001between bullying harassment et cetera and what to do if they become aware of bullying mr cruz do you have before okay thank you um so i brought this forward to the school committee at the request of one of um our our parents and citizens elaine ritchie so i'll invite you into the conversation also happy pride to you and your family um so the first thing i want to do to kind of frame the conversation is get a definition that we can all work from as to what bullying is at cheruhou because bullying can be a very personal um and a very trauma-informed definition within ourselves so i think we should start by understanding how cherijo defines bullying and then the follow-up to that um to open the conversation is then what types of trainings are
002you anticipating how are we going to teach that definition to our our students and teachers the protocol here is strong we have a clear procedure um i i think we need to discuss what bullying is how we define it and then i'd like to invite miss ritchie into the conversation with the questions and concerns that she had that she felt wasn't addressed um at the march meeting so we'll start with the death of the definition it is the behavior code so i'm going to read directly from our code yes thank you so we use the definition right out of the statewide bullets bullying bullying definition which means the use by one or more students a written verbal or electronic expression or a physical act or gesture or any combination thereof directed at a student that
003a causes physical or emotional harm to the student or damage to the student's property b places the student in reasonable fear of harm to himself herself or a damage to his or her property c creates an intimidating threatening hostile or abusive educational environment for the student d infringes on the rights of the student to participate in school activities or materially and substantially disrupts the education process or the early operation of the school thank you for putting in that on record so i think from that platform then we can kind of move this the conversation forward all understanding um what bullying is at the state level and here um so i guess the next question i'll ask before i um stretchy comes up is how are we communicating such a subjective experience to our teachers and
004our students that they can then use these procedures use to see something say something for them how are we sharing that knowledge with them right now it seems to be done through the behavior code the beginning of the year orientation within the classroom there definitely needs to be more what we found under my conversations with both the middle school high school and the elementary principals is that sort of an overall reset needs to happen it's been a while since the policy has been written as well as the statewide requirement so basically reviewing the statewide policy with all of the staff uh as well as the administrators along with our we have three new deans getting um ready to come aboard so that will also help sort of reset that stage we're right now talking to
005other districts about um the different kinds of opportunities that they found most successful you know my both myself and dr marlon had experience um bringing in presenters for bullying and what we find is that obviously it's important across the the district but most importantly in middle school it's where if you if you don't really start to unpack and rewire the students um brains to be able to um rethink how they're looking for that behavior because oftentimes a bully becomes a bully because they've been bullied themselves so they're looking for a relationship that in essence is negative but they're looking for some kind of a relationship so they seek they will seek out negative relationships and if it gets to the point where we're unable to find out help support and they get to the high
006school you're going to be looking at at individuals who can move towards physical altercation and assault because they're seeking a higher level of um aggression and that's where it becomes very uh a huge safety concern across the board but really what the research tells you is to really try to implement young programs elementary middle school to ensure you don't have high school bullies but it definitely needs to be an overall reset in the district okay wonderful and next year we can maybe request an update so one of the things we've talked about is also at the school improvement team level which is our school governing is that we have ongoing conversations with that team so that they can talk through the specific things happening in their individual schools uh talk through so it's clearer talk
007through with this with not just the staff with the students during advisory times um because this is a we're also hoping with our peer-to-peer support so we have i mentioned this i think at the may 24th meeting we're partnering with the chris collins foundation so there's now a 12 2500 stipend for the middle school and high school facilitate a mentor that they'll facilitate and they'll select peer mentors really to push that idea of kindness tolerance respect um but sometimes as adults we can sound like white noise to students so building the leadership skills and building the um inspiration within our students to be able to support the peer-to-peer and hearing from their own peers around the work so there's a lot of work coming like i said we've added the dean to the middle school
008we believe that that we'll have a dean at the high school and middle school who will lead the student service initiative we have um a contract that's coming in front of you next month to add two additional clinicians through contract using essa funds to be able to not only support building the capacity of our deans and our teams but to help us with the pd that has to happen across the district wonderful thank you we still have a lot of work to do miss juicy so as we do as you define bullying i was under the impression that bullying was something that was a repetitive behavior right i don't know that i heard that in your definition is it something so i'm going to give you an example i didn't hear that in your and
009you can correct me if i'm wrong and i misheard it let me give you an example if a student is called a slur one time by another student is that considered bullying or and so this is where it becomes subjective and i'm going to share with you very openly that there are students who are repeatedly called slurs and they are afraid to come forward with that information because they don't think it rises to the level of bullying because it maybe happens once or twice and it may not be the same student each time but i think that's something that we need to address i think this conversation has opened up over the pride flag i think we've heard from some of our students who are lgbtq allies and lgbtq members that this is happening in
010our school people are using slurs against them when they wore their pride flags on themselves not hanging it and i agree with the policy but some students brought it threatened to have it ripped off their back followed into a classroom told i'm gonna rip that off of you let me intimidate you um is that bullying so i think i need more clarification because i need to empower our students to understand that one time is too many frankly two times is a major problem and if there is a root here that we have people who are not supporting all of our students then we need to suss that out and we need to make sure we can address that so i need to be able to empower these students so that they understand yeah that rises
011to the level of bullying because that policy has a little bit more of a weight to it than just going to the dean someone called me a jerk well that's not bullying in my opinion somebody calls me the f slur that's bullying in my opinion completely unacceptable um so i need that clarification so i can pass that on to parents i'm going to read you it from the statewide because what we do is in our behavior code we say refer to the statewide bullying policy so i'm right after that e that i read this is what it says that may help the expression physical act or gesture may include but not limited to an incident or incidents that may be reasonably perceived as being motivated by characteristics such as race color religion ancestry national origin
012gender sexual orientation gender identity and expression or mental physical or sensory disability intellectual ability or by any other distinguishing characteristic bullying most often occurs as repeated behavior and often is not a single incident between the bullying slash cyber bullying offender and the bullying victim so there's a lot to this point there's a lot here and what i would say it's any student any time needs to report it thank you very much for here thank you yes cheers so so catherine it's under reported and it's our bullying is under-reported in part for that reason and even um when you said you know to you jerk's not bullying but another word is even that is so subjective and my concern is that a teacher will say that's we'll make those judgments because they are feeling we all
013inform our idea of bullying from our own experience it's so subjective which is why the training you're talking about at the at the sit level at the bringing presenters um all of the things that you listed gina are so critical because it's really about asking the student how did this make you feel that word gesture um even if it was a silent following there could be no gesture there could be no word but you're being followed there are so many ways we have to understand that we have to ask the students do you feel and it's everything you just read so it could simply be fear and intimidation in the learning environment if we can get to that our reporting will be more accurate and we as a school committee can recognize what i think
014mr richie might have been trying to say which is i don't think you're getting it because if we say please give us the reports those reports are not are not really capturing what our kids are going through so thank you yeah okay mr okay a question here you know specific specific we'll paragraph it on the right hand side so specific information about just what imposed on the offender may have been disclosed to the victim it's any information just go to the parents like we've contacted the proper personnel in the school we contacted i mean we can be general but we can't say you know picard has been suspended i just i just don't see it saying here that we've it's says specific which means what some people what some people might might read a specific
015meaning i can't tell you anything and other people may think that at least they should know that the property uh agencies and authorities have been contacted and stuff like that so i was just just i thought was maybe a little uh ambiguous for somebody to uh yeah not necessarily you know not necessarily you because you see you hear this all the time about you know school districts dropping the ball on on a lot of kids so i just want to be comfortable that uh we're we're documenting everything and the parents that are uh impacted uh being uh kept in the loop too right and it can be frustrating as a parent not to know what's happening or oftentimes it gets misconstrued because somebody thinks they know and then shares information and you know it's part
016of a student's right this one's part of a student's record which is covered by ferpa so you can't disclose information um about anything only your own you're only allowed information about your own student thank you my name is elaine and i just want to say catherine um mr day and lisa um i've been only coming to the school community meetings for a few times so i apologize i'm not good with names but i just want to say thank you because those were my key points when i did bring this up a few meetings ago and i just want to know like the very first time it was talked about it was um a few times saying it had to be a repeated occurrence so i want to thank you for noting that it can be
017just once so i think that's good to be on the record um and i think um what i've been hearing is really good because what what i also brought up the first time is many times kids are going to um the dean are going to their teacher and they're being told that's not bullying you know because whether they think it's just somebody being just not nice to them or or whatnot but i think asking the child the question is how you know how did this make you feel because it's ultimately like who are we to judge if someone is being intimidated or not um and even if it's found not to be bullying were still talking to that child and helping them because they felt they felt that um something was wrong there and i
018think communication is key i think a lot of a lot of parents that i've talked to one me being myself and um other families and with students himself the frustration is really communication and i understand it's not my right to know about the bully person the bullyer um but i think just basic communication to the parent um you know mrs ritchie whether it's an email or a phone call um your child um has presented a bullying report and we are actively investigating this and please let us know if this um this um behavior continues because that right there i don't need to know more i just know the school's taking care of it when my child comes home and and says there's an incident i don't hear anything i don't know what's happening and then
019if it keeps continuing then i'm thinking the school isn't doing something and the child thinks the school isn't doing anything and that same communication can be to the student as well we are doing something you know we we are active we are acting on this if this continues please please let us know because and i also think that you know maybe the ways and i like how you're thinking creatively about different um successes to help these students because i really feel like our kids are deep down great kids even the kids who are tend to be bullying other kids because there's a reason like you said sometimes kids bully and i think for the past few years and for a long time as a society we are enabling this not um great behavior not being
020kind and kids now i've been talking to my own children about this because i knew this was going to be presented today and kids now i feel like the past couple years that they've been taught that's not bullying when i was appalled when my child when i was asking her she when i asked her about bullying she had so well if i get enough if somebody like um beats me up and i'm like that's a soul that's not bullying so now kids are kind of thinking that this is acceptable behavior and i think kids that are doing this behavior also thinks this is acceptable behavior because nothing has really there's been no repercussions of it and i really think a number one repercussion is you know the first incident it happens get the parent involved
021even if it wasn't billing if my if i got an email saying there was a like my child was that question of making someone else feel that way i would have a conversation with my child and most of the time i bet you that's going to nip it in the bud because we have good kids here we have good kids and i think if we help all the kids it's going to help the bullying and i like the idea of building a leadership with the community of students himself and i was hearing a lot of educating the teachers and deans but i think educating the students as well is huge because i think just kindness goes a long way um and i just wanted to ask and i just because i know i heard that
022just as we could see how long it took to find out what bullying meant on our website it's it's really hard to find that bullying report and print it out and i know at one point in time there was a request request made for a digital format and i heard it was being worked on so i can't give you an update so um our um dorothy fitzgerald is our data analysis she's amazing and um we're working with powerschool to make it edible if it if it can't come to fruition by september we're going to go google form until we can we put in some tickets because what happens is we can have it the form is not the problem it's when we have to print it for the record and often times like we have
023you know parents we provide parents we sign it so it becomes a long length of really non-cohesive language so we need to get that that fixed and that's not on our end that's um from the vendor's end but if it's not ready for september we're going to use a google form okay so it will it will be something where you can edit right in it and so that my understanding from our last time was that really to make it um so that you can submit it the other area so for example if you do power school when you go on your power squad when a student goes on their power school they can submit the form right there to the administrator into the dean uh with that what that helps with it's very efficient documentation
024it's just now for the record being able to print it isn't important we had to talk to the administrators that's one a key piece but we know we have sort of a work around if they can't get it up and running for us by september but and there are other things that we've added to your point the letters for communication there's conversations that we're having at our summer advance with our administrators but please know the education of our students is as important as the education of our staff yeah we absolutely agree with you no thank you um and what was gonna say um yeah that's pretty much it so thank you i i really thank you thank you thank you yeah oh yeah oh no perfect well thank you thank you thank you yes mr
025lagorie i just i think one of the things that i'm hearing from everyone but certainly living and i want to bring up catherine's example of someone being called a jerk which by the definition you read does not qualify as bullying but it's wrong behavior and i think we've gotten and please don't think i'm minimizing blame i think we've gotten so focused on defining bullying and determining whether something is or isn't we've forgotten about what decent moral behavior is so calling someone a name that doesn't qualify as bullying is still wrong and i don't know how the interactions take place between the student and the dean and but i live in a world of hierarchy and the hierarchies exist it's a it's a power struggle for any kid to go to an authority and complain about
026anything but we and i i love terre haute schools but i think we all have to get back to the value of just modeling good behavior so whether it if it's defined as bullying or not it's important but i think it's allowed us to miss out on a lot of other things that are important that relate directly to that and that was the reason for my suggestion of no matter what report comes through whether it's it's deemed as bullying or not willing communicating to the parents because ultimately i feel like we have good kids and i feel like sometimes especially in the middle school everyone's trying to fit in and they're trying to find their niches and they may be acting not like themselves and saying things that they're not like themselves to fit in
027because maybe they don't want to be bullied or they don't want to be called those names so i think if we immediately get the parents involved we can have conversations with our kids and i think that alone will help the kindness and the good behavior get back because i feel like we have a good community and i feel like parents would be appalled if it was their child and you know you always think it's not my child but it could be it could be you know it could be so um that's why i think just communicating with the parents at all levels i would never be upset with the school because they contacted me like about something like that i i just wouldn't on a canon pin i can't imagine any parent would because it's
028just a conversation with the child with their child so thank you my final point i think um when we first brought up the bullying issue mr zhenyan said at that podium and said i need help from this community really he put a call out to the parents in this community to say um i need help you you need to model for your children the expectations for our schools um and i think to gary's point it's modeling the behavior that we expect to see from them outside of our homes um you know the world is changing there are words that are considered slurs now that weren't considered a slur in my generation and so when my daughter comes home and says we don't use that word anymore i think okay explain to me why we don't
029use that word anymore and nine times out of ten i buy right into that we don't say the r word anymore my sister was born with um developmental delays i used that word because that was the medical term and i would say to people my sister has mr right yeah that's the military medical term but we don't use that word anymore and we don't use that word anymore because i think we all understand that's a hurtful word now right there's a whole campaign about it i think it's educating the students that you might use that slur and maybe not recognize in this i had an incident at the middle school with my daughter who had someone who she considers a friend call her a slur and it was an education piece for that kid to
030say you're not a bad kid but don't call me that and let me explain to you why you can't call me that not a bad kid 12 years old but the education piece so i guess this is me playing to the crowd a little bit and i i appreciate everybody's patience but it's modeling that behavior at home don't use the words at home if you get a phone call from the school follow up help mr xenyano help mrs florenzo help the community out help your children understand that it's unacceptable behavior and i think if we can start as a community setting the expectations for what we will and we will not allow i think it makes everybody's job a little bit easier thank you she wanted to know what bullying is bullying is what mild
031the son had to go through when he was in tears did not want to go to school was 54 days absent because of bowling he was cornered needed a bodyguard that's bullying and also what do you do with the staff who would be bullying any students like mrs garlick did to my son no no no no no don't use names please well she's dead even more so what would you do with a staff like a director at a certain program who would be bullying students she's a school committee and then yes please sir you can be next um what kind of avenues of reporting do the peers have if they're witnessing bullying so if they're not immediately involved as the bully or the one being bullied are there ways for all the student advocates who
032are and the allies who are around to to to start a conversation yep oftentimes actually other students will hear something and inform administration or a dean that they overheard something and then that this follow up um to a lot of people's points sometimes students don't necessarily you know want to let us know so oftentimes we get that from a parent this is what my child said this is where i heard it and oftentimes it's not their own children say um we have to say something app so if a student wants to remain anonymous they have access they can just go online we all get the text message we all get the alerts on our on our emails so there's other ways for us to know um so that that that's all that all things that
033happened but again to everyone's point it's important that we know and because what often happens is people will wait until it's too late or and then they're really they're feeling vulnerable more vulnerable because now it's going to happen more if no one's addressed it and and i agree 9 out of 10 times parents are cooperative they help us stop it and it changes behavior immediately and when um it's not when there's not that cooperation then we have some more work to do it doesn't mean that you know all bets are off we have social workers school psychologists student support um services available to really try to do the work that we can in school to help hopefully avoid the behavior or change the behavior so they would have access to the web form on power
034school and well we're looking to do the forum on powerschool that's what we're working on um but right now they would just do the report they can print it but they could just really what you just tell a teacher or an adult yes sir please mr george yes i'm glad that i stuck around um because that well like i said both of my children had fantastic experiences their entire educational career here at cherho the only exception to that has been bullying i found out that my son was bullied for five years and was terrified to tell any of us including his parents and he did his last he did his senior year online because he could just didn't feel safe coming to campus anymore my daughter has missed a lot of school over the last
035few years because a lot of kids are terrified by what they perceive will be the repercussions from the bullyers and other students if they come forward every time that i've reported it to mr peter rudy to principal zenyu to vice principal florence they've gone out of their way immediately to try to fix the problem but when the students and it's not just my kids i know it's a lot of their friends when the students are too afraid to say anything either to their parents or to the staff at school because they fear ongoing repercussion then i mean that kind of leaves us powerless i don't know what you can do to to make more available to them safe and anonymous ways of reporting this but that really you know it's a it's a big problem
036and i think it's the it's the one cloud over cheerio that we really need to sort of sweep away we have have asked our teachers to go over the say something app at the middle school and high school level to make sure students know there is an anonymous way to do that if they feel exactly what you're explaining even so even even with the anonymous app there some of them are still they're like oh well they're going to know it was me even if i say it anonymously so-and-so is going to know it was me and that really prevents a lot of a lot of the reporting which hopefully that's why the education of the students right so the idea is that you know allies and and creating an environment where students understand really what
037this looks like and and at any point to mr lagoy's point if you see anything just say something you don't doesn't have to say well that is that bullying or not don't ask just tell the adults but it takes some trust in it and it can be scary well i appreciate you all taking the time to look into that and to stay with it i know that you personally have been involved with it for a few years and trying to get a handle on it and we we really appreciate that as parents thank you good conversation thank you all for participating thank you thank you okay items agenda items anything need to be pulled okay a one two and three oh okay sorry a1 i'm probably not being loud enough thank you all eight one
038okay so we're gonna pull a1 a2 and a3 okay thank you anything else oh don't go now everybody good night everyone okay so you wanna so madam chair uh i will make a motion to move the remainder second there you go okay so those those in favor of um consent approving consent agenda items thank you okay there you go okay you ready yeah adam chair make a motion to approve a1 executive session miss on may 24 2022 superintendent's contract minutes not sealed second there's been a motion by mr luzon a second by mr callahan to approve the executive session minutes of may 24 2022 superintendent's contract minutes not sealed uh any discussion on those minutes no okay those in favor any opposed abstain abstain i shouldn't be approving these since i'm going to abstain from
039all three of them that's all you're saying i'm saying okay thank you go ahead no uh chair yes make a motion to approve a2 the executive session minutes of may 24th 2022 second there's been a motion by mr callahan a second by miss giusti to approve the executive session minutes of may 24 2022 any discussion on those minutes those in favor any recusal extensions nope okay that's it thank you number three chair make a motion to approve a3 which is the regular session minutes of may 24th 2022 second then a motion by mr callahan the second by mr legori to approve the regular session minutes from may 24th 2022 any discussion on those minutes those in favor nope nope thank you okay so now we're into reports oh did they do the whole question yeah
040we did all that yep okay so um we have k registration now actually if we do subcommittee reports there aren't any just so we know superintendents report i have the k registration numbers ashway we have 17 students charlestown we have 24. can you go slow start again ash away 17. ashway is 17 charleston has 24. hope valley has 30 and richmond has 50. oh boy those numbers don't really with classrooms no they do yeah they're actually very much in line with what we saw last year yeah like they were fine so you would have two charleston have two right now actually chelsea still has i believe the three um so they're a little under okay a little more recruiting i have to call that miss poor um and it's not to it's often times parents
041do wait for the summer um i'm going to get down to further in my report hopefully there'll be some incentive to get registration people registered the district annual yard sale will be held on friday june 24th with district-wide government agencies and non-profits will be given the first option and attached um to your packets are the items listed for sale so for our end of year updates we held our 60-second commencement ceremony last friday evening to celebrate the graduating class of 2022. actually you see here one of our advisors mrs alvarez it was a wonderful event it was a wonderful evening we were all very proud of the accomplishments and recognitions that our class of 22 graduates have earned and actually that class earned over a thousand dollars in scholarship so that was a really wonderful
042evening over um i'm happy to report that we've also received the ride kindergarten jumpstart grant uh for enrichment it's in the amount of eighteen thousand two hundred and ninety 299.43 it's a very exciting opportunity to boost children's kindergarten readiness through immersion with high quality curriculum materials and activities prior to the start of school so the students must be fully registered for kindergarten and there is a flyer now if you go to our main website uh it's right on the main page kindergarten registration link and the jumpstart registration link if you're interested so we hope to get our class of 2035 ready for the new year great i'm also happy to report that we received the ride cte teacher grant for a total of 23 382 and 40 cents to support cte teacher certification and cte
043professional learning and our last day of school is june 21st next tuesday for the majority of the district and cala will be two days after that wow okay um school committee requests are future agenda items or legal opinions mr day uh yes a few months ago i uh made the committee aware of what i called the inequity in this saf accounts and i was led to believe that there was going to be some movement on on balancing those things out and doing has there been any uh movement on these did you mr j did you have an opportunity to meet with mr draper because i thought that was supposed to know yeah okay i wouldn't be asking the question here so i'll we'll we'll follow up we'll meet up a meeting with so that we
044go through well we're going to have it we're going to have a new uh policy before us as it pertains to this recovery [Music] majority of the school committee wanted to make it equitable to the point where where if you're in class if you're in the a group you you don't have five thousand dollars in your account and if you're in the orange group you have a hundred dollars here we didn't put it in policy but we can we did it for we have practices but i'm fine with writing it in policy well i i don't know maybe maybe the rest of them are comfortable with it but i just don't want to i don't want to be seeing the effort i personally don't want to see the saf account again back it back to
045the old days where like i say some some the fifth grade class has got all kinds of money to spend and the other one another fifth grade group that doesn't have any money to spend because the teachers i know generate money and i don't you know we get to the high school you got a freshman sophomore junior senior in in the middle school you you have a class you have class classes and i mean classes good classes with good money and other classes with not so good of opportunities and i think that's very uh discriminatory in some some respects yeah we can i think it's great idea student activity fund policy and the other thing the other the other other thing that i didn't have uh i'm still very concerned about school buses being passed
046all over this district and i don't know whether they've had any conversations with the bus company as to whether they have any suggestions or anything because i i know two personal occasions in the last what's today tuesday yesterday on monday and last uh wednesday one on route two and one on route one yeah ideally it's not just creeping by either i mean they are flying by and i don't know if maybe it's maybe it's the only maybe that's the only route and i can't can't pick you can't you can't please them but this needs to be a way to uh apprehend them they don't have oh they don't have cameras on the outside of the bus it's like the uh school zone speeding cameras right but that they've recently installed i don't know if they
047still do them on buses though i can talk to lilly that's how we used to kids like what's your best you know maybe you should report if it's we know if it's if it's in the sydney we can ask them to maybe police a little bit thank you this is marcus um chair i'd like to request that they put um the reset for the bullying protocol and practices that superintendent mccarthy was talking about on the agenda for either the end of september or beginning october okay um so that this existing school committee can have an opportunity to um reform revise and give input before we all disband and a new committee sits okay thank you so late september early october yes thank you thank you anybody else motion to adjourn [Applause] oh that was a
048second okay that was a favor thank you how do you