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e e e e e e e e do we not introduce don't we're going to call to order the a
royalston Regional School District school committee meeting for Wednesday February 12th 2025 um we are recording this for playback on YouTube or aotv or wherever the lovely place it wants to stream um this evening we're going to start with the um um Pledge of Allegiance Eric will
you start us off flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible liy justice for all moving on we have the approval of
minutes for January 15th 2025 is there a motion thank you thank you Bobby is there a second Lee thank you is there any discussion seeing none all those in favor and Kylie you're you're one here
okay yep perfect do we have any public input over there you didn't see anybody on there is there anybody here for public input no okay um this evening we had our recognitions just prior to this meeting our recognitions this evening were at RCS Finley Fontaine and Al F at Aces
Clayton Palmer and Scarlet Collins at Arms Shania Luna and Jonathan Singley at the high school Oli leik and Nathan Brower and our Subway scholar athletes this evening were Abigail mcamera and mine Hermes congratulations to you all this evening we do have a student
representative here with us and somebody will be introducing her because I'm so sorry I don't know who you are but thank you for being here this is Alana a junior at the app high school and she is currently the president of the student council I have
the high school feary highlights that I'm here to share and I'm also sharing the upcoming events at the high school last night 33 10th graders taking AP seminar presented their team multimedia projects to classmates
teachers and public there were eight groups of students who presented their research AAL High School's mock trial finished up their season at the beginning of February where they competed against Fitchburg High School in the preliminary rounds they ended their season 03 overall but one points
for winning arguments in every trial on Monday February 10th 2025 students from AAL High School were visited by Patrick Tutwiler Massachusetts Secretary of athal high school no Massachusetts Secretary of Education and no Ortega
massach its Commissioner of higher education as part of their financial aid Road show free and affordable college is here the discussion was focused on delivering the message that by completing the free application for federal student aid students were eligible
for students were eligible to receive free tuition and fees to any of the state's 15 community colleges and eligible for free or reduced tuition and fees to any of the six State University and four University of Massachusetts campus
additionally this past Monday students in grades 8 through 11 began the course selection process of 2025 to 2026 school year all students were presented with information about their options for next year which included being able to learn
more about our programs such as early college and Innovation career Pathways AAL high school student council is also workshopping the potential for student-led focus groups which can be run during advisory to allow more students and opportunity to have a voice
and discuss ways to improve the school community and culture within the high school we had 22 8ighth grade students attend our prospective students night on February 4th students and families were provided dinner and then toured the high school with current high school students
to get a feel for school and information on clubs and classes offered lastly senior Carly Chase qualified for States and indoor track for shop putut she qualified her qu qualifying throw was 28 ft and 11
11.76 in she will compete in States this Sunday at the Reggie Lewis Center at 1 pm. then the upcoming events the AAL high school student council is planning on putting on a students versus staff basketball game on Wednesday March 12th
where the ath high school students will play staff from across the district it is student council's hope to bring the entire AAL Royal ston School Community together together along with the public all while raising some money our Academic Decathlon team will compete in
States on March 1st at MIT and we have two students who will be showcasing their independent research projects at the regional science fair on March 7th thank you thank you so much for being here of course you do not have to stay so you are welcome to leave so thank you
so much for coming we appreciate you thank you um I'd like to ask for a motion to move up our technology update to this point in our agenda um Dan is here but he's under the weather and I'd like to send him home um so he can get some
rest second thank you all those in favor thank you so much is he okay thought it was is he than you thanks Josh guess oh um Eric
sorry no that's okay if he didn't stay we can always just table it till next month if he's not here it is in our packet we we can move on okay um we we if it's okay we'll continue and we'll come right back to him if he pops in here um moving
down to unfinished business the Commonwealth virtual school there's some information in your packet um after some back and forth with desie we found out that we are not at our current 1% cap um the student that needed to be in was accepted um and it's at this time it's a recommendation not to move the cap
because there still is room um so if anybody has okay perfect motion made in second and is there any discussion about it anybody have any questionsdate on to cap the numbers where we're at yeah just for our here y we still have um multiple spots
left to fill to even get to the 1% and we didn't hit it um last year or this year or any year since we've um had it in in since 2019 justun I think there H there must have been some sort of um some recording somewhere had us that we were at Max but
I think it was based off of our old data of how many students are in the district our current data says that we are at 1638 enrolled here um and have 12 students we have 12 in the program so we do have additional seats it's just there's no need to move it if we don't
have anybody there so awesome so um there's a motion made in seconded all those in favor of keeping it as is thank you Dan thank you so much I hope you feel better no you're fine we wanted to get you home as quickly as possible but feel
free all have interrupt with questions uh whenever you you have one so the uh the federal reporting crdc we talked about that last time that's ongoing it's due March 7th um there's been some issues that uh that website frequently goes
down which is uh interesting given what's happening uh in our country right now but um the website is slow often and you kind of have to work through it and that's why we work on it so early because once you get close to the deadline it is very difficult to use so
we'll have that done way before March 7th the school attending children report same thing ongoing we talked about it last time that's due February 21st and we'll we'll be uh on time with that one mcast testing um I talked about that last time I was concerned about the fact
that we didn't have full access to it and we now have access we've actually done a test at the high school and it was went really well so I've been worried about this for quite some time and it's feeling like they might have produced a pretty good product so we're we're happy about that um so far so good
with the mcass we did have an issue with uh a camera system here in this building and we replace the hardware in that and the cameras are back up and running we worked with the family center on translations that's been uh a big deal
you know as we've talked about in the past a lot of translation needs and we sort of changed how they're doing the report card process which made it a lot easier for them to do the translations so we're going to continue to work with them in the future and stuff like that but uh I think it definitely had had an
impact and they were able to get it done much faster the uh online facility use form that was uh created and published on the district website and uh working with the facilities director to U make scheduling easier and and uh more
efficient the nwaa testing that happened completely successfully and we'll be doing it again at the end of the year the employee onboarding process um there was a sheet that we've been using and Anthony uh as you know I introduced
him last time he's really good with spreadsheets sheets and he took a look at that and made some improvements and that's uh better utilized at this point also working on the high school PA system um that's in the uh Auditorium they've got issues there where it really
doesn't sound good and um pretty much need a big upgrade there so we have some funding that uh Matt to be totally honest with you I don't remember where the funding is coming from but we do have funding for this year and we're going to be we're getting quotes and we're going to be upgrading that system
before the end of the year believe we still have money in the desie one time fund Nan's not here to blurt that out so I wanted to do that on her behalf yep um and then the last thing is uh there's a room in here over there that does not
get announcements so if there was some kind of emergency they wouldn't know about it if the doors are closed in there so we have to get that wired up and get a speaker put in there and we're working with NSG Life Safety to do that um um lots of other stuff obviously
going on but these are these are the highlights awesome any questions okay thanks so much appreciate it thank you the menus look so much better alphabetized thanks for taking that and teaching me how to get to tell parents
where to go to find teacher information because it was not obvious to a lot of parents so thank you for the work that you put in and thanks for asking and if anyone else sees anything on the we site that needs updating or could look better flow better um Anthony and Dan are obviously our contacts here and you can
go through matter myself but thank you for getting those done it looks so much so much better so much cleaner yeah thank you so much yeah thank you okay uh moving now back into order of new business we have the RCs 2425
school year presentation I was gonna say are they cheaters or readers for me they're cheat so I have a five minute presentation for you superintendent ar oh you want me to
do yeah okay um I did add I think maybe two more photos than what you got in your original packet but um so I just I wanted to be able to talk about RCS and um what we've been working on this year as a staff um because you've heard from
a couple of the other schools so uh our first slide is our goals for our goals for the district so things that we've been focusing on so improving student learning you know using our quality instructional materials and making sure things are engaging for students and one
of the other pieces for me for focusing for this year which is also part of our district is strengthening our our Partnerships within the community because last year was my first year in the district and so people were getting to know me and so um we did a lot of work with my ptg group over the summer planning for this year um because I
wanted to make sure people would have access to the school and so that's kind of some of the things we're going to talk about one of my huge focuses was to focus on strengthening our team at RCS because like I said last year was my first year and um we tailored our
building skills schedule to make sure that our special education teachers and our interventionists um could be because we have you know have one classroom for grade level and so I can't have all my classes focusing on English at the same time because we need to make sure we can get people in um so really being
purposeful with our building schedule and then collaboratively um designing time during the school day for my core teachers to be able to meet with the special ed teachers bi-weekly and to be able to meet with the interventionist on the opposite week so we were able to get
that into our schedule as well this year which was a request um from my building instruction leadership team from the previous year so I was like we will figure it out so we did so my teachers and our specialed uh interventionists have time to be able to plan Implement
interventions and actually review data and make adjustments as needed and they can plan for co- teing our co- teing model for inclusion one of the wonderful things for me this year is being able to see the different ways in my grade levels
are collaborating to do co- teing and they're really getting creative in Sharing classroom space um my fifth and sixth grade team they lend themselves to be able to do that quite often and we're getting the students ready for the middle school so uh we had a stem day
and there were I think there were 10 different stations and fifth and sixth graders were joined together and they opened the classroom doors and there were kids in the hallway working on things and they rotated through the stations throughout the day at 15minute intervals um and they were doing Ela and they were doing math and problem solving
it was outstanding then the kids were thoroughly engaged um and then our first grade our second grade and our third grade are currently working on targeted interventions and it looks different in each classroom but typically the special
ed teachers in there with the our pair of professionals are being in charge of a group and our interventionist and our classroom teacher so there's four core groups and it's targeted interventions based off of what specific students need and we're doing that in first grade second grade and third
grade and my fifth and sixth grade piloted A Walk tolearn model so they took the two classrooms and they have their two classroom teachers the special ed teacher who works with both grade levels the interventionists and the
pairs in the two spaces and they looked at the children and they combined fifth and sixth graders based off of needs that they sh showed through map testing or mcast that there were gaps so some of the students are working on writing some of the students were working on Phonics um
we had an extension group where kids who were at grade level were able to like reach the new rigor and um do some independent pieces and work together collectively so that they could reach that higher level and they just finished a cycle that they did for six weeks they've giving them um assessments and
then they're actually redoing their second walk to learn model so I'm interested to see what that's going to yield for us um with their classroom assessments what we'd like to do moving forward is do one of the same walk tolearn models with our fourth and our
third grade classroom so we'll be working on that um I did include a fun little picture uh for our school culture I think the biggest piece for me at RCS was um making sure the staff knew that my plan was to stay at RCS and and be
there for them and be there for the families and the kids and we've really embraced quite quite a few things and I know you see the newsletters when they come out I usually have a staff group photo and everybody was wearing their red sweatshirts today because it was our um superhero day and I'm like you're all superheroes because you're with kids so
so it was a lot of we do a lot of those different things and I think one of my teachers pointed out to me she's like you do a really good job at celebrating us and um like Cindy knows I always send her little pictures and I'll have like I had an apple bar I saw it online I was like we're going to do this and so the
teachers had had different toppings they cut up their apples and they love that the best out of everything yeah and then they get something for the holidays and I try my best to let them know how much I appreciate them um yep
so over the summer I kept thinking about I mean we're education so we like to eat live sleep breathe all the different things and I had when I was a classroom teacher I had read um Ron Clark's the end of molasses classes um if you don't know who Ron Clark is um there is a
wonderful Lifetime movie that was created with Matthew Perry as Ron Clark so you can find that but um he is an Innovative uh educator who now owns his own school and he has many different books so the end of molasses classes has little vignettes and it's quick it's
like a two-page read and it's all about your culture getting families connected to school what you can do is administrators and as families and as teachers and so I sent copies out to my staff over the summer and one of my teachers sent me the
screenshot from Facebook from one of my Pairs and one of my classroom teachers who had their books and they put this on social media and I just thought that was outstanding um because everybody Paris and teachers got got the book as well and we started a professional Library this year which has a variety of things
that came out of my building instructional leadership survey for different topics my staff would be interested in for professional development so you see a variety of um Ron Clark pieces and um Ross Green who we're maybe going
to be working with as a district I'm very excited about that and his platform for classroom management and how to support youth that are um have trauma in their lives and there's a connection between Universal Design for Learning and Ross green um but the teachers have been very excited about being able to
take books out and I've actually found there's a couple of books that I ordered for my staff that I've actually recommended for families um there's two about raising adolescent young men and raing raising adolescent young ladies and so I have parents signing stuff out of the professional Library too which has been
great um another thing that we are doing districtwide this year is looking um at student work to align that to our state standards and see if the students work that's being produced aligns with that and what that looks like and my building instruction leadership team just had a
meeting today after school and we were looking at work from a specific classroom and it was outstanding standing and the teacher actually asked at the end they're very excited and they're like can I make some changes and then do this again with my class and
bring it back to the group so the excitement about actually looking at student work taking the fear away of what we're going to be discussing to move instruction in the building has been um phenomenal this year and I will credit that to our data chats um this is our year two last year we had two data
chats and what that looks like is the classroom teacher they're bringing um their map testing scores mcast um we look at Dibbles we look at a variety of different things and they're looking at their data they come we have a conversation they make an action plan as
to different bands of students where we're seeing the gaps and they focus on that for six to eight weeks we meet again and we revisit it and look for growth and if we need coaching help or different pieces um we're utilizing that too and that's where some of the like
looking at student work we were looking at our data chats from the ones that we just had right before Christmas break which was a coaching session but we had some gaps in certain grades and so I had said to those teachers like please come and bring your work to the building instructional leadership team so we can
look at your student work um and have a conversation about if it's meeting the standard or not so that's been wonderful this year this is just a a quick overview of our data chats and what that actually looks like this year we've been able to um like uh Jason we came up with
Jamie whom which is the coach from the middle school they were able to sit in in one of our sessions and I'm hoping they're going to be able to join us on February 28th as well because around that table after we met last year for the first the first time I surveyed my staff and I said did you find this
valuable what can we change for next time and my classroom teachers were like I'd really love it if the special ed teacher was here I'd really love it if the interventionist was here so I made sure that when we started our round of data chats this year we incorporated the those staff and it's been outstanding um
to see the collaboration and really focusing on the different skills that the kids need and there is a consensus between our building because the coaches come from ases they're seeing similarities in ases too for the needs um so looking forward to what that brings for us at the end of the month
Partnerships um I have some data which is in your packet from our openhouse from the first year I joined the district to our openhouse um this past year year we were able to increase our community members that did attend for our families and um I surveyed the
parents this year our parents and Guardians about different things that I could do as building principal different topics they would be interested in and we partnered with um I partnered with um our commissioner
uh about Internet safety and so we had a um an evening Piece online where we could talk about you know anti-bullying and the Internet safety and the next piece the parents were really interested in was being able to talk about their child's testing data so we're going to be working on doing a presentation for
them in March um we have this wonderful photo where we were able to actually bring our students um to the royalston town hall and they voted um ptg gave us some money for outdoor recess equipment and the kids got to pick the different
categories and how to vote and they went through the whole process we made them picture IDs they had to go through the checklist um and then Marie barlay told me that there were more students that actually came to the voting with their Guardians and she attributes it to being able to go
through this process and so we are going to continue this again next year as well and uh what else oh yeah um we have a wonderful Partners partnership with the royalston um Academy for their Grant so we've been trying to get more um like
more artists to come in and different things like that so we were able to have Frank gantos come in and our ptg collaborated with us so we were able to purchase his books and we used it as a reward for that month for the students um this just is more of an
overview of uh trying to increase our Guardian involvement we have our traditional um pieces where we have um our events that you know we do something for the winter right before winter break and there are certain things I did not include these were additional pieces so
really trying to have my classroom teachers think about how they're going to be purposeful with getting parents on campus and we had a fourth grade did a state fair so there's some photos of that and then fifth grade just had their writers Cafe so the students had been working on personal narratives for
almost two months and they invited family in and they were sitting in little clusters in the calf and reading their work um and officer Josh was there and then that's officer K he's um new to royalston so they were sitting with a group of children too it's the additional picture I wanted to add and
last but not least um our ptg I worked over the summer and we've been really purposeful with making sure we could try to have a different event each month um to have more people come on campus and we're having our s'more kindness event the Friday after break as I'm looking
everyway um we're going to have some warming fires outside and we're going to have you know s'mores for the kids not to cook over the fire we have a separate piece for that um but we'll be outside so we're looking forward to that yeah are there questions I know
that's a lot I was trying to be fast I had five minutes I'm trying that was wonderful thank you so much for bringing this to us it's interesting to see what royalston does as a parent whose kids went through the athl school system so um I'm hoping that the other schools do use this as a as a
hey maybe we could do that too or so thank you for bringing that to us it's great to see thank you wondering if it's the momentum of like getting up and moving and kind of also know RCS we talk about this a lot
one from kindergarten all the way through sixth grade with the same kids every single day every year and so I think they also just enjoy the opportunity to work with students that don't work all the time and it's nice to see the different grade like so one group has so many sixth graders and so
many fifth graders in it and it's they do so many different activities together it's really I would say it's like one one classroom for different times but yeah thank you thank you m okay and the communications next is the district enrollment um it's where I
pulled the 1638 from that's our current District enrollment if anybody has any questions we are keeping an eye on um the enrollments for any type of Virtual School at this time I don't believe there has been any additional requests um but just so you know that's in your
packet um we already did our technology update and we're moving on to financial statements and approval of accounts Nancy is also under the weather this evening um so we have Matt to fill in unfortunately we did not meet at the budget sub so we do kind of need a
little bit of an update so sure so there is a financial package in your um with your agenda I have ny's notes which I will try to go through probably not as well as she does um our year-to-date figures are definitely on track while
some lines are over budget uh there are Savings in other areas that are definitely going to help offset those Nancy likes to each time highlight some of the overages just so people are aware so if you notice on page 10 foster care expenses did increase by $7,000 since
last month now almost we're approaching $50,000 over budget um this is is due to just our increased number of foster students and the services that they need um the the transportation costs have become absolutely insane there were
conversations about that with the state just the other day uh legislators and the department are now even trying to determine whether or not they're going to put some cap or limit or some other system into place because districts including us are seeing increases in
transportation at 12% 20% % 33% and there's usually only one bus company that bids for each district and it's kind of a a little system that the bus companies have with one another not blaming anyone um Mary Phils does a
wonderful job of servicing our needs but um something that the state's looking into the SRO line on page 11 is above budget it's 20,000 over that's actually probably an issue with the budgeting
because we had agreed to to pay the SRO a certain amount and that's in accordance with our Mo MOA page 14 our unemployment costs Rose from last month uh so those also were over budget again I want to be clear that there's plenty
of lines where we're not over budget and we're UND spent so everything is very well balanced right now we're not looking at going into the red in any fashion definitely in the black still with regards to our grants we received approval fin finally for the actual
intensive assistance grant that is the $325,000 that we're getting this year for Aces we're going to have three years of that funding and that's going to be applied towards salaries to help address overages in in that area but again um there are specific positions that were
put in and programs that were put in with that money that we work with the Department of AD and our state system of support to uh continue to monitor the FY 26 budget status the good news kind of uh the governor's
budget proposal did come out uh their proposal included a 3.05% increase in Chapter 70 funding that for us turned into $756,000 there was a
16.66% increase in Regional School transportation equating to an additional $128,000 for $189 92 sorry for the district and there was a 55.8% decrease in our Charter School
reimbursement reducing that funding by 68222 we did check I believe I've said it a few times possibly publicly um our District's lowincome grouping did fall back into group 10 we are classified as
group 10 and we are this time we were 16 students shy of being being in group 11 La this year we're in group 11 for FY 26 as concerned about we did drop back down into group 10 this year we were four
students short originally and we went back and forth I managed to work with the Senate and the department of Ed to get the right funding and identify those kids they there's not going to be any opportunity for us to reove into the other group this for FY
26 unless there are significant enrollment changes if that happens we're certainly going to stay on top of it and then continue to be in touch with the with the state however it is all based on our October 1 data so as kids move in we may get additional funding for foster
or circuit breaker funds for special needs students but that Chapter 70 is more than likely going to be locked where it is uh we just Yep this one's a little hard for me to share we just got this today and Nancy
did put it on here we received our final medical insurance increase today which is definitely higher than anticipated um we received a 19.9 2% increase to our insurance uh our retirees pay 100% of
their dental and their increase came in at 10.4% for the total for our retirees Insurance um I have already reached out to Maya uh started trying to talk to some of their big wigs at the top and
see if there's anything that we can do Nancy and I also did already reach out to the GIC I I jumped on it to see if we were able to move even potentially back into the GIC for this coming year for FY
26 I've not been in communication with anyone from the GIC yet but I will say that in communication with our Maya rep she informed me that the G and this was the case when we were entering or when we were exiting I apologize when I first
entered we left the GIC they need to be notified I believe it's December 1st for any upcoming movement for that July so being in February now and having just received the final numbers for our insurance puts us behind the eightball
and I I don't know that we'll be able to move to the GIC for this upcoming year but it's certainly something that I'll be discussing with um the business office and our Union and all of the staff to figure out what it is we want to do if we want to continue
with Maya and see if there's any changes to our rates or if we decide to move to the GIC we will get a cost analysis put together for what the GIC increases are right now I am told that this is not uncommon it's not just our district
other districts in the area are seeing increases of upwards of 20% I believe I was told one District saw a 30% increase and there are now districts that are actually being denied they're they're actually refusing coverage because of the claims that they're seeing and the
rates that are coming in so uh forecasting of revenues um right now with respect to FY 26 um Nancy and I are still working on forecasting the revenues and taking the expenses that we
have and getting them down to a place where there it will be palatable for the towns we had a meeting scheduled with Sean sahasi for tomorrow to go over some of our initial numbers I'm not sure whether that's going to happen or not I have a feeling that once I leave a lot
of your phones are going to ring or you'll get text messages um we may meet virtually but it's we be in touch through the day tomorrow and and see if we could still have that meeting um as you see ny's also under the weather so that could put a that could put a damper on things however
uh we are we have asked I think Nancy mentioned last time we've received feedback from our principles and our department leaders where we asked every one of them to see what they could do to remove
$300,000 from their budget right now with all of the requests originally that came in and the funding that we initially saw we're about 1 million $1.2 million off from the budget we found some savings we got that down to about
800,000 and then today we just tacked another $200,000 back onto that so we're going to be continuing to work we still need to do some work on what can happen with our grants now and what funds could be moved from potentially you know what
costs for 26 can be moved into rural Aid what costs can potentially be moved this year into school choice or into um Circ expenses so there's a lot of Shifting and maneuvering that can still happen so
we're definitely not done um but we're making Headway and as I said I'm hopeful that by by um the time we return from February break we'll be able to sit down with the towns and have a joint town
meeting uh with both AOL and royalston and present our numbers um we will be in touch with everyone and we're close but unfortunately we keep getting some hits that we need to readjust for but it'll it will be
okay questions about the budget okay moving on uh reports of the committee reports of the chair I do have a few things this evening um we were contacted um by the town basically asking for representative ative or two from the school committee
who may be interested in joining a task force to look at housing inquiries here um in our district um Matt may want to speak a little bit more but um we we want to make it I want to make it clear and I think the committee would feel the
same if we are going to increase housing here and bring in multiple family units here we really need to think about what our school system looks like and we need to have Town support in in order for us to continue to look at um our uh a
feasibility study to see what we're going to do putting in um potentially billion dollars of Investments here um and I think you may know a little bit more about what type of construction or buildings may be look we're looking at or how many units there could
be River bent project yeah I think that's about 50 units you know off the top of my had there's probably another couple hundred units being proposed yeah um and that doesn't include all the inquiries I think this is where the stems from is Sean got a inquiry from
some potential buyers to buy a lot of the vacant property in town and turn that into housing correct so that's why I think they're looking for a representative okay so I mean the whole the whole idea is yes do we want to be part of the conversation yes but as a district we do need to be supported in
what we are looking for to advance our community here and in our school district so um Matt if you want to say a couple of words if there if there's a volunteer who would like to continue on the task force I know that you're involved in different levels so I won't ask but um Frank you did show some
interest in just at least listening in and yeah and I appreciate that Bobby thank you yes and thank you both for going to that meeting those couple of meetings and listening in and um get bringing back to us what we didn't know was happening so thank you for doing that um but Matt you want to add to that
sure um I can say we as the school district recognize the financial struggles of the town and we recognize that adding any type of additional space in our schools is could potentially have an impact um however
with this type of housing information we we're going to have more students coming in and we really are almost that cap I would say we're at capacity if not above capacity already um the town has been
working with us very freely everyone everything has been very copesthetic the towns have been sharing information with us we've been working with Shan and Eric Smith I was going to say Eric Smith did provide us with uh an updated listing of
what he has as the incoming housing units and what I believe are estimated to be the numbers that will be coming in with that space in terms of families in terms of families M and bedrooms in each of the apartments so that's been absolutely you know every everything has
been very amicable and we're working with the towns and I do believe that we will figure out a way to come to a place where we understand what we need to get the needs of our students served and to continue to grow our community because this type of growth in the community is
actually a wonderful thing most regions in this area are seeing people moving away they're seeing their student enrollment Decline and they're shutting schools we are having the opposite people are coming to our community they
want to be here they want to stay here and we want to make sure they're educated so I think that's where we want to make sure that we're involved in this housing task force because we want to be there and understand what's coming in so we can work together with the community
with everyone the towns and anyone who wants to come out and be involved in the planning of it right we need to work together to make sure we're meeting the education needs of the kids that are coming in here because we want them here they enrich our community and they make
life better for all of us so um so that was my comment on that I do have a couple more items um as you all know I joined the arms PTO over the climate and culture concern here and also having a child here um in this building I wanted to say thank you to Mr
LEF Fountain and Mr Arabian who have been the administrator and the teacher who have continuously come to the PTO meetings they are the the only two that have come to the PTO meetings um we would really like uh more parents to show up to the PTO meetings um we will
put forth uh some things shortly to the arms families that we're doing a kindness week um February 24th to the 28th there's a bunch of things that um the PTO is organizing everything from a poster contest to a writing contest to Loop in um you know the academic piece
of it um we're going to have ice cream for the kids on Friday all sponsored by the PTO here every day is going to be something different we have parents who have donated prizes for the best poster in each grade and the best essay in each grade um I wanted to uh also say that and from hearing from the two who do
show up the climate and the culture in the building it's NE it it's not anywhere where they want it to be but it's better and um there Mr Arabian you know he he came out and he said we always have a lot of work to do he goes but the climate has come down things are
moving in the right direction it's never going to be as fast as everybody wants it to be but things are moving um the PTO also is looking to put out a survey to the teachers here at Arms to say as a PTO in your classroom how how can we help you are you looking for a volunteer
do you need more supplies we're basically looking to put out something to give them an opportunity who who can't come to the meeting to say hey we need your support as parents here in the classroom with these types of initiatives so wanted to give you a brief update because the climate and the
culture here at AR arms um was a huge issue and I think we all needed to look at it from a perspective of where do we go from here and not you know not how are we going to um continue to butt heads with everybody here so
thank you to the PTO if you're watching this evening you guys have been doing an awesome job um I have just a couple more things um Matt sent me an email um about the vision of a graduate I'm sure that will be talked about in public relations so I do want to make sure that that is talked about but I need um some
volunteers or maybe um some conversation about how we set our district goals moving forward specifically for our superintendent I'm looking for everyone's opinions um I'm thinking that we take a look at the um the
superintendent um model that tells us what the evaluation process or what the evaluative pieces are and if everybody could take a look at that rubric come up with an idea and what you would like to see we should really Mel together our goals for the the superintendent for um
at least the next 3 years so if we could um if anybody would like to be on a committee for that or would like to just email me individually I'm looking for ideas and how we set our next goals does anybody have any feedback on that oh right here okay we can go the committee route
and take a look at what um the superintendent indicators are there's a there's a whole smart goals there's an entire model set up for um how we look at the superintendent's job and how what what tasks can be asked but really would
love to start that conversation so we have a road map um but that conversation hasn't started and I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we have goals that we have to have and meet and and move forward so with the assistance of Matt setting some goals and with us coming to the table with additional
goals I want to make sure that we are focusing on moving the district forward um and I think that was it for me budget and finance Lee did you have anything you wanted to add we didn't get to meet um last week
so we'll just set our next meeting and uh go from there um facility subcommittee get okay negotiations signicant updates to share um at this moment but we are as you know working um through superintendent
contract negotiations a thank you academic Excellence um you guys have the meeting notes from December we did just meet um this Monday and we got some updates on suspensions they've started to increase in all schools um I think
having the Deans in the hallway at the high school having the new Deans at arms and Aces um and then the tier one team at yeah I was going to say decreasing oh sorry thank you decreasing not increasing sorry in November and have
been steadily decreasing um but the tier one team also at Arms is doing an awesome job to help with that culture um and then we got an update um that according to our district district instructional plan three of our four schools met their target for the
winter and testing which is outstanding so continuing to work on that awesome thank you um public relations mattt turn that to you yeah you know I was not able to attend the uh
steering committee for vision of a graduate so I'll let you take it so I will say I was only able to attend a portion of the steering committee it was fabulous it was a really great experience there were staff and parents and Community Representatives that did
show up which was awesome uh Ashley Santiago from Focus schools has been facilitating this work in the beginning there was an excellent slideshow presented and we talked about what the purpose was um identifying the strengths and skills and knowledge that we want
our graduates to be leaving our district with uh we they were put together some data and the group unfortunately I moved on to the academic Excellence subcommittee meeting and then while I was there the group that was at the steering committee uh used some of the
data that was brought for AOL high school and started digging into it and discussing what the skills knowledge and and um characteristics are that we want to see in our in our kids I have a little update that was sent officially
uh a v I probably should have just read it but the vision of a graduate steering committee held their first meeting on Monday February 10th the committee learned more about the project and their role in leading the work began reviewing the district data and started brainstorming their own ideas again
about the Essential Knowledge skills and mindsets we want for all AAL high school graduates the next meeting is set for Monday March 17th and at that meeting we're going to be reviewing additional District data and we're going to be talking about
focus group feedback um so if anyone has any questions or ideas in the interim regarding this work you can reach out to myself or uh you can reach out to Mr King as well and we will take that feedback to the group and and work with
um the steering committee yeah Bobby time is going to be 4 to 6 it is 4 to 6 uh that is I believe the standard time uh I just want to double check it
is I believe there were other dates that we just put together I don't think that they've um been fully vetted by the group but we have meetings set up for the next few months and the hope is to have this work continue this school year
and potentially we'd like to have the basis of right what our vision is by June there's still work to be done once that General Vision is painted because the the object of this work is to start
at the end with the vision of the of what we need our graduates to be doing or the skills they need and then work our way back through the schools and talk about the work that has to be done to meet those goals that we want our kids to be able to walk across the stage
with and that goes from we start at the high school level where our graduates are leaving and then we'll go back to the middle school and then we go to our elementary schools it's essentially backwards design uh a best practice in education but we're doing it for our
entire development of our work to serve the needs of the kids so I'm really thrilled that this work is going so well and I'm excited to see it continue thank you um and policy policy we do have a first read of
our policy which is in regards to public participation um I did want to highlight even though this is a first read I did want to highlight some of the main changes um just to bring them to your attention so first and foremost our current policy actually doesn't
technically allow for dis District staff students parents um of students who who go here it only accounts for those who live in AOL or royalston and so the subcommittee felt pretty strongly that that is not the route we want to go we
want to hear from those who work in our district or go to school in our district even if they may live out of athal or royalston so we added that component in um there were a lot of questions during our last public input session regarding could we extend time things like that so
we put some parameters in to allow for that based on simple majority votes and things like that so that there's a clear path forward um during public input if if there's more time needed and that's that's for the overall time as well as the individual speakers time um couple
other things in um bullet number five the if there are comments that are longer than 3 minutes we did want to make it an option for people to provide those through the chair and the chair can disperse those to us as as that person sees fit um reading of anonymous
input would not be permitted because there's no way for us to validate that they belong to either of the groups that we outline who are allowed to speak so AAL Royals and residents District staff things of that nature so however we would certainly allow reading of a
statement on behalf of somebody else who meets one of those criteria so we could Envision a scenario where someone's on vacation but has input that they want to say on the agenda and so we want to make sure that that is still something that can be done so those are just some of
the highlights um as far as changes to the policy that I wanted to bring forward again this is only a first read so if there are other questions concerns or changes please just let me know and we can bring them to the subcommittee level um in addition we have two policies on a third reading so we'd be
looking for a motion and a vote the first one is ehb which is our data records retention policy um that's been in our packets for the last couple months so just if there is a motion to approve great and then the second is the ehaa
which is District security relating to technology also up for a third reading and looking for a motion Jody can I also just make a note too that we'll need to alert um masc that we've added those policies in because I
believe we've already sent them our policies that they're and I have another one needs as well okay perfect okay moving along we have Committee Member referrals uh lee we'll start with you tonight what do you got nothing tonight okay Frank Christie Bobby nothing tonight
Eric just's defense she forgot to mention that the hatchet hun is this [Laughter] Monday awesome um okay we do have a need to go into executive session this evening um pursuant to mgl lc21 A3 to discuss
strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have detrimental effect on the barting or litigation position of a public um body and the and the chair so declares in addition to pursuant of mgl c21 A3 to conduct strategy and session
for preparation of negotiations with non-union Personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with non-personnel um and that's for the superintendent I need a roll call vote Eric Tammy du I
FR we are now session we will not back a public session have a great evening everyone