Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Good evening. I will call to order the Milton Public Schools School Committee for the purpose of a school choice open public hearing. We are here today to
discuss the policy of school choice. The School Committee votes annually on school choice procedure for the Milton Public Schools. Currently, Milton is not a school choice [clears throat] district. This is a state requirement that all school
committees must do each year. And I will defer to the superintendent here for a quick presentation on school choice. Thank you very much. I would ask bless you Dr. Carroll to bring up the PowerPoint that we have for the public to see on school choice dated May 20, 2026.
Um Each year, every district, every public school district has to its school committee has to vote on whether they want to um take part in school choice. Uh it has a um a very unique history of uh something
that districts do in [clears throat] the western part of the state where if school district school districts have not regionalized, they're actually supporting each other by sharing students. It tends to be less prevalent in the eastern part of the state. Most of our cities and towns are a little bit more populated.
Uh people decide to just keep their uh districts not a school choice district. So, the background of this uh law is uh it is uh 76 section 12B of the national laws details the terms and conditions of interschool interdistrict school choice.
The Milton School policy is JFBB regarding school choice if you want to look that up uh in our policy book. The interdistrict school choice program allows parent and guardian to enroll their child in a school district that is not in the child's home district. And again, this is not within the district
like Cunningham district, Tucker district, uh Collicot, and Glover. This is Weymouth, Braintree, Milton, Westwood, uh etc. Um The prior to declaring themselves as a school district school choice district uh with the state, the school district
would determine how many seats would be available uh to be offered and at what grades they would be available. Um On the next slide, uh each year the Milton School Committee must vote on whether or not to participate in school choice just like all other public school districts across the Commonwealth. This vote must
be submitted by June 1 uh to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education along with the minutes to justify that we've actually had this conversation public. If the Milton School Committee voted to participate in school choice, a student enrolled in the Milton Public Schools through this program would have the right to remain
in the system until graduation. Historically, the Milton School Committee has voted not to participate in the interdistrict school choice program. So, just a little background now that we've gone through the slides, um I'm assuming that past votes of the Milton School Committee have been not to
take part because our enrollment is a concern, our class size is a concern. Uh we have just been invited into the uh Mass Building Authority uh project um process to build a new school in order to alleviate uh the enrollment concerns we have especially at our elementary
school um as we're trying to create more space to serve our students. And I would uh recommend that we continue to vote to not accept school choice. Um this is something that some districts do in order to increase their enrollment and
also increase funding. Uh, there was a headline the other night that a school district did not take uh, did not vote to take on school choice. And I think because they've had budget situations, they were hoping that the school community did want school choice because those students come with uh, a a percentage of the per pupil
expenditure. It's not even the full per pupil expenditure. So, an example would be a per pupil expenditure from DESE is about I'll use a round number of $18,000 per student. [snorts] You really only get about $12,000 uh, from DESE in the exchange of taking a student from another district or
inviting other students. Um, I think it's a wonderful program if you want to be able to open your district up and you have space in order to make sure that your classes are full and you can um, invite other families in, uh, but that just seems to be not the case in Milton.
And so, uh, the district gets to vote each year. We'll give DESE [snorts] the actual information after it's voted, but my recommendation would not to be take part solely on space and overcrowding at our elementary level and at our high school level. Great. Uh, the committee will have time
to discuss this kind of within the general agenda, but for the purpose of this hearing, this is a public hearing, so I would ask if anybody in the audience wishes to speak about um, school choice, they could raise their hand. There's nobody in the room with us here, so sorry about
that. No hands raised online. Okay. All right. Um, well, to be clear, uh, without a specific no vote, uh, the system becomes a choice district. Vote limits Milton's school population to those students who live in the town. Um, however, Milton residents may attend
other choice districts even if we vote against choice. Um, the vote does not limit or impede any other agreements that exist in collective bargaining agreements. There are still no hands. And I will uh I would take a motion to adjourn the school choice open public
hearing. So moved. Great. Is there a second? Second. Great. All in favor? And hearing is closed. I will now call to order the regular um meeting of the Milton School Committee.
Uh and we will start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Good evening evening, everyone. Uh our we'll move to our second item of business, which is to approve tonight's agenda. Everyone can take a look and let me know if there's anything on the agenda, especially related to the subcommittees that uh we need to remove.
Hearing none, I will assume the agenda is approved, and we'll move forward with item number three, which is public comment. Um So, um in accordance with School Committee policy, we welcome members of the community to share their perspective with us during public comment. We have
set aside 15 minutes for this part of the meeting, and individuals may speak for up to 3 minutes each. While the School Committee does not respond directly to public comment, there may be opportunities for members to address issues that are raised over the course of the meeting when relevant relevant topics are on our agenda.
We strive to engage in respectful discourse during our meetings and ask that public comment speakers keep that in mind. Speakers should introduce themselves with their address for the record. At this time, if anybody would like to speak uh public comment, please raise your hand.
There's still no one in the room with us. No hands online. No hands online, then we will conclude public comment and move on to number four, the superintendent's report part one. Thank you very much,
chair. I would like to welcome student rep Olivia Wilson. Olivia is a junior at Bolton High School. Last week I saw Olivia stroll up to the stage at Scholastic Honors Night several times collecting some well-deserved awards. So, we welcome her as part of
our student reps. Unfortunately, Spencer Futrell could not join us tonight as he is in the MHS concert that had to be rescheduled because of last night's power outage and the concert is taking place tonight. So, we wish Spencer and his colleagues well at the concert
tonight and welcome Olivia. Good to see you all again. I'm just going to give some brief updates of the goings-on at the high school. We'll start with sort of the less fun stuff, which was that today and yesterday were the math MCAS dates for our sophomore students. And tomorrow
actually will conclude about 3 weeks of AP testing. So, we will be done with that very soon and then the bio MCAS is going to be coming up June 2nd, so that's for our freshman. When we were talking about what to say today, we had a whole section on the seniors because this is like their last
hurrah. So, their last day is May 29th, which is going to be next Friday. Then our prom is going to be the day after that on the 30th. And then we're going to have They're going to have their own separate award night where they'll do all of their like teacher recognitions and then recognizing single
students and that's going to happen on June 2nd. And then they'll have their graduation on June 7th, which is a Sunday. So, that'll be really nice. And then they have a senior lunch and we're going to be having a boosters banquet as well. And then there'll also
be the MHS varsity athletes banquet um to support all of our students that have sort of contributed to our school community in that way. Um and then oh yeah, also the seniors every year they walk through the elementary schools um that they've attended and get to kind of say hello to their old teachers and see the next
generation of kids that are going to be coming through. So that's a nice fun thing that they'll have coming up as well. Yeah, that's kind of like that's basically June of our school. So yeah. >> [laughter] >> So Olivia, how does it feel to be a junior slash senior when the seniors leave
uh and getting ready for a summer of going into your senior year? Well, there's a lot more parking, so that's >> [laughter] >> Um it's it's you know, now I'm the king of the school when they leave, so that's fun. But >> [laughter] >> this summer is you know, for juniors if you if you know a junior in your life,
this summer is kind of crazy with all the college stuff getting ready and visiting schools and writing essays and everything. But there's also like that that light at the end of the tunnel that has is becoming more and more visible as the days go by. So like my last AP exam is tomorrow and then I can finally like
kind of relax. So that'll be Any other questions for Olivia? Thank you guys. Thank you very much for Thank you for taking the time tonight. We appreciate it. Uh great. We will now jump to the chair's report. Uh the first item is an executive session.
Um I will go ahead and make a motion. So the motion will be to go into executive session pursuant to MGL chapter 30A section 21A3 to discuss strategy with the respect to litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or
litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares specifically an open meeting law complaint and to review the executive session minutes of April 29th, 2026 which was held under section 21A6. We will be returning to open session at
the conclusion of the executive session. Is there a second? Uh it's an executive session, uh so we have to do a roll call vote. Nathan? Yes, Stevie. Yes. Mel? Yes. Yes. Yes. I am a yes. We are returned into executive session,
and again, we will be returning to open session. >> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. >> Good evening. We're back from executive session and I will now make a motion
to release the approve and release the minutes from executive session meeting April 29th, 2026. Is there a second? Again, this will be a roll call vote. Stevie? Nathan? Now? Lizzie? Yes. Anna? Yes. And I am a
yes. So those executive session minutes have been approved to be released. They will be posted and we will talk more about this item the subject around that session which is library here a little bit later. But for now we will move forward with
the school choice recommendation. So this is our opportunity for members to ask any questions, have any discussion, ultimately make a decision a vote about the school choice status for next year. Are there any questions or comments? Hearing none, I would take a motion.
I'll make a motion to that I make a motion that Milton not be a school choice district for the FY27 school year. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Ty goes to the new member. Yes. >> [laughter]
>> All right. This does not have to be a roll call vote. So all in favor? It's unanimous. That is the school committee choice recommendation and you'll pass that over to the state to let them know. So we'll meet that obligation.
Next up, Milton School Committee subcommittee and advisory committees. So that is attached. I sent that out. I'll just frame it again. Try to balance membership across um, based on interest and experience and kind of what people
had done previously uh, have not heard, nobody's been banging down my door super mad about their committee assignments, so I assume it's all right, but if there are any kind of lingering questions about committee assignments. All right. Uh, well, then what I would
do is I will make a motion, I will accept a motion to kind of accept these committee assignments uh, as they're listed in that Google Doc and I would just, um, name again also for the committee assignments one thing is that I'm going to have to sorry.
You scroll towards the bottom the devolved responsibilities of vendor warrants. We would be making, um, Nathan the, uh, assigner of the vendor warrant. >> [laughter] >> We anticipate Nathan becoming the new finance chair. We'll make that official in our next meeting, uh, for our first
meeting of the finance committee. But again, that is a devolved responsibility that Nathan will now get to take on. So, I just want to make sure I highlight that for everybody. And so these committee assignments will go into effect
now? Um, I mean, I know we've always had a little bit of like a transition time. >> Mhm. And the key subcommittees of finance and policy continue to be cross-posted, so for example, for the policy
forth, like upcoming policy meeting, I could still come to it even if I'm not technically a voting member of policy. Mhm. Yes. Should you mind if I just, um, does anybody have any questions about that? And cuz Stevie, I know that you knew we we post all subcommittee
meetings uh, for all school committee members to attend just in case folks want to come. Uh, that way if if we didn't do it that way, school committee members would not be able to come to that meeting if they had time to go to that meeting. It would be you know, breaking of the uh, open meeting law. So, we just post everything that way, that way we don't have that
worry um at any time. Yeah. And we're talking specifically for kind of the three primary subcommittees. Now, it will be four with the new superintendent search committee. >> Correct. Uh I did just want to take a moment to publicly talk about the superintendent search committee. So, that is a new committee we we are forming uh
for the purpose of finding the next superintendent for Milton Public Schools. Uh that search committee, very excited to have uh Lizzie Nason and and Stevie on that. Again, all members will be involved in that search, uh but we appreciate kind of the work that three of you will be doing to kind of organize
us as a committee, bring back kind of plans and ideas on on how we we do this as effective as possible and engage the public and find the best possible person. So, thank you all for taking that on. That will be a lot a lot of work. Uh it doesn't go unnoticed that you all are agreeing
to do this. And I think there was broad interest from all members, even those that uh aren't on it to be part of that cuz I think everybody recognizes how important that work will be in the upcoming year. So, thank you all for everybody kind of raising their hand and trying to participate in that process. Uh
if there are no other questions or comments, then again, I will I would take a motion to accept these uh subcommittee assignments uh for the 2026-2027 School Committee session. So moved.
Is there a second? Second. All in favor? It's unanimous. All right. We're getting a lot done tonight. Thank you all so much. Uh yeah. Would these be posted at any point somewhere so that if people needed to reach out to committee
members? Yeah, I think we have a list on our uh website. Obviously, the town committees, they will the town manage that and they'll update that. So, I'll send this out over to the town administrator so he can update the website. And I think we have our committee assignments also on the website. Um I think so. Which again
we'll just update with the current membership. I'll ask Shelly to do that tomorrow. Okay, it's a good point. Uh town meeting updates. All of you were there, so mostly for the public that we had town meeting since our last school committee meeting. The really one
warrant article that was directly related to the school committee was the school budget and that vote was approved overwhelmingly. So we appreciate all the members of the town meeting for their engagement and their their support as well as select board, warrant committee, everybody else who kind of made that happen.
Uh that town meeting was only three nights, so thank you to moderator Dylan for making that as efficient as we can. Uh any other comments, uh things people want to raise about town meeting? Mark and John, I just thought you all did a great job in your presentation and responding to community input and
questions. So just thank you for representing the work. It was it was excellent. Great. Next up is the summer meeting schedule. Um so everybody most people have kind of um submitted their stuff in the meeting materials, right? We have the June,
July, August calendars. I know there's a lot of conflict uh especially in August with several members and Al's taking an amazing trip. We're all really mad and jealous about. >> [laughter] >> Um So kind of two things coming out of that, I think and we can get this with
also talk about this in the upcoming meeting, but based upon kind of our conflicts in later July and the beginning of August, I think our governance retreat, which last year we did the very beginning of August, we're going to want to pull forward and do at our June 17th meeting. So we still have
that kind of on the docket for as normal school committee meeting. Right now it's not seeming obviously that's like close to the last day of school. It's not seeming like there will be a lot of pressing items to actually need to have a full school committee meeting. So instead the plan would be to pivot that to a a governance meeting, assuming
everybody is available. Um that's we think that's probably an easier time to make sure all members can participate in that. I mean that would be the start of the summer. Uh I do think though, again, if you haven't filled in the calendar and I haven't just double-checked that everybody put it in, please do just
because we may need to have other meetings over the summer based on the input from the superintendent search committee on if there's things that they want to update us, run by us, need our approval on as it relates to finding a a search firm and something like that. Uh we want to have the the ability to kind
of know when we can get members together and well, there or maybe it's just be times where unfortunately, your amazing trip, uh we might have to meet without you, but we'll obviously let you know and if you want to zoom in from across the world, >> [laughter] >> we'd love to have you. Can we post it?
We'll try my best. The joys of a hybrid life. You can't even get away from it. We have some contracts to vote to. Mhm. Probably after we Yep. Great. Yeah, so there will be things that will pop up from the night. Do you want to do that virtually?
Um Okay. That is all I have for summer meeting schedule, unless anybody had any comments or questions. So, we're meeting we have a the last sort of
regular meeting is June 3rd. Yes. June 3rd is the last regular meeting and then June 17th we will change to be a governance meeting. We'll do that. I haven't talked to John and Anna about where we're going to hold it, but in the past held it in the superintendent's conference room studio, so
that's probably where we'll hold it. Same time? Yeah, likely. Okay. >> I think [clears throat] think so. Well, we can also talk about that offline if we want to hold it up an hour or have dinner together or something like that. Yeah, do it at like 6:00. Yes.
Okay. available to meet at 6 on the 17th. Sports are over by then, so. >> [laughter] >> Okay. Well, if some changes you can't let me know, but otherwise we can move forward with that assumption with 7.
Very much. That is it for the chair's report. We'll send it back over to superintendent's report part two. Thank you very much. Um >> [clears throat] >> very happy tonight for uh assistant superintendent for curriculum and professional development Carla Costa to uh talk about what
um uh good work happened across the district this year related to curriculum and professional development specifically. Um Carla had uh entered the district in August uh just in time for our leadership meeting with the full leadership team. Uh and started right
off the bat assembling the full leadership team uh at the high school on a very hot day for about a 7-hour meeting connected to uh and looking at data that we uh wanted to review uh the strengths and weaknesses as seen through the data and through the lens of
our leadership and curriculum folks uh and came up with a set of priorities that the leadership team wanted to uh advance and move through the district this year. And then that work was continued throughout the school year led by uh Carla. So, I want to thank her for
jumping right in and then executing uh significantly uh you know, important and well-received um uh professional development by the staff. And uh and also want to thank her and I think the entire
um teaching community would say asking the teachers for what they need listening to what they say, so listening feedback and then you publishing the feedback rawly right back out to the staff. This is what everybody's saying. This is the strengths. Here are some of the things we'd like to see differently, and here's
what we want next time, and using that data to inform all of our professional development. So, a lot of teacher voice, a lot of transparency, and a lot of good work happening this year. So, I'll let Colleen go into that in detail, and Colleen, thank you very much. Thank you.
I'm trying to get the slides up. Awesome. So, thank you. Really excited to be able to talk with you tonight about this year. Um it's been a great one in a lot of ways. Um so, I'm just going to focus on professional development tonight just to give you a sense of what we did this year. So, our agenda for tonight, um
I'm going to start with the context for the 25-26 school year. Then, for those who may be listening to a recording in the future or listening today, what is professional development in educational setting? Understanding what guides professional development in a school setting, and then what we did, how we did, and then
what our plans are for next year. Next slide. So, the context. So, the context is that first and foremost, uh Superintendent Fallon and I entered the year as interim one-year team. And uh as we all know, there were multiple
prior years of change in leadership. And so, the roles that we were in, and knowing that, we our primary goal was to stabilize the district and provide uh and focus on the fundamentals with our teaching and educator staff. We developed the five priorities as
Superintendent Fallon mentioned with our full leadership team in the beginning of the year um in an exercise that um we all talked about different priorities, and wherever the the you know, mass of priorities seemed to be in our our discussions is what we focused on. Um we created a true line to ensure that
those five priorities are understood and could gain some traction. And we worked on building a sense of team for our leadership and our educators. And we did school walk-throughs on a regular basis and uh used some feedback from that to understand strengths and needs across
the district. Next slide. In an educational setting, the focus for professional development is on educator needs for areas of learning and growth. That's the bottom line. And uh it's important to align that with the district priorities so you can dig in and make some headway there.
And we want to find me ways to meet the needs of educators in different roles with of course the ultimate goal having some type of impact on a positive impact on student outcomes. Next slide. So, the picture you see here is from November 4th. It was This was the
elementary team, which I'm going to give you some more information about that later. And this is uh Superintendent Fallon and myself in front of this team uh doing some calibration on the priorities. Uh the recap on the priorities are here. The first priority was to provide all students with robust and intentional
tier one instruction. Two was increase the use of data to inform instruction. Three, increase rigor through high expectations and high supports in the classroom. Four, take strategic action steps to ensure underperforming students achieve at grade level. And five, continue to cultivate classroom and school climate
and culture to lower absenteeism. So, those again were the priorities that the leadership team came up with. And this session that you see in the the photo was really about calibration. And I'll explain that a little bit more. Next slide. So, what I mean by through line is to
ensure that our priorities are real uh and lived and not just something on a piece of paper somewhere, and to build capacity. They were infused into multiple work streams. So, the first work stream that we really wanted to ensure was done with fidelity was our evaluation process.
And uh in a former district that I have worked in, we created plug-and-play goals and I'll explain what that means in a minute. Um, and those are really helpful for educators who have to create smart goals every year. And if you can create uh goals for them, write the goals in smart
format, um and they want to use it, um they can. And it's a way to you know, again, uh support the um the district priorities. And so, many of our educators decided to use that option. And then through the observations of our
evaluators and their feedback is a way to continually talk about those five priorities. At our elementary and secondary leadership meetings throughout the entire year, we continue to talk about the priorities and all of our work was geared in the direction of our priorities. The weekly staff newsletter, um every
week I put a microlearning on uh some topic that relates to the five priorities that teachers can access. It's a bite-sized professional development. They can watch a video, they can read something short, just to kind of keep their brain moving in in the priorities. A lot of I find Edutopia
is a great resource for just really bite-size learning. And so, every week I put something out there and I tie it to a priority and make sure it's explicit which priority it connects to. And then uh at the building level, principals, when they put out newsletters will to the staff will often
mention uh opportunities to think about the five priorities. And again, in blue at the bottom, um you see professional development. So, that is another big bucket uh that we use in our through-line to help educators feel connected and informed and ready to work on the priorities
together. Um I wanted to shout out a special uh a special thanks to our PD planning team, a group of volunteers who meet bi-weekly to think about professional development and help think take that feedback and turn it into action. And that is Amy Tom, Brian
Selig, Kat Young, Bill Fish, Doc Tran, Daniel Wetmore, Zena Hamdan, and Holly Kunkel. Next slide. So, my philosophy uh is that what's good for kids is also good for adults in a lot of ways and we've all sat on professional development and sometimes
professional development hits and sometimes it doesn't. In order to have it hit, I believe that it needs to be personalized. It needs to be timely. It should be immediately usable. It should be informed by the feedback of the people that you're giving the professional development to. It should
be transparent. We should be able to sharing that feedback. Whatever you say, I'd like you to know what others are saying. It should be consistent in its approach so there's no surprises and people feel like there's a structure that makes sense. Next slide. So, for this year I found the key
success factors that that really helped have a positive experience for all of our educators was again that the planned PD time was had an explicit focus. We shared our approach with the staff from the very beginning and let them know we will have a clear focus. Your
input will guide our work. We will share and respond to your feedback. We assessed a baseline understanding that was really important to kind of understand where people were coming from. What do they know? What do they not know? We gathered feedback with an exit ticket after each professional development day.
Shared that feedback with staff and with follow-up action steps and we used the leadership team analysis of all that feedback to help inform the work as well. Next slide. So, just kind of in terms of the consistency of approach, this is what the educators could expect. Every time they would be
opening slides from central office. So, if they're a building based, the principal would they all have the same slides so every educator would see the same thing. That provide context and alignment to our priorities. Every time there's a PD day, there'll be an exit ticket. You would act on that input and suggestions wherever we could.
The full day professional developments were were with colleagues across schools and the half day PD time was segmented into 50-minute sessions with 50 minutes for principal time, 50 minutes for curriculum and department time, and then 50 minutes for independent time. So,
that was the approach every time. >> [clears throat] >> Professional development by the numbers. So, just to give folks a sense of what it looked like throughout the year. We have about 420 unit A staff members. We had two full days this past year and three half days. On the full days, we had district wide
development and on the half days was building based. On November 4th, uh we had 62 workshops offered by educators. 47 were academically focused, 15 were self-care and connection. March 3rd, we had 56 workshops, 42
academic and 14 self-care and connection. And the average ticket response rate was 32%, which in the world of response rates is pretty good, pretty solid. And I hope you had a chance to look at the some of the catalogs uh which I hyperlinked here. If you didn't, um feel free at some point.
Um you can also look at all of the data that was uh provided by educators in the newsletters. I think you all have or can get that weekly newsletter that goes to staff and all of that feedback is in there if you want to take a look. Um next slide. PD by day. So, here's how it
went this year. And I'll actually I'll start with that image on the top right. So, I put this slide up with our educators in the beginning of the year because I believe it that sometimes the greatest PD are the teachers down the hall. We have a wealth of talent um and expertise
in our district and um I find and have found over the years that educators really like to hear from their fellow educators. And um it it is they're more receptive in a lot of ways than someone coming from the outside to listen to their uh colleagues. And so, that was a foundational element and I I got a lot
of feedback about that and appreciation around that. Um so, I think they they felt good about learning from each other. So, October 8th was an early release date and that on that date, it was a building day, so MCAS data analysis was happening, and then the building based and or targeted PD happened on those
days. And what I mean by that is job-alike folks. So, your special educators would meet together, your PT OT might meet together, your classroom teachers might meet together by grade. So, everyone had something to be doing on those days, and that's what I mean by targeted.
November 4th was a full day. The elementary folks were at Pierce, and the secondary folks were at the high school. And as I mentioned earlier, we had 40-plus workshops all facilitated by our educators with a host of different topics. And again,
take a look at the hyperlink to really get a sense of what was offered on those days. And another aspect of professional development days that I have found helpful over the years is to really have that focus on the academic side of things, but also give colleagues the opportunity to do something fun
together, to connect, to build team. And sort of like the what I need block for students, we give that to educators. And and if they didn't want to do something collectively, they could do something on their own, but it's really just respecting their time and giving them time to connect to each other.
On November 17th and December 10th, we had group work, and we asked all of our educators to focus on priority four and to take a strategic action steps to ensure underperforming students achieve a grade level and to think about that together. And they had a response some
thinking to do and and a response mechanism to give feedback on what are the gaps that currently exist in Milton Public Schools in terms of priority four. So, that was really informative to us to think about what that feedback was.
January 14th was an early release day, and it was building based and targeted by role. And then March 3rd was a full day, same model as November 4th, but all of our staff was together at the high school, which I thought was chocolate. Next slide. So, at our first meeting in November, if
you haven't used Mentimeter before, it's a live polling and we did live polling with our teachers. This is this represents the elementary folks in the morning that John and I met with and we wanted to know how they felt what they thought about tier one instruction and so the question was, I feel confident
that I understand what robust tier one instruction should look like in my classroom or office. And that data was important to us. It was great to see 71 folks thought definitely, but 88 mostly sort of and then no clue. So, that was interesting information for us to be thinking about.
The next slide that I asked them for, next slide there, thank you, Lizzie. Answer this question for us, educators. I have a full toolbox of actions I can use to support underperforming students. And as you can see there, 150 folks said I could use more. So, that gave us
immediate feedback to know where we should focus our time and energy. And again, that was live polling with the elementary folks on November 4th. Next slide. This was an interesting dialogue where we asked, what does rigor look like in your classroom? And
this was again with live polling with the elementary teachers on November 4th and this is just a snapshot of the feedback because we had 162 responses live while we were talking to them and we had a great conversation. If you look at just that little part,
you see the word engage or engagement and then we had a conversation about just because you're engaged, does that mean it's rigorous? So, it was an interesting discussion. Next slide. This was again a very similar feedback loop where we asked, list three data sources you use to inform your work. And
so again, doing this type of live polling not only gives us information, it gives all of the educators information about what their their colleagues are thinking about. And how do we define these things? And so, this was critical early feedback to help the superintendent and I think about and and the leadership team think about what we
might need need to do uh with any gaps out there. Next slide. This uh you guys have seen this before. Um a kind of a word wall, emoji wall, uh where we checked in. This was in the March uh 3rd PD day when we had in the
entire staff together. And I find this is important feedback. How are people feeling in March? Um tired was the biggest word, but as you look around, the emojis uh are generally happy and the words energized, uh excited, relaxed. There's a little bit of meh
there. Uh but this is good information. How are we doing in March after, you know, several months together as a new team? Um and that was good information for me. Next slide. So, what do we do with the feedback? We share all of it with the staff.
Um the Google Form feedback doc, which I'll show you in a second, and any summaries that I put together of the feedback I gave right back to them so they could really understand where they all were and uh you know, what was working and what wasn't and just get a shared understanding of um how the
professional development was going and some of the issues that educators brought up. They could kind of see, "Oh, I was thinking about that." Um or that's an issue I didn't even think of. So, I find that's really helpful and it builds trust with educators that there's nothing being hid here. You're part of the process um and so your feedback it's necessary
for you to hear it and see it. We then review and analyze all of that feedback with full leadership and the plan the PD planning committee. And then from there, we determine future action steps. So, based on some of the feedback uh from the November 4th day, we amended the format of the second PD
day. We tried to create more tools and training for tier one. We want to review and evolve some systems and I'll talk about this in a little while, the student support team model. And then we we we got a lot of feedback around vertical and horizontal uh curriculum alignment, which will be
referred to the next incoming central office team. Next slide. This is just a sample, a little snapshot of the feedback output that's shared with staff so they can see every comment, every rating. Again, we had a 32% response rate. We
had a rating of 1 through 5, 1 being this was terrible, 5 being this was great. I ask what is useful from what you learned today, what is not useful. That helps me understand okay, we don't want to do that again. And then a comment bank letting folks kind of just tell us what they're
thinking. So again, this all of this information, if you want to drill into this and have a sense of it, go back to those weekly staff newsletters that came to your email and Stevie I can get those to you if you want them if you can't go backwards in time. I can get those to you. But I think it's important to take a look
because it'll give you a real sense of the the temperature in the district and how people are feeling about things. Next slide. So I pulled out some some comments about what worked. There are many comments generally speaking that were positive.
And I think people felt like when I see words like relevant, when I see refreshing, when I see I love this PD day, that really makes me feel like we're on the right track. Thanks for recognizing the value of educators simply being together to reflect, brainstorm, and communicate and
grow their practice. I want to hear that. And great tool to use in the classroom, great, thumbs up. We're getting somewhere and and people are getting what they need. So we got a lot of great feedback for that. And of course there are opportunities for improvement. So the next set of quotes
tell us maybe we need to make change some things or maybe we need to focus on something differently. So looking for more specific strategies and supporting struggling learners. Okay, we need to develop that and provide that. Hoping we can continue some of these conversations from today and follow up. And we did that.
Um so these kinds of comments just help us think more thoroughly around, okay, they're asking for something, let's see if we can deliver. And then the next slide. So this is just a sampling of pictures of those days. And uh I will tell you uh
I felt the energy in all of those rooms was positive. Um they were Everyone was learning. There was um just a great energy in the buildings, and I was I was thrilled with the opportunity to see all of this in action and teachers feeling like they were getting something really
positive and powerful and impactful to their learning. And then the next slide is the self-care and connection. So you'll see there, we got a walking group, we have a snowshoeing group. Pliables in town donated some um some great smoothies uh to the yoga group. Um so lots of fun
activities. That's a mahjong group. That's fun. It's hard to get into. People wanted me to wind that up more. But um but that was a great um option for folks, and they really enjoyed that connection time, and the feedback on that was um was great, too. So what are our next steps?
We need to distill all the feedback from the school year '25-'26 with '26 with our leadership teams. We've been doing that all along, but we want to make sure that we kind of think about that uh thoroughly, and then when we meet for our leadership retreat in the fall, we'll use all of that to think through what our next steps are for um next
year. We are currently working on a professional development road map that we would like to give to staff uh before they leave for the year, so they have a sense of what's coming. And um I found as an educator for many years, I I just like to plan. I got my calendar. I like to know what's going to
come my way. And so that's that's a goal of ours is to give that to all educators. It's important to note there are no half days next year. Um so a lot of the the kind of building-based work that happened uh on half days this year will need to happen on full days, so we'll have to think carefully around how we
continue to move forward with the five priorities, but also kind of get things done that buildings need to get done. Um, you all know that there's an elementary focus on literacy, so there'll be a big uh part of the professional development for the elementary folks. And we Bottom line is we want to execute a meaningful professional development
roadmap that is attuned to educator needs. That's always the goal. Um, and so we're excited to to think through that. Uh, my smaller team will be thinking about that and we'll deliver that uh roadmap um in draft form to them by the end of June. Um, and that is the end of
my presentation. What questions do you have? I just want to Sorry. I just want to stop um commenting on how str- strategic strategic that you you have been with the the group educators, planning things ahead of time, and
getting the questions that they're curious to know more about, and and executing all those professional development sections, and inviting colleagues of of the educators to to run those sections. I think those are very great strategies that you have been
doing um this year with with the MPS school. Um, you mentioned one thing about um observation, the class observations. Um, do we document the our observation notes? We do. Okay. Do we have a centralized location to store all those
notes for the educators uh to go with Like, each student have their own portfolio, but each teacher should have their own portfolio as well. Yep, they do. >> Awesome. Awesome. So, the state has its evaluation system. Um, every school in the in the state has the same system um and standards to follow for
educators. And um and I can give you a lot more information about that if that'd be helpful to you, but um yes, that was one of our our goals this year is to make sure that that evaluation system was used with fidelity. Um and so people are sick of me reminding them about things, but I'm doing it anyway. Um and um that those observations of go
into the online portfolio for educators. They they talk about those those about observations and eventually end of year evaluations, um there needs to be a dialogue and ongoing dialogue around professional practice. And so the system kind of holds that information, but the
the real uh the metal meets the road, is that the phrase? The really good stuff happens in the conversation. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Awesome. This is very exciting thing that I'm seeing at MPS like in the past just 1 year. So that's amazing.
Questions? Um I wanted to So first um it's really um cool to see how engaged the educators are. Like one of the things that stood out to me is even in the slide that was about the feedback the opportunities for improvement, uh one of the piece of
feedback was we would like some uh you know, head room to be able to participate and present because we're feeling inspired. So that's that's really cool. It's like a you know, an improvement that is actually also still um a uh a compliment I guess, you know.
Yep. Absolutely. >> Um I suppose the the two questions I have and forgive me if uh you did touch on these in the presentation and I just missed it. Um you said no half days next year. I'm curious as to the why of that um and uh you know, your feelings about it if
that's detrimental or or you know, the impact of that. Uh and then also um what are the criteria for evaluating [clears throat] the success uh of this plan, you know, like um what are you going to be looking at in the
future to determine if if this is is working besides the the feedback loop I know is a a consistent thing, but in the end what you're looking for is uh to see that there's actually progress being made in those those five priorities. So, um how is that going to be measured? Yep. So, let's go to the first question first. So, first question is why do we
have we don't have half days? We have a one-year agreement. It's based around the calendar that we had to kind of make some shifts um just because of how the the year falls. Um so, we have a one-year agreement uh with the KMA that um took away those half days just for one year.
Um and yes, I do think and I do believe all educators feel like they need more time with half days, but in terms of how the calendar worked out, um we don't have them next year. Do you want to add Yeah, that that was a that was a memorandum of agreement that the school committee and the KMA entered into to Kaleigh's point because we had a unique
calendar year that maybe they was falling so deep into September that we had to move a week earlier to start and we were trying to navigate some of those pieces of parent conferences, early release times, starting early and it was a compromise to make everything
work for that agreement for next year. That's a one-year agreement and we'll be back for the following years. Okay. Thank you. So, how do we measure success? Um so, ultimately, we want to see kind of the traditional metrics rise. I don't expect there's going to be a spike in anything next year, but we'd
like to see some type of movement um in some of the traditional metrics. Like you said, anecdotally, um as we continually gather feedback from educators, where the to the gaps still exist, what's working. We also have our leadership team who are, you know, kind
of in in constant contact with educators to either re- reinforce what's happening, understand what's still missing, and keep moving. That's kind of the job of our leadership team. Um so, you have your traditional metrics that you hope to see rise over time with consistency around kind of the way we approach
professional development and you got it and you have kind of the anecdotal like you mentioned earlier, that feedback loop that helps us understand what's happening on the ground. Right. Because you you hope to see that number, for example, of people who know what Tier 1 education >> Yes. Yes. Yes. See that shift. Yes. Yep, absolutely. And I'd like
>> also say that Carla and I do learning well we were doing learning walks once a week going to a school for about two hours or so. We stopped doing them and we started just meeting with principals to see what they needed for the end of the year, but we bring with us a um uh an outline on a cardboard piece of
paper with the five priorities and we're looking to see if if those pri- five priorities are happening in the classroom. And so we're evaluating and doing observations of our principals so they can see We're asking them, "What did you see today? How did that evaluation go? What did you think of that lesson?"
And then we're also dipsticking for is is this sticking? Are people talking about rigor in their lesson? Are we seeing someone uh strengthening tier one instruction? Are we looking at anybody using data? And we're trying to get evidence of that so we can actually uh you know, positively reinforce when we
see that with teachers doing it that they're taking advantage of the priorities and focusing on them. Carla always has notes for every single observation after, "Thank you for focusing on tier one instruction. I saw today in your classroom we visited." So our goal is as what I would call short timers
is to increase the energy around focus back on the classroom, focus back on teaching and learning uh and students first. And if our measurement may look pretty good with data at some point from student outcomes, but we're also ge- hopefully uh Stevie looking at teacher response.
Are people buying into this? Is the focus back on on students? And are they asking good questions? Do they feel like they have agency in this? And I think that they do and I think they should and they're saying that they enjoy that and they feel respected in that. So you know, we're looking at kind of uh what's the response of our
educators and then will that stop working and showing progress with our students moving forward knowing that we have a two-year window to kind of focus on that and build that back up and build that culture back up of professional discussions, professional development, uh supervision and evaluation, being in classrooms with
teachers, uh building up that good professional culture I think is one of our goals for the two years that we're here. Questions. Carla, um thanks for this. This is great. Two two things. First, next year I would like to
attend teaching literary allusions through the music of Bob Dylan. Can you put me down for that? Right. Uh-huh. Um and then the So, you said at the beginning that the primary goal for 25-26 was sta-
stabilization, focusing on fundamentals. And John, you're kind of getting at this just a second ago in your in your comment. Um as you think about the road map for 26-27, are you sort of thinking, "Hey, we need round two of stabilization and
fundamentals?" Are you thinking, "We're in a good place. Let's go up a click." Like, where Where do you How are you thinking about next year with that goal? >> So, I I think it's important to continue to focus on those fundamentals, continue with those five priorities. I think that's really important. One of the things we're going to kind of do with our leadership team before we exit for
the summer is get some feedback for them. What's happening on the ground? Where do you think we need to dig in? Um and maybe help educators focus on each priority, choose something that they want to kind of a little more focused on next year. So, if we're focusing on tier one
instruction, what's a strategy that you're going to try next year? Um so, our leadership team has to kind of talk that through and think what that might look like. Um but I think you have to spend time and continue with the same You know, I don't want to switch anything up on them. I think they need to really continually focus on these
five priorities because they are fundamental. Um and if we do want to kind of move the needle and and we've talked about this before as a group, um be consistent, continue talking about the same things. [clears throat] Sa- same plug-and-play goals. Let's keep moving. Um but I do think we want to try
to focus a little bit on each of the priorities to see if if uh educators want to do something really specific related to those priorities. Hope that makes sense. Can I shed light on that, Tony? So, when you look at the five priorities that we have, which Colin and I have been talking about, how can we deepen any one of those? What what's a
sub bullet underneath rigor that a teacher team with the peers can create and say, "This is what rigor means to us." So, we're going to focus on rigor but in identify maybe a sub goal underneath rigor that they're going to focus on as a team or as a teacher or as a school
building or as a, you know, English department. And so, giving them permission to really like dig into that and and and make some deeper, you know, you know, movement on any one of those five goals. Keep the structure the same, keep the focus the same, but now that we're all in alignment of what
rigor is, and we've done that work of really coming together and talking about it, uh who wants to go deeper in that and then goals might be able to be a little bit more specific. There might be something in their team or in their department that they really want to do together that can come under that and then everybody can identify it as such. So, a
little bit of a deepening of it but keeping with the structure and keeping the five things that we think are valuable for them to all kind of stay focused on. Just ask one more quick um it won't be that long until we're building the budget for the '27-'28 school year.
Um Spoken like the true new chair of the finance committee. >> [laughter] >> Potential chair of the finance committee. Um I you know, I can't recall what resources are allocated to to fund this work. Um but is there anything that you think
is important for us to talk about as we think about the resource resource allocation, financial resource allocation for professional development, either next year or just in the future. I know it took a long time to lay the groundwork for the early literacy curriculum renewal.
So, I'm not saying we need to we can or should change anything next year, but how are you how are you feeling about the financial resources available for this sort of work? Are we leaving big opportunities on the table that we should
I think we're we're funded as you know for next year at a at a level that I think is going to be is appropriate for what we're going to try to do next year. I think there will be need to be some more thinking around the following year. So, that's something we need to do early to in terms of the
budget cycle and think through. Once we are gone, what does the leadership team need? What's surfacing for them as a critical need? But for now, I think we're in good shape to Yeah, and I think when we think of the following fiscal year, uh we are making
two of the the pieces that we haven't talked about yet tonight is that we're engaging with the Teachers' Lounge in order to give the leadership team professional development. We were paying that out of partly out of a grant and partly out of our PD budget. And and that's just warming the plate from the from the leadership team that's
going to have to go down to staff. So, the next you know, the following two budgets maybe fiscal 28 and fiscal 29 may need an allocation for higher engagement of the Teachers' Lounge or a third party to come and do that work or a train the trainer model where they come in and do more training with leadership and then leadership becomes
the trainer with the district. But we might need to invest in that. So, that might be a targeted PD budget item. And we're also we haven't spoken to you, but we are exploring foundational common um curriculum time at the elementary level. If I have them block schedules for
elementary, so we can focus on literacy and math and having tier one instruction meaning that everybody's in that block at the same time getting the same instruction on the standard-based work of that grade, whether it's third grade ELA or fourth grade science. Um Across all the schools at the same time at
once. >> Not all of the So, so the So, we're So, we're running into challenges, right? So, we have a district that has a unique program of French and the pathway STEM pathway. We share teachers. We have different
You know, breakdowns of how our grades work. So, what we're doing actively right now is planning each school is piloting what block they want to do for next year. They're talking to the educators about it. So, it Collaborate might be just the ELA block. It might be the ELA block at
two or three grades. So, we're wetting the appetite of everybody to kind of find out how it would work. And then figuring out whether or not we are ready as a district to move into a full whole scale MTSS like model and going into training for that.
That would also be significantly supported by an outside third party person either to train the trainer or coming in to do the work. So, that's another potential budget item that we might want to put on the plate. And so, when you when I think about big chunks, I think we've said this a couple
of times this year. It is our diversity work and it is our MTSS work that we think are the major pieces that we want to kind of put some focus on. And so, we might be talking about what that would mean. And we we need help to do that. So, we would need some funds to engage somebody to come in and support the district in
some way. If we think we're ready for it and if this pilot goes well across the elementary schools, we'll see how we can engage a third party to come in the following year. We are already engaged with Teachers Lounge to come in over the summer. They'll be here in June. They'll be here in July. We'll be working with them throughout the year with his
leadership. They're great partners. We're already throwing ideas around about what they're working with the full staff. So, but we'll have a better idea to how to budget for that when we have a clearer idea to what what we think is the next best step forward. Um that's all to say that we're trying to
do things that we feel the next superintendent would want to continue. We think those are two very fundamental pieces of the work that every district should be doing with a high level of professional development support. So we're we're making the assumption that those are things that would be continued
where we left. The leadership team is really and we're all being thoughtful about we don't want to start something new that someone's going to commit and stop and change cuz they've already experienced that 5 years in a row. So we're really being thoughtful about we know we have more priorities than just that but what are the ones we can do that we know will have a staying power
of that a universal approach would is just good for teachers and good for the district to have regardless of who the superintendent is at the time. One more area that I Oh, I'm sorry. Let me know. Go ahead. I was going to say one more area that I'm thinking about and trying to investigate is um
a cohort opportunity through MassCue to have our incoming director of instructional technology and a team I have to apply for it. I have to to get in. Um to develop or continue to develop our AI guidelines and our vision around AI.
Um you know, that's certainly something that we need support around. So that will be another chunk that I think that we're going to need not only next year but going forward. So that will be on the table as well. And and to add some humor to the night, the problem with John Fallon and the roller coaster is that we don't prioritize well. We don't
say no well. So the leadership team says, "Hey, can you think about working on that?" And all of a sudden we're we have the third, fifth, and eighth and hour going to 10 things that we'd like to do. So we are trying to be really thoughtful. Obviously the the lack of technology education director this year has been
missed and we we've fallen behind. So we really want to accelerate that with the hire of the new person and I'll get to the hiring process in my segment later today about who's who's in line for that. That was the question I had was just your the vision for how that role can
support the use of data to inform all of this work. Um and I was just going to also say that I mean for the six of us, like it's actually in our power to determine that these five priorities, like our priorities we will
continue as a district and thus we seek and hire a superintendent that's equipped to carry this work forward. So, I think that will be an interesting part of the upcoming transition and sort of the need to work together to bridge it. Um,
and you know, we'll have a lot of opportunities to talk through all of that. Um, but I just wanted to um, I guess say, Carla, I'm not surprised that you got the feedback refreshing,
you know, to the PD because that's this is also refreshing. You know, like you mentioned about like the opportunity to have this level of insight at the school committee into PD is, you know, very fresh and refreshing.
>> [laughter] >> Um, I really appreciate it. Um, and you know, to be able to learn about like what's actually happening in those classroom observations that you had shared with us you were doing and you've
shared like bits and pieces, but just to see how it all fits together um, in this like coherent way is really um, it's really helpful. Um, I also noticed the piece of feedback you got about positive feedback on the
PD that provided background, modeled strategies, and then gave time for working on implementation and I feel like that's that is like research-based that that's effective. How to approach professional development
and so, um, I just feel like that, you know, for that to be happening as like a baseline of the approach is is just really great. No matter what the content and to your point like that's important whether it's
you know, DEI B related about the culture and climate work, tier one or what have you. Um So, that sounds that sounds really good. Um you had noted about vertical curriculum alignment like that that really is a large
undertaking for the next permanent superintendent and team to embark upon. Um and I do think though that you're helping us um lay the table, set the table for like a
better cadence of curriculum review and you know, some of those key ingredients um for that work. Um And you know, even my question jumping in around the like the alignment across
all four elementary schools even with the existing curriculum. I think that's something that I hear about in the community um questions about and so I think just seeing that you have some focus on that um especially with the new ELA curriculum is um really glad to hear
about that. Um and I just wanted to finally like say John, you quickly identified the need to like we wouldn't even be having this rich of a conversation about this you hadn't decided that we needed a
full-time assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction um which you introduced as an intervention like to realign our resources to get this work done. You know, and um I think
it would with all the fit the things that have happened like we can lose sight of that. Members of the community may not have paid attention to that. Very strategic move that you took and then providing us with the all this extra capacity from you, Carla, to like
do this. So, I feel like in terms of seeing the result, like just even having this presentation with all this data, to me, it reinforces what that investment, you know, has provided.
Um and so, I think that in terms of the return on the investment, like to even just see that you're collecting that feedback in order to share that feedback. Like um that I think really reinforces the value of the investment. So. Thank you so much for everything you're
doing. I really appreciate how you've kind of pinpointed what we really need to prioritize first. And And I love the variety of offerings that are offered in the workshops. You've kind of touched on everything and it still ties back to
priorities. So, I really appreciate iterating AI tools. Like, that's phenomenal, right? >> Really good. Yes. So, which is awesome because I think just kind of understanding where we are and being present in the present and kind of looking to the future and seeing
um is so, so important. So, I really appreciate the variety that's offered here, but how it still comes back and ties to the priorities because I think that's what we always have kind of struggled with. But, we've had so many Yes. you know, priority areas and there's so much we've
taken on, but I love that you you know, here are five areas that we're focusing on and here are all the things that tie back to that and uh you know, I mean, being here, you know, almost as long as Lizzie has and having seen many versions of this, this has been,
you know, pretty amazing and uh I just love the detail that you've gone into for each one and just kind of, oh, that's that's really cool. And even getting this like, you know, um the description of each of them and what they're actually doing and how it ties back, which is phenomenal. So, thank you so much.
>> all the credit to the educators because they're the ones that stepped up and in their uh in the form where they could say I'd like to facilitate something, they had to tie with their priority to identify which priorities it was going to connect to, but they did it all. They prepped it, they gave me the
information, they tied the titles. It was it was uh all of them. They did all of the work and uh the fruits of their labor were great and I had a lot of folks saying, "Can we have a part two of that one?" cuz it was so good. So, people came back and did another session on that. So, uh I give all the credit to the
educators who stepped up. That's great. So, do they kind of like um go do the research and put all of this together? Like are there resources available to them? And then afterwards, we have a folder with all of because the first time around I learned a lot from the first time around where can you share those slides? Can you give that?
So, we created a uh a way to share all of the stuff that was shared in other um presentations. So, if I couldn't go to the AI one, but I wanted that information, I could click on that schedule that you're looking at had actually three more rows that had people and resources and things like that that um that the teachers could
just access and still can access at any time. And uh how does for instance like facilitators that did the AI one? Like did they have other workshops that that they went to attended? Is there like cost associated with that that's like covered? Like how does that? >> So, no, this was just
bring yourself into a classroom, open your laptop and or some people that we had all kinds of different workshops. So, um there's no cost. Okay, that makes sense. >> It was just knowledge prep for the workshop. Like the facilitators >> was volunteer. Right? So, if you don't
want to do it, that's okay. If you want to attend, yeah, that's fine. But I was just really appreciative of educators saying, "I'll do it. I want to share something." Took a little nudging and then the leadership team on the ground were like, "You should do that thing. You're really good at that thing. You should offer it." And that that helped.
>> It built really nice momentum. We were asking the principals and the leadership teams to go out and seek volunteers. And then in our learning walks, we could say, "Well, that third grade teacher at Cunningham's unbelievable at, you know, tier one instruction. Can Can someone go John, can you go John Reagan, can you go ask her to Would she want to present?"
And then it just kind of built from there. And there were from the AI perspective, there was a couple educators who are involved with AJ Millionaire's AI committee and the tech committee. So, they were really anxious to get out. They wanted to get out there cuz they didn't really feel like they had a chance to share that information in previous years. So, it was really
helpful for some of them to, you know, to get up and and finally present on the work that they had done. And uh to college point, it was all rooted in one of the five uh areas. And uh and I I really uh you know, we we respect teachers very very much. And and I think it uh was evident that that was
part of the process. And I think that they felt that way. And so, that's when you ask people to facilitate. But I think also what other people feel who aren't facilitators, the respect of choice. We're not going to You're going to sit down and you're going to I'm going to tell you what you need to hear. Like, no, that's not working for me. You know
what I mean? We're going to give you choice in what you're interested in. And it's going to be around these five areas that we're all focused on together. And you get to choose which one you want to take part in. And then you have active more engaged folks. Uh so, uh that that theme [clears throat] and that approach that
college put in place was really I think well received and professionally well received. They I think people felt very respected and valued in the process. It's good. I have one more follow-up question. Um just in terms of the uh the live polling and some of the data that you showed us.
Um I noted and I think you alluded to this a little bit that some of the respond that there's like a 169 respondents out of 233, which is a good number. But I'm wondering if you have uh any sense of why
uh folks didn't respond. Um I Well, it's funny. I was thinking about that. Um I think some people when you do a live poll, it's on your phone. And I think some people are like, "I I can't figure this out." So, I mean, I was running around the auditorium making sure they could figure it out. So, it could be that. It could be I don't want
to engage right now. Um you know, and I I really want to give educators choice. I I I just don't want them to feel pressured. I want them to, you know, kind of come to the table. And I offer the opportunity. Um and so I couldn't tell you exactly why, but
those are my guesses. Okay. All right. I was just wondering cuz sometimes when you have that number of people that are not saying anything. Right. Right. >> say something Are they engaged? Sure. Are they disengaged? Are they the ones who are really not taking to the
program? So, I was just curious if you, you know, had an and if there was any strategy for trying to bring more of them to that table for the feedback. Yeah, I think so with multiple layers of feedback are important. So, that was a live poll with the whole group. Then we take good the Google form out.
And I don't know this for a fact because I I I keep it anonymous. I want them to tell me what they're thinking. So, if I I don't, you know, if they have to give their name, they might not tell me. So, um so, there's another opportunity there. If you want don't want to do it in a live setting, you have another opportunity through the Google form to
to give more feedback. So, try to do various ways of of getting that feedback. And then of course, all of our directors are meeting with folks and principals. How do you think that went? What did you think? So, there's kind of layers of of feedback um available. Um but it's not perfect. No, but that's great.
When you can keep tracking that like into next year and like that could be one of the things you're looking to see improve increasing. Exactly. >> Yep. Yep. Absolutely. That's great. Uh for the interest of time, I'll save a couple of my questions I have just a few comments here. Like I
appreciate the balance that y'all are really trying to make between choice for staff and also within the gym as directed time on the need to allow teachers to engage based on the things they're interested in and also from a administrative perspective through your classroom walk-throughs,
through your kind of team meetings, whatever else, through the data that you're seeing on the ongoing, like what are the gaps we're seeing and the need to say, "Ooh, we need to spend We just need to spend more time within this team on this." I also think it's important to know that I think you're covering kind of the high-level half days, full day PD days,
things like that. There's obviously probably much more work with teachers like on like team meetings during the week, right? Within the school day, there's principal meetings after school, there are lots of other kind of places in which professional development those conversations are happening. >> Absolutely. Uh but I completely agree
with your point that just time is needed. We've talked about that like there's can't ever have enough time. [clears throat] There are so many needs on PD like social emotional learning, behavior management, 504, EpiPen training, right? Uh just compliance, ethics training. There's
just so many things pulling time. Yeah. And so I think that's a real challenge as I see it within schools with PD. And then, [clears throat] you know, how you I think to the point you're making like you want to say yes and like look at all these things cuz all those things are like good for kids, but how do you also
go in deep and really change practice by focusing on particular things in ways that that will move the needle and not just a one-off. And I think those things are are just balances and pain points within how you how you do it. So I appreciate all the thought, appreciate the presentation. I also just thank you again. You came in
August, immediately had to put together this thing, put together a year-long plan. I think you seeing you being really mindful of what I've seen at least from my seat over the last 3 years, which is these historical pain points of teachers of feeling um fatigue from all the different kind of
jerks back and forth. And so I think you could you could have quickly lost staff with coming in and putting in a really like >> Yes. rigorous and so you listen to them and I think that that's great and I'm excited for what you do with next year and glad you're will be here. It's great. Thank you.
And and the planning was done when Carla was three days a week. >> Yeah, I know. Uh she was she was she three days a Yeah, yeah, officially three days a week and didn't shift over until mid-year. So the work being done, the volume of work and the quality of work being done with
half the year being part-time is really uh incredible. So thank you very much. Okay. Uh Labaree? Yes. So um we have a presentation um that we are putting forward tonight as a
very high-level overview of some of the options. Uh want to kind of um start with uh you know, if if the audience is watching this live or if you're watching this on tape, uh want to go through the context a little bit of uh what what we're doing and why and
what the goals are and some of the timelines. Um and uh I'll go into that in a moment, but uh first of all, we are a district that has concerns related to space. We talked a little bit about that earlier. We have been accepted into the Mass Building
uh Authority um process to build a 7-8 school uh uh up by the Gail Road campus. That is still happening. That group is still meeting. That work is still moving forward. And then uh Labaree closed was decided to close and their facility will
be up for sale, which I think is a great opportunity to pause and decide whether or not uh this uh purchase could in uh in some way alleviate space within the district uh either in partnership with a new
building off of Gail Road or in place of that work at Gail Road. So a lot of it is very, very high-level. And when we had discussion about this at our previous meeting, the request from the school committee generally was, can you provide us with some options? And so we decided to do that tonight and look at
the different options and try to pull them pull those options through a similar um process so we can kind of get some common data. What's working and what's not. So I'm going to go through the slides. I hope that works its way through that we can talk about it. This site by the way is beautiful. First of all, the the site before that is
uh this for those who don't know where Laboure is, this is on Adams Street uh in Milton. Uh coming up from Lower Mills, it would be going over Adams Street on your right. Coming from East Milton, it would be going up the hill and on your left. Uh this is what they call building A which they also call the
mansion. It is a mansion. Uh I think one of the the president could nicely said, this is kind of like an old colonial. Uh [clears throat] this is not an old colonial, this is a mansion. Uh this is an amazing >> [laughter] >> amazing residence uh that was turned into office space that the Laboure uh
administrative team was in. Then behind that mansion in that beautiful building, uh two additions, uh buildings B and C. Uh building B is a small addition that mainly is office space that can be chopped up in any way that we would like.
Uh these are all connected from the inside so there's no having to leave the building uh to go to the next building. And then that third building in orange is the major school building, that's where the classrooms are. Um Mark and I walked the space with uh Dick Milano and uh members of the building committee uh
several weeks ago and our full leadership team uh our full principal team walked it two weeks ago to get a sense of the space as well. Um the next slide shows basically uh the site potential. Uh we have building A which is quote the mansion.
Uh that's where all the central office space could be. Uh superintendent's office, special education, tech department, finance department. Um the DEIB, residency and registration. And uh you know, if we had the funds moving forward maybe a family center maybe this
is where we all go to register for school what a great way to introduce families to our district by coming in and and signing up for school there. Building C which is the major classroom building technically has room for about 12 or so classrooms on the three floors
but as we talked further we're not just looking at these buildings as they're presently constructed. Building C and B would be given what you used them would require renovation so we're making that into the thinking so we really have the telephone poles think of the think of the
potential of these spaces don't just think of how they're set up now because it is set up as a nursing school not necessarily measuring up to public school grades or parts of our work. Building B again as I said it was small offices we were seeing that that room could be used for any one of our
specialty services to students whether it be OTPT nurse custodial space etc. It does have kind of a full basement that facilities might be able to use for a workshop. It's currently a workshop for library I think it would need a little work to make it be more habitable but
there's a lot of good square footage here in this beautiful site on I think about three or five acres of land that backs right up to on on Just to give you the context of the library office option we are trying to make this PowerPoint
self-standing so when it goes on the website people can read it if they didn't view the the um the the the night's community meeting so bear with me for the wordiness of it but I wanted to have something that we can put on the web that people can read later on uh but just to give the background the
Milton Public Schools have been experiencing space challenges at the elementary level for several years the the town did take action several years ago two years ago to increase classroom space at the Cunningham school by
creating classrooms where the former library was at the Cunningham and then putting the Cunningham library at the floor above that. The first round of that construction happened in summer of '76. We have beautiful classrooms and office space in that what would would have been the old library space at the Cunningham now that's being used every
single day and next year the summer of '26 will be the finishing of the library portion of that. So we'll have a brand new library on top. So that in itself was very one big important step for getting space at the elementary level.
But the need for the space has been established by the work of the building committee. They've been talking about the need for space for a long time. They've been talking about enrollment and and really doing some very good work to establish that we are running out of space and I don't think everybody
in town really understands that that's the case and having been in the buildings very consistently over the last 12 months, we do need space. There's no doubt about it. We need more space for the service delivery to our students. While the building committee was entering into the
process with the MSBA and has been accepted into that process and it is in stage two, Laboure announced that it was closing and it was going up for sale in August. So what we have is a very short window to figure out whether or not it's something that the town would like to
pursue and the way that we were talking with at the building committee meeting that Nathan and I were marking out a few weeks ago, the way Shawn or or what part it was you know, the school has to come up with does this work for the schools? How would it work? What would go in there
and we need to have that work done. So that's what this is going to be talked about discussed tonight. Then the way Shawn put it very very well was and then the town's going to have to set up a way to figure out if it is useful and we do think something can fit that will have value and will meet the goal of
providing more space in the district that we've been chasing for more than a few years. Then the town has to figure out how to fund it. And how to have that be talked about in the community and have money allocated for that, whether it's through a vote of town meeting or a vote of the town.
Uh so that's their job. And then the third job out there is for uh the school building committee to be available to help shepherd this work through if it does become something we think is important and we are able to uh purchase the space, then the building committee would have
we would have to all decide how we would want that body to move into the operationalizing of uh the analysis, further and deeper analysis that the building uh renovation that would have to take place and then starting to uh take charge of that work on behalf of
the school department of the town. So, there's three jobs out there that have to be done. Our job right now is to say out loud, here are some things that we think would fit and here's why. Um and then this group would want to, you know, have that discussion tonight. We may want to have a second discussion about this as well.
And we do have a meeting set up with Nick and some other folks, select board members, I think in the next week or so, uh to talk about this in in a select board school committee {slash} large meeting of different folks. So, um this is exciting. It is a tight window. It is an opportunity. It may be
something that would be good for the schools in the town and it may not. But we have to really, I think, take it very seriously. Can I jump in real quick? Yeah. Um first of all, the site's 4.7 acres. Um the just on the point of the coordination with the school building committee as part of the school
building update is just I think the conversation we're having tonight and obviously, as John's saying, like decision around what is our sense of what direction we want to go around programming is important to then share with school building so they can provide and cuz they are we are
contracting trying to contract with an architect who can provide some insight of like, okay, is that feasible? Like what would it what would it look like to do that on the site? What would we lose on site, what, you know, where can we put some things cuz then obviously that informs okay, how how feasible is this idea?
Maybe we have the these grand visions that can be seen. And so once you get that feasibility, then that comes back to us to determine, okay, is this still the program that we want to move forward with and are we still interested in this being kind of a something we want the select board and town administrator to pursue, ask them to pursue at least.
Um so, yeah, all that happening kind of within this tight timeline context is chance discussing. And uh in an uh conversation at the school building committee meeting a few weeks back, there was some remaining funds that they may have available to hire an architect
to kind of give us that overview of what the potential looks like. It would be very helpful to Mark's point to have that architectural firm have a program in mind when they're thinking about what the space could and what they could envision for the space looking like for that population to be served. Um
so the goal and the timeline, we have a tight uh tight timeline here. The goal uh of this presentation is to review those potential educational program options. We want to be able to provide the school committee and the community with a high-level analysis on several academic or educational programs in your consideration
uh by the end of June, we'd like to kind of decide on this big picture of who would what could actually fit there, would it work, and do we feel okay about it? And would we recommend that to be the scenario or the option that the architects kind of have in mind when they look at the building for potential renovation or uh thinking about how they
could modify it to serve that population. Uh in July, the town administrator's office would have to consult with the school building committee and the school committee to see what options would work to to sufficient to provide sufficient capacity to achieve that space and have that analysis supported by a contracted
architectural firm. And I think at the same time be thinking about how we want to pay for this cuz if we're going to make a bid when it goes for sale late August we this is not a municipal you know, we can take our time once we go and bid this thing out. We're going to be in the open market to buy the
space. So, there's going to have to be a process for the funding to take place that Nick Milano, our town administrator, is working on. And lastly, in August, the purchasing of this campus would have to have a positive impact on the Milton Public School space challenges and the town would have to discuss the mechanisms for
funding it. So, you know, when I think about this from a big picture perspective, the first question I think about when we go to the next slide, we try to make a quick rubric here. Um does it address the needs that we've been talking about for years in Milton
that we want to try to remedy, which is the Cunningham in our elementary schools are overcrowded and we need to be able to alleviate that. The building of an 8/9 school would result in our grade five going up to the middle school space because 8/9 would be located in it
and that's how we would loosen up the space and under that scenario. Under this scenario, we're taking different grade levels in different populations in the schools through this rubric because the first thing it has to do is meet does it actually does it work towards the goal that we've had for the last few years? Does it
create more space? Cuz if it doesn't, then we're not just going to buy it just to buy it. We just has to work and be part of the solution. Uh can the greater program fit in the library building building with the additional renovation? Is the program or educational just a fit for that site, the age,
what's needed there? Um and are there any different or additional operational costs that might be involved that would be above and beyond the normal operational costs of of separating any one group into another building. So, we're kind of using this as our framework. We're going to walk you through some scenarios in a very high
level. Um again, this this presentation is meant for anybody to to tap into it when it's on the website. So, first of all, if we built a brand new elementary school there, a K to five elementary school to have now five elementary schools so we could spread out our students more and alleviate the space at
every elementary school by rezoning the town and having the school be one of five instead of one of four. So that means we'd take that population of students K to five divided by five instead of by four and create more space in each building. Would that provide relief? It would.
Can the grade and program fit into the library building? It would be a three strand school, be about 350 students or so. Right now Tucker is a small school at around 400. So imagine a school that's probably a three strand school. That would take the the pressure off the other schools if we were able to build a
new school. Is the grade or educational fit does it fit the site? I think it would fit the site for elementary students for sure. It would need a playground and it would need some things like a probably an addition that had some sort of a gymnasium cafeteria kind of space that
we could put on it as well. That's probably likely for all all of the options that we're looking at. And what are the costs associated with that? We believe that the scenario is really creating a whole new school where we're going to have to create even though teachers will be
you know spread out across the different classrooms. This will probably be one of the more cost impactful options because we're going to have to create a whole new administration, specialist, language, OT, PT, speech, all those different
things that go in every school would have to be replicated at this school as well. So this could be one of the more costly operational models I think. But it it could could it fit and would it be worth would it work? It could work. John, sorry just a clarifying question. What's a three strand school? Meaning three classes of
grade one, three classes of grade two, and three classes of grade three. Tucker is four, right? Tucker is three. Tucker is three. Yeah one year every once in a while they have a fourth. >> Yeah of course, sorry. And Tucker also hosts two two two classes as well.
>> So this one and okay, that's right. Um then we started to think about like at the high school would it work to bring any one grade at the high school? So, we just kind of worked our way down the uh high school, middle, and elementary. Um you know, just generally speaking, no one liked this idea at all because
the the four years of high school are the four years of high school. We have a comprehensive high school. It's working uh between the band, the sports, the athletics, and everything that makes up a high school. Um we would like to make sure that we kept those four years together. So, could it fit? Sure, we can fit 350 students
there. Do we think it's a good academic and educational fit? Probably not. You know, it's not something that we would recommend. Um because we actually feel like our high school is actually working well. It's the flagship and it and it's actually performing in it's a traditional four-year high school. But, you know, we
could walk you through this process if you want us to go into more detail. Getting into the middle school, you know, one of these discussions we've had lately and and this is something that I've been kind of a little bit, you know, over focused on is you know, do we do we put our eighth grade somewhere different?
Do we create an eighth grade academy where we you know, we leave that middle school model for that eighth grade and we really focus on something a little different type of focus on our eighth grade students in an academic way and to pull them out of that middle school and do something different. Could it fit? It could.
Do we do we think it's a good idea when we think about all the transitions that students are making and do we want to have a traditional elementary, kind of a traditional middle school, and all of a sudden pull our eighth grade out and then have them go to high school? Maybe not. But, uh you know, there is some value to thinking about isolating that one group
and really preparing them in an isolated way for high school in a very thoughtful way. Um I I kind of in my back of my head I like that idea, but I I also don't feel as educationally comfortable with the transitions that that would mean for students to go out of their traditional middle school, go out for a year, and then go back to a traditional high
school. But, um it it it would probably have some financial cost baked into that as well because school you have that you have all your languages, you have all your specials, you have PE, art. All those are shared right now between three grades that we have to isolate them and we might have some traveling folks.
Um similar to the elementary uh into the middle and high, do we take one grade out of the out of the middle out of the elementary level and just take fifth grade out? Again, we could. Um it doesn't feel as impactful as the eighth grade doing that with them. It also feels consistently interrupting the
educational flow of that child as they go through pre-K through high school. Pulling them out just for fifth grade, if you don't have to, wouldn't be something that I would recommend. I do know that uh folks point to Needham as an example that has a sixth grade school. That that sixth grade school wasn't by
design because that was an educational well-thought-out model. It was because they had certain space, they had certain amount of buildings, they had enrollment growth, and so they had to kind of organize themselves around the buildings that they had. Uh it's working for them. Needham is a great district, but I don't think it would be by design. I don't
think I'd go that way by design. Um then we get into uh our model of kindergarten and preschool. Um this is the one that our leadership team feels most strongly about. Uh we feel like we already have a preschool director, we already have a
preschool that has their own team chair, BCBA, OT, PT, speech. Um uh we they're they're a unit in and of themselves that is almost like modular. [clears throat] We could actually pull preschool out and put it in any one of our schools and it would work. Um if we
did this in in conjunction with adding kindergarten there, it would just be a larger space where the the pre-K and the K students could interact. Uh we have been talking as a group all year about the eight to nine transition, the fifth grade to sixth grade transition, but
also the pre-K to K transition is very, very important. We go from a preschool that we are servicing three, four, and five-year-olds who are on IEPs based on their pediatrician's recommendations. By law, we have to service them, and we're glad to do it because we get them ready
to enter into kindergarten. Um and we also have uh peer students that go as well to be part of that program. But then that's a big jump to kindergarten, and we lose them at all four different schools. And what what we're hearing from especially our elementary principals is that wouldn't
it be great to soak that that whole group of preschool and kindergarten in one school with literacy uh and and let let the least restrictive environment of kindergarten be least restrictive, [clears throat] but in a setting that we still have a lot of control over. We're
not losing them to that bigger elementary site that we can really do a better job of finding out our preschool students who are going into kindergarten. We could be more thoughtful about not you know, really letting them be in least restrictive in kindergarten. And if we're in need of pulling that back to
be more restrictive, all those services are right in the building and then and then with the with the teachers who live in preschool. So, this is the idea that's really taken a lot of good roots with the leadership team. We could just be a literature-rich
you know, vocabulary-rich support-driven environment. And so, this is the one version of the options that I think the leadership team feels more strongly about. Uh and the modification to the building, the
auditorium, the bathrooms, and modifying the building in a way that would be young people uh friendly uh is something that I think is construction doable. And uh and it it even though it is another transition, it it feels like more of a logical transition to do pre-KK.
And then um unique to Milton is that we also won't have students going into kindergarten in a building and then potentially having to make a choice between program and potentially have to having to leave that school. You know, it alleviates that whole French-English lottery. I don't want to
leave because I want French, but I don't want to go there and my sibling doesn't take it and they're over here. It would really allow us to have everybody stay in one place and then when they make a program choice, they can do that in their neighborhood school without without having to think that they have to change just one year later.
That kind of transition change is hard for our families. We're in the middle of that process right now. We just had a lottery. Um we had several parents tour the the Glover who were thinking about leaving either Tucker or the Hollycot to go for French. And and having spoken to some folks in person or on the phone, it's hard.
You know, and and so choice is hard. Some people don't want the choice. Just tell me where to go. Uh and when you have choice, it's hard. So this might limit a little bit of that and it might uh shave the edges down on it a bit. So we really think that's uh one of the strongest options we have and we go into a little bit more detail later.
Then we just think about playing kindergarten. Just put the K there. It feels like that would work, but I think partnering it with pre-K is actually more comprehensive and would make more sense for our preschool students to be part of that early literacy or early childhood center. Uh but of of course if
kindergarten and preschool would fit, kindergarten would fit and be fine. Um and then there's a preschool only model that I think is very interesting as well and uh Bernadette Butler, our preschool director, you know, if we were able to just, you
know, not agree on preschool and K, uh there's a high demand out there for preschool. At some point [snorts] in time, we were leaning towards uh an education to have uh universal pre-K for every child. We would be building in pre-K capacity for that. So if we just
had preschool there, we could actually be ahead of the curve by offering preschool either for a fee that we could either, you know, generate some revenue or have it be self-sustaining a little bit. Uh we could offer it to staff if we wanted to have that component of employment. We're
trying to retain staff. We have over, you know, 40 people out on maternity leave and paternity leave. Uh it could serve the community well. We have the universal pre-K class at the Tucker that's open that's not associated with our uh traditional preschool that's full every year. There's a waitlist to get
into that. So, uh that has legs, but that wouldn't really remedy to the full extent our space issue that we're only able to do. So, it's a nice idea, but it might not fit the first one, which is doesn't really alleviate that space issue. But, it's thoughtful and it's it's creative and we're obviously
entertaining it. Um the next slide about why do we think preschool indoor kindergarten is the fit? Uh you know, we are creating a space for our long youngest learners to be together where we can focus on a solid deepening of their start to public school, which we think is really
effective. We'll have three, four, and five-year-olds all in the same space being taken care of by preschool professionals in early childhood professionals. Uh early literacy and foundational learning can be provided consistently and deeply in that site where we like that's the true focus. Um
the service delivery for students who need it. We're all together in one spot with all people just talking about early childhood development. Um um students will experience the diversity of the town and their peers before they go away to an elementary school and then come back together again at the middle.
That was something that one of our principals thought was really unique um aspect of this as well. Um the site can be be retrofitted to unique academic and social emotional needs, motor rooms, uh the playground, auditorium, all those things can work
and we can do bathrooms. Um we could also maybe partner this with a family center because when you're signing up for preschool, uh we're working with a lot of different agencies when students are coming in and turning three. And then, you know, handing your child off for the first time as a kindergartner, uh especially
if you only have one or it's your first one, you at least you know you're going to this really nice small safe space uh, for that. Uh, and we just think it eliminates the uh, also eliminates that need to go to a school and then have to make a decision about grade one. It kind of kind of reduces that that stress level. So,
uh, we let our leadership team know that we will be presenting tonight. Uh, this still seems to be the model that they think would be the best fit, uh, least impactful for transitions. Really creating an early literacy early
childhood center for kids. Um, really reducing that pre-K to K jump that's made right now. And um, and really solidifying so every, you know, you really feel good about every K student will leave ready for first grade and ready to go to their their
elementary school. Uh, and um, and I can't think of a better way to introduce a family to the Woburn Public Schools than inviting them to, you know, a beautiful site on Adam Street, welcoming them to the district, and having this really enriching environment for their three, four, and
five-year-olds preparing to move into the Woburn Public Schools. So, uh, it's a unique opportunity. Uh, I think from a larger scale from a not a programmatic uh, viewpoint, this is also eco-friendly. Like, this is we're not tearing anything down. We're actually using existing structures
and we're renovating them in a way that's um, all of this will be brought up to code, whether it's windows or anything else, we'll get a price on that. But, you know, right now, I in the world of construction, you know, uh, rehabbing is better than building new. I think it's makes more sense.
Uh, it would if it were able to take place and alleviate the issue of having to build a new seventh and eighth grade school, believing open space in in the town. We weren't to build in that open space by dollar road. And uh, and I think the town likes to see government working by buying
existing assets and taking advantage of them and utilizing them in a way that just makes sense. And I'd really be interested to find out between the purchase price and the potential renovation price, where that would be from a cost savings perspective.
From um from just a purely financial decision. I think we're targeting right now at somewhere around 170 million um for their 7-8 school. That will continue to go up over the years. We might be able um and um you're wondering where you could after
you take out the financing the PV version it's going to be a number that goes up and you're wondering what the what the net to net cost would be. Um so there's there's a lot of good advantages to this and it works. Um and if we really want to you know,
come up with a good plan and we want to go after it then we're in a position to do that. It seems as if we feel the start of it and we can transition to purchase in a time. I just don't think it's worth exploring. And to give me the opportunity.
The the leadership team is excited about this opportunity. There's a lot of eyes wide open in the walking in the space. It was nice. They just kept thinking and thinking and thinking and uh it was a good afternoon. So, that's a very high level. It's not
the detailed version that we would we might you know, have normally done if we had more time. It's an on-ramp to this conversation. Uh we have a meeting on June 3rd. Uh here as a school committee we have time with the school building uh committee and the select board coming up where
they're going to want us to kind of weigh in on what we think would work. And and this is all hypothetical. We think we'd like to do this. Can you go price it out? This is what we think it might work for the school department. So, there is a time element to this that we just have to acknowledge. Um
we'll be following. That's the presentation. This is great. Um I I really appreciate all the considerations for each of pulling out each of the grades and seeing what makes most sense. I would say just by what's shared here. Um
the pre-K and K just from a number standpoint, the amount of kids that you can put in that building, you know, versus 350 for the others, but here looking at about 100 kids more. So, which is awesome to be able to alleviate that space at the other elementary
schools. So, that's fantastic. I also appreciate the thought process of bringing both of these grade levels together and then also introducing students district-wide early on at at such a
young age and forming those bonds and relationships because I do think it because when they see each other in middle school, it's a it's a different feeling and sometimes when they're seeing kids new, they tend to kind of just stay stay themselves or, you know, go with kids that they know and I think
that's where you do definitely do see that segregation a lot at the middle school. So, I think this could really help with that. Um so, I really appreciate um what we what is shared here. I'm glad that we looked at this. I think, you know, pulling out a fifth grade or an eighth
grade, you know, as our student rep said, it's great to be that the older student, you know, at that grade level cuz you've been there for 3 years or you've been there for 5 years and you're like, "Great, I am you know, like
the big guy on campus, you know, like that feeling." And and it's great the eighth graders feel that right now. They're all in DC right now and they're just feeling really special with all the end of the year stuff that's coming. The same thing happens in fifth grade. So, they're like kind of remove that.
I don't think it's fair and I know like even with town sports, a lot of sports teams are set up 7-8, 5-6, you know, like so it's nice to kind of keep them together. Um so um but and same thing with the transitions going in from you know, pulling out ninth for
instance. So, I'm glad that we looked at all of those, but I do agree that the pre-K and K is the strongest. So, thank you. I have questions, comments. Yeah, um I have a few comments and then couple of
questions and agree with Anna. This was great presentation and really helpful to see the options here. Just in the just in terms of comments, I feel like in the rubric if it's a if it's a no on either consideration number one or number two, I just feel like it should be
automatically ruled out. It helps the other two. There's you know, there there could be debate within both of those, but if it's not really leaving space and can't actually fit anybody in there, then that's an easy one to me. Um similarly on item two, "Can the greater
program be fit into the buildings with additional renovation?" Like there's another version of a of that question, which is are we maximizing our use of the space of that building? Like Anna made the point that you know, with pre-K and K, we're putting I don't know actually what the
building can hold. So, I assume all these options can fit in. Um but pre-K and K will take uh 450 versus the other options are 100 less. So, if we're able to maximize the space in that building, well, I think that's a that's a real plus.
Um what else? Still have a couple of comments here. Um I I think if if if we do seriously consider any of the single grade options like 589, which it sounds like are lower on the list, I
think I would want to learn more just about like what what what is the evidence on what it means to segregate a an entire grade level into another building? Like what does that mean for child development or learning or whatever?
There might be pros and cons. Um the The fifth If If it were not bad, I I don't I don't mind. I I think I'm I'm in the I like the early childhood idea the best here. The fifth grade one
to me is kind of interesting. I think one of the big social challenges for students in Milton is that I mean they stay with their elementary school pod for a long time. Like often all the way through middle school. And fifth grade integration
could be a way to break that down a little bit a little bit earlier. I'm less I I I think the pre-K K idea is is a good one. I think the idea that a year of integration will some somehow do something. I'm I'm just find that
I'm less convinced by that. Sorry. Now I'm just I just I I just took a lot of notes during your presentation. >> [laughter] >> Um >> [clears throat] >> I really John, I like the point around the lottery and the way that this could um help avoid some of the some of the
big headaches both for central for administration of a lottery and for families. Um I Sorry. I had one one more thing here. Um On the Okay, two two two questions for you. Now And don't feel If you don't know the
answers, that's totally fine, but just um transportation wasn't listed here. And pro- probably any new school we have it's going to have transportation implications. I'm wondering if there's especially with the early childhood
model um if there's anything unique to consider there around transportation. It's not particularly walkable neighborhood. So and these are all young children they're all going to have to be driven to the building.
So I'm curious to know how we're thinking about that there. And then if we do move pre-K and K and I'm not an expert on our preschool program. So we have preschool at Tucker and Cunningham and I assume that that's a district-wide program, right?
But it's going to so it's going to differentially free up space at two schools and I'm wondering if we will need to if that will have implications for the catchment zones of those two schools in particular. And whether we might have to think about
how students shift potentially shift between schools to balance out the population and whether we might have to change [clears throat] the the catchment zones to get an even distribution at each of the schools based on what their capacity is.
So first question the cost of transportation will go up. To that question I think that and there is a there is a potential that your start times might need to be looked at reviewed again. Some people might think that that's great because people always want to drive high schools
later. There's a lot of science around adolescence and sleep that that we could always use when that in terms of the the zones of houses connected to schools we already have some I think what I forget what we call them
in Milton but they're buffer neighborhoods where you can you can be Glover or Tucker on my pots of Thatcher Street. You can be Cunningham or Collicot and pots of the neighborhood off of Pleasant. Uh depending on the year. Depending on just the enrollment and so
we usually utilize those well this year. And and what we ran into this year and what we also need to be thoughtful about related to um where our school what what what resi what addresses go to each school cuz we have a lot of housing being built in the town right now and the majority of it is
on the Cutting Ham Collicot side. So we have the DPW um uh uh units. We have the units right on the highway that may not produce that many families and students. They seem to be more high-end. Then you have the the units that are behind Abby
Park and um and there're going to be children coming from there. So we're already trying to predict how we want to slightly move our lines a little bit, but I think either what whichever unit whichever group of students go in there we're probably going to have to move move those lines around a little bit. In
the preschool K it's so it's it's a little easier, right? They come from everywhere. They're all going there. But given the space that's freed up in each school to help with Nathan, we might need to make adjustments cuz we you know the Chickering could become a fourth grade school for grades one through five, right? Because they're we're
freeing up enough space there. Um and uh you know we know our community schools needs more space. So if you are you creating more space than you need? You're you're never going to have more space than you need in terms of the elementary schools. Uh you know I would have dreams of science centers, community schools, you know give Martha Condon of all more
space to let her do her thing. More kids can be happy. More parents can be served. So um but in terms of the lines I think we're going to I think the town's going to have to look at the lines of where we how we organize our uh houses to schools probably in the next
three years. Um you know I'm glad we pass that on to the district superintendent. >> [laughter] >> Hopefully. [clears throat] Thank you, John. Appreciate that feedback. So I I have um
a couple things that I was wondering. I think this is great. I'm um it's exciting. Um one thing that occurred to me hearing you talk about the opportunities of the pre-K K building
is a question that again we might not know the answer to tonight, but it's something I'm wondering if we could think about is like currently how many do do we know how many families in Milton live in Milton, but
do private kindergarten and enter the district for first grade? And what we wouldn't want is to get like create this amazing center that now people are like, "Oh, I am going to kindergarten in Milton elementary
schools now." And somehow it's like not big enough to hold additional kids. Not just kids families moving into town, which is happening, but do you know what I'm talking about? Families that have opted out of kindergarten for whatever reasons, but that this new
setup might for the attractive things bring them in. So that that would just be something I'd want to research to make sure that we're not creating something that is too close to being at capacity that then we have to like reorganize it soon. Um and then I'm
just thinking about so when you're discussing the opportunity if it were the pre-K K to have central office relocated there, then that alleviates space in the high school. Uh current central office space becomes usable for the high school. So that
helps the high school. >> your other department centers will be in the high school. >> Yeah, consolidated. But that leaves Pierce Mhm. the place that doesn't Correct. directly receive like a benefit through this. And so I have a whereas the seventh eighth grade building
was sort of an um an interesting idea because it helped at all at all of the levels. Yeah, so I don't know and I don't know the 7th and 8th grade plan well enough. Uh so the high school would keep central
office at the 8-9 school was built. So then the high school would 7-8 school would build. So the high school No, central office was going to move to that site. And where was it? Yeah. As well. And so to the 7th So that would free up high school building space.
Similarly, by having central office move out. It wasn't I don't believe it was going to move like all this special ed department and other additional places. Um and then you know, the fifth grade would have been able to move to the Pierce.
So the issue is just I just I'm I'm sure that that's the kind of thing that just gets sort of vetted in the next level of um determining the um like cost-benefits of the model. But
I that was just something that I was wondering about and honestly I just think that there are a lot of interesting new benefits that this opportunity presents that the, you know, upper middle school
doesn't actually address. But Just just on the the space piece, I I have some questions about that, too. But generally, I think this site is smaller than the middle school, right? It's 4.7 acres versus we're looking at a minimum 6 acres. Which Gower Road is. It's over 600 kids,
right? Cuz it's 330 kids per 7th and 8th grades. So it's almost almost close to 700 kids. It's not accommodating something that big. >> right. Yeah. I'm again, we'll have the architect look at it. It's very unlikely it will be able to accommodate something of that scale. So anything we do at Lab area
will by just that math be smaller than anything we would do at Gyle and so therefore the space the positive space impacts we would see across the other schools would be lessened by doing this. Question is how much like what degree is. But it looks like you would be putting
be able to put more of the district personnel there than based on the center and the middle school site. Or would it just be central office that would move there? I I'm not aware of this what the plan was for central office at the at the middle school under the MSBA. The
options that they're moving through so I don't want to speak to it because I don't know in detail. Um and um we we understand that the Pierce is not impacted with the library site negatively or positively. Um Bill understands that he's the only one that
doesn't get any kind of flexibility there. Uh and that's part of the decision, right? So do we go if it costs less and it does 80% of what we wanted to do, great. And if there's some educational benefit because we like what it does with the pre-K K thing, great. So we're going to have this little check off list where
you know, something's going to be missing somewhere. Um the nice part about it could be more timely. There's there's going to be a pros and cons big picture list, right? From a financial to operational to educational to space that we'll just have to walk our way through and say that the the balance is
work in the favor of moving forward with it or or not, you know, for sure. Steve. Um is there any uh universe under which we considered doing a K through cuz thinking about the Pierce and you know,
anecdotally knowing that um when my kid was there not more than a couple years ago, uh there were space issues and they were using library classroom space and that sort of thing. Uh is there any universe in which we considered a K through six option um which does the thing of alleviating some space at the
elementary level and also alleviate space at at Pierce. So we thought of it as if we go with pre-K at Laboure and the space opens up if the the impact of space opening up in a very unique way at every elementary then you can bring six back down to elementary
and you can have a one through six. I see. If if you if every school loses their K then you're going to replace them with fives, but you're going to lose the preschool. So is that net is that is that net impact of that provides a good enough flexibility at elementary
and that actually would provide you space at the at the high school. I mean at the middle school that could only then be that's where you could go seven eight in central office and then everybody could possibly win. So that's we did discuss that point. You just have to move all the pieces
around to get the meeting. Sure. Um so the difference there in just in thinking about what the architect would need to explore would be um what you're talking about there is central office has does not relocate to
Laboure. Yeah, it well it could anyways cuz the the the main the the the mansion or the building A Yeah. is uniquely cut up that would would never be able to be a school. >> be there probably either way. >> Either way. Okay. So the high school
would gain space that way. The analysis that you're talk The analysis needs to happen about um whether bringing the pre-K out of Cunningham yeah, whether that creates the
opportunity to bring sixth grade down. Pre-K and K >> K and K. Yeah, I think it's pre-K. Yeah. >> that's a pre-K K one through six seven eight school nine through 12 no central office at the high school central office being at the pre-K K and now all of a sudden we do have space at
the middle school that's one grade less. And that's where the extra space would be available for whatever the next whatever configuration you'd want to be thoughtful about it. Obviously, Glover doesn't get any space in that scenario if you assume the sixth grade that they're gaining is the same size as the
kinder they're losing. Yeah. They don't have a pre-K. Collicot kind of gains >> Right, but then that I wonder if that is part of the conversation about the redrawing of the lines. Mhm. Maybe the catchment zone for Glover becomes like a little bit It could be because Tucker
becomes a four-strand school, then you can start to slowly fine-tune the And it really comes down to how many what what how many sections will each school be? It will be a three-unit strand, right? So, if you have a four-strand school at Tucker, a four-strand school at Glover, could you have all four schools
be four-strand schools and make that work that way in three small spaces? And we're averaging about three I think the I think it's 330 at 330 and 340 that MSBA said we're going to the average kind of some of the ninth grade I think they they settled in a
cohort of about 330 per grade. per grade. Yeah, that's So, if that's being projected as the seventh and eighth grade one, that's a little smaller because they that takes into account the attrition that we're losing some students in middle school. I'd say that we should plan on a 350
elementary grade class size. Do you know what I mean? Uh that's more than the 320s that we're seeing lately in the middle of what you've seen and you've seen some 370s Right. too. So, um but to your point, uh Lizzie, you need to pay really close attention to
not building something that doesn't have the full capacity in just four years. And there is a build it and they will come factor to any new construction that you'll have. The nice part about the seventh and eighth school is that we want people to come to seventh and eighth cuz that's the that's kind of the value that's where the enrollment pauses a little bit
before it goes back to the high school. So, um but all definitely good things to think about uh cuz we're trying to build capacity. That's the whole point of the the purchase. Um, I I had a question just on the numbers. So, again, I think you were
using 350 for most of the scenarios given that's kind of about the cohort size per grade. And so, and most of these are like one grade scenarios. Obviously, we we would need to see with the architect if we think 450 kids could fit on the site
with the pre-K case scenario which you're going to have the biggest enrollment impact. If we assume 450 kids could fit on the site, I had a very similar thought to you of like K6 model like have we have we thought about that? Could we think about a K6 model which
again would then turn all of the schools into K6s? Um, obviously, like issues with that is you're keeping kids up It does the opposite of your your fifth grade idea of like you're keeping kids apart one year longer which I know is a concern within um, the school, but you're not adding an
extra transition cuz any of the other scenarios you're adding a fourth transit third transition for kids. Um, another issue is you would have to redistrict as you would with a K5. Um, and again, I think an issue you brought
up that I had to with any of these like elementary ones is that it's just it's not a walkable area. The idea that with the all of our other schools, you just see so many families just walking their kids and flooding the streets to get to school and that's so wonderful. Yeah. And this is just not that like I don't see how that could be.
So, that would almost be >> K6 model, um, to the Glover point, that that that requires us to make sure that we're using Squantum as a fourth grade school to alleviate grade space cuz you can't A add sixth graders to Glover cuz they don't have the space. >> Right.
Well, again, you would you would add kids to Glover because you'd be reducing Glover Yeah, in the other grades. The The way that would work is you'd be pulling kids out. >> A6. That's what we're talking about. >> Five K6. Oh, you're you're talking about it having to be a K5 school. Oh, okay.
I'm sorry. Well, no. I'm saying K It's a K5 model, but instead of making it K5, you make all of them K6s because you're pulling kids out of the other schools. I'm sorry. I didn't >> And again, could you pull enough kids out of the other schools? So, five K6 schools. Yes. I also have one more point is that pre-K right now
is not required by law. Um we we do have Yes. And but we do have the half-day pre-K program. So, so the 120 pre-K students exist 60. Yes. So, the capacity is really 410. Yeah. Mhm. Cuz they >> [clears throat] >> It's a half-day program for most of
those students. They take them out. Correct. But we do have one class that is full uh full day. Correct. Professor Tucker. One or two? I I think it's one. It's one. 18 spots. But then if you're doing a full
elementary school, you would have to provide all the staffing needs there. I think it's the biggest I I have a question on that. I have a question on that. Cuz all of your scenarios, you have a principal, you have elective staff, you have front office staff.
I think other than the pre-K K because you would convert the one of that to that. And so I that saves you that one position. You still potentially I mean I I guess the question is like how many elective teachers do you need for half-day pre-K and then a
kindergarten model and maybe that's a little bit less than the other scenarios, but like otherwise the front office staff you still need the custodians, you still need like none of that's changing. Correct. So, like it's It's more about specials and any languages that have to travel. Um
added added adjustment counselors. I It's all going to be There's going to be fine degrees of what is too much and what's not enough. Uh and then you have to compare that also to is this the 7th and 8th grade school? What does that What does that look like? Cuz I think people are going to want to know that answer as well. I think traditionally people say, "Oh,
it's all the same. Everybody just moves over." Colin and I just went through this in the previous district. It does cost you There are more staff that you need to hire. Custodians, there are these auxiliary positions that you need to provide. It's not overwhelming and it's not It doesn't make it not worthwhile, but there are more
positions that you would need to add to make whatever we do work work. Yeah, I'm just thinking it's the the question of again, exactly what is that What is that delta? I mean, you have point two of adjustment counselors that you have to work kids that are getting older and maybe need And you're just having more people
within that space. You need some more [clears throat] of those positions, but any I guess the question I'd have is as a like next step would be any honing down of what we think like that delta could be between a K-5 or K-6 model versus like the the
pre-K to to understand that cuz it it does seem like there's a lot of overlap between the positions that would not 100%. Um There is a factor which you know it comes about um
the town having a sense of like buy-in to the opportunity. Obviously, it's all it's about benefiting all the kids in the town by alleviating overcrowding. I think it is also a little bit It's a different proposition to introduce like one beautiful new
elementary school while the rest of our other in that case four elementary schools continue to age in place while we have this beautiful new one. So, a fifth of our students are you know, attending So, I'm just I'm not
saying that's a reason not to do it if everything else points towards that, but that just becomes something that you have to like help the community sort of think about, which is just different from introducing a facility that serves the entire town.
I I would agree with that. >> is the case for the early childhood or the middle school and which like all families who have children of that age >> could universally benefit >> you know, benefit from it. Feels more like a benefit to the whole town. So, I'm just that would be something that would
would need to be like, I think, addressed head-on um to avoid some ill feelings about that. >> And I think just looking at the Laboure College site and seeing the mansion, you know, shows like it's like for appearance-wise too, even though our
classrooms are in the other building behind in the back, like it's just that perception of like, "Oh, wow, like this is where this new elementary school is going to be." So, I do appreciate the thought process behind, you know, the can pre-K. And that's
>> Yeah, the whole the lack of walkability to it is a very interesting point that you brought up, Nathan. This it you know, I don't know whether it's how many people could access that on foot, do you mean? And what does that three-strand school look like? And what neighborhood does it serve? And
>> Right. how would that balance everything out? It's just it'll it's interesting. I do like the university universally everybody being able to benefit by this new space by going to either pre-K or kindergarten. It has that feels better to me, whether that's emotional or intellectual or
data-driven or not, it just feels better to me to have everybody access this space for a really unique experience before they go on to their elementary school. I I do think one of the challenges with the site is going to be the mansion in that to the point you made just with like, I don't think there's any way in
which you can salvage the mansion and have it be a student Correct. usable space. I just walked in through it like it is. And so, that's a large chunk of the the site, the facility, and you're going to need to figure out how you create access for people to come visit the administrative offices or whatever
else that is that they would make a larger building like a K-6 challenging. Mhm. Uh because the site is obviously Tucker is 2 acres. It's obviously a very tiny site. >> Right. This is 4.7 acres, so Tucker is
450 kids. So like the idea that we can fit 450 kids, 480 kids on this site is doable, probably but again, you know, start losing parking, there's not really good other alternatives parking.
I don't know. People at Tucker probably say similar of like they could benefit from parking. Uh and Yeah, anyways, so things things like that are things that have just come to mind. And so again, I I do think pre-K K is a strong proposal.
My just concern is the additional transition, which again, we have with the upper middle school thing. So it is an issue, but I think there are a lot of Is there room in the 4.7 acres if we wanted to potentially like, you know, if enrollment increases to like add on, you
know, since these buildings are kind of they all look very different, but they're all connected, you know, so is there a potential like is there a room or is it conservation? Like is there like anything like that that we They said there's no conservation land on the acreage. There is
conservation land that abuts the acreage that's owned by Pond Pond. From my understanding from that conversation the wetlands, yeah. Uh and yeah, it's funny that we're talking about expanding capacity, but we're worried about expanding capacity to the right level, right? It was you know, so
but it's accurate. Like we really have to make sure that if we do this and we reorganize ourselves as a kind of work the cohorts that we decide to put in there. And uh uh So I I'm interested to to see if the 450 410 would work
on the pre-K K. and and my head is spinning with so what does what does each of the elementary schools look like without their K and how do we want to think about that? And and maybe there's some uh for lack of a better term mining of good ideas about how could we utilize
good space at elementary schools differently. Uh now that the space is potentially freed up a little bit. Um the first thing I come to is after school care for our community which is really something that people need and I and and if we had the funds to operationalize any kind of
you know science centers and things like that or tech centers within each elementary school. We had a lot of conversations in our district about when we uh moved to the 7th through 12th model and then we had a 4 5 6 intermediate school that would have extra space in it and
then we only had K to 3 schools that would be the four elementaries and um and we knew we would have some extra space for for after school care but also we were really thinking about unique programming that if we could generate the funding for you know what better to have a science center or what better to
have some sort of a tech center or literacy center or whatever that would be that every student could access in that building and that that the educator could hop around building to building and be the specialist to do. Um so um if we're lucky to have more space than
we need to a certain degree not to the point where we don't need it and the taxpayers say that's not a good use of money but to do have other educational programming that would benefit kids. Uh that would be a good thing. Another thing in this conversation about the school in general that we like is the
the opportunity for space to house programs um that could allow more students who are currently out of district to remain in district. Absolutely. >> Um and that would be like beneficial across for the education but all inclusion and
also the financial savings of not needing for them to go out of district, so those kinds of um calculations feel like really helpful to be able to make.
Yeah, this is all it it's all exciting. Uh I guess I my in my brain the next steps are hearing from Shawn and Nick about the architect and what we what what's a deliverable that we need to give to the school committee and to that group in order to make this more real and
substantial for them to actually have direction. Uh it might be like you need to tell us which which one of these do you want guys to let's go I don't know I really want to hear from them about what the deliverable is. I'm assuming they're going to want to know at least one or two options that that they want to kind
of sketch out and see uh what that would look like and if it's doable and I think in construction these days anything's doable. Um I also want to make sure that we're good neighbors to that community. Uh so I I you know I'd like to think that they would appreciate a school going in after a school. Uh and who
doesn't want pre-K and kindergartners and the noise of that good noise in the playground? Um >> [laughter] >> I I live next to the high school and every time I hear the crack of a softball bat or the cheer of a lacrosse game, I just think it's awesome and the
lights go right into my living room. I have no problem with it at all. I think it's fantastic, so >> Yeah, you're raising a good point which is at what point in this process going forward would it become important to offer like a community for community session [clears throat] for
for neighbors etc. Like that would be good to do sooner rather than later. If it's moving forward. Yeah, I think I in my brain and please jump in the order of operations is let's find out what they the other two parties of this triangle look like what do need
from us, what decisions do we need to make? I just don't want to hold it up. Yes. Uh whatever we need to get done while our leadership team is here and we're in school and we're all in session to give them time in July to kind of work out whatever they need to work out, assess, draw up, cost out, timeline out,
and then come back in Octo- and come back in August and really have hard conversations about this is viable or not. I think this where we ultimately will be. Yeah. I I think we need to move towards limiting the options. [snorts] The more options you ask the architect to do, the more expensive it is. More time it takes. We don't have time. And
so I think ideally uh it would like us to come up with one design option to say let's move forward and and cost this out. That's what that's something that I think feels like we can get to, then that's great cuz they can put more time and investment in there. I don't know if we
we don't need to get there today. I do think if there's >> [clears throat] >> particularly like if we feel like we can throw out option, like get rid of certain options that John and and the team have looked at. If we feel like we can get rid of all of them except for one, then that's great. We
don't have to make that today, but if we feel like there are a couple things still on the table that we'd like some more information about uh for John and the team to like think about and come back and further the conversation on the Excuse me. Yeah, that's what I'd be looking for members
to say. Um sounds like I haven't heard anybody kind of raise the flag for the grade nine program. I'm just saying what what I've heard and so correct me or the grade eight programs or even the preschool only program, K
only program. Cuz it seems like those have some challenges. >> So I think there's some value in keeping those lines in there and some of those other discussions that we had kind of populating some of those like, you know, if if we put in a a new K through
five or K through six school there and it's brand new and it's Same program. like kind of the same like how does that feel and just kind of put it in there so that if we do have a community forum, we have explored every single option, you
know, possible. And if there are other ones, great, that come up, you know, we're happy to look at that, but based on all these discussions and talking to you know, the other, you know, Nick and Shawn and kind of fine, you know, kind of fine-tuning it, but to put this information in there saying that we've
looked at explored all of these. Yeah, I'm not saying for the community forum. I'm saying for us on the third. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I think we want to narrow this down because I think they put together some good, very quick information. But how do we What is the more What are the scenarios here we want
them to look into more? Right. Again, it seems like PK pre-K through kinder that I feel like there's general alignment that like that needs to stay on the table. We need to keep talking about that. Is there something else beyond that that we want them to That's good. Oh, no, no, no. I do I like the eighth grade
that you have you know, we briefly talked about, but I think when we're talking about the vertical alignment and the eighth to ninth transition, we're addressing that, so I don't think it's it's needed. It's interesting because I think there's a lot of work that needs
to be done at that grade level, but um since we're addressing it through through all the other work that we're doing, um I don't think it needs to be on the table. I I I liked Nathan's point earlier about uh the two most important things being
does it alleviate space because that's yeah, one of the main purposes and then, you know, can you fit the number of students in uh and that anything that has a no in either of those really kind of falls out of consideration for me. I I I agree with that and I think grade nine meets that criteria
because it doesn't alleviate space uh uh, that we need really space at Millard North High School, um, you know, but I don't think we've talked about that being a place that we're constrained. Okay. Good. Can I ask a clarifying question? Pre-K through K, when when we talk about
five K to six schools, um, where does pre-K go? So, you you're talking about the option, not the pre-K K option, but a A fifth K through sixth Yeah, a fifth K through sixth school. That was one of the things that we put on the table. That. >> Um, and knowing that
uh, that if we I'm trying to I'm just I I'm I'm trying to wrap my head around it and I'm not >> the that's a challenge of that yeah, idea. I mean, you could you could do the addition with some additional space for pre-K to pull pre-K out of Tucker,
right? If that's a place that's going to the issue is with the K-6 model is it only works if you're pulling a strand per grade level out of the other schools, right? To give them that stuff. Uh, and that means Tucker becomes a two-school strand, which is very small.
>> Yeah. Uh, and like Yeah. Could you actually Could you actually mathematically do it? I don't know if the answer is right. I was like trying to do some rough math and I'm not sure I I got to the numbers. Like how big would it need to be? Again, theoretically, if Tucker is a like
pointing over in this direction. If Tucker is a, um, 450-person school, and um, uh, if the new school can be about that size, could it service kind of a similar
number of students and strands as as the Tucker school minus pre-K? Or again, could we make it a little bit bigger and make it serve 500 kids with pre-K, something like that? Cuz the site is two and a half times bigger than the Tucker site. So, I
I This is like very rough math, and so I I think you'd have to you could maybe could immediately disregard this idea because you're just can't fit the kids. Mhm. The addition would need to be way too big to give any room. Mhm. Yeah. >> of the mansion. I also think something
in the name is the K5 program that you say you'd have to add a gym in addition to adding a playground in addition to adding a cafeteria versus a pre-K K scenario where you are really just adding a cafeteria and a playground. You don't need the gym. >> No languages. No Yeah. And the
walkability factor that someone mentioned I think is important. Uh that's important. I don't think they offer languages in the pre-K and K anyway. No. We don't. No. We don't. So that Yeah, that's I If this is going to get further
considered, I think I just Yeah, the idea of a two-strand school I don't think that that's educationally healthy. I think so. I think you I think teachers need at least three classes to >> Yeah. to work. Especially if it's K6 and those kids are together for
>> Yes. seven years with the two strands like Could also do something funky with the language programs. Yes. Yeah, you could have You could end up with two classes or no classes. There could There could be some weird stuff going on there, too. >> Yeah. Maybe it's not a good idea for all those
reasons. >> [laughter] >> Two things. One, it's important to say it out loud cuz if if you can wrap your head around it quickly and we can all understand it, then it's you know then it's why we need to just dig into deeper, but I just thought the in my head I'm just operationalizing everything and I'm just walking through every building at the same time. Um
And uh wanting to make sure that whatever the deliverable is for the third, I can present it in a way that can be consumable and thought be thought about so we can get this done for the end of June. I think the other thing I do want to stress a little bit is what you talked
about in the TV like giving giving teachers voice, right? And and they you know, if everyone is kind of unanimously saying that pre-K and K work in the space from because we're in the buildings every day and we kind [clears throat] of understand the landscape and you know, our space needs and the
challenges and all of those things. I think that's a huge consideration, right? Like we could talk all day long about different options, but they're the ones in the building and I think I think, you know, it's funny. I won't say which principal said, but they said, "I'm going to cry if my kindergarteners leave."
This is going to be hard no matter how we no matter how we divide this, you know, these uh these, you know, these are components that we're trying to move around and uh the only one that seems to be movable without disrupting a school culture is kind of a preschool.
Cuz they've been their own kind of group for a little while. As soon as we delve into uh a grade, I think everybody's going to I I love I love my fifth graders. Why do they have to leave? You know, I'm going I love my kindergarteners. We're going to see we're going to definitely see a lot of that and uh I and understandably, you know. Can I add another layer to
this that I you just think I think of? One of the challenges our elementary teachers have, because they're on two different schedules, is getting together and collaborating. You add another school to the mix. It would make it even harder. >> it even harder. It's not time in the time yet.
>> kind of the the uh the differences that you've talked about in terms of elementary schools. You add one more, now you have another layer. So, teachers want to talk to each other. And they need to talk to each other. And they need to learn about each other's practice. So, if you separate them again, Mhm. Now it's
five places I need to try to figure out how to go to. So, this is just something that occurred to me when you said that, Anna. I was like, "Oh, yeah." And that's another thing we've heard in the feedback. I want to meet with my grade level peers. Yeah. Very hard to do. Whereas, as you were saying, John, the pre-K K brings all the kindergarten
teachers together in one space and provides a foundation to all of the students that's common. Yeah, it's really early childhood centered versus traditional elementary school separated by subject area and grade as much as it's going to be a real
early childhood center which would have its own kind of little curriculum. Uh, leadership group in that that have to be something that would be leading that but it would definitely be from an early childhood viewpoint versus having to make sure that you're treating K's like
your grade fives from a curriculum standpoint. It's just not the same. Kindergarten is very different environment from a learning perspective than a fifth grade is, Jimmy. And um Yeah, that's that's the educational piece. Thinking of it through a teacher's lines uh, an age-appropriate developmental
lens, you know. Are are you in the I know the leadership team was part of the visit and the conversation. Um if this it is becoming something like have the pre-K and kindergarten teachers been
consulted in this yet? No, no, we we we've just laid this out with everybody being potentially impacted. They're aware that we're all talking about it but it's very very uh, early in all these things. We wouldn't want to have a conversation with folks that if it's off the table, it's off the table. Uh, but if we are
now we get down to two or one then we would want to meet with folks and and have a voluntary meeting and and just Right. The idea is through the principals. That's sort of our way of Right. Of if the principals are
supporting the idea, that's our way of hopefully understanding that like the teachers are not opposed to the idea. >> Yeah. I I I wouldn't say that, right? Because we haven't asked them yet. Jimmy and I really want to let them speak for themselves, yeah.
>> So, I understand what you're saying as far as like it might not move forward for myriad different reasons even if it's a good idea that we want to pursue it might not be possible but I guess that would be something I would want to personally know before like
supporting to move it forward that at least there had been a layer of consultation with the teachers that would be directly impacted by the shift. Even as a hypothetical shift to make sure that they have the opportunity to
say like I absolutely would not want to do that as a kindergarten teacher and you know, so Yeah, cuz that would be tough if we were like moving forward an idea that >> we have that conversation with the 7th and 8th grade teachers where we said that we were going to have a 7th and 8th
grade school? >> Yeah, I think they did a lot of they did listening sessions, right? Well, I don't Didn't they? I honestly can't remember that, but I think I think the difference is that they're already together. Like the 7th and 8th grade staff are already Yeah. They're not They're not being pulled >> they're not separate. It would be about
taking [clears throat] them out of their I just thought of it when you were saying the principals um would be sad to lose the kindergartners like there may be reasons that kindergarten teachers like to be part of >> Absolutely, there's no doubt about it. I think that they do. I think that I think it would be hard for our kindergarten
staff to be disconnected from their historically K-5 schools. And and I think that I don't want to diminish the fact that as a parent being a parent at one school for K through 5 is the longest stretch you
get. Yeah. And it becomes your school and your your social community not just your school community, it's really important. It's the only stretch you really get that's that long. And I think there's a lot of value in that. That's why some people like K to 8s cuz it actually extends that that way.
I I know a lot of districts do K1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, they do all these choppy but that I think it that reduces community. So, um there's definitely going to be differences of opinion with teachers and probably families about how that would impact them. I'm a parent of five children.
you know, having all of your children at Glover and walking to one place with two in a carriage and three at school and you know, and then being that person who has two at Glover, two at Pearson, one at the you know, then all of a sudden you're like this, but um but there's value to the community of the school, especially at the elementary level when
it's the little folks, you know. My teachers will want to Teachers have been working together for a long time, you know, and they have friends and colleagues in different grades that they would probably sorely miss no matter how we're going to organize this in any way.
But they should have the >> want to put it out to any group of teachers until this body has decided this is where we're going to go because I don't want to disrupt and worry a lot a lot of teachers if we're the model needs to be decided first, I think. >> Right. And then we can get some Yeah, cuz the other part of this is that
if this is if this meets the the space issue, the financial issue, free sub money, the operating budget, you know, all all these things just might be decisions that might have to be made, period. But I I would like to find out what they would prefer or what they how they feel
about it what would make it easier if that was a transition that they had to make. Uh we did a lot of work after the decision was made to reconfigure our previous district in the way we did to then go and meet grade by grade by all right, we're going to you you're going to move and you guys are going to stay
and and we and we just did listening tours where we just listened and and you could really see people who were just like, yeah, this sounds great and then you I I've been doing you know, I've been here for so long and I would miss that grade. It was just it was all genuine. You know what I mean? It was really impactful.
I just want to be mindful of time. Um we I think that was a very nice robust discussion. Um do you feel like you have we're going to continue I assume the discussion next meeting? Yeah. I'll elaborate. We will have the conversation
with the town ministry that information. We really won't have much more from school building committee other than like maybe having to sign something with the architect. Um but if there are other like questions you have on the No, I I just said I had No, I really good conversation. Thank
you for the ideas. I just need to digest it a little bit and get a sense of maybe when you and I and Anna meet about the next meeting, we can kind of fine tune what what we think is needed to be reviewed again or discussed in a way that might be more helpful of is is it just putting these things over here for
now and focusing on two or three and do we want to add one and Um I have to say that this is the busiest time of the year other than the first 3 weeks of school. That uh you know, we have a leadership meeting on Tuesday that we were thinking of letting the principal stay in their buildings because Mhm. that's where they need to
be. You know, there's field days, there's things going on. Mhm. Um and uh MCAS is still in place at school. So, uh it's really hard to, you know, dedicate a big chunk of time on next 2 weeks just to this, but so, fine tuning it in my brain first, talking it out, and then finding out how we can
operationalize it would be would be great. Just ask if members have uh follow-up questions as you're also processing it. If you just email those in advance, maybe that helps inform the discussion. Uh we can cuz again, time is sensitive and you're right, it's very busy time. Uh hiring update? Yeah, so uh very
quickly, um I actually forgot my superintendent's update, but I'm going to skip that. Um Sorry. I wanted to first of all, uh let you know about the administrative hires. We have the director of business and finance, the human resources director, the director of technology,
instructional technology and data analysis, and the assistant director of student services. All those um search teams have been at work. Um the uh search team for the director of business and finance was Carla Cosa, Maureen Kennedy, our payroll
administrator, Martha Sandoval, of all schools director, and Harris principal, Bill Fish. They uh did a screening and then they interviewed candidates and came up with three finalists. I have met all three finalists and I will make an initial offer to somebody tomorrow.
Uh and we hope to tie that job up by the end of next week. We have three very qualified folks. It's going to be a hard choice. So, Carla and I have met uh to go through the notes of what the screening team thought of those three candidates and then Danielle Wetmore and I were the two finalists candidates that uh we met with the three finalists
candidates over the last three days. Um the screening team for the director of instructional technology and data analytics was Carla Holly Gunn Cannon, Bob Patterson, uh Jessica Jablonski, technology teacher at the high school, English department head H. Hardy, and
librarian Janice Alpert. Uh they had a really thick pool. We were really surprised at the quality of people we had applying for this job that we were a little worried about when we added analytics to it. Uh I interviewed the two finalists today. Uh >> [clears throat] >> you wouldn't be able to go wrong with
either of those folks. We're really, really fortunate uh coming from great districts with really good experience. Um so, we feel confident so jobs will be offered to those one of those folks in the next day or two and then they'll be brought in for uh a finalist interview and signing of a
contract if they take the job. Um screening committee for the director of human resources is led by Karen Kehoe, uh Dr. FA Shavers, MEA president Brendan Bond, and Cunningham assistant principal Andy Young. Uh we had Brendan on this because our union is working very
uh very [clears throat] connected in some of the uh HR functions and we want to make sure we had support from them. Uh they're in the beginning stages of making I think they've had one interview, but they interview several candidates over the next two days. They're interviewing seven folks and
they hope to yield three that will go to the finalist stages and I will interview. There are experienced, qualified uh school HR folks in that pool, which is really exciting. Milton has never had its own HR person, and this is really exciting
for that for that to happen. Uh the director [cough and clears throat] of um special education position, the assistant director, uh Danielle uh Wetmore has been running that with uh Dr. Fish. Bernadette Butler, uh preschool director Molly Mason, special
education teacher Collicot, Tom Faelin, uh high school educator Clover team chair Laura Lamerey, and speech and language pathologist Shelly Wolf. So, as you can see, all these teams have multi-grade, multi-subject um folks on it. Uh they are interviewing, I believe,
seven folks uh for that role. And they have some qualified folks in there, as well. So, um we're really excited about the pool. Uh these these roles were all advertised at the Boston Plan for Excellence, the Teacher's Lounge, Indeed, SchoolSpring,
um and we're actively working with the Teacher's Lounge to to to reach out to folks in that work bar, so we think that we're diversifying our pool uh considerably uh in doing so. Um two of the three finalists, as an example for our finance job, are people
of color. Um then we also have roles like our audition coordinator team chair. We have our building-based jobs that are open. Um some of these are due to resignation, some of them are due to realignment. Uh I'm sure this list will get bigger over
time because people make decisions over the summer, uh but each interview team at each building uh will be doing that in a building-based way, and then bringing their finalists up to central office. Uh I think we've said this before, but just to say it again,
the entire leadership team was trained uh and went through a training session with FA Shavers. Dr. Shavers presented uh for at least 45 minutes on bias through the interview process, work with Carla uh on how we can use a job description
to identify what we consider to be the qualities of a person versus you know, someone who went to the same school as me or who looks like me. So, we're trying to really base everything on qualifications and the job description to try to take that bias out. There's a lot of strategies that FA gave us that
those slides are now being presented building-based teams. So, everybody's getting the same uh message about this is how we really want to be thoughtful about how we're uh interrupting our bias while we're walking through this process. Uh so, between diversifying the
pool uh going through training at every level of the district, making us all aware of what we're uh trying to do in terms of diversifying our staff uh these are the strategies that we're taking to hopefully diversify our staff. We met with CDM and Mark on uh Monday morning
and uh went through this whole process with them as well. Uh I think that they were very thankful that this is very concrete and happening uh along with our work with the Teachers' Lounge um to get support from an outside party. So, I think it it's been a very very uh
different process this year than it was in years past. And now, really what we need to do is look and see what happens in October. I mean, in in August we actually make the hire. So, uh we're we're happy to be where we are. Um I want to thank FA for her work uh and Carla uh in the absence
of a current HR director, we've been all acting as HR director uh the work that we've been trying to do with Teachers' Lounge and the Possible Center for Excellence and uh in the training as well. So, um we think we're in a good spot. So, you could have a business person by next week
uh a tech person by next week, a human resources person by the following week and assistant director of sped by the following week. So, by June 1st, you could have those four major positions hired. Mhm. That's great. That's great. John, are you the decider on all of the hires that are
director and assistant director level? And then um when do when do you think about having Do you have target start dates for thinking about the HR director, the finance director? Is it sort of like they can start when they're available or is this like a July 1st
>> July 1st or or after? Okay. And for for the director of finance position, Katie and I have already met. Uh we're balancing Katie's time in the district with her um her her task that she's taking very seriously and professionally to get
everything set so 26 is close-out-able even though you don't really close it out until July. It should be a very clear road map. And working on the budget for FY 27 to be very clean and orderly so that person can just jump in and know exactly where all the money is and what it's encumbered for and we're
identifying two days in June, I think June 23rd and 24th where uh uh Katie will dedicate those two days to whoever is being brought on. We'll ask them to take some two days off and be in the district for two days to just sit and go through all that work with her so
we can really And then, you know, we're we're working and talking about is there any Is there any need to have Katie on uh some sort of a retainer so we can call her at a certain time over the course of July, and August, and September. She's open to help any way she she we would like her to do. She's very professional
like that, but we also want to formalize it. And I'm also respectful of the fact that once you leave the district you think you're going to want to come back and help and then all of a sudden you look at what you're getting into >> [clears throat] >> and you're like, "Oh my god, I I need the help and you're asking me for help over here." So, uh we're trying to balance that. Uh Katie will do whatever
it takes to make the transition work and we appreciate her professionalism on on that. There. Questions on the hiring update? Uh we will keep it moving. Up next is the the for the superintendent's report, right? You know what? Um, I'm going to defer. I
had some really nice stories about what's going on in STEM. I had some really nice stories about the high school uh, um, scholastic night last week. Uh, freshmen through seniors on stage. Um, amazing night. Uh, really not rooted in uh,
everybody there is the highest grade point average person. Uh, wildcat of the week, wildcat of the month, uh, book awards, um, National Honor Society, uh, just a great night for Milton High to be
celebrating kids that are achieving and and motivated and good school, uh, you know, students that represent just all that's good about Milton High. Uh, and it's not all the highest grade point average stuff. It was just a wonderful night. Uh, Karen did a great job. Um,
and uh, we had a great trip to Washington D.C. trip called in today. They still had a picture of all these students sitting with two Vietnam veterans outside the memorial just talking. Just really, really amazing, heartfelt. Um, we had a group of STEM
students who just went to Fenway Park two weeks ago for the egg drop out of the MIAA that the air at the play it out in Deer Island this week. Uh, trying to really make sure that we're engaging students in that work. And uh, the end of the year grade 12 work that our
student represented tonight of all the kids that are coming up that are really exciting for our for our seniors. So, that's just my without reading it all and boring you at 10:00 at night. There's a lot of good work. And we have at the elementary schools, we have all of our field days. Uh, we have our K screenings happening
right now. Uh, the middle school has just finished the Quebec trip and now has a D.C. trip. Uh, step up day number one was today at the middle school. Step up day number two is tomorrow. Um, great transition work there. And we just got some funding for the buses that will have the eighth graders
coming up to the high school later in June when the seniors leave. So, a lot of good transition pieces, a lot of good things happening, very busy district. And your principals are amazing. So, when you see your principals, say thank you. They're just great folks. They're really working hard along with the teachers.
Uh we're going to move it along finance sub committee. We haven't met, but I have some vendor warrants just to let you know. Vendor warrant 44 dated 5 7 26 in the amount of $280,828.87 was signed and vendor warrant 45 dated 5 14 26 in the amount of $460,586.96
was signed. We have vendor warrant 46 right here. I'm going to leave that to the new finance >> [laughter] >> uh committee chair. So, that is it for the finance update. Unless there's something else you really want to do, we're going to keep going. I
really wish I miss Amanda right now cuz she would have had us out of here at 9. >> [laughter] >> Uh negotiation update? Yeah, just really quickly. Um I think negotiations continue to go well. Um since the last update, we have
participated in several negotiation sessions. Most recently this past Monday the 18th. Um we have continued through these meetings just moving closer towards agreements on um
the priorities for each team. Um both language in the contract as well as uh the economic package, which is currently being discussed. Um we have meetings next two negotiation
sessions are scheduled for next week, May 26th and the following week June 1st. So, I do think I haven't run this by you, but I think it would make sense probably to have have executive session at the June 3rd meeting where we can um share with you in more detail what by
then, you know, hopefully uh we will be very close um to some agreements to be able to share and discuss. So, I I would only say that across the state we're seeing a lot of um
districts and unions have uh friction in their work together to try to come to consensus. Uh this has been one of the most um productive and uh professional negotiations that I think I've ever encountered uh in my
time and previous time in Milton and my time in Belmont. Just want to thank the MBA for their uh ability to listen and respond and uh partner and meet in the middle in some places. Uh and uh also the school committee and the team that we have to do the same. It's been really I think it's been very
productive and we did start late because they needed some time uh and to be able to be finished in June of that year with all the time that we had to to miss uh for for very good reasons. Um I think it's it's remarkable in this day and age when some people are doing it
for two years and we'll be doing it for about six months and I think it's really uh it speaks to the good culture that's being uh played out in our schools right now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Uh school building committee updates
very short. Uh still working on two paths. We have a committee established to try and go through uh for the OPM selection. We've kind of talked about that before. So, they're posting and then they're going to review the submissions. So, that through [snorts] the MSBA process
is still moving forward and then we did talk about library and school building committee and um made a motion to kind of ask Shawn to move forward with trying to secure an architect to look at the site. So, uh he is is working on finding one.
Thinks he has a kind of beat on one and so uh that's kind of both our both the scopes of work we're working on for school building. Questions on that? We'll jump to approval of minutes. See if we can get out of here by 10. Uh any edits, comments on minutes, or is there
a motion? I'll make a motion to approve the April 29th uh school committee meeting minutes. Is there a second? [snorts] Second. Great. I give it to Anna just kidding about the
loose ties. Uh all right, all in favor? It's unanimous. Uh next meeting agenda items, uh what are we covering for next week? So we have So we will have a um a preview of our uh year two goals that we
have with the um initial uh goals for next year with the leadership team that will be represented by Colin and I as we work with them. Um we will also go over a round two of labor A. Uh we we may we will have an executive session to give you an update on the
negotiations. Uh we will have a policy meeting between now and then. We'll have a facilities meeting between now and then. Um I think that might be it. I'm not on finance. Yeah, we'll be in a [clears throat] finance update by then. All right, anything else comes up,
please email the agenda setting meeting here in about a week. Um any other final things? No, thank you everybody. It's so late and I said how tired we are of being together this late, but thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Then I will I will take a motion to adjourn.
So moved. Great. Is there a second? >> Second. Uh all [snorts] in favor? Return 9:59. We Thank you all. Moral victory. >> [laughter] >> Mhm.