##VIDEO ID:Qsf6eBB_S7M## all right good evening and uh welcome to the October 24th 2024 uh meeting of the halls of the school committee uh we have a quorum one more you join us later but we will get started um so I would will call the meeting to order and we'll go to our consent agenda I did put uh into the folder uh one additional set of minutes that uh that Joe was nice enough to prepare for us if you want to um amend the consent agenda just St them they're just the the uh the minutes from our pre-own meeting meeting so they are uh fairly um basic does anyone want a second to look at them or are we good adding them I okay all right so I'll accept a motion to amend the send agenda to add the October 24 20 21st so second okay all in favor okay now I will accept the motion to approve the consent agenda uh including the uh gifts everyone all right second all right all there thank you that passes all right we now have a report from ran reps welcome so the PSATs happened last week and they went smoothly um field hockey senior night was on Monday and the youth program came and supported and then tonight is the boys soccer senior night hopefully that's going well um the class of 2025 has two fundraisers on November 5th um they're doing one with the Cris with Crispy Cream and then the flag football fundraiser which went really well last year so hopefully it'll do well again um the class of 2027 is doing a cookie dough fundraiser on October 28th um and then Deca just had a field trip um to Bentley College um last Sunday the class of 2025 had a dumpster day I heard it went pretty well um HOSA and wise club they're both having a bake sale outside of the gym before the election the term ends on the 31st and that is as well as the last day of the French exchange students being at the school um student council is doing a voter registration drive tomorrow for the students that don't know how to register how to vote um Monday November 4th is the mock election and it's run by the students from the elections class and NHS has a caned good drive October 29th okay thank you very much uh school committee comment which good down the line yeah one call out town meeting we uh got the approval for Capital budgeting for the r oh sorry the uh Rams roof got approved so thank you town meeting that's going to well part of it good part of it um so that's that's all from my side okay Jo no additional comments for me I wanted to thank CPAC for all their efforts in planning a successful Trunk or Treat last week and their upcoming unified basketball game a lot of fun inclusive activities for the community no comment I just want to thank everyone for attending town meeting and for uh helping get through it in one night everyone thought it was going to be two nights but so that was that was excellent um the uh the Rams onea for this weekend so so that so make sure to have take an opportunity if you can to show up um but other than that uh I am good so uh we now move on to public comment we have three public comment one okay um so uh we'll start with Michelle you just right there just move the yeah just move the thank you um I have copies of do I need to do anything just on Michelle Hastings address oh 142 H the road figured that but I've never done this before um I have copies of what I'm saying I don't have copies for everybody but I'll leave them here so if anybody wants to grab them that they can um I'd like to take a moment to revisit the statement that I read at our school start time committee meeting this past Tuesday um I believe it's important enough to share again and additionally I've been told by several people and I noticed it myself that the zoom recordings of our meetings are very difficult for others to follow and understand so I I feel like it's important I want to say this again um I joined this committee to put the I'm sorry I joined this committee to put students first and ensure we take care of our faculty unfortunately at this point I feel like we are failing to do either we surveyed the staff and the responses are truly alarming with many indicating they may need to leave the district due to the proposed later end times extending the school day beyond 3:00 p.m. would make it nearly impossible for a large portion of our staff to continue working in our district because many have children second jobs are taking required courses that enrich our practice and have other commitments just to name a few a later dismissal would severely Impact Staff ultimately affecting our students the following information is based on a survey of 170 staff members focusing on school end times and their impact on the staff um 2:30 p.m. has minimal impact 3 p.m. 67 staff members report a moderate impact while 25 staff members face a significant impact at 3:30 p.m. more than 70 staff members experience a moderate impact and approximately 75 report a significant impact there is a jump um from 25 to 75 members facing severe impact from those two times 3:45 p.m. the impact becomes more severe with 118 staff members reporting a significant impact along with an additional 40 staff members facing a moderate impact 4 p.m. over 100 26 staff members experience a significant significant impact and 34 more face a moderate impact I understand the desire for a later start time for our older students at the middle and high school but the logistics of only having two different start times make it impossible without effectively at Le I'm sorry make it impossible without affecting at least one of these schools I also believe the community and most of the staff didn't fully understand the implications of adding 10 to 15 minutes to the school day many family thought that supporting the override meant a pay increase for teachers not an extended school day and staff thought it would result in at most a 10 to 15 minute extension of their current end time it's important to note that there's no way staff will be able to leave the parking lot at the same time as buses and families this will extend the staff's day by at least an additional 10 to 15 minutes I've spoken to several staff members who would actually rather give back their pay increase than have some of these changes I want to note that that's from conversations and not data that was collected the only dat that was collected was from above this is off what I'm reading right now but all for me this is not the union it's not any this is me um representing the teachers uh staff didn't realize this change would disrupt bus schedules and significantly alter their workday while shortening the gap between Miller and placentino was a major concern for parents the proposed changes only reduced the time G Gap slightly from 1 hour and 20 minutes to approximately an hour the quality of our students education will suffer if we lose experienced teachers due to these changes a later end time would also affect coaches and staff involved in after school activities many of whom have said they would no longer be able to participate I believe we need more time to carefully evaluate this decision rushing such an important choice that affects so many members of our school Community doesn't seem right a pause would allow us to consider all factors more thoroughly especially since this impacts students faculty after school activities second jobs and appointments I realized that more time to evaluate this isn't realistic but we can't have later start times an additional 15 minutes and teacher retention something will be lost and if sleep is our priority we will have well-rested students with no seasoned Educators to teach them what's our priority in Holliston later start times for high school and Rams are they both a priority only two bus routes teacher staff retention the additional 15 minutes I feel as though we've proven that we can't have it all this is what I've written after Tuesday this that was my statement at the start of t t I'm sorry at the start of Tuesday's meeting no school committee members were present when I read my statement later during our discussion a Committee Member made comments that felt unprofessional and critical of teachers as a volunteer on this committee this experience discouraged me from participating in future meetings and sharing my voice it highlights some of the concerns that teachers have expressed about the challenges with the climate and culture in our district teachers always put students first that's the nature of our job and we're constantly trying to balance work with our personal lives while investing significant personal time and money into our profession at the same time we manage family responsibilities and financial obligations which for some include seeking additional employment all of this affects how we handle potential changes to the end of our school time and impacts our staff I honestly don't think anyone whether it's the school committee Administration or even the union fully understood the logistical challenge challenges of adding an extra 15 minutes 10 to 15 minutes to the school day adjusting the start times and prioritizing sleep for our olders students when decisions were made about the override in contracts the fact that our committee still can't reach a solution underscores this as a new as new issues continue to arise to make an informed decision we need more concrete data specifically regarding the various bus routs scenarios we've requested more information about the bus routs but have been told it's too difficult to determine until decisions are made about which school groups are going together and the timing and these decisions are closely linked and it's impossible to make an informed Choice without having all the necessary information at this time I believe it's in the best interest of everyone in our school Community to avoid rushing this decision thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and I also want to say I very strongly support the students and how this impacts you I would like love I I I just this is my teacher based portion of this but I have many hats and I'm a parent I've grew up in this town a parent of four children that have been in this District we've R I've done all for buildings for many years I don't anymore but I walk the walk like I I really feel this passionately I feel it passionately for this the faculty and for how it affects you guys I do thank you I'll leave those there so thank you Michelle hold on one second if if you would um do you so the survey you're talking about do you have can can we can we get a copy of that I can find out if you can get I would think you probably could get a copy of it I I'm not in I don't have this I didn't that portion was sent out from our Union so who who was part of the serent the people that are within the union it was sent to all the members of our Union but every school every school absolutely every school staff is Teachers peras everybody's part of the Union this was sent to when when was it Conn this past weekend so we had time to have it before um the meeting that was on Tuesday so we had some information I think I do think we need to clarify a little bit though because um we were very clear going through this entire process about what this meant on May 28th we did a presentation to the select board in which we said that uh upon passage of the override the halls of the school committee will commence a process which is what this which is what this committee is uh to reduce bus runs from 3 to two we said that Miller would be starting later we also said that we would be working to make placentino earlier and there do seem to be some issues with with with that um that presentation was sent out to the entire Community including all staff on May 29th on May on June 7th uh we sent more communication again reiterating that we were going to be moving to from three we're working to move from 3 to two buses um we were we were very clear we were so clear in fact that it was part of the contract that this decision had to be made by January 1st that is that that date is driving this entire decision and part of the the reason behind that is to give people time to adjust the change now that being said I I I understand that some of the change May that is being discussed right no decisions have been made but some of the some of the potential changes that are being discussed are are quite significant and we're going to take that into effect into account but I think that we we owe it to everybody to keep an open mind about this because as much as it is impacting teacher staff and everyone it is also incre is also impacting uh families um I know you know I listened to to the meeting I could hear it actually sometimes you have to turn up a little bit because Keith is kind of loud but um uh but but um you know you said that it was only about 20 minutes to close the gap right from from an hour and 20 It's actually an hour and 25 right now down down to 60 Minutes at least to start but that 25 minutes is actually doubled right so it's actually 50 minutes and so what we have right now is a very tight Gap that we're trying to widen because you've got a lot of working parents stay-at-home parents that that 50 minutes a day maybe the this the time to get them to and from an errand that they need to run and then back so then they have some time to to do some things around the house or get to their job and and and get back we're we're you know we're we're trying to balance everything and and and and I hear you and and I appreciate that um but I think it's it's it's it's it's it's frustrating to hear some of the things that you're saying because we spent um 3 months fighting for this contract fighting for the for the teachers to try to get this past the community showed up up in in overwhelming numbers 66% of Community voted for this override and they weren't just voting I they were voting to support the teachers they were voting for these pay increases but they were also voting for the things that we talked about fixing the start times which I think over time has real we've realized that was not optimal and one of the reasons it wasn't optimal is that the time that the decision was made we didn't have the money so we included $200,000 in that override for these additional buses they were voting for the extra instructional time that we were going to they were trying were working to provide to to students so um you know I I appreciate this and teacher voices are very important and are obviously going to be to be weighed heavily But but so are all those that are impacted by the decision you know parents Guardians and things like that so I I it's it's um we're not negotiating the contract though the contract is done and I understand that this is just me sharing really truly my feelings other than that one section in regards to um the the data that we collected in regards to that and then the other thing is are part of it it is from conversations that I've had with people I had a conversation with a parent just today about the fact that they didn't realize all the ripple effect implications that and maybe you guys did I don't I don't know I I I can be totally wrong I I just assume there's so much involved with this and and in our committee it's it's mind-boggling to me all the different variables that that are there and us trying to to figure out the best way to proceed with this and we're not going to make everybody happy and I know that that's impossible you're a committee you obviously know that um but I I do want the teacher's voice to be important I understand the parent voice and all that stuff but I also as a parent can say that you know I dealt with those three years of this bad start time or the inconvenience and then it's you move on to the next thing and you're now you know you're dealing with the other start time that's now there but I'm also looking at this from a teacher's perspective like this is like they have after school jobs and they have other things that they're doing and they're trying to get to their families as well I just want all to be considered when all this is is is part of the conversation and I'm not I'm a parent I I'm I'm looking at it from all aspects is really what I'm just trying to to say well and again that I mean that those are important voices and that's why when we when we were discussing this during the over we that we don't have the final decision because we want to go through the process we want to have teacher involvement we want to have parent involvement have administrator involvement we got to select board member on the committee as well you know we we are hearing from all the voices you guys are going to make some recommendation hopefully um and then we will we will decisions are hard um and then we're going to have to start doing some work and that may you know include some some additional uh discussions surveys or something like that but um it is important and I hope that the committee is able to come with at least some recommendation um even if it's two recommendations with different pros and cons um that we can that we can look at and and uh you know try to do what's best for the community because we we are listening we are hearing because because you all made that comment in the meeting that you don't feel Hur what I'm saying is I mean I I we are we are hearing and I've had some conversations with with Keith since then about different things to look at but we also are dealing with a compressed schedule and it's unfortunate that we have to do it in this time but it's also been something that we I mean I you know when I joined the committee two years ago Keith was already was was still thinking about different ways of of doing the star times I mean it's not it's not something that ever really stopped being thought of so it's not like it's a new thing to wrestle with it's just you know the the nitty gitt I urge everyone at home to watch or to listen to those meetings because it it is incredibly incredibly complex so anyway thank you anyone else this isn't our I just want to be clear this is on our agenda so I I view it as you know fair to have a conversation about this um if there's anything we're learning in this committee it is challenging right I mean I don't know I I I certainly didn't come in thinking we'd have three decision you know three options and we pick one um I think we're digging into I and that's the difficulty of this committee I mean I I agree we likely need more time but more information too I think it's very hard there's so many ifs it's like if if this if this if this the only thing I'll C agree uh however I think sometimes there's analysis paralysis right and I think sometime we we need to go with what is the most most ideal but not perfect I think some of the conversations we've been having is like it's perfect for me so I want this or it's perfect for this group so we want this I don't think any solution's going to have a perfect for anyone totally so we have to look at that um but think the principles we have are still solid like we need to look at two bus runs we spent two meetings on three bus runs and that's how we got to a 4:00 uh exit for one of the schools at least I just think it's important the 4:00 is not an option yeah exactly as far as I totally I mean the survey tell 330 we're teing I just think that you know I mean we have to talk about it because you know there are a lot of other macro factors that are going on there's a bridge that may or may not be open I mean there's so you had to kind of look at it but y that that's not you know I just to the community that 4:00 in time is is so that's why two bus runs though is necessary so now it comes down to okay what groups can go together I do think out of everything that happened this Tuesday at the end there was some productiveness of could we get through some of these challenges that block us from proceeding with an optimal more optimal solution not perfect again I hope so it'sing because we don't know that we can have the two best ones we don't know that we're going to get that bid so it's very that's it's just there all those variables make this extraordinarily challenging um because it's just there's so much information we don't have and so to I guess that's where the frustration lies on in everyone that's sitting in that committee it's very challenging definitely agree thank you for everything you guys do I appreciate it thank you B hello I'm Barbara Ryan 14 Irving Place um kind of a PR pronged um sharing first I just want to thank the administration and our building leadership our principles um and Dr Cusco especially it's it's I think you're in your fifth year I heard you say earlier and not always been an easy ride but I think the Steady Hand of leadership has been there and all of you really have helped us through not only Co but to get us to somewhere better and I just want to publicly say that uh thank you as a parent um with now a first year in college and a first year in the high school which is no small feat as parents or caregivers um and certainly all of you thank you for helping to shepher my children to better um about themselves and their education um in my PTO hat I'm the current PTO president of the executive board I just want to thank the school committee for what you do and for always accepting the donations I know that's kind of something we're all getting used to this process which protects not only our school system but it helps us to create that good in the community with the generosity of materials and time and money everything from supporting breakfasts to um the invitation to now Revitalize a little bit these inner Courtyards for our students here in the High School uh to take advantage of and we've gotten a great Community response um for a very large job but um with your with your help and with the leadership again in our schools been able to do some really positive things from the PTO so thank you for that um now on to a little bit of the homework I've done and um I have been going to the start time and the and the bust um meetings um as a curious um Jane public as I've named myself lately I'm going to lots of meetings but I'm just trying to stay involved um for many reasons it's partly who I am but I feel it's my responsibility as a taxpayer and as a parent and as a Community member um I think to look at a holistic approach or a whole of District approach first I looked at the 6 September um information on school committee and our spend per student is the lowest in the region at about $15,000 or so and every District surrounding goes up the spend per student so I think that's really curious um we're about in the middle for tax base um we don't pay as much as maybe wsy but we don't pay as little as some other towns so I think that's really interesting that we are even below uh the national average is $1 15,980 pocket so we look at trying to make changes what are we spending per student and how do we do that and how do we match surrounding communities um learning I'm really encouraged by what I'm hearing um for everything from what you're doing to the administration to make those threads from prek through 12 plus we have a new math curriculum which that's been a real struggle and if you look at normative data um we haven't been doing so well do numbers matter yes do rankings matter to some not to me it's it's I look at my individual child so I'm encouraged by this these curriculum changes our literacy focus our stem is very important but how do we write how do we read and then I know there's a focus on AI and how do we encourage that and the most heal healthful way so that's the learning is is incredible to me um keeping great teachers I I can't say much more than what Miss Hastings has said um that data that's presented in um September it is alarming but the trend is going back up to keeping good people so that's a tough nut um that all of you have to help us figure out as community members and taxpayers um and and um to keep our great team teachers and lastly start times when I looked at the the why it said the HPS request is almost entirely to fund the teacher contract as well as for additional buses um that are needed to fix the school start times and increased instructional time that is part of the contract so that to me is what we voted for um right I mean that's the Crux of that there were a lot of things that were being Tau but that's the Crux the the teacher contract um buses and maybe additional funding $200,000 or so and then looking at the start times my pediatric nurse practitioner hat I've been in these meetings I've been able to speak um there needs to be a holistic approach it's not just the late start time it's how are we helping parents and caregivers understand devices need to be put away at a certain time we're all learning to live with tech 10 you know 15 years down the road so how do we help help with that um can't do can't tell me what to do in my house but yet late start times do relate to mental health and do relate for the teens and tween especially um performance discipline Etc um I think this plus 15 minutes still feels very nebulous to me where is that going what instruction how does it apply to four very different buildings with different um developmental levels of Learners right where does that go how do we do that and that really this 15 minutes has created a domino of effect so I'm um I've said a lot of things a lot of thank yous and then um there's a really a lot of work to do and I'm not so sure if in two weeks we're going to have the answers from this the school bus and starttime committee um contracts have to be negotiated and put out for buses so there's a lot to figure out and so I respectfully request that either consideration would be given to have more dialogue to make and make decisions that we have to make right now for buses and busing um but there are a lot of things to consider so uh thank you for doing the hard work and thank you for letting me speak [Music] my name is Denise Irving can you hear me yeah 38 Taylor Road hollison I've been teaching in this town since 1999 I've been living in this town since 1996 um I'm not going to read all of what I wrote cuz it's a lot of just supporting what um my colleague Michelle said and um what um sorry was your first I'm Barbara B what barara said I just kind of I'm thinking the same thing like we're in education and um like I just feel like we should pause and be more thoughtful about the decision and like really come up what is with the best solution for teachers and students and how that's going to play out um it's okay like I'm a teacher I do this all the time it's okay to say like you made we made a mistake we didn't understand the full ramifications we didn't understand the Ripple effects we didn't realize the implications of this decision and how it would impact and how they're all these moving Parts um I just at least for me thinking about the time like the 15 minutes and and I know you just said Dan that we have to for wouldn't be a time but like for Miller at least that's like 120 minute difference I mean nobody thought oh we we we're ending our day at 2 now we're going to have to come at 4 like that's a huge thing to ask like my husband's a firefighter and he starts at 8 imagine they just say okay next year you're going to start at 10:00 I mean it's a big difference um and I do totally appreciate when I went down to the tent when you guys were there and you were there and you've been doing a ton to support the teachers and the parents were all there and it's really great like how this community rallies this community hollison is like that with everything right they support things they help people they do things I just really feel like it needs to be more time I feel like things are are just rushed and just like for example I don't feel like there's a lot of Forward Thinking and this doesn't have anything specifically to do with the start times but like for example has anyone thought of like when one of those houses goes on sale on Woodland Street like purchasing one of them like one just went for sale and then bringing in another way to get into the Miller placentino complex and like solving the problem for the future so that it's not one way in and one way out like maybe there's a teacher entrance like all the other schools around us have solar panels and um like when I mentioned that several years ago everyone says oh it's not like you know the cost benefit or whatever but it's a public school it's not going to go anywhere like over time we're going to reap the benefits of that so I just feel like a lot of the things we do and I'm just using those examples it's like really shortterm thinking it's not long-term thinking like there was a 40 acre lot for sale across the street from um the park and wreck and I emailed the school committee and said hey why don't we look into buying that that would be perfect it could be like hopkington you could put the high school up there you put the Middle School up there maybe you can't do it for for 15 years but that's okay like let's think longterm instead of short short term so that's kind of what I'm thinking like let's really do stuff the right way let's really think forward long term and not just rush and and do stuff and all the 25 years I've been here I could obviously come up with a ton more examples but I just feel like being more thoughtful about stuff and really processing it and really putting everything into play would help us come up with better decisions for our schools thanks I'm just going to reiterate um you know as far as pausing goes I mean we have an agreement that was negotiated with the hft that these decisions need to be made by January 1st this was something that we agreed to it's it's in an M MOA um so we're dealing with the the facts that we that we have before us the agreement that we had before okay I mean just I voted no but that was me I I just want to clarify too I mean 4:00 has been brought up a lot in the committee we talk about all the options right part of it was to see what is the art of the possible and that's where 4:00 did come up when we look at three bus runs I from my knowledge and where we're going as committee I think we've ruled out 4:00 was a scare T like scare Factor we're not going with three bus runs we can't with the 15 minutes otherwise the school will get out at 4: so I I just want to make sure those at home don't feel like we're settling on 4 um as Dan said we're not going with like we can't end it four logistically but the concern is that if we don't get we can know we don't have the best thing to do the two best runs then we would have to go back to the three best runs and I think that's very scary and frightening um to think that the 4:00 time could be a possibility so I think that we again all those factors that we don't know it is a possibility and then I also had one time mentioned that you know if we don't get the two bus runs would we then try and ask for the two bus runs the following year there after and I would said yes and I just feel like changing teacher schedules student schedules parent schedules year after year is is it's just I don't know I I I I'm it's very frustrating to I'm sorry it's probably I'm probably not supposed to speak right now myself I'll stop understood anyone else we obiously get an update yeah Mo on on public comment all right um thank you everyone and thank you to our administrators for uh being patient with us there but uh we will we will move on to the district and school improval plans so we have our amazing building principls here tonight um and we're here to talk about our school and District goals for 20242 and I'm going to just do a very quick brief full ofie because you've heard multiple presentations since August from all of our central office leaders so I want to dedicate most of the time to the school I'll just run through kind of the process that we've done um the last few years particular since we did this new strategic plan three years ago so as always we're trying all of our work to our mission and vision vision is very simple and back our your journey personal local Global four values are listed here we share them they're embedded throughout all of our buildings we have posters our four archers our strategic objectives Arch one communication practices Arch two social and emotional wellbeing three is teaching and learning and Arch four is talent and resources and as you've heard me for those you who have had to listen for multiple presentations throughout the years we really are aligning and embedding all of this work in everything we do with our budget cycle we align try to do a multi-year look through and try to Al all of our Archer we priority needs which I people will hear us talk about in January and then we also um every PD day we embed these Aras and talk about this the work that we're doing today is related to Arch one or two or whatever that is and literally the conversations have been happening in all buildings and we're so well aligned right now and that's that happens because we' made such a concerted effort to do so so if you look on the slides that we did we did insert um on everyone sub um I should have probably not tried to leave but if you take if you go to the link you'll see that we've also inserted on every one of these our um we have all of our action steps related to our four arches and all of our strategic initiatives so we embedded those for you to look at they're very long so we're not going to be sharing those tonight but what we will do is make sure that you have access to those and we're just going to do a snapshot of some of that work right now under Arch one communication we're looking at some key takeaways for the upcoming year expanding our s'more footprint we've been doing a ton of work getting s'more out there I put in the corner that was our welcome back message and I don't like being videotaped but I thought for parents that don't know me in fact I've had some parent Coffee hours this week and some of them had not met me before so I thought okay before your kids come you at least know who I am and we got we're still getting views from our welcome back message 7,274 people so I'm sure that doesn't mean they're reading every single detail but just that people are coming back to it and hitting on it and our principls are using that as well and they're getting this very large number of hits as well which is a good thing we are making sure that we we have devices to translate for students we've been piloting some um devices right now and we're looking at all types of different options particularly for our e elll students that are at level one that really come in having no English acquisition and now we're expecting them to have them being thrust into classroom so they have translation devices that are in real time so they connect with teachers and students cyber security as you know is a huge thing that we have to focus on we have um received a grant and we're working with the town and we're going to have updated training on cyber security again this year and all of our teachers I think will be getting trained in January but we're waiting to get that um for sure but I think it's going to be our January PD date um you know we already talked tonight at length about school bus start time so I won't be labor that and then we're looking at web services web resources for the the family Hub under student services and multilingual homeschooling title one under Arch two social and emotional well-being as you know our director B Ellen Equity who's done an immense amount of work and also works with Jess spey to enhance mental health supports he's working District wide anding Partnerships throughout the community we've had PD um in multiple areas on trauma sensitive practices and social emotional learning continuing to Foster safe and support of school climate we're doing culture and climate surveys having culture and climate um teachers are working in culture climic groups at the school levels and that work continuous districtwide and then looking at data youve heard us talk August 29th we had our data presentation and we talked about the data dashboard that we're using and we'll be sharing much more of that tonight and then in future conversations as well under teaching and learning and the data dashboard for intervention and curriculum we've talked at length about the multiple curriculum reviews we've been doing from year to year um and that's how we were able to purchase the math Resources by identifying an immense need forri resources District y had not been purchased since 2015 and then Health responsive teaching PD is happening in all buildings and throughout the district as you know we uh presented already that we're going be working on the math study group and we be bringing recommendations to you soon and Dr manard and I have met a couple of times with that Math study group already and it looks like we may be able to get a recommendation to you sooner than the date that we proposed in February so I'm not promising yet but we're hoping to get you something sooner because the teachers are really anxious to know what's happening for next year so that they can plan accordingly as we move to eligible one for grad in particular star times um and launching of the new IP have been really important and then alignment of special education services continuing and supports under Arch four talent and resources we're still trying so hard to attract ret train recruit do anything we can to support people coming to the district but then what do they do when they get here how do we retain especially some of we've been able to hire some wonderful people looking us endur candidates and then we need to tailor some of the things that we're doing so that they feel supported in a district that is primarily white in our teaching staff and how do we bring people in and then make them feel welcome here it's still a challenge um so that's an area we continue to work on and I think we still need to keep revisiting our mentoring programs new staff orientation while we're doing a great job with that we still struggle with some of our diverse candidates obviously coming in to the district is challenging just because we don't get many applicants but also once they're here what more can we do to support them for the de in the state but overall our retention rate has improved we were at 89% retention rate last year for our teaching which is about it's about where it was pre and in addition to that we are looking to look for ways to navigate the staff portal that really has a lot of information for staff to access easily because our previous staff portal was very challenging as you know with the contract negotiations we really have increased our salaries quite competitively and I'm hoping that that will continue to have our staff um wanting not only to come here but to stay here long term our our highest teacher salary at the end of this contract will be at um about 125,000 which is quite competitive in the area and then as you know um we did apply again for msba for both our roof project and the high school um statement of Interest project as well we'll be hearing shortly and hopefully get get the funding for or at least get the goahead for both projects in continuing our staff newsletters to get information out related to Talent resources and using our organizational charts to make sure um I think I shared a new chart that we had done this year because we had the new roles at all buildings the curriculum intervention Specialists were new at some buildings so we had to redo the or chart that year for that reason and then you'll see links here as I mentioned before um the reason I'm going very quickly through um the district overarching goals is because we did do a data and assessment presentation August 29th the district curriculum team presented at our October 10th meeting student services and social emotional Equity updates were prior to that so I will be sharing out these links in our community newsletter on Monday or Tuesday and people can access those on the website as well but I figured that would be um we won't be labor since you've had a lot of information on that when we back mid year we'll be doing you around January or February we'll do our midyear updates and we'll bring that for dat to sh with you at that time as well great uh would you like to hold questions to the end or how would you like to do that as five presentations can we ask questions in between do you want to just ask one at each I mean question in between is that asking I mean it's really the Comm is that yeah I don't know others think but it's just it's five that's a lot yeah it is a lot it is l sorry you up does anyone have questions right now for for central office I have only one um sorry I'll just jump in um so I'm wondering uh how are you tracking progress toward the goals throughout the year so not just kind of looking at are we completing our action steps but are those having the desired impact at different points throughout the year yeah and a lot of that depends on which goal we're talking about but a lot of that's where we're excited about the data dashboard because a lot of that the goals that we're trying to establish and the changes we need to make to have a better education experience for student is driven by the data we have in front of us so what you're going to hear tonight when the principals each speak is they're going to really they're going to show you some of the data that help them decide what their goals are for the specific buildings and it's going to be pretty much a common theme districtwide so as we come back in both mid year and end of year we'll bring back the data and we'll have a lot more at that time too because we're just kind of tipping the iceberg with this new platform and it hasn't even completely been built yet so I feel like once you see um some of the results of that I think you'll see a lot of progress in mid year and they're going to talk tonight about the work that we've done already in the past few years on structured literacy and math and we're already reaping some of the improvements that we expected to see it's um I mentioned earlier to the parent C our parents that we're here this is year three of our strategic plan and it takes 3 to five years of making changes before you do see progress and we are actually seeing that progress right now in livetime and the data that they're going to share tonight will show you that some of that has already been moving but but it's also going to show some areas where we still continue to need to move and that we are concerned about and you'll hear each principal address that okay thank you you're welcome and similarly um the high school link here is for their action steps for the entire strategic initiatives but they're going to to hit on some various areas for each of our takeaways Mr your list all right thank you um so as Dr Kusa said we these are snapshots um if you go into the document itself you'd see a lot more um with under each of these arches um but really in speaking of the high school what you'll see is um started last year um with the information um that we got from our our neas visit and uh from the equity audit and and the work that needed to be done um and so we're continuing a lot of that work um and you'll see some some through lines here and what that what ends up being is that our access to data um and the ease of sort of starting to be able to pull that data and understand what it means um and so under um Arch one uh Dr K the next slide has the sort of pictures I guess um so what what you see there is um the the panther pulse um that's just our newsletter but what we're really working on there is how do we communicate about what's happening in the school across the board to the community um how do we share more about what students are doing in the classrooms what projects they're working on um getting in getting in contact with the eighth graders earlier um I got a chance to present at uh open house um I'll be sending out the first contacts to eighth graders uh in the next week or so which is months earlier than we did last year um and we know from you know speaking to families that they just you know there's some nervousness about high school and so wanting to know what it's about what's happening uh so we're trying to find different Avenues and different ways to reach out to the community uh and to help understand what's going on whether it be through social media or emails or or any way we can to let the community know what's happening um especially with their their support of the the vote recently I think they they deserve you know the cool stuff that's going on at the high school um what you also see here is is the is letter so this is a letter if they have to be froml um which I'll talk about in a minute but the uh the chart to the right comes from open Architects and that talks that's sort of that's our attendance data snapshot um as of a couple of weeks ago um and that just lets us know about our chronic absenteeism our attendance rate but what we're doing is sending out uh monthly letters to families um about their own students absenteeism because we know that we we had a problem at the high school level um and across the board with chronic absenteeism and so we want to have the families more involved and understanding what's going on and so um this dashboard is really helpful not just in helping us understand um that we need to communicate but who we communicate to and because it goes down to that deeper level uh and so we're uh trying really hard to communicate all of the information now we had a coffee hour earlier and the uh parent asked a what seems like a simple question but it's very deep like how do I know how my kid is doing like generally like what's happening and so we're trying really hard to find more ways to communicate to families about grades about attendance about what's happening in their classes and make it easier to understand because High School understanding what's happening in high school is is really hard if unless you're living in it um and again we'll keep up with um my principal Coffee hours even though I only get like you know two or three parents but you know keep them going um what Sarah yes Sarah always there yeah everyone people to show up to your you get three people to show up to your coffeee hours I show up to dance that's like 50% better than so yeah but I Sarah's always there which is nice U yeah so I just want to have ways to welcome parents in and to have them be a part of the the school because I always I say this every year is that like parents hit high school and it's like drop them off and see you later uh but we really do want them involved in What's Happening Here uh and so the the communication piece is really important to make that happen and again for the thinking about the younger students and and connecting what's happening uh for them to be excited about uh coming to hollison high school and then in Arch two we talked about social emotional well-being um you know hollison High School does a great job of building relationships in the classrooms between teachers and students uh what we need to do is be able again to understand um where we're missing the mark and again that data piece is really helpful in starting to build tiered supports for students uh we'll have mood check back um we have challenge day back again um and new this year we'll be working with the Nore Eastern University Center for study of sport and Society um because we recognize that the the sports field um is an area where we don't do a lot of support for our coaches um and how to support their athletes um and making it a safe space to honestly a safe space to struggle right like it doesn't seem like it's not a good space for athletes if they're if they have anxiety if they are feeling bad about their performance and how do coaches recogn I that cuz not all of our coaches are teachers um and so we're partnering um with nor Eastern University and um the first week in December um we'll be offering training to all of our coaches so all seasons of coaches um and we're going to then pilot um a for our winter athletes we're going to Pilot um a session um with them as well uh to be able again to to understand what what it means to uh be social emotionally healthy um as an athlete um because it is very different than what we see in the classroom um so we'll be doing a lot of work there um we're we've again been setting up processes to um to understand why students are absent what's going on again that tends to be a larger issue than just they aren't coming to school um and so we want to understand how do we reach those students what can we do to support those students um and um building in um the like uh the uh open Architects has a a model where we can actually track our interventions throughout um forgetting the student companion thank you that camera came to me I was killing time there till I remember but uh it's called the student companion where we can start to look at a whole snapshot of a student um and really understand bigger picture and it's all in one space which is I like I I you know des's website is fun at all but like it's it's impossible to find stuff sometimes it's all there it's just hard to find um and so this is really nice to have that snapshot of students and being able to hopefully um engage in interventions earlier um and having the curriculum interventionists are a huge piece of that in building those supports identifying and then supporting those students in various ways all right so we wanted to give you a picture of some of the data and how we're using it and and and what it means when we're looking at it um this is just an an overall snapshot but I'll go into some of what we learned at a deeper level this is mcast from the past year and what you're seeing here um are our students um are non- high need students and our high need students High need students are those who have are have a disability uh low income or our El students um that's they're group together as high needs um and so what you can see here is uh honestly a massive discrepancy um in in achievement nothing else to just right there for us to say um you know but I mean what we can see though is for a number of our students like in the math we do have that SGP um the SGP growth is great but we still have a lot of work to do um what the open Architects platform lets us do though is dive a little bit deeper um and what I did learn from my deep dives into that is no matter what content area you're looking at here literacy is a piece that is a a struggle throughout um when you look at open response question questions uh you look at essay questions uh it doesn't matter whether it's science or math or or Ela doesn't matter that's where the struggle is um and so it's been really eye openening for me it's kind of to be honest a gut punch to me when I saw what what this is in front of me um but I needed that because uh and I didn't you get this on as I said the Desy website but it's it's not pleasing to the eye I guess and it doesn't really it's it's hard to to to dig into um and so here we were able to do that and so um what that does is it gives us obviously we have ISL which is um you know a nice support for students who are struggling um we have the new math curriculum coming in um but what this did allow us to do is to really look at and understand the need for literacy support across all content areas and so that's going to be a focus moving forward um and even in my conversations I was saying this in my parent coffee hour earlier with with a with an AP science teacher who said that the students biggest struggle is reading the question like what's the question asking they have no they don't know so these are students who think oh they got it but that's where the struggle is so um so we're going to be doing a lot of work in in literacy um which you know I know happens is a lot of the conversation at the lower grade levels but really needs to find its way up in into the high school as well um again in order to do this we want to go to the next slide um just to give another sort of snapshot this is the the Des slide right here just to to to give you an idea it's it's it's it's just some scary numbers there right like if you look at the left side that's all the the left pair the left columns are all all students so that's all 200 students that took the exam that year um and then the right are the lowest performing students so that's no longer a high needs designation that's just the lowest cortile it's the lowest 25% so it could be a could have disability that could not could be could not be so that's 50 of our 100 50 students and you can see that we're not making what is determined by the state as effective progress in in any area um even so far as the zero in science achievement um and as you go down and look at the bottom there you can see that um our our to Total towards Target percentage is only 55% so we have a lot of work to do um in getting there um and a lot of that has to do with where do we build in supports for kids and so that's a lot of our our schedule work that we're doing um in looking at a new schedule where do we build in the supports for all students where do we get access to challenging courses where do we get access to to the Arts where do we build in the multi- system of supports that all has to come with um whatever schedule um that we land on uh in order to support student learning um we're also looking at um as I said the the math curriculum looking that holistically uh working with um Karen at the at the middle scho understand you know how we can support students who are coming up um and looking at math not just it's not just like you go through like middle school math and then you hit like algebra on like we have to look at it like 3K 12 plus it really is a h it's got to be a holistic approach um because otherwise it just becomes uh too messy when you get as you get up to the high school level and and you know parents call it every day for this math or this math but we need to have ways to understand where students are how to support them how to help them grow and even to SEL Beyond where they are if you look at something like ISL like those supports that are built in you're able to support students who are struggling in certain areas and you're also able to have them move forward if they want to go beyond where they are in their classroom um which is really nice um the just a couple of other components of looking at ARS three and teaching and learning is that we also want to engage students um in in what they love and what they're doing and so um we got through phase one step one of the Innovation path Pathways Grant um and received approval to sort of move on to phase two of asking for for more approval um and those Pathways just engage students in areas that that they want to uh have a focus on um we'll be um bringing in a financial literacy fair this year for students in 11th and 12th grade um we will have uh all students this year will'll be getting the state we be doing the state mandated Civics engagement projects um and we will be also rolling out our vision of The Graduate rubric um which are those pieces beyond the academic numbers which will help us understand how students are progressing um in the the other skills um that was in a previous slide but go in there um and then next slide pause a second you're going to see a comment we tried to use some of the same data in each building so you're going to see some of the same things but there are some notable things with the high school and part of what our concerns are as you know the limitations of schedule we have been able build in the intervention model at pastino Miller and Rams for a number of years and we've actually expanded the model we've added more tutors and we've added more um we went from having two reading and and one map now we have two math at um one at each building so we've expanded our model and you're going to see that the targets have are starting to grow in these other buildings so really the limitations of getting interventions to the kids because of the schedule that we have is really challenging and I think why you going to see that the model we put in place does work but we have to have the places to put give the model to the as well and then finally an arch for um what we're doing as an admin team um to calibrate our work and feedback um in the classroom is uh working doing um uh full admin team learning walks going into classrooms um we're spending a lot of time looking at again we're spending a lot of time looking at the data and how to support teachers in the classrooms um engaging them with the curriculum interventionist to support students in the classroom and support that work um and we will be um rolling out um a opportunity for staff to provide feedback climate and culture surveys um and then finally on on the schedule piece again um looking at what's best for kids um just spending time uh working with our scheduling committee uh to really focus on areas overall that will support the teachers um in what they're doing and and most importantly um doing what's best for kids in this and making sure um that they all have the opportunities that they deserve uh uh throughout their time at the high school great thank you and uh we'll get to the schedule update after all this but um are there questions now can I ask that yes um so we just heard from Dr kusta that we were awarded or District was awarded a Innovation career Pathways Grant um today a $1,000 I'm assuming that's to do something no yes so it's a it's a three-step process okay um the $155,000 um allows us to It's called The planning grant for it um and so what that basically allows us to do is start work on um making connections to um organizations we when you do an innovation pathway you're you're basically saying that you can provide uh substantial internships like over 100 hours internship hours to uh for students in in a specific area so we targeted business as we have a very successful Deca program after school we have we have the business classes um we also have access to um it's it'll help us um if we can pull off a part like finalize a partnership with like UMass Dartmouth where they will offer up college courses to our students at $540 each for three credits um where we could then use some of that money for scholarships there's as lots of opportunities we have to create those Partnerships and um we use that then for you can use that money to then Mark it out to students and what it takes to do the class you can use it for um starting to buy like look at curriculum resources um so that that planning Grant's there we just submitted um part A of the application and we'll find out at the end of November if we can submit Part B of the application which is part A is our sort of philosophy around the work and then Part B is more specific to uh the fin Finance is what we need to support it and they're they're substantial grants um and each pathway uh is is a substantial amount of money um to to support each one you you kind of apply for like one at a time right so just for the public like a p that Innovation pathway is like a school within a school yeah I mean yes you would take like you would come in and your freshman year I mean you don't have to enter your freshman year but you come in you could take like an inter a business class and you could just move on you could go take a marketing class you could take uh a a data science or a statistics class um and part of it which is really nice is that it um really the goal is to create um opportunities for not just learning about a career but Advanced coursework so one of the beauties of this is that you have to take Advanced coursework as a part of this but by partnering with some place like UMass Dartmouth we're able to offer all of our students um Advanced coursework versus having to take an AP class um and and that um and just for State data information like that counts as an advanced course Advanced coursework um just like an AP would when you're looking at what are students how many students take advanced cours work so it actually provides more access to Advanced cours work um without necessarily having to say you have to take an AP thank you I have a question uh going back to Arch number two you you said you'd be implementing uh mood check and challenge day what exactly are those and how would they be implemented so challenge happen last year um I I don't know how to explain it um did any of y'all it I don't know how to you want to take I I it's it is a it what I mean the the easiest way to say it is that it is a a mix of a hundred different students in the building and um you can do it as many times you want but it's 100 students in the building and you understand that we all have our stuff going on and it's important to understand that we all have our stuff going on especially High School level um and that um that doesn't even do with Justice I don't know you want to give it a like vulnerability it pulls on on strings and and and helps first of all try to create a a a space where you can share you know sort of things that are going on and and know that you're not alone that in fact you may think that you're going through something that is unique to yourself but in fact you know half of your classmates are are experiencing the same thing um it was kind of it was I mean it was for someone who doesn't think of themselves is very sort of you know emotional um it was it was pretty cool so so actually we got a few people that were in that room so I was there Dan was there Barbara who's in the crowd was there um as well uh but it is meant to kind of break down barriers break down biases understand kind of like how everybody's differences are um it's meant to be a very close setting to provide an opportunity for vulnerability um during that time and for those that are there um you know students uh students and staff and and parents that are there um begin to kind of show their vulnerability and know that we're all humans um and despite our differences uh we can get together and it's you know a very highly recognized award uh winning program um you can YouTube it you can see kind of some of their like standard program activities that they do within it and it's quite powerful David recommended it last year and it was awesome we're doing year what we doing this year yeah yeah there's more dancing than I cared for but uh Fant we're going different kids took a different you know seriously different levels of seriousness but there were definitely some kids who had a lot going on and you could sort of just see them sort of break down and sort of release that that sort of uh you know um in ter I say to kid just trust me just do it which is really hard to do like right but it's it's um Joe you should definitely do it I yeah just do the rest the question yeah just make sure if we do do it again make sure Joe gets a get so we didn't we did not have we did not have um parents or um outside other than teachers at the high school but the middle school yeah um and then mood Che um is uh partnership Now with uh Dr Tracy Gladstone and Brown University um where um they come in meet with our students and um assess um social emotional Wellness um risk assessment um uh anxiety depression you know um and will uh if students um based on their conversations with students if they show up as if they're concerned about one of students they then provide them um with access to outside resources when does that happen during dsb class time it it it happens like throughout the day over a couple of weeks CU you go through every kid it's a it's a uh it's the protocols they go through with each kid um with with their support person and and one of the ideas behind it is that you know a lot of times parents like kids don't necessarily want share yourself with schools um but if they share something with these outside individuals which Believe It or Not kids do share like even you look at Metro like it they they they want to share um uh and then they work with them those families to support them with the outside resources and then they'll keep in touch with them to you know uh engage them so it's a nice program that we're able to to engage with it it's a really incredible program and and it and it does catch kids who are you know definitely on the edge of of of real real problems I remember there were a number of years when we got a grant for it um and then that Grant stopped and school committee which is always asking the finance commit for more money but you know that was you know high up on the list and I thought that was something that I was glad they prioritized because I it's quite literally saved kid lives so no no no I'm just saying I'm just saying it was I just remember the sort of the fear when when the grant went away absolutely it was palpable for sure it's not it's not expensive but it's not cheap no can we look at slide 10 again I had a question um so this one no slide 10 the overall goals oh so there's a lot there and I know that's kind of the nature of schooling but if you could distill this down to like what is the one primary instructional Focus for the high school for this year so in terms of instructional Focus um it's it's really about tier one supports in the classroom and that's where we're going to be focusing our our work um narrow further like what what's the thing that you're really focused on well so I mean just from the data that I've been digging over the past like month it's we have to focus on literacy like we have to actually look at that across the board how do we get students more contact with writing um how do we get students more contact with the skill sets around writing and literacy close reading skills no taking skills like all like we have to really build those back up um and again this is from like again we're able to access sort of in open open Architects like I get access to like AP data sat data like all of that those pieces so like even when you see good scores you can still see discrepancies in certain areas and where you start to see those discrepancies really is is it you know if you want them to recall like what like the parts of a sell they got that uh if you want them to explain you know something that's where the struggles you start to see those scy there so really it it it boils down to a focus on on literacy and the skills that come with that that's helpful thank you um Sor I have one more question yeah um so looking at slide 13 um so it's really exciting to see the trajectory of the high school this year lots of fls that you shared on the other side where we're you were exceeding The Targets in many areas and some really good outcomes for our students in different content areas um and I know you're very transparent about looking at the high need students and for anybody who's not familiar with that that's a single count of our students with disabilities or multilingual Learners and our low-income students and when we drill down deeper into that it's mostly the students with disabilities that we're seeing the biggest gaps and multi-year gaps so we're really seeing them pulling away from their um peers so I was wondering you're clear using this data how is this data especially your students with disabilities driving your um School Improvement plan and the implementation for this year so working with the um the the the new positions the curriculum interventionists um working with them to really again as Dr C said like they've had some of these structures built at the other schools and we haven't had them at the high school um and so we really need to have something that not just identifies but then starts to track and build the the tiered support systems in there and so that's that's the start of the process there um and then really looking at all the data and as you said like digging down deeper into those students to see what areas of need and what's happening with those students what the CL like you know when we look is it it is it a schedule thing is it a the level of the classes they're in is it because they're in how much genius groupings and not heterogeneous groupings and so they're tracked all the way through is that so we need to understand more um um as I said this just I think we finally got this all pretty recently we just got you know this all this pretty recently and so um but I think step one for us is really I'm working with uh Joel stbridge and Leah Barton to really identify how we can start building a structure within the high school to support students but again the the the schedule that we have is very limited in being able to um offer supports for for any student I think one of the things we've heard since I've been here and continue to here is so many things happen during DP it's like a Catch All We Do music we do course we do band we do all kind of things and then for our students that have um need academic support that's often during dsb and then if they want to do leadership opportunities so we're asking kids to choose all the time and so sometimes our special ed students don't go to their academic support because they want to do something and so and that's obviously a violation of their IEP they do have to attend that but we're making them make difficult choices and I think I think that's part of why the limitations that um Mr list describes are really challenging and that's why I think you're seeing because we have wind blocks and different things in place in the other buildings we have more opportunities to get these interventions to kids and get the right kids in the groups and we've we've been struggling with that and that's that's why we need to do something and I would also say in terms of the data what also I looked at when I started to look at the the the if you go to the next Slide the like the the um the lowest performing students that Gap um if you start if you pull out students with disabilities and all end the students who don't have any any any labels let's say the the Gap is just as wide for them and the struggle is there too and so it's it's yes students disabilities but we're also missing that like like as you see like good says like oh 85% of kids are meeting and exceeding and then you when you that but that's that's that's 150 kids so it's 85% of 150 kids um and then you look at the rest of students so you're really talking about a quarter of our building that's 200 students that are struggling um that we need to that we have work to do um and to F figure out um curricularly again this goes back to looking at it prek-12 plus as they're coming as they're coming to us like how are we having those conversations of support like there there are a lot of uh structural components of the high school that we need to look at uh to support those students have one quick start hope fairly quick uh yeah um what are your thoughts around Advanced Corps were completed zero out of four points so you have to yeah because this is like we had a it basically counts certain classes there's like a list of classes at Desi that count as advanced coursework um and when you look at the data from the previous year it didn't go up um in terms of access we also found which we found a little late but at the end of last year um so it didn't make it into our uh we didn't find it until the summer sorry so it didn't make into our data collection is that every course has a number that's course that you have to choose from the state that corresponds to so some of our Advanced courses were not actually labeled correctly um and so I I don't necessarily agree that that should be a zero um but I mean we do need to do a better job but again that's we're looking at like if we can partner with UMass Dartmouth you then open up a whole Avenue Advanced coursework that's available to any student does it's it's not AP contingent it's it's it's any student the more of those that we can offer then um we we can grow that piece but then we have other classes that like we have high level classes that don't count towards Advanced course workor because like like we're offing organic chemistry this year but that won't count towards like towards that and knowing it's 10% I think I'm most concerned one Z to four for Science and however November 5th happens with the mcast is going to drastically likely change that yeah okay I mean the mcast graduation piece the thing is the MC exing will could Sor but it's going to exist even if that passes like the mcast will still exist um and so right now and I've said this to my to the teachers like that's a major data point that we have at the high school whereas like when you look at the the elementary school and middle school it's like they have a lot of lot of data points that they have throughout um their time with the students but at the high school it's like we have M gu yeah like that's it and so we have to find other way to collect the data hi hello um so I'm going to talk about um Rams and similar to um what David said we have our and what Susan said we have our um you know if you click on the link you'll see all of our action steps and then this is sort of like the the Highlight Reel um and I just I hope that I can do justice to explain what is going on in the the place where I get to work um because there are so many things um that are going well and so I I trust if you have a question you'll ask it seems like you're asking all the right questions and also you'll look at our um our larger action steps and and reach out if you have questions um but if we're starting kind of with Arch one that's our our communication practices at Rams um we are looking at sort of like year 2 in our Behavior support system and that was put into place last year it's something called kickboard um it is a a way for us to communicate with um students and uh families and teachers with each other like in and among that that sort of encompasses more of what the whole child's kind of goes through and I have a um a slide coming up that you'll see and then we have sort of our leadership um at Rams that's like how we're messaging that out how we're getting that across to Families how we're getting that across to students how students are buying into that PBIS that positive behavior intervention system that we have um and for our community engagement we we're using s'more um we're using our newsletter we have some other ways that we're reaching out in the community and then again we're using the data dashboard with all of our um data monitoring systems um do we want to go to the next slide to talk about those thank you so if you look sort of to the left that's like our family and community outreach and you can see we're using the same s'more format um newsletter it is bi-weekly um it it is uh I I sort of put a new one up at the top there and then I put an older one where you can see how many hits we're getting so we're getting anywhere between like 2500 and 4500 hits on newsletters and and people going back to things um so it's it's quite a mix of what you'll see um in in those newsletters so we do some Community things we do um things that we have going on with other schools we do things going on with our own school and uh we do get a lot of a lot of people checking that out um and then weekly I send out a Monday memo to all teachers and staff and that's just communicating smaller things um you know to avoid lots and lots of emails um it does often you know bring up questions and kind of create some communication between like Administration and staff and and teachers so that's um that is helpful we also do use bright arrow for messaging and um those might be letters that go home to families about ISL or maybe something happening with the buses so any kind of that communication and that does have um a feature where we can click and say this translate to translates to the family's native language um and we are also working on practicing with our new translation tools and our new we teacher making sure we reach out to families um that may not have English as their first language um and then to the right of the screen you can see just a snapshot of what is going on kind of in our PBS PBIS kickboard uh Arena and that's been a huge success over the last um two years so last year we didn't start it until October um and it's a way for us to kind of put in comments for families when we're recognizing students are doing something fantastic or whether they're doing something that may be a minor corrective behavior um and last year the Buy in was extraordinary with over 30,000 comments going in for our um almost 700 students and um we have a team of PBIS people leadership that work on that uh and they have instituted things like our ramazon store where the kids can cash in their points and kind of earn things or or um like items or privileges but they really like looking at what their teachers are saying like hey I really saw you doing this this great thing or your group really was making progress here or I saw you standing up for this person um so last year was really our like launch for that and there was huge buyin and you can see um it's very very small and I'm happy to share more data but we have um you know already thousands of comments entered this year for students and so that continues to show like the Buy in um it also shows like we did get some data back that said there's you know 20% of our students are not feeling like there's enough respect and 20% of our students are not feeling that their peers would stand up for them and we can use that data with this platform to kind of say like let's really recognize those behaviors like as a team like as a school so we can not only use this to communicate with families where there is that drop off when you get to Middle School of communication um but we can also use it within our school culture to kind of build and um and it's it's awesome so I think that's it and and next we have our social emotional well-being slide so we do collect data um we do the Metro West Health survey and the mood check um and those are both pieces of information that are aligned with um larger uh forces I guess and give us information about our kids in their social social emotional health so it could be anxiety it could be depression it could be some risk behaviors that they're taking um and we're able to use that data and really provide some supports for kids like as they go through middle school with our counseling staff so we can provide some tier one supports in the classroom we can also provide tier 2 supports with like counseling and the the service providers that we have within the school um and we have we've been able to take that intervention and U monitoring to our like organizational chart here that you see and there's a piece in there that that really speaks to this like social emotional well-being so we have our intervention meetings with teams um and with our intervention staff there's the ability for teachers to bring a student of concern um that may not be identified through a mood check or through a parent or through a teacher um or ready and kind of like bring that student to the Forefront and then directly to the right Point person um and then underneath that you'll see sort of our um attendance data that goes kind of hand inand with um what we're looking at as like maybe a concerning behavior for students so you'll see where our sixth grade our seventh grade and our eighth grade are um most recently with their attendance and we are kind of up where you know we would we would still like to see some improvement um but we are looking better than we did last year at this time and we are consistently monitoring that with um you'll see that as a through line you know going through all the schools that that attendance piece is really big um you know some kids are not coming to school because they are not feeling safe or they're not feeling supported and so we really reach out and address those students we talk to those families we create supports for them to come back into the building it might be something that is easy to fix or it might be something that's more of a step-in program and we have um classrooms and support staff in place to help kids get back into the building whether it be just from a school refusal standpoint or maybe they were like um receiving like care outside of our facility for a while um maybe it was an injury so all kinds of of reasons why we would need to help kids get back into the building um we're also trying to increase um opportunities for students so we do have um we're using the mood meter which creates an opportunity in the classrooms at the tier one level that's just at the the classroom level where all kids can kind of um get that benefit where we're having that common language using ruler so that's like that's the tool we're using right now but regardless of the tool we use I think we've established as an administrative team that we want to have a common Lang language that kids are learning in the elementary schools and then we're moving up to high school so they can identify feelings and we can really help them um you know figure out how to best get to the bottom of getting the best education and experience while they're in our hollon schools um we have a massive increase in our peer leadership program this year we have 82 peer leaders and I want to tie that directly back to challenge day which we kind of talked about um we did start that last year and um you've already heard the brief explanation about it um but it was a culture shifter and that's why we want to continue it it changed the culture at our building because it made kids see like each other as humans and Adolescent development has them just like in the circle around their feet and that's appropriate but this really gave them a broader lens in seventh grade then you see the outcome in other places like peer leaders ship we have 82 peer leaders this year that's huge that's almost double what we had the year before if every kid wanted to be a peer leader every kid could be a peer leader um and and the experiences you know they teach our safe and supportive lessons they they work with staff the leadership staff on like what data and what things are important to kids they go into classes and they teach those lessons to younger kids that peer-to-peer interaction if you go back to jerel's um his sort of like social emotional you know entire presentation you'll see the most important thing and we know it it's 87% of our kids feel that peer-to-peer relationship is like the most important thing to them so hearing from their older peers is it's um like it's it's amazing it's an astronomical thing and having 82 peer leaders go into classrooms and be able to do that is awesome but we're also able to expand based on the data and based on our student needs and with the the help of the the leadership team what we give opportunities for those peer leaders to do for example we have students that want a quieter space for lunch so we're working with CPAC on you know getting some social pragmatic stuff into a group where there are some peer leaders that go in there and just kind of hang out with with kids who might want a quieter lunch and maybe get to be part of a of a peer group um we have some you know ler of thought we have some um we have crisis and counseling meetings that that maybe take um some of the stuff we get from our challenge day or get from our mood meter or get from our data and we're able to support those kids through some deeper um experiences with smaller groups um so it's it's really hard for me to say I hope you can like feel my excitement but there's so many things going on in the social emotional well-being of our kids um but I probably said enough about that and we can answer questions later uh and yes we did uh we do we are showing the same data points for mcast um and the same data points for our low um performing students so what we focused on here was um directly from the Desi website but hopefully in a more like snapshot version so that you can see what's really happening um and if you look over on the left that's all of our non High need students so for science um Ela and math you can see that the the kids in that group are having a lot of success and that is the majority of our kids in our building however um if you look at the discrepancy between our um non- High need science and our high need science our non- high needa and our high needa you're seeing and the math you're seeing like a 50 point discrepancy and that is um that is a huge concern to us that's one of the reasons why we are doing the interventions that we're doing at the level we're doing tier one tier 2 and tier three and that just means ways we're supporting kids um because that's not okay with us um and again that high needs group is represented by students who may have more than one you know low income special um services or multi lingual Learners so for example our multilingual Learners um I think over 50% of them also are on IEPs so we're talking about kids that are impacted a lot of times in more than one way so um it would really like it matters to look at the subgroups in that group but it also really matters for us to look at that group as a whole and how we're identifying um what we're doing for those kids and you'll see that in the way that we structured our interventions this year from the meetings to identifying students through data identifying students from qualitative pieces from teachers and then also how and where we provide those services for kids and at what level level two um or level three interventions that happens during our Rams blocks um it happens in small groups we are um we have resources and tools like a new math program and like I Excel but those are resources and tools that go behind the people and the children that are doing that work and we're already seeing um growth in our students and we just started this new model this year so I feel really hopeful that we'll see some some um some growth in this area for next um and then the next slide again this is from the the data and accountability from the state and you know they give us a score right they give us a score based on some factors um the factors are spelled out here if you do click over all the way to the right you'll see a lot more data and a lot more things spelled out but for our purposes and like to keep this pretty short what I want you to pay attention to is um sort of on the in the center as you go down you'll see that number for our kind of non high high needs students um and then that is compared to our lowest performing students you'll see a discrepancy in that number a lot of those students are the same students who are struggling with their mcast scores we're able to pull out individual students now with this data that we had before we're not necessarily able to do that without really combing through and spending hours and hours and making spreadsheets but with our data dashboard and with our intervention people in place we can put that all into one place we can spend less time identifying kids who are struggling and more time getting to the kids that are struggling with the interventions that we can provide so yes this is important to look at but I think it's more important to know that we have a data dashboard that puts this all together for us which is super helpful in delivering the services that we need to in helping students um and then in our next slide still under Arch three with teaching and learning I wanted to give you is just a um you know you can you can take a look at this on your own the numbers are are teeny tiny but it gives you an idea of how many minutes how much buyin there is um from teachers and students spending time not only in school but at home using ISL which can be teacher-driven it can be intervention driven it can be independent kids um can have a lead on this they can do this as a whole class they can play games they can watch videos but what they do is they make progress so our students using I EXL at Rams that's what the left picture kind of identifies yes they are using it at Rams and they're using it at home they're spending tons of minutes um getting proficient in skills in literacy and in math um and then are they making progress you know are they getting something out of this out of this and you can see that is um that is clear on the right and again we will track this from year to year and it will be more powerful from year to year um probably our interventions will shift from year to year when we see more growth um but this is just sort of where we are now um so I wanted to kind of point this out to you and um I guess like anecdotic the these you know if you look at the E just the eighth grade the amount I didn't ask you anything um if you look at just the eighth grade and and just the amount of time they're spending on this and you remember that these are adolescents right these are kids that you know they're they're trying to um make potions at lunch with as many different drinks as they can and they're they're having a contest like you know they're 6'2 and they're they're getting in a line when we go outside for lunch and going we're going to have a heel clicking contest can you tell us who's the best yet they're going home and they're like working on literacy and math skills in this program so like yes it is something that um you know maybe they don't all love it but they're buying into it like ad lescence are buying into it and um I just feel really I just feel really proud of them so I wanted to show this slide to you guys um and then here we are at at at Arch 4 and over to the right I'll start with that because we did get the approval for the roof um but there was some some I have more piur part the roof not the whole roof the the of the RO parts of the RO and the important parts of the roof as you probably know where identifi whe they orang yeah there's a moisture survey um and these are some of the infrared pictures of the moisture survey um and then we have some internal pictures where we have um kind of water mini waterfalls nothing like the high school head but um some mini waterfalls and um some uh some roof tiles that that need replacing and then we have just sort of the picture I didn't put the whole you know picture up there where the problems are but we are super excited about getting parts of any roof um and then another focus is our learning walks um learning walks are happening in our building so that we're getting into classrooms more because ultimately what we want to achieve is having teachers get into teachers classrooms and really feeling more comfortable doing that with each other um and so we're doing some building school-based walkthroughs where we're just like walking through noticing things and then sharing that with teachers providing coaching opportunities we might work with our interventionists at that point because they're pushing in a lot instead of pulling kids out a lot and that really is an effective way that we're kind of incorporating our learning walks and our in intervention strategies um and then we're doing that at the district level as well and then our through line is that we're trying to um calibrate our thinking which we realize we we can't do but it might give us a lens to kind of like how we're sharing and how we're providing feedback to teachers and maybe um kind of switching that up so teachers get a lot of different feedback and coaching opportunities from different um people in their in their lives um and I think that's it I I want to close with that I know we got the blue ribbon award and we're super excited about that but I want you to know how serious I am about how much I care about the place where I'm currently working and like how much work we do need to do and how much I really am passionate about moving that work and how much I love middle school kids and families any questions um I have one and this is more to clarify because I think you talked about this but I want to make sure that I I understood it correctly so um I know we looked at the high needs data and you talked about um the needs of the students of disabilities that's definitely like a through line we're seeing from the Middle School to high school very similar data great scores for our students but students with disabilities is an area focused for the district um and I heard you talk about tiered interventions pull out Services Rams walk supplements like L but what about the uh can you just talk more about what's the tier one instruction how are we supporting their needs in the classroom with the day-to-day tier one content one of the biggest things we did this year at Rams is we created a language-based um like teams so kids with language- based disabilities they're they're not just receiving those services in elementary schools now they're going to receive them at Rams and so the teachers that are in those language based programs um are you know getting trained in like OG and um you know the the things that they really need to help those kids so instead of those kids going out to receive those kinds of services they're getting them in the classroom we're also working with um landmark and we're working with aln and those are just two outside groups that are going to come in and assist teachers in like we're still facing not only gaps in achievement um because of students with maybe disabilities or um other things going on with them right but also Co right we're still seeing gaps from that so we're trying as Educators to figure out ways to best help those kids so we bring in a group like all Learners Network it's aln what they're focusing on is giving kids menus right um giving kids choices in their classrooms it's truly differentiated while they're in there and they're able to say like I'm working on this High leverage skill at this level I'm working on this High leverage skill same skill maybe at a deeper level and then that can continue um so they're really broadening our ability to do that as a school um and landmark is really helping us with our literacy Services um and I think you know what I said about the curriculum specialist pushing into classes that's huge because they're going in as additional people who actually have lots of data on which students to Target and bring along in those skills so when we talk about tier one we're really talking about what's happening in the classroom and ways we beef that up and one more thing I think that um mentioned is that the last year I rewrote the job descriptions for the curriculum intervention rales and then had that model so that we have two each building stem and Humanities and and a big part of their role is to help support teachers with curriculum development but also to go in and Coach teachers and so we're trying to get them more training as well Joan's been working with them and to provide those opportunities that they can when know teachers are struggling with their kids not only am I going to help intervene with the kids but I'm going to come in and try to give you strategies and supports along with all Learners networks I think that's another piece of the mod that we're hoping will prove um helpful as a go and and I do want to say like the teachers are awesome if you if you walk down the Halls like you'll be smiling you'll be seeing kids working you'll be seeing kids smiling you'll be seeing group you'll be seeing all the things that hardworking teachers do but for some reason if we're not making the progress we need to make we all want to do something different together so it's not to say that that anyone isn't grinding and like doing their job it's just to say like we're trying to make a really impactful shift and I think that um I think we have the people to do that I think we are seeing that we are closing the gap on the student growth percenti it doesn't mean we're you know everything's perfect but that's I think part of the reason we are we have seen some of the successes with the national and so thank you any more questions when you talk about the menus is that is that all on like software that they're doing on their Chromebook what are the like what they're choosing to do so a menu is just like say you have like a lesson plan or a learning plan or teach whatever you call it as a teacher you can call it anything and then you um when the kids come in you have say a standard right or an objective or like this is what I want you to know and be able to do when I when you leave right when we finish this unit or this week or whatever kids you take that skill and then there's choices so it's like when you go into a restaurant so it could be any sort of like could be a worksheet it could be read something it could be yeah but there's all different levels so like you have different maybe reading levels you have different um like skill levels you have different like depth that you get into but the beauty of it is like kids are fluid that same yes that same high leverage skill yeah and that's an all Learners Network kind of that's what they're coming in and working with our teachers on yeah so one of the things I hope that you're hearing is couple weeks ago we had Jerry ol and Jess here uh last week or a couple weeks ago you had our curriculum specialist here uh and they kind of gave an overview of kind of what they were doing uh and we're trying to you know go a little bit deeper and show you some of that data so I hope you're able to see uh some of the connections you know we're presenting tonight but there's teams behind us that are putting this work together for us we've got our literacy people in the building we've got our assistant principles our ssas you know we don't do this on our own um but we're up here presenting uh the information to you we've got teachers uh that are on committees that are doing a lot of the work uh that are on here so at Miller uh again you can click on that that goes to that lengthy dock with all the stuff in it uh but we did a a highlighted one um today when I'm doing my slides I'm going to the the big focus is going to be on two and three um we I will um chime in with some of the communication uh that we're doing throughout because I think the communication with families All Families uh making sure it's interpret interpreted translated for All Families uh is a goal as a district that we're trying to do ruler a big Focus uh on uh the three schools uh and are a big initiative that we have is a uh a uh climate and culture calendar that I'm going to show you that we're we're building uh throughout the year we've gone through two we had a group working on November's today uh but this comes out of kind of uh if you go into the next slide you know where did this all come from it came from staff surveys it came from parent surveys it came from student surveys two years ago we did a survey of the staff and this started our climate and culture kind of committee um and it was kind of there we weren't you know getting a lot of uh feet on the ground uh and then we did our student service survey and parent survey we only had like 50 parents out of 600 participate in that first year so we we went about it uh and and last year we had a lot more obviously all of our students did it but we had uh 233 family responses that time and again we had all of our staff one of the thing that drives it is you know it's out of a four-point scale and anything under three um you know we wanted to take a look at and one of them was I don't feel comfortable at school was under three and so how do you make everyone in your building feel like they want to be at your school how do you have um if you're under three on a family that doesn't feel like they're welcome and it falls in you know one of your um different racial categories you know how do we make everybody feel comfortable uh in our schools if you go to the next slide so this year um we had this summer we had a a climate and culture committee get together and take a look at how we can tie all of our different initiatives together how can we um really focus on making uh Miller a welcoming place so we've got uh on the left side some some school events and celebration uh then we go into ruler what are we focusing in on ruler that month next PBIS what are we focusing in on there we're trying to tie in health because health wasn't taught at Miller only at grade five uh because we put uh science into the classroom and then how are we tying uh the UA uh into all of this our first um month our theme was welcome in because our new theme for the school is welcome in expect greatness uh so this month was expect greatness our first month um we took a look at creating Charters uh in the in the classroom uh classroom Charters with ruler uh and this month we are looking at uh teachers uh teaching the the mood meter and what that looks like and I know you know uh I think it was when jerryl was speaking there was a question how do you know what's going on um and I'll show that on the on the next uh can we go to the next slide on the next slide you can see it around our building um we've got a mood a live mood meter um in our front hallway um and we actually have uh teacher pictures uh depicting some moods so you've got some that are sad or Sor you know some that are happy elited um and again these are teachers driving this mood meter and and uh putting this up in in the hallway you've got a couple examples of classroom Charter so you go to the classroom and there's her Charter how does students want to feel uh in the building we are trying to do celebrations uh whatever they may be we had Spanish Heritage last month uh each day over the announcement we were giving um you know uh examples of some uh famous Spanish people in in our um in our country this month was disability uh awareness uh and so there's different topics um that we're trying to do we had World Smile Day uh where we had uh taking pictures of kids smiling uh teachers dressed in uh something that had a smile on them um and again a big push uh this month uh was our mood meter so if you walk around the school you are going to see it alive uh with the different things that we are trying to help students want to come to school because they feel safe in school uh and we're trying to address their social emotional needs uh while we're doing that one of the big pushes can you go to the next one um was attendance and I know um you I'm going to get to the slide that everybody else did but I wanted to walk you through you know what the state tries to do and it they they give you a point so last year we were at 11.5 okay they give you a Target they want you to get to 10.2 and so that's your Target and if you make that Target you know you you get a three but if you exceed that Target which we did um we got four points and I'll show that later and that ties into all those academic pieces too they give you a score they want you to make it here and if you get to that score then it's like a three but if you advance beyond that you can get a four if you don't make it up to there you might get a two and if you drop you may get a one or a zero but this is kind of how that point system works uh on that chart that I'm going to show later the one thing that's a little discouraging in this one if you look at our L's or former L's you know we declined uh there so that means that our L's weren't attending as much as we wanted them to so we've got to dive into that we've got to figure that out and you know how can we do better um with that subgroup you want to go so people showed the data dashboard uh what we're trying to do go back to the communication piece we're trying to communicate this with staff every week you know here's where where we are this week here's how our kids are doing we have a student support team that we meet and talk about the students that we see are above where we want them to be or chronically um we have our guidance counselor talked to our school nurse is there were they out because they were sick has anybody contacted them and if they haven't we contact them to find out what's going on are they is it an anxiety piece is it something but it just so families know that we're trying to you know work with them to make sure that their child's come to school we're communicating this process we did it at our back to school nights how we were going to be addressing attendance this year it goes out in um monthly uh we communicate but it's also we're sending out that individual report as you've heard to every family once a month they'll probably I believe they're getting another one on day 45 which is right around the corner uh and so parents will get a regular reminder about how their kids are doing your kid may be doing great um but you may also not know that your child has been out uh and two times a month over the course of the year ends up a child being chronically uh absent uh for the year uh and so parents need to realize that if they're going on vacation if they're doing anything else but we want to make this aware to the whole District because the state is holding us accountable uh to to this uh data uh and up until now you can see we you know we're at 7% which is above you know better than we were 8.4 at the end of last year and 77% of our students have improved attendance uh this year which is good and our data dashboard can give us this information but also remember we haven't even uh scraped the surface of what we're going to I mean we don't know everything the data dashboard can give us uh right now it's at the admin level taking a look at that we're working on uh getting it into the teachers hands but we're not there yet um sort of thing next slide this may look familiar to you um uh I'm going to point out our zero uh points in the ELA uh goes to our tier one instruction um and you know what are we doing uh to try and focus on well I think we heard ilsa talk uh a couple weeks ago um she was uh looking at looking over the summer they worked on the sentence level and and getting kids to write in in in Reading we need to look at um a more structured uh literacy approach uh at Miller I know we've got all Learners are no we have Landmark uh who has been working with our special ed teacher we have Landmark coming in for placentino and Miller teachers for all teachers uh to look at what that looks like uh in their classroom to focus on that tier one uh instruction because as you can see we had zero um and the year before I believe we were at let me pull that out the year before before we were at 2 so we still weren't making the progress we wanted um but we were at least at a 2 our number 76 down at the bottom there the year before we were at 57 so we have improved uh in that area the big piece and I think you saw it at at middle to the fours under the lowest performing students that's showing us our lowest performing students are exceeding what the state is asking us to so what that's telling me is our tier three instruction so our special ed instruction our um specially designed instruction is working our tier 2 instruction is working um where we've got our Wind Block that we use at the Miller School um and now with I ready we're able to monitor uh three times a year but we're able to use my path um to focus on some of the skill areas that they're weak in um so that's a bonus the other thing is under the science we were a zero under science uh last year under the the lowest performing we didn't have a big enough cohort because that is only taught that is only um fifth grade data uh so that's why there's no uh data under the the science achievement there under all of them we are making uh we are on Target on growth uh on Ela math uh and in our lowest performing and Under The Chronic absenteeism we were a one the year before and um it got worked up to a four so we are seeing games but we do know that in ela we've got to really look at that tier one instruction so here is our data very similar to the other schools ours is set up differently because I needed to see it side to side not up and down uh and so um you're going so that's the way my eyes went so uh the non High needs is on the left the high needs is on on the the right and you can see the comparison uh and how much um better our non High needs kids did um than our high needs kids the one thing in mathematics that I you know even though there at 36 there was growth there was a 57.3% growth which is is good but again the achievement level is still uh down in that area um and here's some other data that we're able to get from I ready so on the right is I ready and so if you look at the green uh the green is uh grade level uh students are at grade level if you look at the yellow um this is they are below grade level but when this assessment is given at the beginning of the year these are third grade um um these are grade level um skills that they haven't been taught yet so anything in yellow is green is okay it's the red you really want to focus on uh and so those students have already been identified they're already on our list those students are already getting uh interventions uh and so promise in in ela so that top piece and it it is uh I believe it's um phic awareness it's all green it is not actually uh on the assessment in grade three and it's all green anyways and so Jamie would tell me it's all green um but if we look at the phonics uh the green that goes across there that is showing us that the students coming up from placentino um they are um getting that phonics piece that was weak for a very long time and so I'm encouraged uh to see that coming across the data on the left is Dibbles data and I I I don't know I'm going to have to read to you what some of the the the Dibbles stuff is so Dibbles looks at nonsense word fluency it looks at word reading fluency it looks at oral reading fluency uh as always to and and all those are given in an assessment and and scored and so um you can see what what the data is and that's realtime data beginning of the year data so we do look again at the red this is another data point for us to see how it fits in uh with the I ready data uh and how you know if it's grade four or five how it might fit in with mcast but it's a totally different assessment because mcast is usually more comprehension and writing then it is um more you know that fluency piece or that reading piece and our last piece is here too so what I ready can do for us and we actually have a PD day in November on this half day and this is going to be explained in more details uh to the teachers but um Ashley buard and Elsa O'Brien have gone in and and explained this uh to the teachers but it will give us can do what students can do but it also will give them Focus areas that they need to work on with each student and in the bottom right hand corner this is an actual class uh we kind of bubbled it out so you wouldn't see the names it can um it can create educational groupings of students who all need the same strategies so you've got your reading groups or you've got your math groups in in different areas but this is what the I ready tool can do for us and so um that's kind of my data for today okay um I have a couple sure I'm going to ask about students disability again not to be redundant but just because when I look at the desie heat map the school and District profiles our education to Career desie Dashboard all of it points to students with disabilities as a focus for the whole District um so looking at your culture and climate data because I see that's a real big Focus for Miller um when I look at your vocal data grade four and five um not on all items but there are a lot of items where students with disabilities rated themselves significantly lower than their peers um and looking at environment safety and engagement so I'm wondering with your climate and culture Focus how are you thinking about supporting the needs of those Learners um with your initiatives so did I want to go back were you looking at the vocal data yes gotcha um that we actually found the vocal data more um tellinger more informative uh than than the survey that we gave out last year uh we found that the questions on it were more uh just better uh for us um we have not taken a total dive into all of that data in the vocal um um in what was provided to us but what we when we did our initial dive into it we wanted to make a local vocal um survey because it it was uh more accurate I think for us the one thing in this is no one thing I don't like about the vocal data is it comes at the tail end of four days of testing that nobody wants to do and so a lot of kids are just rushing through the data um but at the same time it is something that we've got to take a deeper dive into um and I another question about your data too so um it's clear you're looking at a a range of data to identify student needs and Target some supports and looking at your your MC data so in 2021 63% of students are meeting or exceeding expectations this year it looks like 47% in ela so as you're working with Landmark I'm wondering about how you're looking at the mcast data your I ready data your DBL data to really drill down in like what's the focus with Landmark to move students toward more students to Mastery of ela standards well one of the things um we know it's an area we need to focus on I mean it it it is and it it's it's pretty telling um and from and I ready is new to us so it's a it's a new tool for us and it it's um um the information it gives us in the areas that um students need to focus on um is better data than we've ever had before in in at the classroom level you know we may have had it where special ed teachers may have had it or reading tutors may have had it but not all of our classroom teachers are reading Specialists who can dive into that so our hope is that we can build on the information that Landmark is giving us and the skills and strategies that uh they're putting forward um the other thing that at the end of last year and again landmark's going to help with this the the my path way uh Karen showed it in the Uhl where kids go on and they do it 10 minutes a day or 50 minutes a day when we saw the data that the students who participated in that pilot last year made significant gains over the students who just took star and didn't have that specific um instruction instructional path uh so my hope is with the I ready piece and and the the the pieces that we're getting from landmark and Learners networks and and you know what all of our special ed teachers in the last SE several years have been trained in multi-century approach to reading and so specific but don't want to go into specific it's more multi-century and so our hope is that we will see um that go into the [Music] classroom everyone still with us for funeral okay so I'm probably going to be brief on a lot of arches because um I feel like my colleagues really talked about it so I'm going to touch upon it but my brevity shouldn't um I hope it doesn't communicate that we're not working as hard at placentino as the rest of the schools I just don't want to be redundant of some of the things that we're doing um so if you go to the next slide this is our overarching pieces we're doing um if you look at the document it's it's much deeper than this but what I wanted to do is pull out some of the high leverage pieces that we're working on so when you look at um Arch one we really are enhancing our communication practices not only with our families but with our teachers as well um I'm going to talk a little bit about how we're supporting student attendance um as we get into some of the other arches when we look at Arch four um my colleagues talked about the work that we're doing around learning walks um my colleagues talked about all the work that we're doing in each of our schools around building um a a stronger School climate and um I believe Dr CCO talked a lot about us launching our staff portal which is really been also ties to Arch one around the communication practices so tonight I'm really going to focus on Arch 2 and Arch three um when we think about Arch 2 my colleagues talked a lot about ruler we're doing all of those foundational pieces to build emotional intelligence with our youngest Learners starting with our babies our three-year-olds learning those emotional um vocabulary words and I'm going to talk a little bit um soon about our approach there we're also part of year 2 of the culturally responsive education Academy and um that is going to be weaved in into some of the things I'm going to talk about um so why don't we go to the next slide so thinking about our approach to social emotional learning I feel like that at placentino we've taken on a lot so we've have PBIS we lots of acronyms right PBIS we have ruler we have our Dei initiatives and it was kind of information overload for our teachers and you know when you try to take on a lot sometimes you don't do anything well so one of our Focus was how do we tie all this together underneath the umbrella of social emotional learning and wellness for our students so we had a committee this summer come together and much like Mr K talked about his calendar we kind of developed a um Cheryl cero our assistant principal LED this initiative around developing a scof and sequence for our teachers that tied it together so it wasn't just here's a PBIS lesson here's a ruler lesson it was built under themes and really tried to integrate it together so that our teachers understood what they were doing so then our students our youngest students could be that um end user and be able to um have the biggest impact on it so we're really proud of that next slide please as you saw um across we've been addressing absenteeism I do not have accountability slide I'm sorry you don't get to see that again but ATO we do not have mcast so I do not have an accountability slide so I feel that it's important that um in full disclosure talk about what's going on at placentino and our absenteeism so if you looked at our absenteeism across the district pre 12 plus actually placentino has the highest level of chronic absenteeism for our youngest Learners so diving into that why what's happening well um I think it's easier in um in our minds sometimes of our families to think about that's keeping our youngest Learners home might not have the big as big of an impact as our older Learners when we look at our chronic absentee data this is from about last week um when I we we have a team as well that meets weekly to look at this we broke down all of our students who are already chronically absent half of them has been because of vacations um that are more than 5 days so it's an impact that we're trying to um we want a balance of family life but also we know that we can educate students if they're not in school and we know that it might not feel like a lot for a kinder starting to be absent 10 to 18 days but that begins habits and that gets compounded over time and as they get older they're missing more and more school um collectively throughout another part that we are struggling with at class antino is our tardies up to about last week when I pulled this data from our data dashboard we already had 303 tardies um you know talking to Mr bud and Dr Jordan about this some of this is impacted by our late arrival of our buses um we kind have two lines into our building I have my kids coming off the buses who do not get marked as tardy and I have kids coming out of cars who are being marked as tardy as a parent that might not feel great you know that I have other kids walking in it's hard for um our parents to maybe even know when school starts if it looks like it's a rolling start um many of our tardies are 5 to 10 minutes and it's something that I'm hoping to fix when we adjust our um our bus schedules to be honest with you so that we have our students that we who we're transporting students are actually getting there on time don't me dender up but yeah does this include the L buses or no no no no no it doesn't no it doesn't but it is a problem you can see I have a row of cars and I have people seeing kids getting out of buses they think that their students are on time the grade two seems out of control what' you say the grade two is like I mean obviously all of these are not great but yeah it's a lot um next slide so I'd like to celebrate some of our success we have been working for the past three years to really shift our literacy approach um as Mr Kim talked about in our current third graders when they were kindergarteners we implemented a femic awareness curriculum called heger and really shifted our approach um in that area when our current third graders were first graders we started structured literacy and for the past two years really been implementing that when I um I did peek into your dibles data today and I focused on um looking at what we call correct letter sound which is the decoding of words that's when we have all those sounds and we break them apart 78% of our third graders were at or above um that is a huge achievement and I'm really proud of our teachers um especially led by Jenny man to do that so this is our success of what we've been doing next slide when we look at I wanted to point out some pieces um I wanted to show our current second graders so our current second graders compared to their um so Moi is middle of year no oi is end of year so phing segmentation um that's the ability to hear a word breaking up into sounds putting it back together that is a foundational piece for learning how to read when I look at our current second graders compared to the middle of the year um Dibble says beginning of the year data for kindergarteners is not not as reliable as middle of the year because we they don't have the same experiences coming into kindergarten so the most reliable data for this is middle of the year um we if you compare from these the same students from middle of the Year kindergarten to end of the year first grade we decreased our intensive supports by 26% we increased our students who scored above the core by 26% and we increased our students who scored at core or above by 41% these are the same students students next slide please when we're looking at their ability to code that correct letter sound these are the same students um for this we were able to this is the same data um um we were able to look at decreasing intensive by 26% increasing by 26% and again that 41% of students who are now in um an increase of 41% for kids who are in core above core the instruction's working our Shi and practices are working and what I'm hoping is that you're hearing Mr Liss talk about the struggles in literacy I'm hoping that our foundational work um of being having kids breaking that code that's what we call that being able to decode break the code so then they can focus on that higher level thinking of comprehension and synthesizing and analyzing instead of struggling with just learning how to read next slide [Music] so where is our area of focus this year um our area of focus is in math specifically in number set so what is number sense um a number sense is just that foundational piece of math much like I talk about in reading for where phonics and phic awareness is it's their ability to be able to understand numbers and their relationships not just memorizing procedures when students are able to compose and Det compose numbers to understand their meaning to each other to be able to perform Mental Math so what you automatically do when you go to the grocery store and you're trying to estimate something in your mind that's that Mental Math um having a confidence in Reading um something that is my probably biggest pet peeve is when people say oh I'm not good at math you would never hear someone just proudly say I I can't read um I I believe firmly that we need to build strong confident mathematicians and this has been an area weakness in our district it's part of the reason that we chose a new math curriculum Eureka squared math really lays a foundation for um number sense next slide please so this is our current data this is our why when we look at um what you say is that it thanks so um as Mr K said this is our I I ready data so what we do did was we took that yellow and we broke it up into into two different categories so as Mr K described yellow is students who are approaching um that grade level we looked at our data and our numbers and felt that there was such a range in the yellow that it wasn't really accurate to keep them in the same category so what we did was we looked at the range and broke them up into half so we looked at students who are in that light yellow as approaching in Orange who were really at the beginning of the previous school year so those are the students that the students in the orange and in the red that we really need to be focusing on be beyond the tier one changes that we're making so in kindergarten we have 23% at are above 73% who are approaching first grade 22% at are above 34 approaching 33 who we feel are at the one grade level behind and 11% who are two grade levels behind grade 2 28% out are above 36 approaching 23% one grade below 14% two grades below this is our why this is where we need to be focusing next slide please so what's our plan of action so we're implementing Eureka math squared um with all students this year prek through um grade five the program itself relies heavy on those VIs ual models that are shown in the bottom which helps Foster and build their number sense it also uses a coherent um progression so that every unit that're on it Cycles back and they're continuously building their number sents and it elicits student discourse so what is that you haven't seen anything until you see three-year-olds discussing numbers and that's how they build their number sense through conversations next slide please we're going to be continuing to use our data to analyze and guide our instruction um conduct small not only the data that we're doing here but our um our stem um curriculum coordinator Kristen Marino um will'll be doing helping teachers with number talks and number um interviews with students to be able to have a a Founder a bigger understanding of what their thinking is we'll be doing targeted math interventions um and as Mr K talked about using I ready in its learning path so and not just let's get on the learning path but what is there's a there's a composite number in math that shows where students are um you have to dig beyond that composite number like what is their their piece so if it's number sense making sure that they're doing targeted work in number sense if it's geometry making sure they're doing that and having our teachers really understand how to manipulate that and change it next slide please and then finally doing targeted teacher professional development with this we're partnering again with all Learners Network at placentino um not only are we um have we had some full day professional developments but we're also doing some additional optional professional development um that is in small groups grade levels for our teachers so that they can work on building student number sents looking at student work together increasing their discourse around number sense with each other um through a facilitator and then next um this is our schoolwide goal I would say that have 90% of our classroom teachers who signed on to this goal as their student learning goal um and as their professional learning goal they're um utilizing a number sense goal as well so I never feel good about saying 80% will Meer exceed I always think about that 20% that being said I think this is a pretty rigorous goal considering where we currently are but we're committed to 100% of our students making measurable growth that's where we are Hillary come on I always get nervous talking about math in front of you you answered a lot of my questions no but I appreciate the way you laid that out like this is our specific domain we're going to Target this is why this is how we're going to do it this is the support for teachers and this is what we're going to look at and this is the day we're going to use um through like middle of the year end of the year to monitor that so that was really clear um which is why I don't I only have one question but um I wanted to go just go back to the literacy piece and I'm sorry if you said this and I didn't and catch it but um your data Miller's data looks really strong with like the foundations of reading um the phic awareness the phonics that a coding piece and when I look across the two schools I my Wonder is about reading comprehension that's really that next up for us um you know I think that we really needed to focus on at the same time all along we've been working on comprehension for our teachers so you know they've been doing their read alouds we've been doing shared reading we're building common vocabulary that piece when we think of structured literacy it does include comprehension I think there's a misnomer that people think that there isn't but there is in Landmark coming in what they're going to do is the success that we've had with our tier three in o G training and other multisensory approaches they're going to be helping bringing that into our classroom and just BD is working really closely with them and we want to work on strategies for comprehension as well thanks any [Music] else this is great this is really important stuff I I do think maybe in the future we want to consider me splitting in of word because I think Elementary like I think this no no because this is really really important but I think that when you do it over an hour and a half I'm not entirely sure that we're able to give the the sort of the attention and and and and detail that that I think it deserves yeah and I think as you know we've um increased how we're looking at data when I first started we had kind of shifted and I we've been trying to get that balance back so of course when you start integrating and they could have put a lot more but help I like to take some out but I think what would be helpful to us is this is the first time I mean we usually share our goals we're not throwing in the data on top of it so if there's data you like data you didn't like if if something was more informative than others you know now that we have the data and we're we're starting let us know what um or give Susan feedback on what um because we were not sure what to bring forward and I think when we do um the midye goals we could probably just do the data you know what I mean we don't have to talk specifically like where the data has grown or not yep some of the links were were not like working when I was trying to link to you want to take a deeper dive look at this and I was like I but if you are you in um are you in slideshow mode if you're in slideshow mode you should be able to if you can't open one let me know there just some that Wen open and I see that little [Laughter] thing thank [Music] you he's still on the agenda wait but we still have we still don't we still have [Music] pieces thank you everyone I'm sorry that that happens every oh I'm sorry no no no you stay you it's still public meeting just not no just everyone's left um [Laughter] no Mr is on the H um okay so uh I guess we're not quite ready to do the international trips t i no I just honestly I just didn't print it out so I didn't have it to give to you all so so we'll add that to the next night um but then I guess you you have we put on here the update from on the uh high school schedule committee and the work that you're doing yeah um so uh we the schedule committee um where we are right now is as I said sorry so as I said before we we've identified and I talked about in my presentation um the the needs um that we need to meet in the schedule those those are obvious I've talked about those for over a a year now um and so moving forward now we have to sort of put that into play with actual kind of numbers and power school and what works and so um what uh working on right now is getting a consultant from Power School in um to be able to tell us um based on sort of our needs based on what we have based on all of the things that we want to keep and not keep um within our with within our um courses our schedules our credits are all of those components that make up a schedule um what can actually um kind of work um within that um using the multitudes of structures that power school has access to because of the the the thousands of schools that they work with um and so hopefully um that meeting will happen um in in the next uh week or so um uh Dan mlau is pulling that together for us uh as the Le on through Power School um and so that we'll have we'll have that meeting um and then go go from there um with what structures kind of can fit within our our parameters okay um I mean I think it's it's been pretty clear from discussions you know that we we've had uh when you when you've come before us that you know we have some significant inequities uh in our schedule um you know one one concern that I've had to is is the length of the of the the uh the blocks that we have now um and I certainly don't think I could could see you know supporting lengthening that block uh that you know so um hopefully we're looking at things I think I looked up you know the average sort of the recommendation is you know 50 to 60 Minutes um so I don't know where you where you are maybe you're not ready to to share that but I just want to I don't know where the other committee members are but um just thought i' share that as you continue on with your with your work yeah I mean we're looking at lot I mean sort of looking at at everything but I mean that is what the most recent you know data would tell us is that you know between 50 and 60 Minutes is about the attention span uh of students um I'm not ready to like pull out we're looking at 60s 2 and a half minutes uh you know as we're looking at really really what it is now is like there are with within any schedule there are are so many variables um and so we really have to look at what actually works within what our what our requirements are um and then you know be able to present that out to the the staff um with what's best for for students and then obviously just for the community I'm sure you know this but we are also dealing with a January 1st deadline that we agreed to within the mo MOA for for for this work for for the your committee to come to a consensus and then we have I think till April 1st or April 30th something something like that something in April to to to ratify but you know because then there's going to be time once a a change or you what status quo is is decided that we that we'll then need to you know seek uh you know just feedback and and sort of get that out there into the community the the working with power school will be uh will be kind of the um guide that we need that really helps us with the the minutes the credits the courses the that that piece there so that will sort of uh hopefully um be the thing that could can move us forward rather quickly to meet that timeline and and so you'd expect another update on at the November 14th meeting then okay that's my ex I like coming to you know yeah um any other questions I have U my only advice for the schedule committee like we're learning from the school bus time start times start with guiding principles like what you're trying to achieve because there's going to be so many variables that are not going to make everyone happy but if you if we agree on The Guiding principles then ducks start falling in and I and I do think we're there um in terms of because I mean we last year I presented a lot you know like Nas gave us a lot of feedback on the inequities the equity audit gave us a lot of feedback um on on this there just looking at um again our our student achievement data um looking at um our student access to different programs um different courses uh those were sort of those were like staring Us in the face like we we those are there I think at this point it it becomes um if you ever want to watch the bill Gates documentary they actually had him when he was in high school build his high school schedule because of how complicated um it was cuz he he talked about it that talk about it like it ends up like it's an infinite amount of variables because you're talking about 800 kids with 800 different schedules and different needs and and all of that so um I I love the puzzle of it but I think you know the the the principles there I think at this point it's it's looking at um what what we can actually do with those principles because if we want every kid to have access to the Arts if we want our our our um students who have learning supports to access electives if we you know all of those pieces that we want that we have to figure out what works to build that yeah there defin barriers that need to be removed and that's right absolutely right the other thing I'd like to see so there's the there's the like this is our current schedule and this is where we're going in the meantime there's kids we've got kids who are currently will be in like mode where they've been in you know they've had the block scheduling for one two or three years and then they're going to switch to so what is the transition plan for some of those things where they had the you know they were trying to get to calculus and how they how did they get there now when answer your last so we've been yeah so we've been talking a lot about that um um that's not really the scheduling committee is focused on the structures like on the other side of it just to give you an idea of what that looks like is there's conversations with uh the math math department chair and I had conversations about that you know if if you know what we have to have versions of math classes for a one-ear stint um to make sure the kids get what they need in that time um you know any schedule that we look at that um is not the block schedule plus that extra 15 minutes in the day really increases the amount of time on learning so allows us to access more within the time we have so we're looking at all of those pieces all the way through and I would say that in 99% of cases it's a math question right versus the the other content areas great thank you all right um now you you all right enjoy the rest of youring you to you can stay if you want no only Barbara all right get back to uh the policy and the second reading of ik can can we wave the actual reading no we have to read it a second time I thought we could wave the second we can third third yeah all right go ahead okay uh I'll just read it it is short promotion and retention of students code ik the hollison school committee is dedicated to the best total and continuous development of each student enrolled at hollison Public Schools HPS professional staff is expected to place students at the grade level best suited to them academically socially and emotionally in evaluating student achievement each teacher will make use of all available information including results of teacher generated tests and other measures of skill and Content Mastery standardized test results and teacher observation of student performance the principal will direct and Aid teachers in their evaluations and review grade assignments in order to ensure uniformity of evaluation standards students will normally progress annually from grade to grade exceptions may be made when in the Judgment of the professional staff such expectations are in the best educational interest what such exceptions sorry what did I say expectations sorry exceptions are in the best educational interest of the students involved exceptions will only be made after prior notification and explanation to each student's parent parents guardians but the final decision will rest with a building [Music] principle anyone have any uh thoughts comments concerns questions okay I would we could recommend that we wave the third reading and adopt the policy as presented I'll accept that motion second all those in favor I in the books moving on all right the uh Cal office update just a couple quick things we did I mentioned but we had the two pound Coffee hours one on Monday and one tonight and um I think Mondays was a little more um represented but I also think it's worth continuing and we probably will offer another one the next time we were thinking of doing it by Zoom the day or night so I think we're going to just try different ways but continue um trying to reach out to parents as much as possible and then um I did have my first I mentioned the Miller Round Table I think already yesterday um but I just wanted to point out some of the things that the kids um I I think it's just a testament to the work that's being done that they talked about tonight I ask the kids to talk about their hopes for the year and we'll say two of them talked about a later start time um they hope that everyone's included looking for composting that everyone knows each other's names making school lunch better everyone understands other people's feelings they'll work on their Rise um cards and the new playground like centina which I'm not sure their playground looks pretty good too so I'm not really sure about that one and then they uh talk to me about what can they do to bring uh more Equity inclusion this school I mean this is stuff that they gave me I I asked questions but they were generating it and what that means and talking about how kids are sitting alone bring them into you know invite them to come and play with them and things like that um and I just they talked about charity work and can high school students and middle school students which I'll go back to our Middle School and High School teach principles about having them come in and do some charity work with them at midd school as well so I think it really is showing that the work that we've been doing around that culture and climate and that social emotional wellbeing is carrying over CU I'm seeing the maturity in the kids and this is third graders too that just came over from lentino it's a it was a large group I posted a picture of that group and uh they all knew the what they wanted to focus on so I just think that's really I'm telling that the work is is moving the needle for social emotional learning and Equity that's all I have for today okay great and then you need a vote from us to appoint you to the board of directors of the tech collaborative yes okay uh so I'll entertain a motion to appoint Dr Kusa to the board of directors as the representative from hollon for the tech collaborative move by Don second all in favor and just note Cynthia's uh absence or exstension and then the accept quarterly update is in the folder if you had any questions you can reach out to me separately but it's just um a quarterly update that the executive director produces for the board members and we supposed to share at each of with each of you we will accept the accept report I'm very clever um all right uh Dr Berard yes I just wanted to share some wonderful news there's a team from Holliston that's been accepted to the 2425 dyslexia Institute and they're going to have professional development on enhancing their learning an action planning to support students diagnosed or at risk for dyslexia and the staff that will be attending this is Jess Speedy Jenny man Dr slany Lisa Robinson Elsa O'Brien and Nicole Marshon so congratulations to all and look forward to hearing their work um I'll get out of the way first um containing your packets is the updated list of clubs there no changes at the high school level um Miller uh had the fifth grade leadership that was added these the reason they were missed before just the cycle for the posting it wasn't on the cycle of the posting so and then um two at Rams the dungeon dragons club and the uh student council okay so if I can get an affirmative vote on that list without reading every item so nothing got taken off from the high school nothing got taken off okay and was there anything that that they tried to add because it's been run for a number of years that was denied so the way the pilots were they they're supposed to tell me last year if they're piloting something and then at the end of last year they were supposed to let me know if they were bringing it Forward okay so nothing was brought forward from the high school from any pilot okay and this doesn't car casual clubs where five kids may get together may include a teacher but again they haven't gone down the path of of trying to become the an authorized book so something that that you may know about or your children may participate in may not on this list because it's not a school Comm authorized Pro are you good yeah okay so I will entertain a motion to um accept the list of clubs that's presented in our packet and presented by uh Mr B for the okay you want to wait for think she's getting a book Cy do you want to vote on the list of clubs are you talking to me yeah oh yeah I did have a sidea is Nots Dream It's the gender of sexuality Alliance yeah can you please make that amendment I think um David you had mentioned that it should just be to say GSA for that reason because it's changed at different times gender it's I think yeah I mean it's they don't they called it what um Middle School it is but the Middle School's got a GSA I think it's just as far as listen the contract that's why the way I would recommend as a straight GSA so for the high school right now says gay Alliance GSA but it's called the gender they were calling it the gay straight Alliance and at the high school it's the gender and sexuality that that is that so that's um the high school the way I believe it's listed is like what needed to be updated was it was listed as gay trade Alliance which is no longer current correct um Middle School is listed as GSA okay and I I would recommend listing both as GSA uh we can list before we list of both as the um gender sexuality Alliance um it should be whatever's in the contract I'm just going to say it has to go through because they technically have to vote no I think I think it should be with it so let's just vote we have a motion we can amend the motion to basically approve this list um and just give you know the administration the um the ability to make sure that everything matches what's in the contract or matches what students are calling it no I I mean think in this case we actually should be following the the contract and then we can make a change to the to the contract of the next they can then call it sort of whatever they want but the official sort of title is is what's in the contract so if it just says GSA but this one says GSA dream right so we can we can so the amendment GSA am would just be to call that GSA okay all right I don't need to have a big be in my Bonnet about it but I do no no no fine just wanted to be accurate that's all all right so do we have a second to amend that second all in favor of the amended motion all right that passes so [Music] nothing okay thank you um I just like to add that I'm I'm really excited about the ramp roof um having lived under that roof for over a decade um I am very excited uh by it I don't get to experience that uh but I'll have to make those walkthroughs uh through that um Karen's been great uh Sean ke who as our maintenance person has been uh instrumental in kind of like helping with some of the photos that we we've needed uh there and so um I know the staff at Rams are going to be uh very excited uh to to address this well overdue um need um you know the playgrounds as far as working with the towns the town uh and uh Robert Walker with uh DPW as far as making sure the BMS are in there and kind of wrapping up what's needed from the playgrounds and making uh where where we need to be um wall seems to here at the high school seems to be holding up well um uh Miller uh the uh the trees Warden had come out and trimmed the trees along the side of uh by the basketball goals uh so that you know our small uh Critters couldn't crawl up the tree use the branches to get on the roof and make their way to the courtyard and lose their way in the courtyard and find a way back um so that's been addressed and then we'll finish kind of addressing kind of some of the cleanup that needs to be done in the the Miller Courtyard uh specifically we have some just kind of like um updates to some of our alarm panels uh that we're in the in the process of um more on that but that's just kind of uh something we working on as well um as well as uh similar to what had been done at the at the middle school is kind of moving our uh heating system as our temperature system uh to the computers that we have there to be able to kind of track that uh more remotely um and then uh the auction uh the auctioneer uh came out um this week has taken uh photos of all of our Surplus items um we've moved those items and made space for them uh and that so that process should be starting uh here soon um and we'll learn more on that um and then I had well I think that's uh let's see yeah that's what I've got thank you great I look forward to the auction quote coming in to to fund the whole year of of the schools it's be $2 SP the other free Cas close to free cash all right well I'll put it in a note to Travis to tell them it's our um all right um thank you guys um moving on to we are creating a a Sten in position for the fifth grade uh variety show right and I don't usually bring you um stiens to vote on this early in the year this one falls off schedule because what's supposed to happen is clubs start in October as a pilot and then the contract language that we had um memorialized was also that by March then that the principals would have to let me know if they're going to move it forward and then I would bring it to the school committee they would vote on it and then i' meet with the Union to get negotiate the fa so because this one was recommended for pilot last year but the pilot couldn't start till May because the St the activity doesn't begin until May there was no way to fall in that timeline so that's why I'm bringing to you to vote on now as far as if you agree to approve this as a sipon and then I meet with the Union um this one's going to be pretty easy and I we can probably do it electronically to come up with the factors on it so we're just basically approving the position and then they'll be negotiating and then we'll have to approve that after you come to an agreement right no because the fact is once we I don't think you have had to vote on the actual fact is you're supposed to just vote on we we we voted on the numbers before I know I think it's because we were doing it a little off before but I'll double check we'll look at the language again I I'm not sure okay we'll figure it out but for right now um anyone have any questions yeah I do um so I was under the impression that we already had this position so they been doing it again it's sort of like what what Don was saying there there are clubs and activities that people do but in until they want to move it forward as a typ in activity then it has to my daughter was doing this the variety show like way back when so and many many years people were doing it but nobody ever asked to formalize it so that's you know go time all I just assume that it was just part of it okay yeah my bad then any other questions second time today all right that I'll entertain a motion to approve the creation of the grade variety shows stien move by joh second by Cynthia all in favor I thank you that carries unanimously um moving on to reports from the subcommittee communications um so I did um together a quick um newsletter for October yeah I emailed it to all of you just okay um so added some stuff you see what I was I saw that I don't know if that's necessary but I just the only thing is we don't we were told that you know a significant majority but we don't have any any details numbers that what we were told so I just fig includ it a reported sure just signicant majority significant I just based on some of the feedback that we wereing in that group I felt like it was important for to reiterate not the mission the assignment that they've been that we've been given but also that this was ratified by a significant majority of I don't disagree I just I'm just saying it again I know you're not disagreeing with be a third thing and I don't can't have that okay so ratified by both a reported significant majority yes sure I mean report are that no no okay find is terrible alleged right alleged alleged that's noten oh it's almost dead okay I mean that's what we were told we're having a majority know um and then unanimously by the by the school committee I that is absolutely true let's just say a majority then will take my significant out thank you let's next the October 24th is our next meeting because at the bottom cuz we're because we're here it's um the 14th oh yeah do we want to do an office hour in there no she she has a section we'll be holding office hours via zoom on Thursday November 7th that literally just so there always Halloween we should probably deserve for the start times well I guess November think I maybe after the meeting on the 14th because hopefully we'll have some I mean I can hold off on that can we can broadcast that way but we're we're planning to hold an office hours to you know I'll just take that out in the near future I don't know that we're going to be ready to do that this phone set fair enough yeah yes so okay we will be scheduling office hours in November and we'll update or just take it out just yeah I'll just take it out okay I hours at 3:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Halloween bring the candy okay um and other um thank you for for putting this together Sarah um s good something else no no I just was checking our our dates because originally there was like it said we had a meeting on December 2th whatever it was it was like on Christmas day or something like that it's not I took this from the um no no it's she fixed it the master list that has the presentations list as long as that's updated then just there's the add time stamp for YouTube so just don't forget to add the time stamp for the YouTube the link to the YouTube video for tonight's meeting for for Mr list uh update on the sure yep so uh with that I'll entertain a motion to approve the uh newsletter and we can get that out tomorrow move by John [Music] accept as as amended just accepted them so now they're there so move by Don second second by Cynthia all those in favor unanimously thank you very much s to Dan yeah and I'll just so I just need to add the YouTube yes great all right policy um our next meeting is November Wednesday November 20th at 145 central office okay budget we have not had a meeting um since our last school committee meeting but we will have a meeting before the November 14th um next we to about availability great and um I am trying to sus I I've been really trying to figure out a date I did just send you back an email Susan um for us to have our preliminary discussion about uh this is a formative year last year was our summi of year um and to review over our last year's evaluation as part of that and then we'll for and we'll get a meeting to discuss the overall goals and then bring them to the school committee okay so I don't have a date certainly yet to that okay but I put them up I threw them out there nice they're in the universe in the universe mhm all right uh so we've done the high school pieces um and we don't need a I don't think we need anything on the October town meeting um I add that just in case something had come up but we we do uh have on here an update from the bus start times advisory committee we have talked about it a decent amount but uh is there any more any more of an update I I think that you know again we've got a meeting scheduled for next week for next Tuesday and we're hoping optimistically hoping that we'll be able to either come to bring this to some sort of conclusion with regards to a recommendation of which schools together and which go first and which go second or if we can't come to that what the what the criteria is um or the or the constraints is probably better where constraints are that we would say that you know in in the decision making process like nothing before 7:30 or nothing after 4: things like that just to on the things we could agree on y yeah I kind of try for example like Ben Sparrow was there as well and and Cynthia and Frank and what was a kind of agreed or there's common understanding like if we can't reach like a a firm conclusion at least a a list of what like we the group agrees are very important considerations for the school committee to make uh and considerations may not be possible uh but at least they it captures for like the public in front of the various committees that might be able to make decisions that a firm understanding of what are like what are important things okay did your Ben agree to give our buses uh clickers to get through the lights yes so and and you you agreed to that so contract like he was talking about like some infrastructure changes so that's what I heard I mentioned it to the lieutenant today in the meeting as well rotary raised rais rais bus you know ramps basically just let's talk it CRA but I will say that um that from some of his contributions was to say that he absolutely wants us to move forward with bringing something to the select board to talk about how we can make some of these pieces work um Mr G was mentioning things like you know is there a road that we can open up is there like a you know something we can make into a one way is there like what can they do to help support that sidewalk so like I know that they have a sidewalk plan but maybe there's some things that we can do to kind of shift that because if we can allow more kids to walk have safe places safe routes to school then you know that can kind of offload some of our burden with the buses I would like to see some information and data on on different potential sidewalk roots and how how utilized they might be from from from parents yeah well I think not ever not all roads have to lead to the rail as much as I love the rail trail I mean not all roads have to lead to to it so you don't really love the rail well you know I wanted a commuter rail barking up the wrong tree over here like I was like mad moving into town saying oh we voted down a community rail right great anyway so but now it's lovely i' say if conversation were to Ste here with this school committee around like different policy changes or things that might need to consider as far as parameters around like who gets picked up and what have you you know sidewalks will Aid and like exactly the walking to school that might be needed because we are going to have to discuss from a policy perspective you know who we allowing to bus right right and I think right I think there's going to be a lot of discussion around that and then so we'll end up starting off with with two star times that are some distance apart and then hopefully we'll be able to walk them closer and it may take you know a couple years to to do that but minor not you know we're not looking at huge CH you're saying but 5 minutes here 10 minutes it it can be significant but also if you're like hooking up a student that lives literally is you know right right so there's some things we can do immediately and some things that make yeah so it's a huge District these are all the challenges that we faced when we were coming up with this plan and that's why we ended up going with that flipped model because it it is and this is why I think that this committee has been good because just listening to it you you hear all of the the different um issues that this is not just a very easy sort of like let's just pick some times for folks to how it's all made and and and I do hope that people listen to those meetings um you do have to toggle up and down the volume as Keith talks and as other people talk but uh but you can't you you can hear you can hear you can hear everything if you if you if you do that there's I think 99.5% I'd say because it's off of Keith's computer so when he speaks um and and it's just it's logistically it's it's it's too difficult to to get uh everybody on the on a picture but one thing I did want to throw out there and is going to be unpopular um but since we're on the topic of unpopular I might as well go for it so we have November 14th as a meeting and then we don't meet again until December MH we have a lot of work to be done and a lot of deadlines and stuff to be made so assuming that this committee can come to a decision next week or or the I know you sort of set yourself a next week uh deadline but let's leave yourself a little Grace you can't meet you can't meet on the 5ifth because of uh because that's the election and the polls are open so sixth and seventh but you can meet on the six and seven but I also don't know if we want to do all of this work during a regular meeting with everything else that we have to do so so my unpopular so my unpopular idea is do we want to look at potentially scheduling another meeting to just talk about I'll the turkey nokey agree with that wanted to keep us focused on that and yes I think it's important enough and I honestly we looking at well I I will send out a group of dates and we'll see I mean this will be mainly obviously a school committee working group will need you know some some Administration uh guide I think your challenge may be though with regards to the amount of input members of whether be the the Public Public or the teaching public that are going to want to have contributions to this so to push it much further out I don't think you've got a ton of time no no no I don't want to push I want to do this before the 14th no no no no no we're not not to make a decision okay but to start to start having conversations you mean 14th between the 14th and the 12th that's Halloween or the okay you want to do it that way no like the 21st what about the 21st my my thing is we might need to do some sort of survey of the community based upon what it depends on what we get but I want to be thoughtful like I don't want to throw a survey out there so we need to be thoughtful of what we're putting in that survey otherwise it's we may be that we need two meetings that be really unpopular I I think it just depends on whether we're going to actually have something to present so first we have to kind of as Keith had already instructed that we need to figure out which schools and which ones go first and which ones go second then after we do that that's when you can do things like modeling but that might take some time to do I don't think we're going to get there next week every time we try to get there we're going to get there that's it parameters well I think I think what's going to happen at Tuesday's meeting is a bunch of recommendations what we need to go do next as a school committee like they're not going to decide on groupings and and times because there's so many factors that are going to come up in like yes we agree on something it's like oh did you think about this well now that needs to change I think the the challenge which is also the challenge in the high school scheduling committee that isn't as like um public is like a lot of time has to be exp explain spent explaining complexities of like a schedule um in order to even open the the minds to considering um a change and that's that's that's a hard that's a hard process to do and in that and so I'm in agreement with Frank on that so I just there's just a lot of decisions we're going to need to make if we're going to make changes to who we were going to offer buing to and and those decisions then feed into what the times that we're going to be looking at and deciding are right as I say constantly during that meeting it's about structure you you you have to have your structure in place the times are going to feed themselves more or less you're going to have a start time you're going to have a run time you're going to have an end time they're going to feed themselves so you know with regards to that the structure is going to be the most important thing which schools together and which School's First and which school second we have three weeks before our November 14th meeting is there any reason why and I know the committee is scheduled to meet again on October 29th right 29th the 29th is there any reason and to Dan's point no you can't meet on Election Day November 5th but is there any reason and and I think we even saw this in negotiations we thought we needed X number of meetings and then we needed more we to sometimes when you start this project it it takes a little longer than you think it will is there any reason why the committee the subcommittee wouldn't be open to having one or two additional meetings before we get back to the 14th I'm sure they would they they as if those of whove listened to the um recordings they do like to talk and and I mean because they know what I'm saying is that it hasn't been a silent group no I mean it's we end meetings because it's time to end it not because we've exhausted you know discussion right so from that um you know if we say there's going to be two more meetings people will come and people will talk I I don't know how much further we're going to be able to kind of move down that path I don't know how many things are going to change at this point I think we need to see progress next week and if we get to a point like in negotiations where we're getting close we say let's schedule another one if we say we're going to schedule two more we're going to regress in my opinion in some ways we need to keep moving it forward and if we at the end of next Tuesday's meeting we feel like okay we're closer but we're not done yet let's schedule another meeting I it it'll come down to that you know whether or not we think there is a recommendation coming as opposed to you know challenges you know desires etc etc the strategy that was been we've talked every single scenario like I was hoping one would be like aha that's it I think we've talked about every scenario twice at least and there's always something we need to see what you what you guys come up with but then I mean I'm just saying if we if we do decide we want to survey the community on something if we want to have a forum or some sort of public hearing if you will about this I just it you know we 14th then Thanksgiving then yeah then you know I still think whatever land on there needs to be what are the guiding principles why are we doing it the way this is just because there there's so many scenarios like we're saying not to 4:00 well if we do three bus runs we're going to 4:00 some school is that's just the nature we're not going to 4:00 I know we're not but but I see the I think the as as a school crit you're going to have to accept the fact that there's going to be a angered constituency whichever one it was you had one that potentially doesn't want their their times to change from first in the morning that showed up tonight there's going to be people who are going to be dissatisfied with whatever the solution is so you kind of have to figure out what but I want to hear the input before the decision no I understand that no no I I'm not to hear it I'm just saying you're hearing the input's not going to give you the perfect answer because there is no perfect answer to this no there is no perfect answer but that but again I don't also don't want to be voting on this on December 31st mood I'm not going to be here in December 31st well then you'll none of us are going to be as far as I know right we're just worried about the time peram of but um I get it I I cannot just given by the discussion I cannot guarantee that this that subcommittee is going to want to recommend I mean at this juncture I will we get there maybe I don't know there's a lot of chatter that they don't want to recommend uh anything they'll just give us some parameters the way Mr Dr Jordan was saying so what we'll do I I'll wait until after your next meeting see what happens in I can throw out an email we can we can schedule via email that is allowed when their so um we will not that the 29th is arbitrary but I do if we're making progress next week and I know 6:00 we do have the Coalition against ha and bias at six unfortunately not unfortunately for meeting but the timing like we have to close we consider potentially adding another meeting but if I mean I'd be okay with if if if the other me I was say if the other meeting is getting us to a resolution sure the other me just more discussion no no agree it's not worth it that's what I'm saying but if we leave and say hey Kei and and Dr Jordan we need to look at these things and then we we feel like we can come to a decision I'd say it's definitely warrant a subsequent meeting if we keep doing what we're doing totally agree we're going to be in the same the energy is good and we're moving in a positive direction I don't I don't think it's it moves us to have another Mee to keep that energy to go because if we can reach a good place with this group y you know I think that that that benefits you all in kind of how how you it would be ideal to have a recommendation or at least two options or some some something to sort of at least get us started even though we can go another Direction even if we can't give a firm recommendation right the options are going to be ultimately this is why we get paid the big bucks yeah I got 100% raage last year I don't know about you guys um all right anything else on this m all right uh so that does bring us to the end of our uh of our meeting sorry do you have something else you our next meet our next scheduled meeting is November 14th uh stay tuned to see make that quick cuz that's my first right just so you know okay all right um and um I know you don't care so uh now I will a motion toour really wants to make that motion I did so I'll second it all right all those in favor we stand a Jour thank you very much for