uh that's something you know we've talked about strategically going into okay so it seems like we don't have additional questions now which is fine that was a lot of information to take in i think it's hard so if you do have comments or clarifications or questions sending them an email to peter and dave is completely and totally appropriate yeah me and marie too sorry yup um okay so thank you guys for such a thorough thing i'm sure that everybody can look back at the packet and take a closer look at the numbers and understand where they need more information um do we need to do alg mblf updates and i

156want to do a quick apology to uh gary if he's here because when we spoke at blf there today i was unsure about how we were fully going to handle public participation within the meeting um and just to assure him that this is you know we will have more discussion so gary reach out if you have accurate questions because it was decided that we can't pick and choose our participants um do we need to give alg or or blf updates yes okay go ahead john did you want to give it yes um so at the last alg meeting um the actin finance committee presented their point of view and their point of view included their desire which had been stated previously that there be no uh tax increase in acting this year so um yeah

157i think it's important to understand um where the finance committee in acting is as they're thinking about the pressures on our budget um i think in many ways and in fact in most ways um the things that we as a school committee vote on align acton and voxpro but when it comes to what you know dave refers to as assessments and i think of as revenues associated with the property taxes on actin and boxborough we actually have two different positions and i wanted to just briefly remind everyone of how different those positions actually are um by way of a little bit of history um in fiscal 13 the act and tax rate was 19 and 10 cents and the boxborough tax rate was 17.69 so it was 93 of the acting tax rate if you

158roll forward to the tax bills that people received um this last month uh in fy 21 the tax rate enacted is 20 and 23 cents uh per thousand so that's up about a dollar you know from that fy13 number that i just quoted well the boxborough tax rate is 17.17 so it's actually down 50 cents from that rate in fy 13. um and that means that the boxborough tax rate right now is 85 of the acting tax rate um so when you know blf meets to discuss um the ability to expend more money on the schools they come to that from a position where they are not at the levee limit and where their tax you know rate is is what's compared to the act and tax rate on the other hand when acton comes

159to look at our ability um to fund you know the kinds of assessments we're looking at um we are at the levy limit and we have a tax rate you know which is right near the top um and because it's late i don't want to go in this too much but you know for people who have looked at migration around the country everybody knows that it's great to be in places like massachusetts and minnesota and some other places because they've got great services but with those services come high taxes um and what you can see in terms of a general migration is that if those tax rates become too high you know our communities become not sustainable they become hollowed out so there's a real danger associated with letting those tax rates go too high

160so that's the discussion that we have to have on the acting side so um much as we might like to do you know things you know a lot of things related to trying to repair some of the damage associated with this past year the ability to put additional dollars on the table is really low um and i think that's the sense of the finance committee's point of view um and that's you know i think the mindset that the acting side needs to bring into this discussion it's late so i'm not going to comment on that i'll hold my fire for for for budget subcommittee um okay yeah i'll give a quick update on blf because i think it's important to note that we did um we did a reaffirm at the blf that the town

161meeting is is still on schedule as it was shown in the presentation before so there's um there's no plans right now to delay boxborough town meeting um and additionally we shared the preliminary um assessment number and uh understandably the the blf was quite concerned with a close to six percent increase in their assessment as well so i think we we all have a lot of work to do to get to something that's palatable for both towns see adam is so eloquent and doesn't say inflammatory things like i would have thanks adam um okay so our ongoing business we have a consent agenda items on the consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion and a separate vote i'll read

162each item name and if any member would like it help please say hold otherwise we'll we'll have a motion to approve at the end uh the first thing is the approval of the meeting minutes from january 7th of 2021 the second is an approval of an anonymous donation of 627 dollars to the student assistance homeless and food assistance fund and the third is an approval of a donation of three thousand no place for hate masks for students and staff from the ab united way move to approve wow that was like a three-way motion okay uh well if unless there's any discussion we'll do a roll call vote john yes adam yes diane yes angie kyra yes with gratitude yep nora yes amy yes with gratitude me yes with gratitude and i'll just note that jenny

163needed to step out so beth you can note that that's why she didn't vote um okay so now we have a structured learning time update from peter so there's no presentation for this this is just an opportunity to you know let you know i obviously our timeline to implement the structured learning time did not provide for a school committee meeting in between the time that um we last presented to you when you voted to apply for the waiver and you know the date when we actually needed to implement these changes um you know as is noted in the the packet the memo the learning time waiver was not approved by destiny and the commissioner um and so we did have to implement changes both needed to begin being implemented this past monday so we worked

164um with our leadership team along with abea and our staff to identify options that were realistic and could be implemented um you know on on pretty pretty quick targeting our teaching staff i'm very very grateful to all they're doing and they continue to do i know this year is tremendously challenging for them um this was a quick reaction we're implementing this week we're putting a gradual implementation timeline in place because we know it's also a change of routine not only for our educators but also families at home um and trying to get kids online and our kids so it's taking place over the course of this week uh we have worked through some technical challenges um with the increased bandwidth that we've needed on our network to be able to support this uh but we'll

165be working through that over the next few days i'm happy to answer any questions but um you know you saw a brief note in the packet along with a copy of what we provided to our families adam uh yeah i have a quick comment which is um i found it very frustrating that the response we got from desi provided no additional detail other than the fact that this was denied um i i understand the motivation and the reasoning that they're putting this in place um but i think it's it's a really they put us in a very difficult position um to first give us the opportunity to apply for a waiver but then to just deny it without much information you know there are many people in the community are equally as frustrated by that

166so just wanted to express my frustration well i wanted to acknowledge the fact that you know with respect to what jessie's you know reasoning was i i do think that the letter that we ended up writing in support of our waiver spoke in depth about how we put social emotional learning at the forefront of of our priorities and that it was for those reasons that we were applying for the waiver so um is there anything else anyone else have a question or a comment about that jenny yeah i want to echo adam's uh frustration and and state that i i think that our state government has been um not only you know not proactive in a number of ways but actually throwing up roadblocks and unfunded mandates and all sorts of piling on um to

167you to local districts uh in in a time of crisis and i just am you know i'm really um i was extremely disappointed by that response and um think that people at the state level just don't understand what local districts are going through and especially what our educators are going through which um you know i think in a lot of ways is just completely unsustainable for them so i i just want to share adam's frustration and bewilderment at what is happening at the state level i'll also know that there are school committees who are writing things and agreeing to them and sending them off if that's something that people are interested in and we're not going to create it at a business meeting but if people want to work on that it's certainly something to

168be considered um i think melissa if there was maybe some examples of something that different other districts have been putting together and sending forth all right on to the next item uh the recommendation to approve non-resident tuition rate for the rj grade junior high school step program peter do you want to speak to that yeah and i'm just promoting uh debbie dixon who's been with us in the audience to be a panelist in case you have a couple questions um but you know just essentially there's a quick note in the packet but we have an opportunity to expand um some tuition opportunities um at a junior high school step program um our step program is a continuum that also serves students at our high school um so we wanted to bring that forward because any

169um you know out of district tuitions for special education programs do have to be approved by the school committee debbie do you want to just talk briefly to to a little bit of why we chose that tuition rate and the thinking around this or um thank you good evening everyone um among my colleagues um in the area we've had lots of discussions about the programs that we offer in our local schools and there's often inquiries about whether or not we would tuition students to one another schools for years acton-boxborough has allowed tuitions uh tuition students into the odp and pace program at the high school and then it occurred to us that we have the feeder program the step program at the junior high and there have been some inquiries as to whether or not

170we would allow students to start at the junior high level so in the event that we have students that could be tuitioned in i think that it would be um it would behoove us to have that um in place and ready to go um as an offering to our neighboring communities um the tuition would be set this is the same as the high school because it's um pretty comparable in terms of the services it's different because of the um level of uh level of the students um at the high school there's more focus on occupation vocational at the junior high it's more um it's pre-evoke and uh academic but the students still receive occupational therapy speech um speech and language and other support services so i do see it as comparable um so the tuition

171would would be the same throughout the continuum i think was around 100 for this current school year 181 dollars a day and at some change does anyone have a question adam i just have a comment which is i i wholeheartedly support this anytime that we can have a student um whether they're in our district or from another district take place in a program that exists um included in our standard education program i think is um just a great opportunity so i think it's great that we broaden that opportunity to students from other communities great okay so there is if there's no other questions there is um there is a recommended motion in your packet i'll move to approve the non-resident tuition rate for the rj grade junior high school secondary transition education program step as

172presented second any further discussion all right adam yes angie yes okay diane yes john yes kyra yes evan yes nora yes jenny yes amy yes and myself yes thank you everybody um thank you thank you debbie all right the fy 22 school calendar this is our second read um and as those of you who have been on the committee know that this is a really late vote on a school calendar i know that there's been real interest in the community as to what day we're going to agree to start on so um the the idea is to vote tonight so marie are you doing this piece yep um hi everybody so there are two possible calendars in your packet they've not changed since last time we received almost no feedback from any committee members the

173the way the beginning of the year falls rosh hashanah is actually the day after labor day so the 6th and 7th are no school days of september um and our teachers contract has no school on the friday before labor day so that will be a long weekend no matter what we do um so you really have a choice between starting school on monday september 30th which has it ending on june 15th plus snow days or starting school on september 8th which has school ending on june 21st plus snow days and i we're not making a recommendation it's really up to the committee um the one thing i wanted to add is we've been working with the abea as you know this year we've had our early release days on wednesdays traditionally they have been on

174thursdays for elementary and we have found that to be very successful and so we're recommending that early release days stay on wednesdays going forward um and that's not written in the calendar here we would add it upon your vote but the abea has agreed to that it allows us to have our pre-k program aligned with the elementary program on their early release days and through their professional learning opportunities will now be pre-k to 6 available including the pre-k and in anticipation of them moving into the new school with two elementary schools it will be great in many ways so we ask for you to choose either option one or option two there's a proposed vote in the packet in the cover sheet but we really don't know what you prefer so so the way that

175i like to have these discussions is for us to have a discussion first even though i know that that's not what john likes to do so i would prefer that we discuss it first and then someone puts forward a motion um especially because there hasn't been any feedback thus far i think it's less confusing that way nora did you have a question or a comment oh sorry i was just ready to start the calendar discussion but maybe we're not ready yet oh we can start the calendar discussion i just don't want to start it with emotion oh okay that's all so if you want to start the calendar discussion be my guest okay um i usually like an earlier date but given covid and the uncertainty about what fall is going to look like still

176um i would push for a later start date just to give us more more time amy i saw your hand next i i would say that with the uncertainty of covid the later start date would make more sense um it's more of an opportunity for things to settle down so that we can actually start fully in person but that said i have three boys graduating that year so you you know might want to disregard what they have to say because they're going to get out early anyway jenny um you know i think that the the june 21st end date plus snow days is is just really an issue um i don't think you know from talking to teachers and other families and and knowing children you know nothing good is happening in late june people

177are disengaged uh students are signed up for things and are are taking off i think um i don't think it makes any sense to have that little of an end date personally kyra oh i don't even know i don't even know i had a question about preschool and and and what you just said about the wednesdays and it being realigned and um are there specific hours for preschool do we reduce the hours of preschoolers by by having that half day aligned on the wednesday did somebody explain that really quick we do not reduce the hours of preschool by having that aligned um most of our preschool classes go four days a week and we have two classes that go five days a week and they have an early release one day a week they friday

178used to be the day that preschoolers didn't attend for most of the classes and we've moved it to wednesday this year um for lots of reasons thursday wouldn't really work um so we reduced their hours only of those two additional two of the classes um this year and we would like to continue that so that the teachers can participate in professional learning they answer your question karen you're muted i know i'm sorry it's late so i'm i just want to make sure that i'm really clear you just said that we reduced their hours for this year so you want to sustain that reduction into next year yes okay okay and as for the rest of it um i i was inclined to toward um option two i am i but i i hear jenny on

179on the lateness i i feel like we do this every year and then there's much discussion about whether or not june is um you know is a nice time of year anyway because you know sometimes it's raining and it's cold and whatever and it's still hot and lovely in august and you know don't you just want to go to the beach for one more weekend i feel like um there's no good answer here so i um i i'm inclined for number two but i will yield to the wisdom of the group adam yeah it's interesting i don't i don't know if we have consensus because i i i'm definitely more in favor of option one um so i'll respond to um first i agree with jimmy i think it's risky to have our last day

180with snow days um so late in the year um i understand at the beginning of the year in option one is is broken up a lot but i i don't really find an issue with that or challenged with either a broken up beginning of the year or a late end to the year and then with regards to the comments about getting extra time to know what's going on with with covid and all that you know we we pushed our start date back this year because of that and i think we should commit to something that we want without uh necessarily considering what may or may not happen with that if we find out that we're in line to get vaccinations for teachers and it doesn't happen until the 31st then we'll make a change to

181schedule at that point when when we know more information but at this point i think we should start earlier and end earlier for no other reason then i think it's risky to put us so close to the end of the school year and the school contract for the teachers yeah yes um i agree with adam and with because we really don't know what the pathetic is going to go through this year so with the risk of ending late and i prefer option one at this point because we just don't cannot based on some prediction estimate that um it's going to be valid later yeah diane yeah i agree i'm going with option one for all those reasons i i just think it's a bad idea to have a late end date uh john so i

182believe you know we had this discussion before a question of uh could we have remote days on snow days you know should we get pushed and that there's no answer about that right now um i believe that you know if there was actually an issue with social studies if there's a good chance we would find a way to do that and i think um you know i'm in favor of the delayed start um i'll just say that the last time that we not this year because obviously jesse made all kinds of changes and requirements in terms of days days we needed to be in and not but the last time we had a really late start we were pushed up against summer camps and there was all kinds of kids who had started summer camps

183because massachusetts is already really late for starting school in terms of a national um everything and i understand that we don't know about summer camps and that may change there may be all kinds of people that don't want to send their kids to summer camps but i do recall that that was actually a really big issue um with programs that were starting um at the end of june when we got there so um jenny did you have something else you wanted to say or did you want to i do i just wanted to clarify murray your comments so are you saying that there was a cut to the number of preschool hours this year due to covet and that that is going to be a sustained cut going forward let me try that again so

184um there are i think nine preschool classes total and um seven of them run five four days a week so those seven out of the nine were not impacted at all we had two classes that ran the fifth day um and we've made those two classes four and a half days instead of five days so that um they are consistent with the rest of the district and the staff in those classes can participate in the professional learning it's been actually a contractual issue to have only a couple of teachers not getting the early release days not participating in professional learning um so we had always intended to do that when we moved into the new building um but we did it this year to get everybody on the same schedule with colvid and for lots

185of reasons nursing coverage etc so why are those why are those two classes meeting five days a week instead of four days a week like the rest of the seven a different level of need of the students ieps okay so that means that the the two classes who are experiencing uh cut in hours are our special education preschool special education students yes the whole preschool is special is no i get that but yes yes okay so i i mean i i would i would you know have a uh have an issue with that i think that those students need probably more time not less um i'm not in favor of that marie and committee this is dawn um i believe that the aba programs even before um this year we're operating on a half day

186on fridays i believe the students were dismissed at 12 or 12 30. so it's actually not a reduction in hours i would want to double check that though please i'd appreciate that right jenny we'll look at this offline um i'm absolutely not positive um okay i'd appreciate a follow-up on that so complicated issue but not necessarily a calendar issue like we still have to make it yeah i'd like to make a suggestion maybe table that part of the motion um and instead just pick pick which option for start date yeah thank you evan did you have something to share or comment uh thank you tessa so i yeah so i i may i lean towards the option one i would uh start early so i i would say it's uh for the benefit of even

187personal learning right so we wanted to have a student uh uh so take care of their benefits so it will be safer to have a uh in-person learning uh in the summer actually so we we don't really know what's gonna happen in the next winter so uh so to to go to go extreme i would favor actually students to take the full summer to learn right and have a very long winter i mean just a joke that's just to say i prefer uh option one okay does someone want to make a motion adam um i move to approve the proposed calendar number one with the start date for students of august 30th and staff professional days scheduled for august 25th and 26th the last day of our of school would be june 15 2022 plus

188snow days don't forget that last part elementary early release days are scheduled on wednesdays didn't we just say we weren't going to put that part in i thought that you were just discussing that as just discussing the preschool part i don't think we were are we or no sorry don't schedule the early release days on wednesdays but we have to figure out the preschool hours and come back to you on there whether we do it on thursday or wednesday doesn't change the preschool approach all right so i'll add to my motion that elementary early release days are scheduled on wednesdays is there a second second okay second but the understanding that we're not changing anything about preschool tonight but that's not even in the motion so you don't have to worry about that okay so

189i think we've all discussed our things so it's okay if you don't want to vote for it that's that's the whole point of having two different motions but um ginny yes angie yes john no adam yes uh kyra yes nora no diane yes amy no yevin yes and me yes beth i wasn't adding up votes i think it was six weighted votes to know two acting in one box per okay so it still passes right because it's just a majority okay john and i are agreeing so it must pass okay great thank you john thank you adam all right so school will start on august 30th we'll get that onto parents and staff as soon as we can thank you everybody all right next on the agenda is the soa plan second read and a

190vote peter all right so you know there's a brief note in your packet but we presented this at the last meeting there was a significant amount of school committee feedback um our team did take that back um and revise the plan it did take us a little time to do it because it was at the same time we were trying to work through um the time on learning changes uh with desi and the budget presentation and several other covert related things um so it took a little extra time we were able to make some revisions that we believe reflects most of the feedback we receive we also then send it to our cpac leadership um you know preliminarily um you know we let them know that they're welcome to bring it to the full membership

191at some point um and get more feedback from members and we're happy to bring it back and revise the plan with the state later um but they i believe at this point you know felt relatively comfortable with what was being submitted we also sent it out to our dei advisory group we haven't had a chance to meet with them yet um so we would like to approach it the same way but we did not receive i don't think any feedback directly at this point so um we'd like to present this for your approval um you know to submit to the state we are a few days late at this point on it um and if we receive significant feedback later in the game we can always come back revise it and there was a decision

192on on mine and peter's part that i i gave the thumbs up that it was okay for us to send it in late because i thought the feedback received last time was important enough that we take the time to revise it and so he did um angie did you have a question yes um so one clarification i understand the uh how the subgroup is select are selected so that's based on the assessment among the uh subgroups that need help right not uh not everybody right yeah the the just to go way up on the balcony and take a bird's eye view of this the student opportunity act was specifically designed to help districts focus attention on certain subgroups and populations within their schools that have been underserved by those districts um it's not intended to

193just have something that tries to benefit everyone equally at this point um you know we know and believe our reading program will benefit everyone but our specific focus of this plane is to um put attention on groups that we have not historically served to the best of our ability so as required by the state the state requires us to pick out those samples correct yeah we said this benefits everyone the state would send it back to us and say that's not the plan the question i have is is for low subgroup for the people who in that subgroup that needs help right only not the whole group right okay thank you okay does anyone else have a question diane i'm wondering if um this required any additional uh resource allocation i i didn't think it

194did but i didn't have time to compare the two um there are no resources in this there are resources that we've allocated to you know special education support you know directly um you know for example um we at all of our special educators we have a plan that every single one will go through the full wilson train um you know because we we know that that's an area that we want to focus on make sure we're implementing wilson with fidelity in every setting um and we want every special educator just to have that capability we're doing that that's not part of this plan because the plan is really at this point focused on those subgroups and with the intention of moving that along i make a motion then to approve the um soa okay great

195if there is no further discussion then we will vote uh angie yes john yes adam yes kira yes yemen yes laura yes diane yes amy yes ginny yeah and myself thanks okay so the next thing on the agenda and we're almost done are the um revised operating protocols if you remember at our last meeting adam suggested that we add in um some explicit wording um showing our commitment to anti-racism and equity so the revised the third time protocols are in uh your packet with the changes tracked so that you can see what was done and we'd look like to approve them tonight so that we can get them signed adam i i'll make a motion to approve with gratitude to both nora and the committee as a whole nora came up with a great idea

196of having our auditions being taken directly from the statement that we put out as a committee a couple weeks ago does someone want to second that second second um is there any additional discussion or questions that people have see you know that it's late when no one has anything to say all right i i think it looks great there's no reason to have any additional discussion i think they did a wonderful job so thank you um to all those that that worked on this um we can vote angie yes john yes uh adam yes kira yes diane yes amy yes jenny yes and no jenny i didn't vote thanks on the last one i said yes and then thanks and so i'll say yes and then thank you to everyone who worked who took time

197outside of our meeting time to work on that and to bring something um to us and so um beth will get us this to sign in some capacity i don't know how may i have to stop it and sign it um okay subcommittee and member member report so um diane is there a policy update i'm just that we met on the 15th um our intention is to spring forward finally hopefully the workforce diversity policy at our next meeting perhaps or at least in february okay um were there any other things that people wanted to report on or need to report on at this meeting i have nothing else in my agenda so i wasn't sure uh the joint pto matt i don't know that there's anything that we need to report um okay peter is

198there any we have need for an executive session tonight but is there anything that you wanted to note in the fyi before we adjourn to our executive site oh sorry the warrant sorry i skipped right over it who wants to do that i will hold on okay we have warrants to approve tonight i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrant as follows number p2115 dated 114 2021 in the amount of two million seven hundred fifty four thousand eight hundred thirty dollars and ninety seven cents payroll deduction warrant as follows number 21-015 pr dated 114 2021 and the amount of 556 thousand one hundred fifty four dollars and seventeen cents and vendor warrant as follows number twenty one dash zero one four dated one seven twenty twenty one in the amount of five

199hundred seventy three thousand nine hundred fifty one dollars and eighty-eight cents angie john yes adam yes kyra yes yes nora yes diane yes amy yes jenny yes me yes all right now i'll ask peter if there's anything in the fyi that he wanted to draw attention to before we adjourn for an executive session um just again thank you to the anonymous donors for that student assistance fund and community members are welcome to donate that to that and they can contact david bertolino also we have upcoming qpr trainings um and there's a link to register for those if anyone is interested and then i also just want to call your attention um specifically to the edco collaborative fy 20 annual report but most importantly you really should read the audit report that that is key um

200specifically there is a statement in the audit report for a second year in a row of substantial doubt um of whether or not that organization can continue as a collaborative and it's that that is significant so we're going to be talking about that more um probably at the next meeting um you know and and i think we're we're probably getting to a point at edco where we have to discuss our next steps with that so just please be aware of that and that audit report is important you don't you don't have to read the whole thing and if you have a question on what you should read of it please email dave and he can point out some highlights from it i'll point out that the packet stops um with the contents but not the

201full report from edco just scroll down page 101. we don't we don't actually get the rest of the information in the packet well i guess we really summarize that um we will we'll get that out to you by email and include it in an updated posting too so sorry about that that's right i'll also note that uh the the deadlines of pull papers enacted for the upcoming election is is fast approaching um and there are two school committee seats um that are up for election this year um for three year terms so i believe february 5th nope last day to file yes last day to obtain papers is february 5th last day to file then this february 9th did don have a question i see it i don't know her handsomely that might have [Music]

202all right okay given the need for an executive session i will entertain a motion for an executive session to be convened under mgl chapter 30a section 21a purpose 3 to discuss strategy with respect to litigation because an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the litigating position of the committee this is in regard to the financial position of the educational collaborative and possible future litigation the committee will not return to open session so moved second all right angie yes john yes adam yes hira yes yevin yes laura yes diane yes amy yes uh jenny yes sorry i forgot your name for a sec that's how tired i am yes all right so peter sent a separate executive session link that