##VIDEO ID:https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/929710?autostart=false&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false## <v Speaker 1>Good evening everyone.</v> We're gonna start tonight's meeting. Welcome to the school committee, next school committee meeting of January 27th to the 2025. We're gonna start with roll call Ms. Flats. Here, I'll, I'll, I'll take roll call very slowly so we everyone is here when I get to them. Mr. Brand Present. Ms. Collins? Yes. Thank you. I did hear from Ms. McDonough. She'll be here later. And Ms. Brune? Yes. Great. And Ms. Goce here. Great. And I'm here as well. I would like to make a motion to move into executive session to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining. If an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining physician of the public body and the chair. So declares for EAN, unit A and B, administrative assistance, food service, paraprofessionals and custodial and maintenance. Second roll call vote. Ms. Laers, Mr. Brand? Yes. Ms. Collins? Yes. Ms. Brunell? Yes. Ms. Goeth? Yes. And Emma I, yes. We will now enter into executive session and return to open meeting at about 6 35. Good evening again and welcome again to our January 27th school committee. Next school committee meeting. We just did roll call and the next executive session. We're back in open meeting and we will continue with Pledge of Allegiance and moment of silence. So please everyone stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance. <v Speaker 2>I pledge allegiance to the flag</v> of the United States of America. Enter the republic approach. It stands one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justices for all. <v Speaker 1>Thanks everyone for joining us in that moment of silence</v> to honor those who've sacrificed for our country. We will now go into announcements. I have one, but I can wait if others have any announcements. <v Speaker 3>I have a brief</v> <v Speaker 1>One. Sure.</v> <v Speaker 4>Good evening everybody. I just received an email from</v> Craig Chisholm today with an exciting announcement related to some of our kids who went to the Massachusetts Music Education Association, Allstate auditions. So the following students will be attending the MMEA, which is the acronym for that conference in Worcester on Friday, March 28th, and then Symphony Hall on Saturday, March 29th. All students are in the NHS Wind Ensemble directed by Scott Morrell, Rachel Atkin, who plays bassoon. Eric Broberg who plays trombone. Justin la clarinet. Ben saw what dip, I hope I said that correctly. French horn. You know it. Oh, oh, excellent. And Ellie Stevens from Bassoon Poo plays the bassoon. Congratulations to all the students, their teachers and their families. We're really, really proud of them. <v Speaker 1>Great. My announcement is just a really a note of</v> of appreciation to spark kindness and the other partners in our community who organized last Monday, January 20th, our annual MLK community celebration. And I wanted to actually, we have a little show and tell so there was <v Speaker 3>To hold it.</v> Yeah, sure. <v Speaker 1>As part of the event, there were great speeches</v> and performances including sun and sights and sounds singing. And also we had this, there was a speaker, Jamil Adams, who spoke about the importance of MLK Day and his wife Amy Adams was there as well. She's an artist. While he was speaking, she was sitting on stage right next to him, literally in this, in real time painting. This painting that reflected what he was saying. And so Ms. Brunell kindly asked them to, if we can take the painting so that we can display it here in a public schools, we'll we'll figure out plan for exactly where. But I just wanted to show this beautiful painting that literally was painted right in front of the eyes of all those sweat demo k, event Ms. Brunell, do you wanna add anything? <v Speaker 5>Just that spark kindness then followed up</v> and they sent us a tiny URL and Linda, I only just sent it to you, but maybe somehow we can get that tiny URL out to the public because that will show a link to this. And then also the student artwork that was celebrated that night, that day as well. Such a nice community event. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. So that tiny URL has the</v> recording to the whole event. Yes. Where actually some of our students presented their work, both live and in video. And our very own superintendent and our director of SEL and equity spoke as well. So that's that announcement. Any other announcements from anyone else? Yeah, Ms. Collins. <v Speaker 6>Mine is more of a plea than an announcement. Sure.</v> Last year I quite the happenstance unfortunately stumbled across the lunar New Year celebration put on by the Chinese club at the high school. I haven't seen anything about it this year. I would love to know about it if it's there, and encourage everybody to per to attend. It was, it was just a fabulous day. <v Speaker 1>Sure. We can find that</v> <v Speaker 6>Sue might have an answer. Yes,</v> <v Speaker 7>I can.</v> Actually. It came across my desk today, so they are working on the final details, but it is scheduled for February 8th and the flyers should be coming out shortly. <v Speaker 1>Great. Any other announcements?</v> Seeing none, we'll move to public speak. I'll read the public speak policy. Public speak is scheduled for a period of 15 minutes. Each speaker will be permanent a maximum of three minutes during which time they can speak about topics within the scope of responsibility of the school committee. All remarks will be addressed to the school committee chair. Public speak is not a time for debate or response to comments by the school committee. Anyone here either in person or virtually for public speak? No, our list is empty and my inbox is empty as well. So I guess we'll move on and we'll start with the teacher representative and then go to the student representative. And lastly, our micro representative, Ms. Mc. <v Speaker 8>Oh, the green light was on. Sorry,</v> I don't have any comments to make at this time. Thank you though. No problem. <v Speaker 9>So there's some, alright,</v> so there's some stuff at Natick High School like. So this past week we just finished midterms and Natick High School is starting in semester two this week. And also the Natick Student Council is starting with the flower drive. So we're gonna like go into classrooms on Valentine's Day and hand out flowers to a few lucky people. And to answer Ms. Collins question, adding onto what the teacher said, we do have the Lunar New Year celebration on February 8th. And if you would like to purchase tickets, you could find a Chinese Culture Club member or contact Ying Zoo and her emails like Wise zsu@students.na at natick ps.org if you would like to find out more information. And other than that, there's no other announcements for us to make. <v Speaker 1>Great. Thank you Ms. Scott.</v> <v Speaker 10>I have no announcements either.</v> <v Speaker 1>Great. Thanks. Well, thanks all three of you.</v> We'll now move to the consent agenda. I'll take a motion to approve the consent agenda unless there's any items to be removed. <v Speaker 10>Yeah, I'd like to pull out the donations memo please.</v> <v Speaker 1>Sure. So remove item number three.</v> I'll take a motion to approve the other two items. So moved. Consent agenda <v Speaker 6>Second.</v> <v Speaker 1>All those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions?</v> So the motion is approved and Ms. Bodon, do you wanna speak about the the third item? <v Speaker 10>Yeah. So with the donation memo, you can see</v> that there's two donations to the class of 2025. Now, obviously the class of 25 has had some real challenges with fundraising, but it's become clear sort of through this process that I think we have some challenges, which e with each of the classes at the high school attempting to raise the amount of money that they are required to raise in order to put on the events that they want to put on their junior and senior year. It's sort of unclear to families mostly what the dues are for. They're called dues, but all families are asked to pay for them to pay them. It's unclear the timeline to families when the these dues should be paid. They are the primary source of raising thousands of dollars that each class is trying to do. And the I'm, so I think, I don't know if we as a committee or it's an ask of, of the high school to try to create a better strategy for families to understand the dues. Maybe it needs a better name, what they're for, how when the timeline is that families should pay for them. And then the other piece of this is that I don't know how many families actually make the payments. I, I think a large majority do. The class officers in each class are then asked to raise beyond that thousands of dollars, which often the families are not involved until, in this case it became sort of like a really challenging moment for the class. So I just think we need a better strategy for partnering with families because the class officers are very capable. But asking them to raise like 20 or $30,000 is like not possible. I mean, that's like a huge amount of money that PTOs struggle to like raise. And so I just say this because I think we need a new system, and I don't actually think it's in school committee purview, but we've been asked to approve these donations tonight. And as we can see, the class of 2025 is still trying to raise money. So I just say that and hopefully this can be addressed in future years or just, <v Speaker 1>Yeah.</v> Ms. Collins, oh, sorry. You done? <v Speaker 10>I'm gonna make a motion to approve. Yeah.</v> And so I would make a motion to approve these donations with an ask to get some more clarity around the high school. <v Speaker 6>Second, I was just gonna ask</v> <v Speaker 11>If you still wanted the Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 4>Approval.</v> <v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, Mr.</v> <v Speaker 12>I don't have all the details, but I have spoken</v> with Gier about it. We can get you that for the next meeting. Great, <v Speaker 11>Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 1>Before</v> <v Speaker 3>We do this, do</v> <v Speaker 4>Do these, whatever.</v> <v Speaker 3>That's totally,</v> <v Speaker 1>So you made the</v> motion to approve the nation. So point while taken. And Kathy, you second Ms. Collins, you seconded it. All those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions, the motion is approved. So with that, we'll move to the superintendents report. <v Speaker 4>Excellent. Thank you. And thanks Ms. McDonough.</v> We're gonna actually go a little out of order, but we're gonna start today with last week or last coup couple weeks ago, we heard a really great and informative presentation around our multilingual learners or English learners. And today we're gonna hear special education highlights from members of our special education team. So if you wanna come forward and introduce yourselves, we're really excited to hear your report and I'm sure to engage in some dialogue after. Welcome. <v Speaker 11>Hi everybody.</v> <v Speaker 4>Lemme</v> <v Speaker 11>Just get this open here.</v> <v Speaker 4>Ms. Miller, can you please start with intros? I was</v> <v Speaker 11>Just gonna do that.</v> Yes. Perfect. Thanks. My computer open. So thank you for having us tonight. My name is Erin Miller. I'm the Director of Student Services and Equity. I have two of my colleagues here from the middle school and elementary school levels. Ms. Jen Braman Par is our Kennedy Special Education Coordinator. And Lisa Seer is our memorial special ed coordinator. So they'll be, they'll, they're here tonight to help us answer any questions that you might have about particular levels and also add to the discussion as well. All right. So again, thank you for having us. Every year we, we try to come in and do, in the last couple years, the last three years that I've been in this role at central office, we've been doing kind of a mid-year state of the union, and then we do an end of the year and, and kind of look at our data to see where we are with our special ed processes. So just to start, oh, thank you. Just to start, you'll see that when you look at our numbers, where we are right now, this is as our October one DS E count. So we have another count coming up in March. But a lot of the numbers that you're gonna see today are, are based on our October one count of our students with eligible for special education at about 974 students as of October one. That's a variable number to to understand. So that's an ever changing number. That number is higher as of today. But that is that. But just so you have context of what, what all the dates that you see up there from the October one previous years, it's important to also understand, you're gonna see some different numbers throughout this presentation. When we report our numbers for special education to, to the state, we're always reporting our students who receive services. So we're talking about any student from pre-K to 22 years old who is enrolled in the district receiving services and our out district students. There's also another subgroup of students called our, we call them our school, 86 and 96. That's how we code them. But those are our students who are attending private school placements, unilaterally placed by their families, but also have an an IEP through the Natick Public schools that we monitor. We might not service all of those students, but we monitor their IEP and hold annual reviews and re-eval. So that's, you're gonna see that number come up. That's about another 60 or so students. <v Speaker 13>Okay.</v> Am I, I don't, can you just, now your pointers are moving out there. Oh, there you go. There we go. <v Speaker 11>Okay. So here you're gonna see our number.</v> You'll see this is where, when the first, the two top lines. You'll just see kind of the, that, that privately placed number. But to look at the rest of 'em, this is, this just shows kind of the trajectory of our students and where our populations, the numbers of our populations at each school level. So as of now, as of October one, you'll see that we are, we're actually down 33 students from last year. But again, I do wanna preface in this, throughout this presentation, a lot of these numbers that you're gonna see, the data that our coordinators collected on evaluations and caseloads and all those things was really up to date of January 15th. But it's important to understand in special education, that is a very fluid number based on initial evaluations and so forth. So we'll talk about that as time goes on. But as of the pull of this, we are, we are looking at, we are down 33 students who receive special education services. The next chart just kind of shows you where are the population of students per grade. You'll see we have some, some larger grades. The, the, obviously pre-K is, is a growing population of our students with, with special needs next year. That will have a big impact on our kindergarten next year. We are already looking at some schools. We have one school in particular that is already projected to have 18 students on IEPs in the kindergarten next year. That's a classroom, right? So typically in the pre previous years where anywhere around, you know, 6, 8, 10 students on an IEP at the kindergarten grade level per at, at, at starting the, the school year, there was one school in particular that would be starting at 18 to start the year next year. So that's important. That's just a p important to see kind of those, those larger, those, some of those years. Obviously our eighth grade's, a larger grade. I don't know if the eighth grade's a bigger grade in general, but that it, it can, yeah. But that is a, that is obviously moving into ninth grade next year that's gonna be a, a larger class for the, at the high school. So this just kind of talks about our disability types, and I wanna just kind of explain what I mean by disability type. When we look at special education, when we find students eligible for special education, they qualify under one or multiple disability categories. So it's all of these. So it could be autism, developmental delay, which means a delay in a variety of areas that could be up to students from three to nine years old. Intellectual is talking about our students with more significant cognitive impairments. Sensory could be anything from, it could be hearing, it could be audiology, it could be vision, whatever that might be. Neurological is a, is a, is a piece of it. You know, sometimes you think about our students who might have some traumatic, traumatic brain injury, but it also talks about our students who have significant processing disabilities. So they might qualify under, under neurological emotional is our students with emotional disabilities. It could be anxiety, depression, or a variety of areas. Communication is where we look at our students with more global delays. But it's, but maybe they don't meet a criteria for intellectual impairments, but they have some more disability that might affect them across all content areas, which is a little different than SLD that I'll talk about in a minute. Physical could be a student with a physical impairment or, you know, it, it just speaks to physical impairments. Health is typically looking at our students with A DHD is most where our, our health students qualify. Our a d our students with A DHD qualify under the health impairment. SLD is specific learning disability, where that could be anything from, it could be a student with a reading disability, a math disability, an oral language disability, a comprehension disability, but, or it could be a variety of areas that, that they could qualify under specific learning disability and then multiple disabilities. That's a changing category. So the, you all know that we started the new IEP this year. Previously in the old IEP, you had a primary disability and possibly a secondary dis disability and a tertiary disability that doesn't exist anymore. You can qualify under multiple areas and it's not considered, but it's difficult to assess through our data because you can't really parse out which one's kind of, it doesn't have like one's the, the priority area. But you could have multiple disability under the new IEP. And they're not considered like a primary secondary, they're just, it could be multiple areas. So it's, when we look at our data, that's gonna be something in the, in, in the upcoming years, we're gonna have to parse out a little bit better. So just this visual shows you what most of our students are qualifying under. So you'll see that the majority of our students who receive special education, the three primary areas that we see the most of are our students with specific learning disabilities, health disabilities, A DHD or emotional disabilities. Developmental delay is also a large portion of that, but that is predominantly many of our preschool students qualify under developmental delay. But it's important to note the developmental delay at nine years old typically turns into a diff, it, it does turn into a different category. So some of these students who have developmental delay in the future might have any, it could be a number of, it could of things, it could be an SLD, it in reading, it could be an emotional disability, it could be health. But many of those, that's the developmental delay typically is they're qualifying under, under after nine years old. So this is just, I know there's always questions about caseloads and, and what do the caseloads look like in Natick and are they manageable? I am, this is last year's caseload analysis, just so you have a, a comparison to look at the two years. So I just wanna clarify a couple things here. If you look at the program versus the learning center, when we talk about a program caseload, what I, what that refers to is our students who, who are, who are receiving services primarily through a substantially separate program. Or it might not always be a substantially separate, but some sort of program, whether it's a social emotional program or a program to address academic needs. Or it could be students with more significant learning disabilities, cognitive impairments. That is our, you, you might hear me often talk about our access programs or our Compass programs. Those are our students. When I talk about program caseloads, those are significantly smaller caseloads, obviously, because they are there, there's, there are fewer students who are receiving that level of instruction and therefore they have some more targeted intervention. I just wanna clarify, if you look at Memorial, the reason why that there's an NA is 'cause currently Memorial is our, is is the school that does not have any programs. And we're working on that. And we're, we're gonna talk about that a little bit tonight. But that is something that, so that, that's the one school that doesn't have any programs to be able to, to list the caseloads there. But you'll see that even our learning center caseloads, so our learning center caseloads refers to our students who are receiving more it of their services in the inclusion mainstream environment. So those caseloads are a little bit higher. But I will be on, i i, in talking to my colleagues across the Metro West area, our caseloads are very manageable. They are, we, we really do, there are a couple that we're gonna talk about in the next slide that we're gonna, how we're gonna address that. But they really are manageable caseloads. We've worked to really balance and shifting our teacher teachers to the appropriate schools to around if we need to. So for example, this year we, we had a few teachers at Wilson who we actually relo re reallocated to Kennedy to balance out those caseloads. So we really do try to look at that every year to make sure that caseloads are not only manageable, but they're equitable across the district. So this is our, this year's caseload. So you'll see that our caseloads are actually smaller than last year. They, they are manageable. The the one, there are a couple places that we're gonna be looking at when we look at staffing and what that might look like. But our caseloads are across, again, if I compare them to our, our local districts, we really do have manageable caseloads and we are getting quite far more equitable across the district. There are a couple areas, like you'll see memorial's, caseload, like that is an area that we need to look at. There's a, that's where memorial's at 23 compared to Brown, where it's 14 kids per, per per caseload. So the other thing to be mindful about a caseload is that this is an average of special education teachers at different levels. There are other service providers who might be the case manager or kind of overseeing a case. So for example, if there's a student at the elementary level who is receiving predominantly speech and language services and they're not receiving a great deal of academic services or other services, the speech pathologist could be the person who's actually the case manager. So it does skew this a little bit. This is an average based on the amount of teachers. I'm happy to do a greater analysis of our service providers and share that with you at another time. But that is something to keep note of. So when you see things like, Lilja has a caseload of 17.75, or Memorial has 23, that might mean that there's a school psychologist who maybe is the case manager for, for, for a couple of these cases. So it's not as discrepant across those two schools. It, it might seem like an inflated number based on the amount of special ed teachers. So this is just a, a, a, a visual to show you the students that the number of our students who participate in programs versus participate in our inclusion mainstream. I think it's really important to highlight this because we have, I think it's, it's, it's about 24% of our students participate in some sort of programming. I I think that's really important for the community to understand. The level of programming that Natick provides that we are able to keep students in district is, is remarkable. We are, we have a program at almost every school now. We have parallel programs at our middle schools and our elementary schools now to be able to address. We've really tried to work to help have students stay in their neighborhood school. And we're, we're always contin trying to continually expand that. We have a continuum of our programs. So for example, at the elementary level, we have, every program has, every school has, except for Memorial, but we're working on it has an access program. But with that said, we also have two programs at lilja that is, it meets the, the continuum. So if a student is not making progress in the ACCESS program, we have a more restrictive program at LILJA that meets the needs of our, our most vulnerable learners in the district, our students in that program. And so that program alone, the level of resources that are in that program, but saves the district, the outta district costs. These are kids who typically would be out of district if we didn't have a program like this. So I think it's really important just to capture that. I mean, the level of programming is, is such a cost savings for the districts that we're able to educate our students and, you know, we staff them well and we, and we provide a lot of professional development and, but we're able to keep kids in district because of that. And I think it's really a testament to the, to the work that the coordinators and the teachers in these programs are, are doing. I also put a link to the continuum of services down there. 'cause I know there were some questions about kind of what does the programming look like. It's not just about programs that we have. Our program, our special ed program is a continuum. We have everything from inclusion services to, well, first we start with consultation services to our inclusion services, our co-teaching at the middle school and high school. And then we, we, but that goes a little bit into more of how we can meet the needs of individual learners and, and how, and how we do that. And so I can, I'm happy to at some point go over that if that's something, if there's questions on that. So this is always a, a, a big topic is our referrals. So our referrals refers to our number of newly identified students with special needs every year. Our initial evaluations. So this is a, this is a growing number. So you're gonna see that, you know, right now the district is, we've had 199 initial referrals this year. I wanna be clear here. 'cause you're gonna see the number of people, the number of referrals, the number have qualified and that not qualified. I also wanna make sure there's a, there's a note that there are 79 as of January 15, 15th out of 199 referrals, there are still 79 children that we have not conducted those initial evaluation meetings yet. So we don't know if they've qualified or not qualified yet. So the data's the data is variable. It's a, it's, it's in flux. Okay. So the I and honestly, that number right, the numbers that you see up there are probably very different today because of the timelines that we work under than, than they were on on January 15th. The story to tell here is that, that, you know, I, one piece that I typically have shared in my previous presentations is the information around parent referrals versus school referrals. Anecdotally, I will say that traditionally whenever there's a school referral, very often those students qualify for special education. That is a, that our parent referrals often are ones that, that, that don't have the, the, the, the qualify as much. But I'm happy to get that data to share with exactly with you by the end of the year. I shared that last year, I think last year, anecdotally I can share that about 49% of our, of our parent referrals qualified, whereas about 79% of our school referrals qualified. So that's, that's, I would say that's the, the same story today. The other piece that we're, we wanna look at is having conversations about our students who are engaging in intervention prior to special education. So when a parent calls for an evaluation in Natick, they will typically reach out to the coordinators here. The coordinators will pick up the phone and have a conversation with families and say, so talk to me about what your concerns are. What is your suspected disability? Is the question we typically ask. And we ask them, what, what are your, you know, and that from that they might say there's some attentional issues. And then, you know, and then we decide how we're gonna evaluate them. But part of that conversation is also that are there other interventions that we should engage in prior to special education? A family has the right to always move forward with an evaluation. We we're never gonna deny an evaluation, but we might say, well, have we considered any, any intervention prior to that? Have we, you know, are there is is do we need to have them kind of an interventionist work with them or whatever it looks like at the, at the different levels, maybe a school counselor. So we do have a number of students who engage in that RTI process either instead of, and then wait for the evaluation or concurrently. And a lot of students, a lot of families elect to do that. They might say to us, I want them to do the intervention, but I also want them to start the evaluation process. And that can happen as well. So one thing is, I'd like to see change a little bit is that number of our, per that data, 73%, 73 of the, of the initial referrals to date have engaged in RTI. That's about 37%. So I would like to try to see, expand that number a little bit. But it's also important to, to note here that sometimes when these students are referred by parents, they might not have had the opportunity to go through RTI. So it's not that the district didn't recognize that they need RTI, it might have been a parent just reached out to have an evaluation and they might have just, and then we might, like I said, do RTI concurrently, but they might decide, no, I just wanna go forward with the eval. So that number is a little, I wanna be mindful of that number. That doesn't mean that the district isn't providing intervention. There are a lot of factors to that. But that is a number that we would like to see more students engaged in intervention prior to evaluation. Just a, a quick note on that last slide was the trajectory that we're in. So in the last two years, we landed at the end of the year at 315 evaluations and I think 329 evaluations last year. We are very much on trajectory to be in that 300 plus range of initial evaluations. So that is, that is a post COVI trajectory that we continue to see grow is in our number of evaluations. So this is our, this is, these are the disability areas that we're, we're hearing from families when or or from the school personnel when they're calling us and saying, I, my, my i my child is struggling. These are the things I'm seeing. That's what we call our suspected disability. These are the primary, primary areas that we are seeing on the reason for referral. And again, it's commensurate with our findings. It's our a DD health diagnosis, specific learning disabilities and emotional. And then of course the developmental delay with our younger students. This is a snapshot in time. Again, this is a, this is a graph that very much is probably changed since January 15th. You will see that this is where the blue is our suspected disability versus the kids, the number of students who are actually qualifying. So for example, out of out, I gosh, I can't read that from there, but our, our students with a, a family or a, the school might, might look at a suspected disability of autism. So right now we're saying that there were 12 students identified with a suspected disability and four of those students have qualified to date. But again, if I redid these numbers with my, with my colleagues, I, this is gonna be a very, this, this, this chart is gonna be very different today than it was January 15th given the, our timelines. So moving to OUTTA district. So this is a nice trajectory to see that our number of outta district students is going down. We are, you know, we have, we have consistently gone down. We are looking at, right now we are, we have 59 students outta district right now and we are projected to have 57 or maybe even less next year. 'cause I wanted to be, I wanted to be, there are two students who are, who we know are graduating, but we also know that we are anticipating that we could potentially be bringing two to three students back to the district. And there's some questions about when to bring a student back to the district. That is a very, that is, that's a tough question to answer 'cause it's so individual based. But there are students who have just demonstrated progress or have, you know, oftentimes, you know, I think about some of our students who maybe have gone outta district for maybe social emotional dysregulation or behavioral behavior dysregulation. That is the type of student that sometimes they need to go outta district to be able to really have some targeted instruction to be able to work on, on, on their, their regulation skills. But when they have learned those skills and been able to apply those skills, that's the perfect example of a student that we're able to bring back to the district as they get older. So that is a conversation with many families when we're talking about going on a district with that student, with the, with emotional dysregulation. I often say to those families, we, we exp we expect your child to be back at late middle school or by high school because they're gonna be able to learn all those skills. And that is a real true success story. We do bring a number of students back. We've also brought a number of students back with our, who have visual impairments who have, who have gone to some specialized schools as when they're younger, but then they've been able to come back to school with, with appropriate services and, you know, and and consultation models here in the district. So that's another population that, that we are typically bringing back. <v Speaker 14>Can I say something about that too? Yeah.</v> I think it's important to note the building of the Compass program at Kennedy has really helped with a lot of that too. You know, socially, emotionally we weren't able to support students at Kennedy and we were obviously making the decision to potentially move them to Wilson where their program was. But I think that becomes really challenging for families. And so sometimes the decision was made, is it not on <v Speaker 11>They</v> <v Speaker 14>Know it.</v> No, it was not on. So sometimes that decision was made for students to go out of district as opposed to going to Wilson, you know, because it is a team decision. So I think building programs within our district is really, you know, when we have the capacity to do so, it really does help a lot of students, you know, be able to stay in their home schools and whatnot. So, <v Speaker 11>Okay, so this is just a snapshot of</v> what our referrals look like every year. So they're, you know, we do have students every year who do require a more restrictive setting and do require out of district programming. This year we have seven students who have been referred for out of district and currently five of those students in placed, two of those students are pending placement. The other piece is that, you know, outta district programs, I don't are they're, they're really difficult to access right now. And so they're, we're really, it's, it's, it's becoming incredibly competitive for, for outta district programs right now. The wait lists and the, the level of staffing that these schools have. So when we're making a decision to send a student out a district, it's a, it's a, it's a incredible decision to, to, because that it often requires wait time and some interim planning and things like that. So it's just important. It's, it's, we're really very mindful about OUTTA district and like we said, Jen said, our programs, we are only building programs to try to keep to, to, to not only avoid sending students outta district, but to keep, to keep our, to bring our students back as well. Again, most of our current referrals are addressing social, emotional, or specific learning disabilities in the area of reading. Five, five OUTTA seven students require some very specialized therapeutic programming. And again, we project to bring two to three students back in the district this year. There's already Ms. Stanton, our district coordinator is already working with families to bring, to bring in a couple students back to district next year. So just some quick takeaways about initial referrals. So, like I said, suspected disability in the area, emotional health and specific learning disabilities makes up the most of our evaluations. I think it's important for this team to understand the role of a special educator, special education teacher in, in evaluation 199 evaluations. If you, if I, if I gave, I, I looked at a conservative number of 15 hours per eval. When I say hours of an eval, that means kind of beginning to end of collecting data, co conducting the assessment, doing observations, speaking to teachers, speaking to parents, writing reports, conducting an IEP meeting and then writing an IEP with multiple service providers. I said 15 hours, but I will be honest, we're probably talking 25 to 30 hours per avail between multiple service providers. That is two 2,985 hours of work. So it's just important to understand the role of a special education teacher. They are not only just providing services and doing consultation and doing writing IEPs, they are also the folks who conduct these reevaluations and initial evaluations. That is time during their day that they have to find this time. 'cause we can only assess kids during the day. So this happens within their school day. This they're, they're doing the additional tasks beyond their, their teaching duties. So I just thought it was important to highlight the, the work of, of these folks and the hours that goes into that, given the significant referral. Social emotional is, is has in the last three years has been a, an area that we have seen a lot of student need. And it's, it just, it's Dr. Ferguson and I are continually looking at our interventions for our social emotional, we're looking at our social emotional interventions on how we're looking at this before we get to the special ed process because that is a large number of our evaluations. More students are qualifying than are not qualifying. It's just important to note that. And then again, just looking at the trajectory just to re reit, reiterate that we are talking about being at the same place this year. We expect, I think if I, if I pulled our, our coordinators, they've probably gotten multiple, multiple initial evaluation requests this week or this week and last week alone. Anything else about that you wanna <v Speaker 14>Speak to?</v> I don't think so. I know we have a lot of outstanding evaluations at Kennedy that we haven't made determinations yet. Really like most, I think like, I think out of four, I think 14 of them are still outstanding out of the 16 we had. So same. <v Speaker 11>Yeah. And,</v> and it's important to know this is the time of year that we're gonna continue. We'll we will see an uptick of evaluations because after, typically around when, when report cards come out, elementary school, this is the, I think they come out June 31st. Yeah. So typically, typically right after report cards is when we see, we start to get a lot of calls from families. So this is the time of year that we will February and March are very busy. <v Speaker 14>Yeah. Parent conferences. Yeah, parent conferences. Right.</v> Yeah. <v Speaker 11>Next slide. Thanks.</v> So just another couple quick takeaways. Enrollment and initial evals are up, but caseloads are staying consistent. So, you know, I think it's important to note that there are still students who are, have a lot of great success stories that students are coming off IEPs and 'cause they're, they're meeting their goals and they, they no longer require specialized instruction. And we're also, so I think that's an important story to tell that as much as it sounds like it's we're just growing, growing, growing, we, we are pretty leveled off. You look at our, the first slide we had, our number, our percentages is down from last year. So I think that's important to note. Caseloads are manageable, but complexity is growing. So the, the the, it's it, it's not always about the number on your caseload. I'm often reminded of that with our service providers. It's not always about the number of students on your caseload. It could be, but there could be a great deal of complexity that goes into specific students, specific student needs on your caseload. That's a really important to note about our program students, our program teachers might be responsible for, they might have five kids on their caseload, but there are five very, very complex students who require a great deal of wraparound services and communication and hands-on work that could be different than their colleague who has more of a learning center caseload. So again, what I said earlier, while data's data is reported for primary disability categories, it's important to note that many students are qualifying under multiple categories. Now that's changing and that will be something we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to present to you differently in the future. But with our, once we're, every IEP is transferred to a new IEP, we're gonna have to look at what the, what the kind of the, the co disability categories that's looking like, what those trends are looking like. Next one. So another trend that we're seeing is the number of neuropsychological evaluations that we're receiving this year. We are at 55 to date. That's important to know that. So that's when a parent goes out and gets a private evaluation on their own. We are required by law under when, if a student is, is a student, identifies as a student receiving special education services that we meet within 10 days of, of, of receipt of that outside evaluation. So again, just another piece for, for the, the committee to know about kind of the complexity of the special education role we meet on those evaluations. We have the right as a district to always conduct our own evaluations, which, which I strongly recommend because we like to be able to gather our own data as well. So that's another 55 assessments that happen when we, when we receive an outside evaluation like that. And we always, you know, to be able to look at recommendations, you know, we always meet and, and, and respond to that. We might not always accept the findings in that moment, but we always, we do like to do our own testing. So that just to kind of, to look at kind of the complexity of the role. Again, again, our students who most, the more students who are requiring, requiring outta district programming is due to social emotional needs. And that might manifest behaviorally or safety concerns. That's really, you know, it's, it's a grave decision to send a student out a district. And that really is when that, that comes down to when we are seeing that the, the, the, the Natick environment or our program environment is, is becoming unsafe for some students. That's when we have to make that decision. And then the other piece that we talked about a couple weeks ago is that we are seeing far more English language learners identified for special education services. And so right now we have 19 initial evaluations that we are conducting with our, with, with English language learners. Now with that is another piece that is complexity of in the budget constraints is a piece to bring in there is that, you know, many of these students we are conducting bilingual evaluations and so that means we are typically contracting out and we're hiring evaluators that are tough to come by. But we are hiring folks to come and do evaluations because we wanna make sure we get it right. We can use translators, but whenever possible we always try to evaluate the, the student in their primary language. So that is another, that's a new budgetary piece that we have seen this year in particular. I think that's it for that. I just wanted to highlight on a couple things that I didn't mention for this. I did, that was kind of my snapshot, but I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things that are happening in the department overall. So one thing that Ms. Baloni and I have talked to to you about a little bit is we have been looking at our instructional methodology at our, in our special education classrooms and in particular our small group classrooms. Really I think what Ms. Baloni and I are, our message is that we should be using general education curriculum whenever possible for our students and we should be accommodating and modifying that as appropriate. But there are times when we need to look at other, other instruction. And so that's something that Ms. Baloni and I have been talking with different teams about, about what does that curriculum look like? How are we, how are we not supplanting curriculum but we are supplementing, so for example, at the elementary level we have the, the IM math program. We are really looking at, we, we want students in small groups to be using the IM program, but we also understand that they might have math goals that that need to be addressed outside of that. So what are some supplementary curriculum tools that we can be using across the district that's consistent so that students are getting the same, the same tools and, and instructional methods across the district at the elementary level. So these are the things we've been talking about at and, and in particular at the middle school and high school level about how are we, what, what is, what does the curriculum look like in these small group classes so that kids are getting the breadth of general ed curriculum, like their peers whenever possible. Another piece that we're looking at is we're looking at the elementary model and we're looking at some more inclusion opportunities. Our teachers at the elementary level are fantastic, but we do a lot of pull out services where, where the teachers are pulling students out of the gen ed classroom to work on phonology or math or whatever that skill might be. We are starting to exam to, to look and see how we can build some more inclusion opportunities, in particular the math program and seeing how our teachers can push into the general education classrooms more often. So that's a conversation we're having and looking at different criteria with our elementary learning center teachers about how do kids qualify for that, what students need that. And so we're developing some criteria around that. Another piece that we have been look, have been doing is our CPA series with the Natick cpac. So we have, this has been a couple years now, but we really have some strong programming happening where we're doing some monthly sessions about different topical things. We had our first parent forum, I think in November we had our first parent forum and we had a few parents who, who led that forum for us parent panel. And we talked about kind of, i, I think the topic was something of, you know, what you need to know before, during, and after the IEP process. And it was great. It was, we had a lot of parents come out and speak to parents who have been through this process. We talked about resources for families in the local communities. We are doing a, we're having a parent series, a neurodiversity fair in, in March where we're gonna be having another parent forum with parents who are gonna be speaking about this. And then we also are going to have local agencies. We're gonna have a panel, a panel review and then outside of that we will be having, we'll be having local agencies have like a fair like booth set up to be able to be a resource fair for families. So that's happening in, in, in March, excuse me. And then, you know, but we have some ongoing events that are happening with our CPAC that I think have been really, you know, I'm really pleased with the attendance and we're getting more parents involved and I think the more parents can hear from other parents I think has been really rewarding and valuable for a lot of families in town. I think that's it for me. Anything else that you wanna, no. Alright. Alright. <v Speaker 1>Any questions from committee Mr. Brand and Ms. Collins?</v> <v Speaker 15>Thank you. Great presentation. Lots of great data.</v> One question you, you mentioned that the caseloads were manageable, but complexity was rising or rising concern. Can, can you give a little bit more context about what manageable means? How close are we to not manageable? <v Speaker 11>Well it's, that's a,</v> I'll let these folks talk about their levels. It's, it's, it's, it's hard to speak about that in one context because let's, for example, a high school caseload could mean that you might have a student that you see in one co-taught class, but they're on your caseload. So as a case, this is a good, that's, this is a good way to start a case manager's role could be one consistency across the district. If you're the case manager for a student, you are the IEP coordinator for that student. You are the go-to for that parent. So wherever level you're in, whoever your case manager is, that means that that, that person will be at your IEP meeting. They'll be sending you out documentation for your IEP meeting. They'll be your, your your, if you have a concern throughout the year, they're your person you go to. So that's pretty, that's standard as a case manager. When we get to different levels, it depend, it, it's, it varies on the frequency that they might work with you. So it's, it's hard to answer that question in, in globally, but I'll let you guys kind of speak to the complexities at the elementary and middle school level if that <v Speaker 14>Helps.</v> Yeah, I mean I think, well one thing that helps a lot is programs help, right? When things get very complex for students, sometimes having, you know, the case manager or the student move to a program helps because that's that it's meant for that case manager to have less students and they can manage more behind the scenes for students. So that's one way that we try to help make it more manageable. Another way is when we schedule students, we think about types of methodologies that students require. We might group, you know, maybe five students together that might need a similar methodology so that the special ed teacher becomes specialized maybe in that type of methodology. And they're able to kind of do that to that group of that particular group of students. Sometimes that doesn't always work out. And so that, that's when things get hard for, or we didn't anticipate it. Or sometimes students move into the district that we don't anticipate. Maybe we don't always get it right And that can, that can make things not manageable, right? When things happen mid-year, I think that's when it gets challenging. And from my perspective in the school that I'm in, what I see is the move-ins and how that plays into the complexity for case managers and students. Because you know, in the middle school we want kids to feel adjusted and safe and stable. That's why we have teams. They feel like they have a close knit community within a school, right? Kennedy is very large now and that helps them to feel like things are a bit smaller. When students move in and change complex, like change the numbers in the year, it's harder, it's harder to kind of, and that's, that's the complexity that I see at Kennedy that really is challenging the things that we don't always anticipate or plan for that happen. And we just have to adjust and shift. And those things do happen. As Aaron talked about, like special ed is ever changing, kids move in, they move out. All of those things play into into the factors that I see in our school. I don't know what you wanna speak to Lisa, but <v Speaker 16>I mean are the same</v> that Jen had mentioned to go along with that. The complexity definitely is a factor. Especially with at Memorial we don't have a program. So therefore some of the students that might be needing had have more needs. That puts some more demands on our special education teachers and the other related SER service providers. I think another part of it too is it can, the evaluations that you mentioned that Erin mentioned, that's a huge factor too because for instance, we could start off this the year okay with manageable caseloads and then if we have a high level of evaluations, like there's also reevaluations that are a part of it. Every special education student's required to be evaluated no less than every three years. So we have the reevaluation numbers that are kind of set and we can plan for, but then it's the initial evaluations or the additional testing that comes up because all of our special education teachers who have their caseload then have to do testing for all these students and that's taking up time. So if there are a lot of students who are being evaluated, they can for us in, in January, like you had, like Erin had mentioned, we had, we've had not just initials but re-evals and additional testing, more than 25 meetings alone in January. Just in January for evaluations. And so that's going to be meeting time and evaluation time before that within the 30 days. 'cause they have a certain amount of time to get that testing done and then we have to meet within a certain amount of time. So it's a very congested, so right now in January, I, if you were gonna ask any of my staff members, they would probably say right now it's not really manageable, but you know, once February comes around, then we'll be breathing a little bit more and it might settle down because the evaluations have settled down. So that can be a huge factor too. <v Speaker 15>So just to quickly follow up on that, I'm asking</v> 'cause we're, I'm, because A, I'm curious, and B, we're in budget season and I, while I get the complexity part of this is probably impossible to fully predict and it's different at every level and different at every school. I think there's a, I hope we never get to the bad outcome of it not being manageable all of a sudden. And so that sort of margin of error I think is, that's why I'm asking is I wanna see like if there's any way to get a sense of, sorry, I wanted to see if there's any sense of like how close we are to the edge. And I understand like January might be, we might, maybe it settles down a little bit, but who knows, right? And so that's, that's why I'm asking just like that, given the budget aspect of what we do. <v Speaker 11>So I think another piece to it is that, you know,</v> to be transparent, I mean crisis management is something that is very much part of our, of the student services and, and when I, and this is not just about a case manager, this is about the student services teams at the schools, the level of crisis management that that entails. That that's a complexity that is hard to, to quantify, but that is something that is real, that is something that is very much a part of our school buildings right now and, and and what that looks like in the time that that entails, you know, so for our students, the level of BCBA support that we might need, the level of, you know, our school counselors and how their part and our school psychologists, I mean there, there's a, there's a lot that takes you away from the regular tasks of your day with some of our, with, with, with, with dysregulated students. And I think that's important to note that we, these are students that we are committed to and working through and, and providing the supports and services to learn the skills, to be able to, to work through those things. But that is a, that is something that takes a great deal of time from our, and that's not just a special ed teacher, that is our student services staff as a whole. I would say that is, that is very much a complexity that is in the last few years has been An increasing amount to, to, to really, to name that complexity. And sometimes that can be on a daily basis and an all day basis and an all day basis. And that takes you away from the services or the IEPs that you have to write or the, I mean, student need and safety is the priority no matter what. We drop everything for that. But it, it, it makes it difficult to be able to get some of those other things done within a day. <v Speaker 6>Ms. Collins, thanks.</v> Student need and safety. I just wanna say I'm really proud that Nadick has been able to bring as many kids back with right services in a safe environment from out of district placements and keep them in their neighborhood schools where we can still knowing that we have out district if, if we need it. Which made me wonder, on slide 14 is the outta district referrals. And I get that we're waiting for a couple that we think should go, but in the previous years, what happens to those two or three kids that didn't get placed? <v Speaker 11>So some kids, so, well, it's, it's, it's been,</v> it's been a challenging few years. Like I said, it's, it's, I mean the Globe has written articles about this. This is very much the, the population of students that we are sending, like I said, we are send, we are, it is the, it is the, we've done everything we have. We've done ev we've moved them through the continuum. We've tried everything. We've really like, people are really, really doing everything they can to keep kids in. But when they get to that point, when they need that level of service, the schools that we are often referring to, quite frankly, we often call these schools and they'll say, you can come to us next year. Next. I mean, and that's a reality. Like if, I mean, there are, we are, we have a couple students right now that have, we've been working for months to get them placed and we've sent out 20 referral packets. And quite frankly, these schools are just saying things to us like, we, we can maybe take you in in a year. We can, you can get on the wait list of for a year from now. We don't have, we can't, we can't take them unless we can hire another teacher. And so they have to wait for them to hire a teacher to be able to get these, this is the reality of OUTTA district right now. And the pla and, and when Natick makes the decision to send a student out, it's typically requiring some of these schools that are, that have that real targeted small, you know, intervention that they're really specific schools that we're looking at. So, but what we do in, in the interim is those kids stay in Natick and we service them, but we might have to add more staff to them. We might have to add more supports to them. We add, we add as much as we can or we, we get very creative with families about looking at like, are there, are there other specific support plans that like may we have some students who have with parent, parent agreement of course, that we've talked about, like maybe the morning works best for some kids and they then we provide tutoring in the afternoon or something like that. We have to get really creative. Yeah. But <v Speaker 6>It leads me back to what Mr.</v> Brand was asking about flexibility and having that flexibility also. I mean we typically, at least in the past, I've usually thought of McKinney-Vento as a transportation thing, but I could see where a student gets dropped on you midweek perhaps that is already in turmoil because you know, they're homeless. And I just wanna make sure that we've, we've got the flexibility that we need in the system. So thank you. The other question is about initial referrals. Are we seeing an uptick because now we're now allowed to use the word dyslexia? <v Speaker 11>You can go ahead, use my note, speak</v> <v Speaker 16>More.</v> Because at elementary level there, there might be, they might be because the neuropsychologic neuropsychologist is diagnosing dyslexia and then they want to have us look more into and confirm it. That's one of the, probably the most notable referrals that I've had this year is reading and Okay, <v Speaker 6>SLD I'm not saying it,</v> we shouldn't be sort seeing these kids or that we shouldn't use the word or whatever, but I'm just, I'm just trying to understand, you know, where our pressure points are. As Mr. Brand was asking, <v Speaker 11>And we do use the word we, we as much, we cannot,</v> we can't diagnose a student with dyslexia, but we very much understand we have, when we find students eligible, we very much, we, we might say we can't give you a medical diagnosis, but we can qualify you under an SLD in reading with characteristics of dyslexia. Just like as we can do with a DH adhd. We can't diagnose you with A DHD, but we can say you have characteristics and therefore you qualify under a health disability. <v Speaker 6>Okay.</v> <v Speaker 16>Ms. Fathers,</v> <v Speaker 11>I just wanna get back a little bit</v> to the manageable again. 'cause I know we spent a lot of time and I appreci the number I, this is kind of how, where we're, where we go moving forward, we spend a lot of time talking about the number of forms that have to be in the hours that are spent on the evals and how much time. And that takes up a lot of time. And so I'm just wondering whether moving forward, what other metrics can we look at to determine the, the out manageable by meeting all of the requirements of the state for the assessments is one level, but, and then another level of manageable is, you know, what percentage of the outcomes are being met and the goals of the IEP, like how many students are actually meeting those goals and how is that tied to being manageable? And some of these more complex cases, particularly when you get into high school, the success of a kid on an IEP when, especially when you're looking at the health kinds of diagnosis is are they navigating their life and the curriculum to the best of their ability? And like, how can we start to get to some numbers? So, so we know that the case managers have enough time not just to meet the requirements but also to meet the needs of these complex students. You know? 'cause I also, you know, one thing I've observed in the high school is you, the benefits that could be gained and I don't know remember how it happened in the middle school, but, you know, consistency of a case manager through the four years of high school. Similarly to this, you have the same guidance counselor for four years, you know, transitioning to a new case manager every year to learn the ins and outs. You know, it just, those kind, those kinds of more what other measures, you know, to make sure that the case managers have enough time. And it's a tricky one. And the one thing I'll say about that though is it's tricky. Again, it's a, it's a tough metric to look at from a, I don't know if the case manager with the number of kids is the right measure because for example, at the middle school and high school and at the elementary level, there could be multiple service providers. So like at the high school level, you could have one student who works with five special educators, but one of them is their case manager. So I don't know if we'd be able to, if, if analyzing, you know, the That's true. The efficacy of a case manager would be that would tell that story. But I see your point though. Yeah, it, <v Speaker 14>That's, I some of the things that we've done to help</v> with some of, again, with that manageable is trying to not have, you know, the special ed teaching multiple small group classes because that's a lot of planning and or having them, you know, co-teaching and math while they're teaching a small group. Like we've shifted from that and that kind of helps to be a little more focused in an area as opposed to doing everything right. And to Erin's point, there's a lot of service providers, like even in our Compass program, you know, we lean on the special education teachers that co-teach to support those students. So there's a lot of sharing. But that does come with a lot of collaboration though, and a lot of consultation because, you know, it is probably one of the most important things is communicating and collaborating about students and that everybody's on the same page. And in big schools that's hard because it's like, it's helping 'cause our technology is there. So we have that to lean on and that really has helped us be able to collaborate more effectively in larger schools and forums more than we ever have been. And you know, so that's been really helpful. But we do try to do some of those things to make things more manageable for special education. Yeah, the, <v Speaker 11>It's so complicated.</v> Just that one. What, making sure that some of those, how do we start getting metrics around those or what, what are appropriate? 'cause I don't, you don't wanna measure something that's not appropriate. Well, and I think, you know, one thing that we really wanna start getting better at looking at is looking at our, you know, our metrics about our, our, our students with special needs and our EL learners about what their scores look like. Like looking at MCA scores and looking at the gaps there. I mean, I think that is gonna be moving forward that is definitely an area that I recognize we need to pay closer attention to, to start how are we remediating those gaps and what does that data look like? And I think that is gonna be a real story to tell down the road when we're able to say that, you know, where students are making growth and being able to look at some of the scores that Dr. Dr. Bash has really been emphasizing. And I think that is really gonna be our true story of where of our success and those scores. And definitely would encourage in looking at the scores, not just are they meeting benchmarks because I don't think we always do a great job at looking at, you know, our twice exceptional kids or kids that have challenges, but also our could be high achievers. Absolutely. Now I've been on the soapbox before of the, the weird thing that the state of Massachusetts does that if a kid on an IEP exceeds expectations in the MCAS, they get a target gift card. Like, why should anyone be surprised that a kid would exceed expectations? I mean it's, it's, I think there's those subtle messages that get sent out and so measuring to just exactly, you know, what they're capable of and how they achieve. I just, I think it's important too. Yeah. And I appreciate that soapbox that I, you know, you know, I'm on the same soapbox as you, you know, that's my, those removing barriers. We, we, you know, that's near and dear Ms. Brunell, <v Speaker 5>Thank you so much for the</v> presentation for being here tonight. One thing, just a comment, I I would love to have you come back to the, to our board level meetings more often. I think as much as we talk about budget, I think we should be, you talked about how fluid this stuff is. I think we should be really looking at special education more often. And it, and that leads into my other questions. 'cause I think we've frequently focused on who the students are, again, from a budgetary perspective and as a school committee, I think we are very committed to how we are delivering services to every student. And I know you are all, it's why you got into the profession, right? And so I would love to spend time learning and hearing your reflection on how we are meeting that change in complexity because like, like that, the change from Compass just at Wilson to also at Kennedy, right? That took a lot of thought and planning and careful consideration and budgets and meetings and people, right. I wanna make sure that we're doing that all the time. And then to Matt's point are then are do you have the resources to do that? I don't know if that's possible at the elementary level, you know, I mean to have programs in every single school, especially facing a budget crisis that we're in. I'm curious about that being in the district now for 15 or 16 years. I've seen that those programs move from elementary to elementary. But certainly at our two middle schools, that seems very important to me. So that's just one thing I would love to, to get into the more the, to understand how you are changing as a special education team about the complexities. <v Speaker 11>So we do have a couple, you know, I have some, some vision</v> around programs about increasing programs. So right now we have one social emotional program at the elementary level. What we would like to do is we'd like to, we, we would, you know, Lisa is very much working with, with me to create proposals for this. We would like to add a second TLC program to Memorial. So that then has, at least we have one on each side of town that feeds into the middle schools appropriately. So, so instead of taking a student, inputting them at Ben Hem and then saying to them, 'cause what happens now is the students are all going to Ben Hem for the program. And then the students who are, who are live in the Kennedy neighborhood, they, they get the decision. They get to decide whether they wanna go to Kennedy or Wilson. But at that point it's a tricky, it's a tough decision because you, you have your cohort, your peers, you have all you've made your, your your, your connections at the, with the Benham community. But now you have the option. So what we'd like to do is at least mirror that program at the, at the, on, on the other side of town so that at least the trajectory is going your, the feeder school is you're back to your home middle school. So that is one piece that we're working on right now. And then we've also talked a little bit about looking at a more restrictive program at the middle school level with similar, I don't know if people are familiar with our North Star program, which is like an alternative kind of school within a school social emotional program. We've talked about doing that at our middle school program in the last couple years. The majority of our students who have been, who have been proposed for outta district are our middle schoolers who due to, you know, dysregulation and safety concerns, we've had to make some decisions to go outta district. We would like to have a more restrictive setting that maybe we could try to keep students in district, but provide more of a kind of school within a school therapeutics substantially separate, you know, community at one of the element, excuse me, middle schools. So that's something that the, the middle school principals and coordinators and I are, are having a conversation about I that that's gonna take some thought. That is not something you just throw a teacher into. So it's definitely something we wanna plan thoughtfully, but we recognize a need there. Yeah, <v Speaker 5>It's good to hear.</v> And eventually that would save the district money from these out district placements, right? It will, yeah, it will. <v Speaker 14>And a lot of</v> <v Speaker 11>And bring 'em back. Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 14>And a lot of pain and suffering from the families.</v> Absolutely. And the students, honestly, because I don't think they want to go out. It's like a no, it just, it, it's, it's, it's hard. It's really hard and it's hard to see that. Yeah. And to answer your question about like how do we look at that? I mean, I think that we work really hard to try to find, pull out themes that we hear that are reoc reoccurring across our schools to kind of determine like, what did the, what does the community need within Natick? 'cause every community is a bit different in terms of like, what, what struggles you have in special education. And I think that's like from the top we think about that. What are the themes that we're seeing, like coming up for students and families and then how do we support them? Sometimes programmatically, but also like using these methodologies and thinking about, you know, one thing that I really love about working in this district is I feel like we really do support students in terms of that method, like giving our teachers the methodologies they need so they can be successful in classrooms. And I think that's been a support that we've really leaned on and it really does help teachers feel confident. It helps the students get the supports that they need too. So I think that's something we also look at quite a bit too in special ed. <v Speaker 11>That's great. Just to piggyback on that one area that,</v> that over the last few years has been a a a, an area of need is, is looking at our students with language-based learning disabilities. And what we've just, what we've realized is it's not necessarily that they need a program, they need the appropriate methodologies. So all of our elementary ed special educators are Orton-Gillingham trained now, right? So we're able to educate those students with appropriate services in the school and also, and be able to be with their peers in inclusion environments, but also get the pullout services they need. You know, and then we have speech pathologists. We, we have a consult with Landmark right now that they're working with the Kennedy team and then next year they'll work with a different team. But to really build those, those methodologies, like Jen's talking about. So it's not always about a student needs a program, needs something different, they just need something that, how, how are we instructing them within their day rather than just saying, you need a location. Right? It's not about a location, it's about the services and methodologies these students are getting. Yeah. <v Speaker 5>Thank you. I've just one more question. Sure.</v> Thank you for that. I, I I think that's a, that hit, that hit that hits home I should say. My other question is about these referrals or the neuropsychs that are done, how often do we disagree? Does Natick disagree with an outside neuropsych that's been done if they're taking 3000 hours, right? And there's about, what, 1200 hours in a school year and it and one evaluation takes three thou or like the, all of them have taken 3000 hours. Is there ever a moment where, well, I'll let, my first question is how often do they differ? <v Speaker 16>So For, for me this year,</v> there's been a number where of of evaluations where we have considered parts of it and been like, okay, yep, we can see that we're already addressing it. If it's, it's because they're not just for initials, they're also for students who already have IEPs. But sometimes we get them for initials too. But we'll say, okay, we're addressing that already. And lots of times that can happen where it, it coincides, but then there are times where we need more information. And so we might not reject it right away. It's the additional testing that Erin was talking about where we might say, Hmm, we, you know, we didn't see that area before. We're gonna do more testing. So we're not saying no right now. We're gonna get more information first. And then there are times where we have said for like the same neuropsych that like, yeah, this, this part we're not agreeing with. So it might not just be the whole neuropsych, it might be parts of it where, we'll, where some of it will align, need more information or some of it will be not in line with what we know of the student every day. And so we're like, that doesn't fit with what we know about this student. So there are times that we actually reject the recommendations. <v Speaker 11>So I think it's important to also mention, it's not</v> that we disagree necessarily, it's, it's, there's two different standards. Kind of think about like, so one, there's a diagnosis, but I often say to people, a diagnosis does not equal a disability and a disability does not equal a diagnosis. And I know that's hard for families to understand when they are paying money to go out and get in some, in a, in a physician or a neuropsychologist says this child has a diagnosis of, you know, a receptive language disorder. They might have, that might be true, but it also might true that it's not a disability, right? So that's the, that's what our job is to do. That's why we do additional testing is that we wanna look at is it impacting their access to their, to to their education and are they requiring specialized instruction? So students might have a, so A DHD, you might have a disability, you might have a diagnosis of H-A-D-H-D. It doesn't necessarily mean it's an educational disability category. So that's, and that's tricky and that's hard for families to understand. They're going out and getting this expert information. But we have to look at how does that diagnosis, how does that translate to how the student is, impacts the student during the school day? And many times students have compensatory skills and they're, they don't, they don't, it doesn't equal to them being disabled by that diagnosis. So that's really what our testing and our further evaluation really try tries to help discern. Hmm. <v Speaker 14>Yeah. I think I would say to add to that too, it's also,</v> you know, our teachers are spending hours and hours with, with students in classrooms. So they have a lot of data that they're collecting every day, all day with students. Whereas, you know, neuropsychologists, it's a snapshot in time, right? Which is a sometimes a, a value valuable input. I'm not disregarding that at all, but they're all the pieces together. You have to consider what it really looks like in the classroom day to day all the time. And sometimes that's, we're not, we aren't always in agreement with that. Sometimes we are, you know, I, I would say from my side and my perspective, I would say we, we rarely reject all of it. It's usually just specific, you know, sometimes it's, you know, small group for a particular area, right? For example. And, you know, we have to think about what is least restrictive for that particular student. And that's really important across the board for us to think about for students. Inclusion is really important. And so that's another kind of perspective that we're always taking with students. So we, that's another piece that you all didn't mention that we all also consider all the time when we're thinking about those recommendations from those reports. <v Speaker 11>Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 1>So I have, do you have another question?</v> <v Speaker 11>This is just a takeaway, but for next time, I, I do, I,</v> because you keep mentioning the out of district placements, so it'd be really nice to see what the real breakdown of those students is by grade level and diagnosis and the types of programs. Just curious but not for Absolutely get that. Yep, yep. It's easy to get. <v Speaker 1>So I had a couple of questions too,</v> but first I, I really also wanna appreciate the presentation 'cause it's thorough and it really s also very relevant to what a lot of the issues that we're trying to deal with on the school committee, which is to make sure that we're, Ms. Brunell said that we're supporting every single student in providing every single student the opportunity to thrive and succeed in how, however that's defined for each child. I wanna go back to slide one of the first ones, slide two. 'cause this is a question I oftentimes get, and I have some hypotheses, but I'd like to get your hypotheses or actual answers. There's clearly been an increase in children on IEPs or, or within a special ed population after FY 21 with a slight decrease in FY 25. And I'm curious, any thoughts or or, or information, actual information that on what is, what drove that increase? And also what do we know based on that answer? What can we predict about the next five years? Say? <v Speaker 11>Well, I think that, I think, you know,</v> I really do try to stay out of like the covid, like I really do try to be mindful of like, covid is, it's, we, I don't wanna make everything about Covid, but I do think that parents started to recognize their children's, I think they started to see some the, the skills gaps that, and it, they became more apparent to some, to families over time. And I think parents have just become, you know, Natick is a well-resourced town. I think parents are knowledgeable. I do think there is a, there's a feeling that they wanna make sure their kids get everything they need. And there is a, there's a sometimes a need that maybe I want a, a plan is gonna help me that, that facilitate that, right? Whether it be a, a individual accommodation plan, a 5 0 4 plan or an IEP. So, and I also think parents are just starting to rec, like I said, I think parents are starting to recognize some of those skill gaps or some of those. I think the social skills piece is a big one. I think not just social skills, but social social dynamics. I think parents are starting to recognize a little bit more that, I mean our, I mean we all know mental health needs are, are the forefront of, of our youth right now, right? Like these are, and so I think families are starting to recognize these things young as students are younger, which is a good thing, right? Like that's the point. We wanna identify these students early so we can provide intervention early and, and help them gain the skills. But I do think that, I think that emotional piece, and I think there's a also a big piece about, we're also seeing that kind of comorbidity with our students. Whether or not is it an, is it a specific learning disability that's then resulting in some emotional difficulties? I mean, when school's hard, you know, that's gonna affect you through your school day. Like it's, it when, when, when just everyday academics are difficult, that could affect you emotionally as well, right? Your, your self-esteem. And then, and the adverse of that is that, you know, if there is, if you have a social emotional difficulty that's very well affect your academic area. So I think, I think families are more cognizant of these things. I think the school, I think I will say I do commend Natick in terms of our, our intervention academically that's happening. I think that we've put a lot of academic intervention into place with our renaissance screenings that has really upped the game. I mean that has made it apparent, that has identified students that i, I mean Sue would know better, but I think the five years ago we didn't have those, that, that level of benchmark testing that we have now. And when we see something, we do something in Natick, right? So that is obviously increased that that's gonna lead to some kids. I often say we wanna be careful of not being on that kind of like wheel of RTI, right? We have to at some point say, okay, this student's been through a couple cycles or, or, or a couple different areas, benchmark testing, maybe we've seen a couple. It's, it's time to dig in a little bit deeper and maybe this is a special ed eval. So I do think that's a piece of it too. Yeah. Yeah. <v Speaker 1>And I, this is more of a comment, so appreciate that and,</v> and my hypothesis are very similar. So, but I won't get into them. But where I come from on this issue, and this is why it's important to me, I remember one of the first CPA events I attended as a, as a parent probably eight years ago, sitting a room actually on the same floor down the hall. And we did our introductions and each parent got to say not only who they were, but also what is their story, what is their child's story? And across multiple disabilities, the theme of the night was really how difficult it was eight years ago back then to get your child to get special services. Yeah. Every single parent talked about that battle, that challenge, which eventually, you know, in, in our case, all the parents were there, were all, all had their kids already identified as an IEPs. But we all had that journey of like sometimes a year, two years or whatever it took. So obviously, you know now as school committee a member, I'm very concerned about the budget. You know, I take the, our fiduciary responsibility very seriously, but not at the expense of identifying and providing the service to each child. So for me it's really important to make sure that we are, as you said, identifying as early as possible. Because we also know from research that the, the earlier we identify challenges, the, the sooner we intervene, the better the outcomes are gonna be. And a long term economically makes more e even economically now that it's just about economics, right? But even economically it makes sense to intervene early because the challenges are minimized when you intervene early. So I really appreciate all, all this from bringing that lens, this whole conversation about how we make sure that we're di identifying children, not only identifying who they, you know, identifying them, but identifying their disabilities and the complexity of their disability, including the co-occurring this of disability. Kind like what you were just talking about. Sometimes it's a disability, a single disability along with a social emotional challenge, which might not be a disability, but they're curing, right? And so really addressing the whole child, making sure again, we're providing the best foundation for our children to succeed. So I really that's, I really appreciate that. That's where I'm, that's why I'm so appreciative. 'cause that's the lens I bring, <v Speaker 14>So thank you.</v> I think also socially, emotionally we've seen like a really huge uptick in students at the middle and high level really struggle. And I think some of it's suited technology, it's coming down to elementary. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean I think technology and social media and all that stuff really plays into kids' ability to have the social skills they really need to be able to work things out. Conflict resolution, learning those skills. Like I think that's a, a huge, a huge component to, to our youth today. I'm everywhere, not just here, but that's definitely a real challenge in middle school. I'm sure it is across the board, but you definitely see that. <v Speaker 1>I would also add, if it made just one more comment,</v> the does another side to this coin, which you haven't, I don't think you really addressed, which is not only are the complexity of our students' needs, but also the complexity of the field. We now have more expertise than we ever had before. You know, 50 of us just mentioning this in the previous conversation 50 years ago, special education was neither special nor an education. It was a room where we just threw out the kids who couldn't learn, right? Today you have autism, we have a solution, we have strategies, research based strategies, right? You have dyslexia, we have research based strategies, but we need people who are trained in each one of those strategies with expertise. And we need the time and we need the tools and the resources. And so that adds to the complexity of special education today as opposed to say even 10 years ago, right? So, and I know you all bring that expertise early. Appreciate that. Yeah, good. <v Speaker 4>Alright. Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 1>You can go on more</v> for longer if you, it's kidding. <v Speaker 4>Yeah. But I honestly love the engagement we've had in the</v> last session and this session around and shining the light many of our students who deserve that light to be shined and to see their successes and how much they contribute to our community. So thank you so much for kind of helping us see them today. <v Speaker 11>Thank you. You're welcome.</v> Thanks. Thank you for having us. <v Speaker 4>Oh, there's somebody in the public</v> with their hand raised. Oh, okay. <v Speaker 1>Oh, Danny. Oh good. If I can read correctly.</v> <v Speaker 11>Is Danny up? Yes,</v> <v Speaker 4>We're getting you Danny.</v> Just one second <v Speaker 11>Before Danny talks.</v> I just wanna also put out there that I'm pretty proud of our CPA relationship. Danny and I were invited to speak with the Federation of Children with special needs. We're presenting on CPA collaborations, so we're presenting our CA parent series so in March with the whole FCSN board, the conference. So I think we've done some really great things. So great. Danny's been a Danny and the whole CPAC team have been incredibly responsive and they're on top of things and it's been a great ongoing relationship. <v Speaker 4>Danny, if you can, hi. Yeah, there</v> <v Speaker 17>You go.</v> Yeah. Can everybody hear me now? <v Speaker 11>Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 17>Okay, great.</v> Yes, thank you Shy for calling on me. I'm Danny Newland. I just wanna say I'm the chair of the Natick CPAC and I have a couple of points, I'll try to be brief. I do wanna say thank you to Erin and her whole team for collaborating so well with cpac. I do feel that we're making great inroads I at every school in terms of relationships with the different coordinators at the different schools and working really together around some specific goals for the district. So I do wanna say thank you for that. And we did have a great Recent presentation with parents really sort of speaking their stories and that was very popular and we're gonna look at doing that again. But that's the presentation that FC SN would like us to come and talk to them about on March 8th. I, my second point, I just, you know, since everybody's gotten to it, I do wanna just push a little bit more on the manageable and I think the reason that we're all so really focused on this idea of what's a manageable caseload and getting a little more clarity around that is because we are very sensitive to, you know, the, the changes and the work that's being put on our special educators and also our administrators and the different schools. And I think one of the things that I'd like to bring up that I have noticed across the district is perhaps we'd like to take a look at our special educator turnover. I mean, is this something that might help us? And I know it certainly wouldn't be information available to me, but if our administration, I'm sure should be looking at the exit interviews and some of the reasons that some of our special educators are leaving and you know, and if there are certain positions across the district where we see higher turnover. So this is one thing I just wanna put out there. I don't really expect an answer, but I, I think about that one sometimes. I think The other thing I'd like to talk about a little bit, I just wanna clarify maybe or ask some questions around the outside neuropsych evals. I do recognize that these evaluations create extra work for teams, but I just wanna make sure that the committee understands that the, that the district is legally responsible to meet with families of students or caregivers of students who have an IEP and who present a neuropsych eval, an outside eval or any sort of outside eval. It could be speech and language, it could be ot, it could be various things, but the district isn't required to meet with a general education student who brings a similar outside evaluation. And also to make clear, and this has been said, but again, just to be clear that the district can't diagnose a student. So sometimes while a diagnosis doesn't guarantee a service, certainly a diagnosis can help with clarity. And when we look at the eligibility flow chart, the very first question that's asked on the eligibility flow chart for special education is, does the student have a disability? So, you know, certainly from a parent standpoint I will say, you know, that can feel helpful. You can still end up, you know, finding that student not eligible. But I do think for some parents that that is offers more clarity into why their student might struggle. And then I do wanna say that I am really in support of more work looking at a more restrictive middle school setting. I'm really happy to hear about this and I would, and by that I mean I think the Compass program at Kennedy has been terrific and I know that it's helped a lot of specific students and families. And when I hear this idea of a more restrictive middle school setting, I do think about some of our students that have a harder time finding, for example, an out of district placement. And I do wonder if, you know, this program would help us sort of save those students and families from that painful search process for an out of district placement. So I just wanna say thanks again and those are my comments on the presentation and I second Ms. Brunell when I'd love to see more special ed data in more of the meetings. <v Speaker 11>So thanks Danny. I just wanna clarify one thing about the</v> general ed piece about, about outside evaluations for general ed students. That is true that there is no specific timeline that necessarily has to be followed to to, to review those within 10 days. But we do have an in-district practice that when a, when a general ed student family shares an outside evaluation that goes through typically our, whether we call it our RTI team or our child study team, it's typically a school counselor, an administrator, they review those evaluations and they decide whether or not maybe a 5 0 4 is applicable, but also we have to look at our child find obligations there. So if we have a student who comes to us with now we know has a suspected disability or a diagnosis in that matter, now we have an obligation under our child find regulations to evaluate that child. So often our general education students who come to us with evaluations, leads to special education evaluation just given the fact that there is a diagnosis out there that now that could be a suspected disability under the child. Fine regulation just for clarity means that when we have a student in our district, whether they're live in the town or they go to school in the town, we have to evaluate those children and to, if they have suspected disability, so that we do do that. And that for those gen for general education just follows a different timeline. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Ms. McDonough,</v> <v Speaker 10>Sorry, I just wanted to add,</v> and I really wanna thank Danny for speaking up, but I was reminded when she spoke that several years ago when I was the CPAC liaison, I had worked with Kathy Corcoran to have CAC come and present to school committee. And I don't think that they have done that recently and it just may be something for the committee to think about because it was really helpful and I don't know if it needs to be every year, but it was helpful to hear from CPA and and just to hear all the things they're doing. It kind of elevates the work. They, they do presentations and they run programs and so I just think it would be something for the committee to remember to have them and to, to offer, offer that opportunity when it makes sense to do so. To your point about having more information about special education, there are resource thanks. <v Speaker 11>I think any the more FaceTime CPA could get, they're a,</v> they provide such a, you know, the resources they provide to families is just, it's so the value they bring, but a lot of families still just aren't aware of it. Right. So I think the more we can give them FaceTime to to, to speak to our community, I a hundred percent would would agree with that. Okay. <v Speaker 1>Ha. Having said that, the website is CAK Na,</v> if anyone's watching us and don't know about special about CPA, it is in fact an amazing organization with amazing volunteers including Danny. So, and that's an organization for any parent who has a child with special needs in the district. Great place to, great organization to connect with. And I do see that we have another question in on Zoom, Ms. Klich. <v Speaker 18>Hi, thank you for recognizing me. Hi Erin.</v> Thank you so much for presenting. I just, a few people have mentioned some things that I wanted to reiterate with regards to what a caseload is manageable. I do think we need metrics on this and we need a more operational definition because it's really unclear to me who's defining what is manageable and also what that means. And if we don't know what that means, then we're not gonna know what unmanageable means. And you know, I'm the CPEC lilja rep and I've also been very involved in on a larger level with Danny as of late. And, you know, based upon what I'm seeing, I'm not sure that the providers that I interact with on a very regular basis would necessarily agree with that. And so I I'm very curious to see how are we going to actually measure it because we know from a budgetary standpoint, as everyone's talking about special education services are expensive, and we need to know what unmanageable mean in order to be able to adequately provide for our students and also to manage the budget. Which brings me to my second point in that thank you Ms. Brunell for asking the question about neuropsych evaluations and how often the district's evaluations contradict or disagree with those outcomes because we spend thousands of hours, you know, doing evals for kids who have outside evaluations from very qualified people being presented. And you know, I, in my own progression, I network with most of the neuropsychologists in our area, and I'm pretty familiar with their, the quality of their evaluations, which generally include academic testing, teacher interviews, teacher questionnaires, and you know, if the family wants, they can do, you know, classroom classroom observations as well. And then we're spending thousands of hours gathering more data. And I, I guess, you know, I'm wondering, given that we're looking at an override and we're negotiating a budget, we're also negotiating teacher contracts and want to make sure we're not burning out our providers, I think it would be helpful, can we have data on exactly how often the school evals disagree with the outside evals? And I, I hear your, you know, the presenter saying that it does happen, but I, I think in order to know whether or not we're saving money or costing the district more money, we need data on that. So those are the, the two points that I wanted to bring up. Thank you. <v Speaker 11>I'll speak to that very quickly.</v> So again, I, I don't think we ever unilaterally disagree with an evaluation. I think that we always reserve the right to do testing. And I will say that it is my typical advice that we always do some sort of evaluation evaluation's, a very, that that term could be used multiple ways. I mean, evaluation could mean that we just wanna get classroom teacher reports. It could mean we wanna do an observation. It doesn't mean we necessarily do a full battery of assessments, right? It could be one area that we wanna dig into a little bit more. So I just wanna be clear, clear about that. It doesn't mean that we do a full battery of a full achievement, a full psychology, a full psychological, it just might mean that we wanna do something to be able to compare the data from a school-based setting to a, to an outside neuropsychological assessment. So that that's, that's really case to case. But, but I will say pretty much every evaluation we do some sort of additional evaluation, <v Speaker 18>Right?</v> But we need to know whether or not that's ultimately costing the district more money or are we saving the district money. And that's the data that we're missing. <v Speaker 11>Okay. Thank you.</v> I, and I appreciate the, the, i I appreciate the manageable caseload versus, and I like that looking at like an operational meeting. I think that's a really valid point that we should, that we need to look at more. So I appreciate that. <v Speaker 18>Thank you so much.</v> <v Speaker 4>All right, thanks Ms. CLIs.</v> Thanks team. Yep. Clearly gave us lots to think about as we kind of evolve our messaging and come, come back here at least once before the end of the school year, if not twice. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we're gonna switch gears a little bit. I think we're gonna go into the next thing on our agenda for the superintendent report is the fee recommendation. And Matt's gonna do that alongside the item under the finance piece, which is the SY 25 second quarter update and financial report, if that works for the committee. Excellent. <v Speaker 12>Alright, thank you.</v> If folks want to go to page 1 41 in their packet, that's the start of the financial report. So in summary, we're about 43% through the school year and about 50% through the fiscal year. And I didn't put it in here, but it looks like we're gonna be about 650,000 to the good if everything stayed exactly static through the end of the year. But I know in past experience that nothing stays exactly static for the next five months. It didn't last year. It, it probably won't this year either, but we're still in, in pretty decent shape. The reason it's about six 50 is because we made a decision administratively earlier in the year to try and come up with $400,000 worth of non-salary savings so that we could carry over a little more into circuit breaker for next year to try and restabilize that program and, and stabilize the budget. So at the end of this report is all of the line items that the schools had sort of, and, and other departments had come up with to help come up with that $400,000, which I'll be asking you to vote at the end of it. So right after you get through the, the, the, the text of the report, the text of the memo, you know, the general fund, you'd see the, the two page summary on page 1 44 1 that, that summarizes where we're at with the budget. <v Speaker 4>Matt, I'm so sorry. Yep.</v> But I only see 23 pages in this memo. Am I lost? <v Speaker 12>Oh, I, I'm, look, I'm looking at the, the,</v> the agenda Yeah. And everything that like folks at home would also be be looking at Oh, like the whole agenda? Yeah, yeah, the whole agenda. PDF you <v Speaker 19>Should just look up,</v> <v Speaker 12>Oh,</v> I didn't even realize it was all here. So right past, so on this, it would be probably page four. If you scroll down past that where you'd start to see the, the first muni report. I don't see it. Yeah. So there, there were four, four items that are, that are in the negative. First one was legal settlements that could be related to a student case or it could be related to a staff case. We don't necessarily budget for that particular line because we go years without having them, but there's one there and we, you know, all wrapped in, we feel we can cover that. The next one is employee separation cost. Down the bottom of the page we go, we've gone the last several years without having too much. And then this past year the number of people that left servicing or retired had some, some payouts. And then if, if you go to the next page, you would see two other line items there as well for tuitions, both of which are a little bit over. But we are gonna be charging some of those tuitions off to the IDEA grant as we budgeted for that in the grant this year. Just didn't do it earlier because you don't want to do the general entry before you actually have made the expense. So that's, that's it with the general fund. And if you keep, keep scrolling down, we can get to the summary, summary of the revolving funds with the, with the blue header up top. So this is where I can talk about our revolving funds and fees at the same time. So the circuit breaker account, the school choice account and the Medicaid account are all reimbursement programs. We don't get to set the fee, we just apply and, and, and we get the money back from either the, the state or the, the federal government. And with school choice, the school committee can vote to opt into the program to let students come in. But we haven't done that in recent years because we've been, we've been pretty full and it's probably a longer discussion for another meeting, but it seems like our number is probably right around 360 kids per grade. When we're under that, we might want to consider it, but we probably want to be a little bit under it. 'cause as folks may recall, once you let kids into the program, you keep 'em through the 12th grade and I think the last time the school committee voted to let kids in, it probably looked better. And then our population continued to kind of keep growing. So there's that, there are fees that we have significant users, a number of users that can make a difference. Right. Athletics, we probably have 1500 kids that pay at the high school and another, another 300 or so at the middle schools. We have preschool tuition that's between 65 and 70 some odd low seventies families per year. That, that pay into that program is between 120, 140 kids. It's a balance between special education and regular education. The special education kids don't have to, don't have to pay a fee for the regular education kids. It's a nice optional program. Foreign student tuition we haven't had in a while, Northside tuitions. Sometimes we have seats, we usually have several seats total available for that program and sometimes we get tuition in from a neighboring community. I think the most we've had is three. It's usually, it's usually one or two that we get there for revenue. Summer school we do charge a fee for, we upped that last year. School bus transportation is another one where we have a lot of fee payers, about 2100 fee payers in that rental facilities. We have a lot of, I'll call 'em local exceptions or low fee dollar amounts in that, in that program. That's probably due to be updated in the come your way, but I'm not gonna get into it in great detail tonight. The afterschool program and the esap, which is the early morning afterschool program before and afterschool care services, we've got quite a few payers in that program. That'll be one of the recommended fee increases as well as the preschool tuition, athletics, transportation, we, we could charge more for lunch except lunch has been mandated free by the state. So the only real reason to increase that fee is to just sort of set the price for a la carte items or for the adult lunch price. That'll be in the budget next week as well. Then we have self-funding programs like Instrumental Music, asaps, also self-funding and is, is, is done fine instrumental music. They, they, they sort of raise the fees a little bit based on the, the volume of the lessons in the, in the program. So that's kind of a, a fee range depending on how many, how many sessions they're gonna have to offer. And they've done a pretty good job of managing that. Most of the other things on the list sort of here, you know, one time, one time things or you know, we're not gonna charge a lot of money for guidance transcripts or for kids to take the SAT or the A CT or AP exams. We try to make, make, make the fees, cover the costs. It's not something we try to offset for the rest of the program. That's about it for the, for the fees. And then if we scroll down a little further, there are some backup, you know, to the report with uni there so you can see how the funds tie out. Then we get to grants, which would be a, a shorter list. We've closed out most of the, the prior grant grants and, and FY 25, you'll see there's some activity in the expenses. Not a lot. We, we didn't necessarily get some of this money until November or December. And so generally the third quarter we charge off a lot more to the grants. We're still applying for grants. Some applications close this week and we hope to get a little more, if you compared this to the last last month, you'd see the list got a little bit longer there as well. So that's basically our second quarter financial report. We're in pretty good shape. Things are a little bit tight. Revenues are lagging a little bit, you know, the red does mean it looks like we're, we're projecting in the negative, but just for the kind of the most important and the largest one that, that I think folks sometimes worry about is circuit breaker. What's in the general ledger is printed there, but what's actually been received is, and what we've been allocated by the state is different. We're expecting to end the circuit breaker fund with about $630,000 at the end of the year. So although it looks like it's a negative now, we're gonna get about 3,787,000 in revenue. And the beginning balance was really 2,118,821. The town just posted it late. So it's, it's not as bad as it looks, but we, we put our, our purchase orders in and start paying the bills so we can track things throughout the year. I just don't have the time to do that for every revolving fund. But at this point, if there's any questions, be happy to take them. <v Speaker 1>Any, yeah. Ms. Collins.</v> <v Speaker 6>Thank you. So your recommended motion,</v> <v Speaker 12>Ah yes, thank you.</v> <v Speaker 6>Is is moved to approve the budget.</v> 25 budget appropriation transfers is attached to this document. For those people who do not have access to the document, what is your recommended total transfer? <v Speaker 12>It's a total transfer of 401,000 mo.</v> They're all non-salary accounts and that would go to the private school tuitions. So the principals and the other budget managers couldn't accidentally spend the money they agreed to reserve. <v Speaker 6>Thank you. Reserve. I just wanna be clear for everybody.</v> The second is a question, I don't know if it's to you, to Dr. Bash, to whom are we digging to discuss rental facilities At some point it looks like it's bad and getting worse. <v Speaker 12>Yeah, I, there's some cleanup that we need to do with that</v> structurally and then with, on the town side, I think sometimes things get charged there that don't really belong being charged there. So hope to have that cleaned up with recommendation and part of the budget for the next meeting. <v Speaker 6>Okay. Those are my questions. Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 1>Any other questions? No.</v> Do we wanna talk about the fee recommendation? <v Speaker 4>Yeah, we can. Well, he just went over it</v> and I can show it in the discussion of the million dollar recommended reductions. Do you, do you need to make that motion for the transfers now or do you want, do, do people wanna print it out? Would that be helpful? <v Speaker 6>No, I'm willing to make the motion if,</v> but slightly different than what's printed. <v Speaker 4>Okay.</v> <v Speaker 6>I would like to move to approve</v> transfers in the sum of $401,450 as outlined in the memo memo. <v Speaker 3>Second,</v> <v Speaker 1>Can I be honest, I'm, I'm not sure where the motion is.</v> <v Speaker 3>The page three.</v> <v Speaker 1>Page three</v> <v Speaker 4>Is the motion and then the backup is at the end.</v> <v Speaker 6>And I'm just trying to put the dollar amount into it.</v> Thank you. <v Speaker 1>Okay. I just need to catch up.</v> <v Speaker 12>So page two,</v> <v Speaker 1>Page three. Page one</v> <v Speaker 4>At the bottom of his memo.</v> <v Speaker 1>Oh, I see. Where, yeah,</v> <v Speaker 4>It's appropriate.</v> And then Kathy added the, the number, which is on the last page of the packet. <v Speaker 6>It's also upward in the memo. Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 1>I see. Okay.</v> Any discussion, questions or discussions about the motion on the floor? See none. We can vote all those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions? The motion passes. Just <v Speaker 6>To say thank you, Matt.</v> <v Speaker 12>Yes, you're welcome. Thank you.</v> The town comptroller said she'll, she'll do this in short order. <v Speaker 6>Well, she's back.</v> <v Speaker 12>She is luckily.</v> <v Speaker 4>Okay. So to discuss the fees, I think he's prepared</v> to discuss them, that they're best illustrated on a different document we have that kind of goes through the million dollars in recommended reductions that we're seeking to have this team direct us to do as part of our budget book. That is due technically on the third. We look to have it done by the first And Linda's pulling up that document. It's a one pager that outlines all of the reductions that we're recommending. And a piece of that is the fees. There we go. Can you zoom in please on the fees box just for now so that Matt can walk us through that and then we can go through the rest of it. <v Speaker 3>The table there.</v> <v Speaker 6>That was just my eyes.</v> <v Speaker 12>Alright, so it's a little hazy,</v> but part of the recommended budget for, for next, for FY 26 in includes user fee increases and, and then the expense offset to get our budget down to the, the million dollars kind of below level service. So the first one is the $25 bus fee increase per user. That would net us about 51,875. The bus fee hasn't been increased in six or seven years, maybe longer. Average bus fee is getting close to three 50 through 40 some odd communities that, that have fees. Some communities don't have fees, so we don't, we don't necessarily factor them in, into the average. Right. And, and there's two reasons why some communities don't have fees and, and they're generally at, at kind of the extremes. The first one is they, they can afford it and so they don't want to have it. And then the second one is you can't have three or four kids outta 10 paying the fee for every 10 kids on the bus because that, that doesn't work either. If the, the community, if enough kids that are on free and reduced lunch, you're not allowed to charge the fee by law. So you don't make the fee too high for the few that can afford to pay it. So you kinda have each end of the spectrum that that's not there. And then you have, I'll call it the middle two thirds of Massachusetts where they, where they have a, where they have a fee. And so that's kind of the market comparison in summary and the dollars in the account where it would go to right there. So that would reduce the cost of the, the regular education school buses 'cause that's what we can charge fees for. We can't charge fees for special education, transportation or homeless transportation. Next one would be an athletic fee increase. This would be a simple straight $25 on top of every fee that we have. So if it's a regular athletic fee at 2 25, it goes to two 50. If it was hockey at 400, it would go to 4 25. If it was unified sports at 100, it would go to 1 25 and that would bring in a $52,600. Because I don't think, and this is just my analysis, but I don't think a $25 increase in fee is gonna be enough to turn people away from saying I'm gonna change my behavior and not not participate. The next one would be asap, you know, in increase charge for overhead and administration with their fees, their fees are, are kind of low in the market. And so we'd be, we will be recommending a 12% fee increase that would bring in about $65,000. And it would, it would enable with the fees to, to grow the program and have, have a few more spaces available, you know, to, to get some more staff. The, the amount of fees that are projected would enable us to do that. pre-K tuition, a 7% fee increase would basically allow us to take one more paraprofessional that would would've been charged to the general funds, charge it to the charge it to the revolving fund. And then last but not least, the rental fee increases. It's not a lot of money. It'd be about $16,000. Relatively modest increase. And that's because a lot of our users are town departments or written into the, the policy where they, they get, they get a pretty, pretty significant discount. So didn't wanna be aggressive with that at all. Based on the spirit of what the committee has done in the past. I've never worked with a school committee that wants to raise fees or likes to raise fees. But this $215,000, if we, if we don't get it through optional fee increases to offset some other costs would just kind of result in some of the, the salary positions. Because when you get to the budget document and we break out the schools, you're gonna see that the school's budgets total cost to run the school, you know, our, our money for in that, that the principals have access to is gonna be somewhere between 1.3 and 2%. It's all people. We we're not, we've cut the non-salary things as far as we can go in all reasonableness. And so this is why we're recommending fees or if you want to take the we out of it, you can, you can just blame me right now. <v Speaker 10>It's a we.</v> <v Speaker 1>Any questions, Ms. Madonna,</v> <v Speaker 10>Will you also be raising the family cap</v> for bus and athletic? <v Speaker 12>I, I wa I was not.</v> But you know, with a $25 increase that would only go up a little, a little bit, it would go up 50 bucks. Off the top of my head it's either two or three, two or three fees and then folks hit the, the family cap. <v Speaker 10>Yeah, it just might be like if the bus fee is 200</v> per student with a family cap of 400, it's usually like, okay, two students but you have three or 4, 4 50. It just, it might make sense to have that number be divisible. 'cause otherwise it's gonna be confusing I think to people. <v Speaker 12>That'd be fine. Okay.</v> <v Speaker 10>Well I would suggest looking at that,</v> 'cause I feel like this was probably set to say if you have two students, you pay for two students, but anything beyond two students is you pay, you do not pay. You do not pay. So I would suggest that <v Speaker 1>Increasing the family camp, the family</v> <v Speaker 6>For both</v> <v Speaker 1>Ms. Collins.</v> <v Speaker 6>Yeah. Having my first question dispensed with,</v> I should know this, but I don't remember it off hand. The town decided not to do the transportation subsidy article and instead included it in what they're, what they're recommending the school get. Correct. So that's like a couple hundred thousand dollars that used to go towards transportation that was folded into the rest of the budget but without increasing. Okay. <v Speaker 4>I think I know what you're asking. The way I would answer</v> that is that they did roll it into their projected budget or funding amount, but whether or not they're gonna have a warrant, I don't know the due date for that is February 20. But the way they budgeted budgeted it was not as a different line item. Okay. Does that answer your question? <v Speaker 6>It it does. And the</v> rental revolving you see various changes is that various, like one fee might go up this much and one fee might go up that much or programmatically changes as to how we budget, how, how we collect. <v Speaker 12>We have different rates for different</v> spaces and different groups. So they would, they would change, you know, it is not, it's not gonna be a straight line percentage. It's sometimes it's okay. <v Speaker 6>I just was trying to understand 'cause I think there's</v> some programmatic questions Yeah. That we have to answer. <v Speaker 12>It'll be round, sort of round numbers for the space.</v> <v Speaker 1>Oh, sorry. Mr. Pernell got distracted. Sorry. It's</v> <v Speaker 5>Okay.</v> I know I just pulled up the rental agreement. So I'm definitely interested in group three going up in that rental agreement. And I'm curious, group one and two, their fees are different from Monday to Friday versus the weekends. And group three we just charge a fat flat rate. So I wonder if we should be charging group three great groups who are all other groups, organizations, activities, anyone that's town department or non-profit or in group one and two. But when we have for-profit businesses coming in on the weekend to rent out the gym, I wonder about that. <v Speaker 12>We don't have many of those. Okay.</v> Because it, our sports, the pe the people that are in sort of the business where they would want to be renting our space, they obtain IRS non-profit status. Like for, you know, teaching. So teaching basketball, teaching a foreign language, you know, teaching dance, like they generally get non-profit tax status even though nobody's in business to lose money. But you might not think of 'em that way. But we can't say, well we, we think what you're doing is for profit. We kinda have to go by what, what their tax status <v Speaker 5>Is.</v> So, okay, so there's not many group three, so it really is the group two. Right. That's okay. They're getting a deal. And I had, I just wanted to make a very careful distinction because we've talked in the budget scenarios that were the FY 26 budget to not, if the town was not, or the town meeting was not able to appropriate the full FY 26 budget that we will eventually recommend, there will be fee increases. But those fee increases would be much more than this. <v Speaker 12>You can you repeat the question?</v> Are you talking about the override or level service? <v Speaker 5>I'm talking about the override. Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 12>Yes. So if the override does not pass</v> and we have to cut 2.8 million Yeah. The, we have another round of, of fee increases. But the fee increases are not gonna make up 2.8 million. <v Speaker 5>Yes. Right. But this here, like</v> what I'm seeing on the slide eight of the override presentation is that instead of just going up $25, they'll go up $150 or $125. <v Speaker 12>It would be a recommendation to the committee</v> and with the dollar amount that we expect to be the offset. If the committee doesn't want to do that, then the administration will come back with, you know, more basically it's gonna be more staff. <v Speaker 5>$200,000. Yeah, it's okay.</v> So I just wanted to make that careful distinction 'cause I don't want people to think like, oh you said if I, if you know, if I supported this then the fees wouldn't go up. And you're saying that this is just a market adjustment that this is reasonable, which I agree with, but I, I want people to understand that there's fees to be increased above and beyond these numbers. <v Speaker 4>I think it's really a great clarification you're kind</v> of making, and I think that this presentation here that's part of that million dollars of reductions was really conservatively done based on market, like you said. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that in an, in a no override scenario, we wouldn't have some significant interest increases in service-based fees. Maybe even in the same categories. Ms. Goeth. <v Speaker 20>So I have a question about the increases</v> to the preschool tuition. So my understanding was that we'd like to get as many community kids into our preschool as possible. 'cause then they come into kindergarten really well prepared, right? So if we can get our community kids into our preschool, maybe it's like a little easier to educate them in kindergarten. So I guess I'm wondering is this fee increase, does it still make our preschool competitive so that people would choose it even though it has reduced hours compared to like some private preschools so that we're gonna attract all the kids we want to our preschool? <v Speaker 12>I think so. I hope so.</v> I've talked with Mary Beth about it can have kind of more details on that for, for next week because the option will be laid out a a little bit, you know, better in, in the budget book so people can, people can see what it, what it looks like. 'cause if you're not gonna go to the Natick public preschool and you live in Natick, chances are you're going to preschool in Natick or right near work wherever work is. I mean that's kind of how, how that, and we can't compete with a bunch of other towns. We, we have some information about what other public preschools charge and we're, we're, we're kind of in the middle, we're pretty competitive. But for, for the private preschools, like that's the alternative. You know, we have probably more desi licensed teachers than your, than your common preschool. So to your point, we like to think our kids kids that go through that program are going to do well in kindergarten and beyond. And same thing with the kids that are in our special education program. They get better acclimated to school and get ready for it. And they, it's a good program. It is just a matter of does it fit sort of your, your, your life schedule? <v Speaker 20>Yeah. I just wanna make sure we're not pricing families</v> out of such a high quality offering that will benefit us when they actually hit kindergarten. <v Speaker 12>So yeah. Hopefully, hopefully not.</v> <v Speaker 1>Thank you. Any other questions?</v> I have a brief clarification. When, when it says athletic fee increase per participant, it's per participant per sport, right? If you do multiple sports the same year Yep. <v Speaker 12>And to Julie's question, you know,</v> we can adjust the family cap so that it, it, it makes sure that it, it, it captures mathematically, evenly. <v Speaker 1>Okay. But it is, yes, it would increase.</v> <v Speaker 12>Right? If</v> <v Speaker 1>I'm doing,</v> if I do two sports, I would pay $50. Right? <v Speaker 12>If you, if you did, yes,</v> it would be a 50 in, in three sports. 75. But I think it, it stops there. <v Speaker 1>Okay, great. Any other questions or comments?</v> Do you wanna go into this vote? <v Speaker 4>So, so, so far we have the transfer motion</v> and now we have the fees motion. I'm not sure where if you guys are ready for that. But I can go through the rest of that kind of million dollar outline, which is another motion we will be looking for. We're <v Speaker 1>Stacking up.</v> Oh, so we wanna do two different motions. One for the fee increase and one for the <v Speaker 4>Rest.</v> Yep. I think, I think the, if the committee needs more information on the fees, we could certainly bring that next time and still do the million, the million dollar vote and you could get tidier on the specifics or have more feedback to the specifics. That's up to you. But so far I count three things to be moved. <v Speaker 1>I see a motion coming. So</v> <v Speaker 4>Do I</v> <v Speaker 1>By looking at you,</v> <v Speaker 6>I I would</v> like Catherine Dub a question. Oh well I don't wanna get in front of the question. <v Speaker 5>Do you have the market analysis of the ASAP</v> <v Speaker 1>Pegasus?</v> Okay, good. Okay, <v Speaker 6>Now, now would you like a motion?</v> Sure. Or did you have a question? <v Speaker 10>I don't, it depends on your motion.</v> <v Speaker 6>Okay. I would like to move</v> that we accept the fee schedule as outlined with increasing the family cap accordingly. So that it covers two participations, whether that be two students or two sports or whatever. I just wanna make sure that the family cap is going up commensurate with the fee increase <v Speaker 4>For both of those fees.</v> Athletic and for transportation. Both athletic <v Speaker 6>And transportation. Good.</v> <v Speaker 1>Second, any questions or comments?</v> I'm looking at you Ms. McDonough? Yes. <v Speaker 10>Oh, well I'm just thinking,</v> I feel like we should vote on this next time because I just feel like fee increases, like people should just know that we're considering this and that and then we have the chance to get the memo. I mean these seem very reasonable, but we can just like have the opportunity to compare the preschool and the asap. It sounds like you already have that. And then we can just think on the $25 and then look at the family cap and so that, I don't, that would be my preference. Just vote next week. So <v Speaker 4>I mean it'll be outlined in the budget book.</v> Yeah, very clearly. Yeah, <v Speaker 5>I second that.</v> <v Speaker 1>So that, just to clarify though, so next week</v> the budget will come out, the budget book will come out. Did you want a general direction of how we feel about a million dollars in cuts? <v Speaker 4>So that's the third piece.</v> I think it's separate from the fees. I'd be comfortable if I can go through this sheet that's projected there and you all have we, I don't wanna put a million dollars of reductions in a budget book without the direction of the school committee. I just don't feel comfortable with that would be quite a breeze and move. And so as this is due on Saturday, we'd like to kind of go through an outline of what those reductions would be. Some of these, I shared two other pieces which were a presentation I originally made to the school committee on December 2nd. I'm not going to pull it up here, but it's the Chevron chart that kind of shows a very, what I call the 30,000 foot view. I think we're down to 5,000 feet here, which is hopefully helpful to the committee. We did not go down to to earth because we're talking about 10 FTEs and that's very sensitive. So we made that as a a one line here. So the, this is a hundred percent aligned to everything else we've presented on. This is what I wanna say. The first line is 10 FTEs. That's what we've said all along. And the details and rationale for every one of those positions will be in the budget book. The next one, professional development. Again, we're gonna redo, this is the same message we've been saying. We're gonna reduce that professional development budget for next year, focusing on ways we can align with the district priorities. And we're gonna utilize the experience of our talented Natick staff to provide more in-house learning and seek some grants to offset that reduction. We talked about the fees, I'd be very comfortable here just saying it's $215,000 worth of fees and we'll get more granular on that with a little bit more thought time and more analysis presented to you. Digital programs is 95,000. The district will reduce, we talked about Moodle there, but there could be other overlapping co ways we could save some costs there. And then paper tutoring is $130,000. So all of that adds up to the million dollars. We'd love to incorporate that into the budget book. The budget book is, you know, going to be a little bit more complicated than prior years because not only are we presenting a budget, but we're presenting a budget with the assumption of an override possibly not passing. So it's already complicated. We didn't wanna add this other layer here. So we're seeking the committee to consider these and to give us a directive which way you'd like to go. <v Speaker 6>Ms. Collins, I have a question.</v> So the 10 FTEs, which I do not wanna get into specifics, but you quantified it as $460,000. That tells me it's not 10 classroom teachers, although it may have repercussions on classroom teachers, but it's not necessarily 10 classroom teachers. Am Am I <v Speaker 4>Correct?</v> Thank you. You are correct. A couple things about that. One we've said all along that we made every attempt to make these have the least impact on classrooms and classroom facing positions, student facing positions. So that's still the case. The other piece is, it is an estimate because, because the way the union works and there's sort of a disclaimer up in the dark blue box there. These are listed without associated dollar amounts as they depend on the union seniority and job classification process, which will take place, you know, once we were to initiate this. And so we can't say exactly who's associated with each position yet. <v Speaker 6>Okay. And my other question I think is</v> to Ms. Baloni, but obviously you get to direct it, Mr. Chair, the di, the decreases in professional development and digital programming. I mean are we, I mean I, I know this answer, but I would like it to be more public comfortable that we can do these either by shifting to in-house things or whatever, that we are not going to be abandoning a whole cadre of teachers and giving them no pd. Is that fair? <v Speaker 1>Would you like to answer MS full money? I</v> <v Speaker 7>Would love to answer that, yes, that is fair.</v> We have lots of in-house expertise that we will be tapping into to provide professional development. We still have money in the budget to provide outside professional development as well as grant funding to provide additional professional development. And then in terms of digital programs, we've done a lot of work over the past two year and a half to look at what we're offering for our digital programs and weed out what we have in terms of programs that do comparable things and find the ones that are, give us more bang for our buck and eliminate the ones that only give us a little bit of support and then provide professional development in house or free from our vendors who really want our business to support our staff in switching over to the new platforms. <v Speaker 6>Thank you. That was my question. I'll save my comments.</v> <v Speaker 1>So I guess my question</v> to the committee is we have this proposed overall million dollars in cuts for next year. Regardless of the override vote, the budget will have to be presented to us already in, as Dr. Sp just said, in kinda these two versions, the override passing, override failing format. The question is, should the baseline be the one without the mil? Were the million dollars being cut? Ms. Collins, <v Speaker 6>I have a question on that.</v> Is the question with the million dollars or is the question, which I thought I heard a couple of weeks ago without the $2.8 million, <v Speaker 1>Mr. Gilli.</v> <v Speaker 12>So normally we would proceed with a level service budget,</v> the same number of services we have this year, carry those costs going forward into next year. We, we already know that the town doesn't have the ability to do that, even if the override passes. So what we're recommend it we're, what we want to proceed with is the recommended budget that already shows the reductions instead of people voting for an override. And then we still have a million dollars of reductions to make afterwards. <v Speaker 6>But the budget would assume the override passes. Correct.</v> So it would not be a, if the override doesn't pass and then we'll add these things on. <v Speaker 12>So the recommended budget would, would show</v> 95 million instead of 96 and it would have a list of reductions not in, you know, in, in some detail, but not in a finite detail because of the bumping that the superintendent just explained as to how we would get there. And we already started sharing that at our override forum last week and we expect there'll be more questions after the budget book comes out. So next forum's, February 11th, if anybody is interested in attending, we, we like to have the exchange <v Speaker 6>Given that my preference is</v> that we do it without this million dollars, like at the 95 number, <v Speaker 12>The recommended budget. Because</v> <v Speaker 6>Whether it passes</v> or not, we're proposing a million dollar reduction from what it would be if I realize some people will say, well that's not a cut. Well in this case, in this case these are cuts, these are things that exist in our budget that would be removed from our budget. I'm not however comfortable with going forward with a 93 or whatever the number turns out to be. So that's why I was trying to clarify, <v Speaker 1>Oh, Ms.</v> Goza. <v Speaker 20>So the way I see it, what we voted in December was</v> that we wanted a level service budget and today we're voting to accept a level service budget minus a million dollars of service. Right. <v Speaker 4>That's well said in, in my opinion.</v> <v Speaker 1>Although there was a, sorry it was well said,</v> but it, I, I'm looking at the minutes, I'm trying to find the minutes. I don't know if I'm, I know which meeting it was, but there was, in that motion, we voted a motion to recognize this possibility of a million dollars in cuts. And I wonder if that's kind of, I dunno if it's a reiteration of that, but, 'cause it sounds like what you're looking for is should the budget be presented to us simply <v Speaker 4>Confirm that that's what, how you want us</v> to develop this budget, <v Speaker 1>Ms.</v> Brune? <v Speaker 5>Yeah, I, I understand why we did</v> what we did back in December. Since then we've had more budget forms come out. There's been more explanation from the townside about the town needs. The more I understand about the capital needs of the town in the context of the greater fiscal needs of Natick. Right now, as much as I don't enjoy cutting a million dollars out of a school budget, I do think this is the fiscally responsible thing to do. And so I support it and I trust that, I trust Dr. Stash and your team that you have made the recommendations for these 10 FTEs. Especially, you know, that no school committee ever wants to do that. No administrator ever wants to do that. But students change, programs change, fiscal reality changes. And so I am comfortable voting this level service minus this million dollars because I now understand the full context of what's happening on the town side. <v Speaker 1>So I'm, I'm doing this little</v> straw poll vote in my own mind without putting words into anyone's mouth, but so far I'm seeing two, I mean, I heard two people saying, yes, let's move forward with a million dollars in cuts. And now I'm seeing a lot of head nodding saying yes. <v Speaker 2>Do you want the actual motion that you voted? Would</v> <v Speaker 1>That be helpful?</v> Oh yeah, that would be helpful. Yes. <v Speaker 2>Move to preliminary FY 26 budget public schools</v> 96 8, 90 94 to provide level service administration has identified an additional 1 million credit, 26 cuts on top of 1,000,001 55 minimizing impact on students. That's what we actually, <v Speaker 1>So we never really said we were in favor.</v> We just said we recognize administration has identified it. Yes. And so I think maybe what you're looking for is a next step of us saying, yeah, let's just do it. Yes. So any of, I saw, I think mostly people saying yes. I'm wondering if there's any objections. Yeah. Mr. Brand, this <v Speaker 15>Is not an objection.</v> We procedurally we have another motion that was made and seconded right. About the fees before. <v Speaker 1>Oh, that's right. So</v> <v Speaker 15>Do you wanna, how do we, do we have to do something about</v> that probably before we move forward with this, right? <v Speaker 2>If, if,</v> <v Speaker 15>If we're gonna vote on that next</v> <v Speaker 1>Time.</v> It's true. Yes. There is a motion on the table. <v Speaker 6>The committee is more comfortable</v> specifying the fees next time. That 215,000, I'm fine, I can withdraw that motion. But I stand behind the motion to reduce it from $96,891,904 to $95,891,904. <v Speaker 1>So I'm wondering, just to answer that question,</v> if we feel comfortable with voting on a motion to approve approximately a million dollars in cuts to instruct the administration to make an approximate million dollars in cuts to FY 26? Yes. And if so, would you be willing to withdraw that the first motion and then make the second motion? <v Speaker 6>Yes, I will withdraw the motion. I</v> <v Speaker 1>Would And do you need the seconder to withdraw it as well?</v> I do. Who was that? <v Speaker 15>I'll think, let me think about it. It</v> <v Speaker 1>Was, think about it.</v> All right. I'll have one night. Withdraw my second. Okay, good. Thank you. Move to <v Speaker 6>Move, move, go forward with an FY 26 budget</v> that reflects the approximately million dollars in cuts identified tonight to be further defined by the administration. Does that get you where you need to be? Perfect. <v Speaker 4>Second,</v> <v Speaker 10>Would</v> <v Speaker 1>Like Ms. McDon,</v> <v Speaker 10>I just would like a clarification in the motion</v> because in the slide from December, it's 95,000 491, 9 0 4, which includes an additional million dollars in cuts and carries forwards $400,000 in cuts from this year. So it's essentially a $1.4 million reduction from the projected for this year, which would be level service to a reduction. Is that right? Am I right about that? <v Speaker 1>Isn't it four? But the $400,000 is so that</v> <v Speaker 4>Producing this year that you are Right.</v> Actually, because we cut that in October, we've never framed it in that way. We've always just said it's a carry forward. Yeah. So if the committee would like to reflect that, I think that's what's going to be in the budget. So you're right, we've never framed it when we been presenting on it because we kind of said that's behind us. But you're right. <v Speaker 1>Would you like to make a friendly amendment</v> to the motion to include? <v Speaker 10>Yeah, I think it's, we're putting forward a budget</v> of 95 4 91 9 0 4, which reflects $1.4 million reduction in, in of, of expansion. I don't <v Speaker 6>Even know from the FY 25 original budget. Yes.</v> <v Speaker 10>A level service budget, which reflects a $1.4 million</v> reduction from level service from a level service budget. Yes. <v Speaker 13>Yes. Okay.</v> <v Speaker 4>If it's helpful,</v> we can project this that I presented at the forum the other day. Yeah. <v Speaker 5>Can I say right now, I think the,</v> the point is we wanna make the fiscal commitment that we are as a committee interested in making the cuts to the level service budget. And I, I don't think we need to Dan to say specifically what the budget number is that we're voting for the FY 26 budget because we haven't received the budget book yet. What we've received is the million four cuts and we, so we are saying yes, that makes sense to us. Instead of, instead of focusing on that FY 26 number, let's say Dr. Stash, you've identified cuts that you can make. We agree with those cuts that you can make for next year, that will be approximately $1.4 million. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. And so we have a motion on the floor</v> and I think the motion on the floor does not meant Yeah, it does what you said. <v Speaker 5>Okay. I thought Julie was saying to add the 95.</v> <v Speaker 10>I was, but I didn't make amendment. Yeah. Okay.</v> I was saying that. Okay, well <v Speaker 3>I disagree with you,</v> <v Speaker 1>But we can</v> <v Speaker 4>Do that civilly.</v> <v Speaker 10>Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 1>So,</v> but the motion does say approximately a million dollars. Do you wanna change it to appro $1.4 million? <v Speaker 3>It's 1,000,004</v> <v Speaker 1>Across,</v> <v Speaker 6>It's 1,000,004 from the</v> 25 adjusted budget. <v Speaker 4>Up, up on the screen is the, the slide</v> that I put in the forum that was presented last week. And here you can see <v Speaker 3>This right</v> <v Speaker 4>Here is the MPS Rollup 96.9 million.</v> That includes what Kathy was referring to earlier as the previously separate line item. Transportation subsidy is inside of there. So that's called level service. On the right, you can see the reductions 1.4 million because here the town preliminary budget was 92.7, 96.9 minus 92.7 is a shortfall of 4.2 million. Way too much on the right hand side is kind of the reduction story. And Julie's completely right a million plus that 400,000 from October. When we reduce both of those, it's not shown in exactly the stuff that would support the motion. But you can see that's how we get down to a $2.8 million override. To get down to the motion, I think you'd take the 96.9 million of our level service rollup and just subtract the million four. And that would be the below level service amounts that would be supported in this budget book is ultimately said differently that we would be submitting a budget at 96.9 minus 1.4, which is 95.5 million. <v Speaker 1>So moved. So seconded second.</v> Okay. Any other questions or comments about the motion on the floor? Seeing none, all those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions? The motion is approved. <v Speaker 4>Can I just express some sincere gratitude</v> for the process this team has gone through and kind of coming, I know it's been very painful. I actually feel emotional in having heard that motion, so I just wanna acknowledge the, the pain in that decision because of all the journey we've been on to create so much stuff. So I just, I need to say it and to thank you for your grace in doing so. Hmm. <v Speaker 1>I recommend, do you want, should we move to the calendar?</v> Sure. Or do you wanna cont Okay, sure. So we're gonna move to the discussion about the calendar. The way we're gonna do that is we're gonna first hear from the calendar review subcommittee on the data they collected, and then we're gonna hear the actual recommended calendar for next year and we'll vote on it. Oh. Or we'll decide whether or not we're ready to vote on it tonight or not. So with that, I'll pass the floor to PI cor, Ms McDonough. <v Speaker 10>Yeah. Can you do, I'll give it to you at families,</v> you might go through the families and I can do the, and we can just go back and forth. So we will, we, everyone had the slides earlier, so we'll just try to go through them quickly. Just a brief recap of the timeline for the calendar outreach. This project began, actually, it began in the 2122 school year with the policy subcommittee, with the proposal to make some changes to the calendar. The policy subcommittee decided to do engagement with religious leaders and some community and staff engagement. Although it was a smaller number, they brought the superintendent in the, that process went through the summer of 22. In the winter of 22. In the spring of 23, the superintendent pro, the former superintendent proposed two additional days outta school for religious observance. The school committee approved that, but passed a motion to form a calendar working group that would do, do more extensive community outreach or sort of decide how to move forward. The process was then put on hold because the idea was to form a working group that was similar to the working group that we would form for the superintendent search committee. So the process was on hold till the fall of the spring of 24. When the calendar working group met, the calendar working group decided on a path forward and, and that's what we're gonna walk through tonight. But essentially there was a survey in the fall of 24 and a family, staff and students and, and here we are tonight to review that with you. We'd like to say thank you. On the next slide to the members of the working group, we had parents, the parent coordinating council of the PTOs, CPAC, the metco, our teachers at various different levels, the principal of the high school central staff, we had a representation that was meant to mirror what we had done for the superintendent search committee, the calendar working group on the next slide, met three times in the spring, decided the direction, met again in this fall to finalize the survey. And then Elisa and I worked together with thought exchange to refine the survey to ensure that we got the data that we thought we were gonna get when we designed it with the working group. The calendar working group decided in the next slide, the calendar working group first sought a, I have these bullets backwards. First sought a legal opinion on a statement that about the establishment clause in the constitution. And from that legal opinion, decided to move forward with a survey of family, staff, and students to better understand the preference for observation of religious observance in a school calendar and the impact of full days and half days out of school on academic and social emotional wellbeing. For context, the legal opinion was that it had been shared with us that the Anti-Defamation League had provided guidance specifically related to the Jewish High High Holidays. That the establishment clause of the First Amendment prohibits K to 12 public schools from closing solely for the purpose of observing a religious holiday. They may close but are not required to close for secular reasons, including a secular observation of a holiday or logistical issues for staff. Shared the legal opinion with the school committee. The basic, there was a change in a case that came about in 2022, but the gist of the legal opinion was that the A DL statement is correct regarding school closures on religious holidays for case will test the 2022 interpretation. But that is essentially what the A DL had recommended was is is still the advice today. So the SUR Calendar committee decided to launch a survey and Do you wanna start that? I feel like I've been talking, I can keep going. Sure. Yep. You wanna go? Yep. Okay. <v Speaker 20>Yep. So we launched the survey in November.</v> It was open for 10 days. There were three different forms of the survey. One for families, one for staff, and one for students. We were able to work with thought exchange, so we had translation for any participants who wanted to take the survey in a different language. And it was a very seamless process. Multiple reminders were sent via email, via the district emails by school emails, and we got a good response rate. We had a 33% response rate for families. 52% of staff responded, oh, sorry. Yep. And 30% of students responded. And just to note that this was only sent to high school students. Do you want me to do the family data? Okay. So if we look at the results from the family survey, we're just highlighting some of the questions where we saw different data between the three surveys. So the three groups, family, staff or students. So we asked a question, we didn't ask any demographic questions of FA of anybody, but we did ask questions related to what individuals observe. So you can see that for family, the family survey, there's a range of religious holidays that are celebrated. Christmas day is the top one. And then we have sort of an equal number of families who celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Iam Kippur. And Good Friday we have an equal number of families who celebrate Diwali or the Lunar New Year. And then the smallest number of families celebrated Eids, the two eids. And then we had a group of families who celebrated other holidays that weren't specified. So the next question asked families what their desire was for school operations on religious holidays that they observed. So, and it was interesting that of families who observed the most commonly observed holidays, 80 to a hundred percent of those families desire a full day off for religious observance. When we move on to Lunar New Year and Good Friday, we have fewer families who feel like they would like a full day to observe that holiday at 61% and 57%. And we, one thing to note that we only asked about in our calendar, we have put Eid El Fitter as the holiday that we observe in the Natick calendar. But when we surveyed families, we found that the other, both Eids, Eid Elda, and Eid El fitter were both equally desired as as observed holidays. So that's something that we hadn't anticipated. And we also noted that in the upcoming calendar that we'll be looking at today, both of these holidays fall on school days. So something to think about. Continuing on to the next slide, for, for families who felt that they'd like a day off for school for their holiday, 70% of families who observed Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Diwali Eat Elcher and Christmas said it was extremely important to have no school on those days. And again, similarly we see that it was less important for families who celebrated Lunar New Year and Good Friday. The next question we asked families to rank how important different feelings or desires about school operations were with respect to their calendars. So we reminded them that we have to have 180 days of school operations and that there are some mandatory state and federal holidays that must close. So we asked them to rank in terms of importance, whether or not they supported continuity of routines, ensuring that all religious and cultural communities felt valued and represented if they would prefer school to end earlier in June and kind of maximize the summer break. And minimizing stress for students who have to choose between attending school or observing their holiday. And in this case, this was the order in which families ranked these different values. And unfortunately the way thought exchange is currently set up, we actually couldn't get the breakdown of the number of respondents in each of these categories. But we've been working with the Thought Exchange group and they're actually going to create a new representation of this ranking data. So we'll be able to bring that back to you in a couple of weeks and you can see the actual numbers of people in each category. So the next question was about, you know, we asked about continuity of school days and how important that was to families. So a lot of people had no opinion about this. And we had about twice as many families who responded Yes. As the ones who responded. No. And one thing we didn't do is we didn't ask families to say whether or not their children were in elementary school, middle school, or high school. So we have no way of knowing if there's a sort of student age component to how families answered. <v Speaker 10>Yeah. The working group was just to chime in.</v> They, they just didn't wanna ask any demographic questions at all. So it's, it's hard we can't like, you know, cross have the data or, you know, whatever you do with the, it's just so the, so going back to the Christmas, there were a lot of people who were like, you can't have school on Christmas, you can never do that. And, and we know that, but it actually provided a way for us to better understand who we were. Given that we were not asking any demographic questions at all. So, sorry. Yep. Just chiming. <v Speaker 20>Very helpful. Yep.</v> And then these are just some quotes about the previous question that were included in the, in the free answer. So again, you know, families talking about routines and how it's important to have routines for their students to have continuity of learning some questions about childcare and the difficulty of finding childcare for days and half days. It seems like the half days were more problematic than the full days off from school. We had more families who reported that, you know, finding childcare in a half day is really challenging compared to a full day. Again, we don't, not sure why. Yep. And then the next question is, was specifically about childcare. So again, we don't have the age breakdown. One could hypothesize that perhaps there were so many no respondents because we have more students in middle school and high school and that those families with, with older students aren't as concerned about finding childcare for, for those students. And then just some summary quotes in general, I think there was a lot of appreciation for us doing the survey. We had a lot of people who did comment that they, you know, really appreciated being asked that they, you know, recognized that observing holidays is important and that they really wanted a balance of continuity and being able to observe holidays, wanna <v Speaker 10>Do staff.</v> Yeah. Yeah. And then just, and just a comment on the summary quotes. We just tried to pull the ones that sort of represented the whole breadth of comments that we received. And I think it would be fair to say that those were the ones that were most often cited. So there were many folks who, who appreciated the way the calendar was currently structured or the way we had made changes in the past year. And then there were other people who felt like this was not the way to go and that they preferred a different route and they, they had some challenges with that as well. Let's see, the staff. So we had good response from the staff, which we were very appreciative of because we really wanted to understand the impact in the classroom. The first thing, which was similar to what we asked many of the same questions, but as Elise said, we're, we're gonna highlight different portions of those for this presentation. So understanding who our staff are and, and what they, they celebrate. You can see obviously that many a large majority celebrate Christmas less for Good Friday, which is interesting. But then getting back to the establishment clause, this is why this slide is included. We wanted to understand that if we did have, if you were able to work on the specified religious or cultural observance, if you would, IE you would not need to take a personal day for religious observance. So the school committee wants to consider the days in which you can staff the building. You can use this to, to look at that information and that data tells you when you can staff the building and when it would be more challenging to staff the building. We included this, it's the same question that we asked the families and we asked it of the students as well, but it's in included here. So you can see the difference of what was ranked the highest. And so the 1.92 means that that was the number that was ranked one most, most important, most often. And so I think the ending school earlier, when, when you look at the comments, it's really interesting from the staff and teachers because it's not really that they just want a longer summer break, it's that they're very concerned about teacher burnout. And it's a very long year. And, and so extending it further into June just gives teachers and staff less time to, to sort of rejuvenate themselves and, and to be ready to come back for the next school year. And there were also several comments that the days in June are less useful than the days during the year. So I know we always talk about, well we can just add the days in June, but it was interesting to see that those are just not as useful as the earlier days in the school year. <v Speaker 20>And I think just to that point, some</v> of the comments they gave is that, you know, students really aren't able to focus on June 25th. Whereas if, you know, if they can finish earlier that students are able to, you know, get a lot more learning in. <v Speaker 10>We asked the teachers about how well they, we wanted</v> to understand if our policies made sense as a school committee having adapted and changed those policies, the practices that that largely they were very able to implement the practices for homework and assignments. Some of the challenges observed about the homework policy implementation, particularly at the high school, which is obviously where we're seeing the most homework, is that the schedule is very challenging because the classes meet every other day. It's confusing about which days can be, can have homework and which days can't. Students can they assign homework if there's a holiday, the the the following day because the class doesn't meet till the day after that. And I think there's been a lot of like figuring out as a team which days there can be homework and which days there can't. So that just might be a practice thing, particularly at the high school to provide a little bit more direction on that. And I think we saw some confusion this year around the football game and Diwali and it was, and there was just literally confusion on the emails of, of why the game. And so you'll just see that and I think it's, it's something to consider. There seems to be some confusion there. Are there challenges to implementing this? I just talked about for athletic practices, we assume no opinion is because folks aren't involved in the athletics or activities. I think the primary comments here were that our schedule doesn't align with other districts. And so that's challenging sometimes trying to make sure that the games and games can happen. One of the things that was interesting to note here was that for some reason we are not running late bus. We're on a different slide. Oh, oh, challenges related to athletics. Okay. Yeah. Next slide after that. Oh yeah. So one of the things that came up, which I was not aware of is that somehow, somehow we're not running late buses on the day before a holiday or an a day out of school. And so there were some teachers and staff who were saying that that day, that next day shouldn't mean that we can't have a club, an activity and, but if there's no late buses then we can't have that club and activity. So I don't know why that is, but that came up here. So I think it would be something to look at are there challenges completing the academic material Cha challenges September, October and November getting through material. There's assessment timeframes which are locked to specific days takes time away from learning, trying to get the tests in. So I think that's just something for the committee to keep in mind that there are specific things that both academics and testing that teachers are trying to get through that implement that their challenges. And these were just the summary quotes from the teachers and staff. Consistency is important also, it's, it's perfectly, this one perfectly appropriate to adjust the calendar to accommodate religious and cultural observations. And I thought the last one was, was good. My two largest priorities are wanting everyone to feel equally represented and also wanting to minimize interruptions to learning. And it's virtually impossible to meet both students. <v Speaker 20>So this is our last, last batch</v> of data for the student survey. So we asked them the question about which cultural holidays and religious holidays they, they and their family observe. And this was a little different from the family survey, but again, we were only surveying the high school students. So that wasn't too unexpected, but it was largely in line with the family survey results. When we looked at the rank choice question, it was really interesting that the students valued ensuring that all religious and cultural communities feel valued and represented was the most important. And that the least important to them was having continuity of routines, instruction and testing timelines. So just really interesting to see the different sort of thought processes come through in this survey. And on the next slide, when we asked them if they had time to celebrate or observe a religious or cultural holiday when school is closed versus having pressure to do homework, the majority said that yes they did, which is reassuring. And then the next slide asked them about how they celebrate a religious holiday when it's not currently a day off from school. IE school is in session and asked them if they felt like they were able to miss school to observe the holidays. And I think the data here was a little, maybe a little hard to interpret 'cause there were a lot of not applicables. So I, I think trying to know which students really felt like they couldn't observe a holiday was a little bit hard to tease out from this, this batch of data. So we only had 34% who said yes always or sometimes, but that was twice as many students who said no. So I think there may be some more information that we might want to gather around this to see what the student experience is. So the next one was asking them if, if there were no days off for religious holidays and observances, how comfortable they would feel missing school to celebrate their holiday. And the majority would not feel comfortable. They would feel either somewhat uncomfortable or extremely uncomfortable missing school and basically taking a personal day. So then we moved on to asking them about sports and if they had had practices or games on religious holidays or observances. And we're assuming, again, the ones that said not applicable, just don't play sports. But it was interesting that the majority of the respondents said that they had been asked to have practice or games on religious holidays and observances. So I think that's again, something we might wanna understand better where the pressures come from there. And then we asked them if they answered yes that they'd had practices or games, would they feel comfortable missing the practice or game in order to celebrate a holiday? And the majority said no, they would not feel comfortable. So then we have some quotes from the students about why they felt closing school for, for holidays was important and we, here we note that 81% of the students responded that yes, they felt that closing school was important. And I think that it's a mixture of, of not wanting to feel like they had the pressures of completing homework and having to miss out on a family celebration. And also really wanting, you know, everyone in the school to feel included and not to have that stress. And then just closing with some summary quotes about the experience, I think the students were generally very positive about having days off from school, not only to, you know, for the, the inclusion of their classmates who celebrate those holidays, but also because they just like having sort of regular days off from school to kind of relax and, and have a break. Would you say that was accurate? So <v Speaker 10>Yeah,</v> <v Speaker 20>Very.</v> A very human response I think to having days off. Yeah. <v Speaker 10>Yeah. So we didn't sort of draw a summary slide</v> of our conclusion because we really felt like this was just a presentation of the data of what we found. And so the school committee should carry that forward. But I just want to thank everyone for supporting the motion like almost two years ago to do this work because I felt like it was really important to actually have information from the community and, and I appreciated also going back to the work that Catherine had shared, all of the notes and everything from the policy subcommittee and the meetings and original ideas when this first came to the policy subcommittee. So having all of that and now having this, I feel like gives us a full picture. <v Speaker 1>So thank you so much for the work</v> and for the presentation tonight. What I'm curious about, so we have a calendar proposal from the administration tonight. My understanding, I just wanna clarify this before we move further in conversation, is that the work that you're doing is not necessarily going to lead to any kind of recommendations for next school year, but rather for beyond next school year. So, or do you see any of these recommendations connecting to the proposal for next year? <v Speaker 10>N not for next year,</v> but I don't know that there's any more work that this working group will do on this topic. I think it will just be up to the school committee to do what it wa wants to. <v Speaker 1>Okay. So there aren't any</v> <v Speaker 10>Specific,</v> there's no specific recommendations. Okay. <v Speaker 1>That's helpful.</v> <v Speaker 10>And I don't think there would be</v> any forthcoming. <v Speaker 1>Okay. So with that I'll turn things</v> to administration and Ms. Meloni to talk about the proposed calendar for next year. <v Speaker 7>Sure. So you all have a copy</v> of the proposed calendar, which maintains what we typically do in terms of conferences for pre-K to four, two in November, two in April, high school conferences in December, middle school conferences, which is not listed on here, but will be in January as it was this past Actually, what last week? So that will remain, Nils Day will move back to the Monday after Thanksgiving. We did move it this past year because it was election day, but we'll move it back to the Monday after Thanksgiving. And then all of the holidays that have been listed in the calendar in the past will remain and we will need to add some because of the way they fall during the school week based on the work that was done when we developed a calendar over a year ago. So Rosh Hashanah on September 23rd, yam Kaur on October 2nd, Diwali on October 20th. Lunar New Year is not a day we would need to take off because it falls over our February break. Eid El Fitter on March 20th. Good Friday on April 3rd. Eid Elda, as you mentioned, does fall on a school day. So that's May 27th. One thing that we are recommending is that with the winter break, we would come to school on December 22nd and 23rd and be off December 24th. Re typically we would return on January 2nd with January 2nd being a Friday, we would anticipate that not many students would be returning to school that day and we would have low attendance. So our recommendation would be that we have that day off and return on Monday, January 5th. It puts our last day of school with no snow days on June 17th. And if we have five snow days and Juneteenth in the middle of that, it would put our last day of school on June 25th. <v Speaker 1>So we have, oh, go ahead. Ms.</v> S Oh, and then Mr. Brand, <v Speaker 6>I, I hate to be Debbie Downer, believe it or not,</v> but the current teacher contract requires three days beyond school. The two at the beginning and one at the end. The current admin assistant contract requires five days beyond the last teacher day. You can't do that. <v Speaker 7>The current teacher contract does not</v> require any days after. <v Speaker 6>Okay. Even if you end it the 25th. Yeah.</v> You do not have five days after to finish within the fiscal year. <v Speaker 1>Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 6>For the admin assistants.</v> So we better hope there's no snow. That's for the two, the people who are scheduled to work 220 days, you know, it's fine for the people who are working the 180 3, it's fine for the people working two 60, but those two 20 specifically have five days before the teacher's report. <v Speaker 7>The 1 9 1 93.</v> <v Speaker 6>No, the two 20. Yes. 1 93. Yes.</v> It's two 20 with with holidays in there. <v Speaker 7>Gotcha.</v> <v Speaker 6>It's the 183 teacher days.</v> Ten five days before and five days after the teachers. So I dunno how we work that other than praying to the no snow gods, if there is such a thing, and I'm all for that 'cause I don't need snow, but I just wanna raise that as a concern. <v Speaker 1>Mr. Brand name is Brunell.</v> <v Speaker 6>I</v> <v Speaker 1>Retract my desire for a question.</v> Okay. Thank you. Fair enough. Ms. Brunell, <v Speaker 5>I just have a process question. What's the plan here?</v> <v Speaker 1>So I was gonna propose two options, obviously.</v> One option is if we're ready to vote, we can do that tonight. Or alternatively we can provide recommendations if there either we can provide our own recommendations and or see if the public wants to weigh in and then vote next time. Is there, I know, I, I know there's the question every year, which is how late can we go in terms of voting this? So our ne our next meeting happens to be literally a week from now. So it's not the usual two weeks. <v Speaker 7>We are actually in a pretty good position.</v> I wasn't, we, I don't think we were anticipating that there would be a vote tonight. We know you need time to process this and it's typically two weeks knowing that next week we have a meeting is a pretty tight turnaround. Yeah. So if we need to wait till the meeting after next, I think we're still within an okay timeline for pass that to Dr. Stash for a final. <v Speaker 4>I think you said it well. I think the high school</v> is very anxious for it. So if the team were ready to vote, they would be eager to hear it, but they would not want to rush you. So I, I know we've heard from the high school that they're wanting to kind of know where this lands, but I don't think Oh, 'cause of the prom thing. Yeah. So they're trying to book their prom for the next year and that matters. But I don't think that's, we're also fairly early compared to many districts. So. <v Speaker 1>Well the only issue though, you need to give a</v> <v Speaker 4>Good thought.</v> <v Speaker 1>Yeah. This is an issue for everyone.</v> So we just happen to be in this weird situation. 'cause we have our next meeting on the third, but then because of President's day in February break, we then we don't, we have this another three week gap. So, and anyway, to answer your question though, Ms. Brunell, so it's really up to us when we vote on this, it sounds like probably not tonight, but we'll just have to decide whether we're ready to vote on the third or if not the end of February. <v Speaker 6>Yeah. The Ian contract requires</v> that we notify them by March 1st. <v Speaker 1>Okay. So we have, that's</v> <v Speaker 6>Our window. Okay.</v> <v Speaker 1>As I see it. So we have until the end of February.</v> So I'll take any suggestions as far as steps if we just wanna, yeah, Ms. McDon, <v Speaker 10>I feel like this came up at the beginning</v> of this year when we added in the purple days for religious and cultural observance when school is open. And so I have two thoughts about this. One idea is to have the, the calendar be just strictly about school operations. So it's communi it's, it's a communications issue. We're communicating to people when school is open and when it's closed and when it's a half day if we don't want to go in that direction. I, I do think it's confusing for the holidays that start, we have a note in the box that says Jewish and Muslim holidays begin at sundown the day before. And we're, I think it's confusing. I I don't think we need to, so for example, for Rosh Hashanah, I don't think we need to color the 22nd purple. I think it's, it would be just the 23rd and 24th and the same with Yom Kippur because we have that note in there that they begin at sundown. And I feel like, I think, I think that's confusing to people. I the, and if you, because as you can see, I'm just looking, 'cause this is, and it's the March 20th. So for example, like on Eid outfitter, you don't have the 19th in purple. I just, I feel like the purple's really confusing to people. So I would prefer to remove it from the calendar with the note there highlighted that the holidays do begin at sundown and then procedurally teachers and staff need to be aware of that. <v Speaker 7>So if I could respond to that, I think that</v> that was put in, in the past year or two specifically because of the updated homework policy and expectations. But if I agree with you that I think it is very confusing, I think if we have a cleaner calendar for the public and for operations and then have a separate calendar that is specific for, this is the homework policy calendar that says you and that may clear up some of the confusion around what our homework policy is and when things can and cannot be assigned. That would make more sense. <v Speaker 10>That is, that is my idea. I prefer that. But just</v> <v Speaker 1>Ms. Brune and then Ms,</v> <v Speaker 5>The only places I would push back on that would be</v> identifying Eid a aha and also the lunar New year. I think that what we heard is that being seen and feeling valued and being represented is, is important. And so those two days, they wouldn't be days off, but they are certainly holidays. So I could see keeping purple for those two days. I do like the idea of having a separate religious and there's several committees that have that example of a religious o observation. Because to me, I think at the, the most important thing is making sure people feel seen and valued. I have another question too, but Okay, sure. <v Speaker 20>No, I was, I was, I was just gonna say that, you know,</v> I agree with, I think that the list at the bottom in text where all the holidays are captured and you can kind of read it. I don't know, I, I like the idea of a really clean operational calendar. I appreciate that we need one that addresses the homework policy, but I feel like there might be even even better way to highlight these like community cultural observances. Like, you know, like on the, just on the, the, the public calendar or the school calendars or the things pop up like what's today, you know, national hotdog day or whatever. I feel like we could incorporate it there and then be really visible about it. And maybe people pay attention to that more than they do to this calendar when they're really just going here to look to see if there's gonna be a half day or a day off from school. I don't know. That would be my thought. So I guess I agree with getting rid of the purple and I agree with highlighting all the holidays, but maybe in a different format on this. <v Speaker 1>Oh, I think I, I would also agree with what Ms.</v> Goeth said. Just a another little note, I dunno if this is what Ms. McDonna was saying, but for the Jewish holidays, I wouldn't say that it, it starts September 22nd and October 1st I would simply say begins at sundown. 'cause otherwise it's confusing. It's not the full day, it's just the sundown. Great. The actual holidays are the 23rd and 24th and anyway, that was just, okay. So that's helpful to clarify. But it sounds like just in terms of where we're heading is we're providing feedback that we would want the administration to take in, come back and then we will determine next week whether we're ready to vote on it or push it to the end of the month, end of February month. <v Speaker 10>Yeah. Then we'll</v> <v Speaker 21>Be in February</v> <v Speaker 1>The what? By then? We'll be in</v> <v Speaker 5>February now.</v> <v Speaker 1>Yeah, the end of February. Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 10>I I just wanna high, can I just highlight something?</v> I just wanna say that there were so many people, and maybe that's 'cause the survey launched in November, but November was really hard for people and it's really hard when we add in. So we've got like multiple half days and you've got Veterans Day and then you have the day off now again after Thanksgiving. I just, I don't know what to do about that, but I just, it came up again and again and again and we're just, and I feel like we're not responding to that and maybe there's nothing we can do, but I just think we should think about that as a committee. <v Speaker 1>Ms. Brunell,</v> <v Speaker 5>I also, I agree.</v> I I was wondering about the half days, given that those are particularly difficult for families. Is it possible when, like we talked about complexity and how the things have changed in special education. Obviously this calendar has gotten more complex. Would it ever make sense to condense the two days of conferences into one day and I guess a half day counts as a full day. So maybe that doesn't help us with the 180 days. I guess, did I just give my own answer? Yeah, yeah. I just wa I just, I don't know if this is for the, I don't think this is for the FY 26 I year, I will say, but I definitely think that in the coming year we need to do, we need to really take what Julie and Elise have just done in the committee and really step back and make a values-based decision that allows for the complexity that is a school calendar now. <v Speaker 1>Oh, sorry Ms. McKenna.</v> <v Speaker 8>I just wanted to say with regard to the elementary</v> half days for conferences, it would be really limiting to have one half day to accomplish all of those. It also doesn't give flexibility for families. Like, this is your one and only day. I don't know if there's a, a creative way to look at spacing them out a little differently so that in November it doesn't feel like three half days in a row. But that would just be my recommendation. <v Speaker 1>Ms. Albani, I</v> <v Speaker 7>Guess, and I'll leave this to Mrs.</v> McEnany to answer, but November is the halfway point between the start of the year and the middle of the year, which is why we have them in November because it's a good time of year to assess how kids are doing the first quarter of the year. I totally hear November is hard because you have the Thanksgiving break, you have Veterans Day holiday. I I just, I think Octo moving 'em to October is really hard too because there are two Monday holidays and now there's also a Friday holiday in December. You end up with the break. So I'm not sure when else you would fit in conferences for elementary students. <v Speaker 8>No, I've just noticed they're already,</v> I'm noticing they're already kind of two weeks apart, which is probably, it, it just kind of is the way that, that shakes down in November. But I wouldn't wanna shortchange families on either being able to give them enough time to tell them about their child's progress, but also trying to meet with them too early doesn't give me enough time to really have a complete picture of their child past those initial, it takes kids up to six weeks to become really fully acclimated to a new situation of any kind classroom included. So I wouldn't wanna go too early because then I won't have, or teachers won't have that full period of time to know the student that they're talking to the parent about. <v Speaker 1>Any other suggestions?</v> So I'm gonna try to rush through the agenda a little bit because we, it is almost 10 o'clock, so I recommend that you have the, the feedback and we revisit it next week. Quick question for both the policy subcommittee and I guess the community engagement group. Are those two items that we can postpone until next? We're meeting again next week. <v Speaker 15>I can do the policy subcommittee one in 10 seconds.</v> <v Speaker 1>Okay.</v> <v Speaker 15>Ready? Time me.</v> This is the first reading if you want me to do it now. Do you want me to do it now? <v Speaker 1>I I don't have do it in the budget first. Okay. Do</v> <v Speaker 15>The budget first.</v> Okay. That doesn't count. Stop the clock. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah. Is that right? Okay. Yeah.</v> Okay, let's do the budget. 'cause it came, it's earlier in the agenda and then, but you'll be ready with a ten second. I'm ready. I can do this <v Speaker 4>In one minute.</v> No two minutes maybe Lynn is just gonna bring it up. I'm gonna give the little throat clear to it first and go through the first slide. So essentially just for the really, oh my Max's about to lose power to, that's a long meeting. So we just wanted to share, we, many of you likely know if you've been plugging into this potential override discussion that we have been fielding questions from the public. We're happy to field as many has come in. We just wanted to kind of give an overview of, of what we've been receiving. I've been sending the school committee a memo every Friday on the ones that we answer from the school side. And so really just pulling out some themes here. So since this started, we fielded 48 questions. The memos I've linked in here for the public, but to go through the themes. The first one is budget transparency and cost drivers. So essentially asking questions around budget increases and year over year variances. That's pretty standard. Not surprising. I put a few example questions. Many of the questions that get towards detail that's gonna be in the budget book. We've just deferred people to say it's gonna be in the budget book. The next one is on staffing trends and impact. So wanting to know where there's growth in certain positions. There's a definition between non-teaching and teaching that DESI makes that we've had to put some clarity around. And we've basically explained in these, which are very accessible to the public. All those granular details about the increases. The next theme is on fiscal accountability, asking what are cost saving measures. I think our meeting today really demonstrates our spirit on that. Asking some questions around per pupil expenditures. The next one, educational priorities and services. So asking about funding and staffing for programs. Very much an interest in how we're working with our English language learners as well as our special education students. And ensuring we're protecting that many questions on leveraging technology. And then understanding the planned reductions that we're making. Oops, sorry. Also some questions on facilities and infrastructure. A few around just the Memorial Elementary School and when the feasibility study would be completed. Some questions around who has air conditioning in the schools. And then the last one is on tech and innovation. Wondering whether technology could address larger class sizes. Our teachers are really important, so we don't think that would supplant our teachers whatsoever, but it was a good question that we fielded. The last one is legal policy and compliance. So really trying to understand, I think there's been some discussion over the years. I guess I wasn't here around what are mandated services or mandatory services. And so expanding upon that. So this looks like a long deck, but we're really just trying to give the themes that are coming outta the 48 questions and we'll continue to answer them. The fin com, there's a special batch coming out because the fin com gave us 46 additional questions, which we're working on and should be published in its own batch alongside with the town in the next week or so. I can take questions, but you've all read the memos. <v Speaker 1>Any questions or comments?</v> It's a lot of laughter so I just wanted to make just a couple very brief comments about this. So first of all, thank you so much really to Dr. Sp, Mr. Gillis sbo, the whole team behind us. A team that is much smaller today than it was in previous years, and yet doing enormous, enormous amount of work, gathering all these questions and more importantly, providing the answers, really ensuring that we are informing the public of exactly what it is that we are dealing with. The next point I wanna make is gonna sound like I'm contradicting myself, but to the public, I wanna say keep asking these questions. It is important. At the end of the day, people will make a decision about the override in favor or against it based on what is right for their situation, what is right for their values and priorities. And that's how democracy works. But from our perspective, I think it's, from my perspective, it's really important that people realize what is at stake and what it is that we're working on. I have always defined, I'm not gonna go through, I'm gonna have much more to say in when it's not 10 o'clock at night. But in general, I, I wanna say, and I hope the public realizes that just by watching tonight's meeting alone, is that the school committee and the school administration have the very difficult challenge of balancing two really important responsibilities. The responsibility to care and educate for every single one of our students and their fiduciary responsibilities towards the residents and taxpayers. And sometimes those two things are at odds. Investing in more teachers, investing in to reduce class sizes, investing in specialists, in interventionists, in math and literacy, in mental health, expanding extracurricular programs, making sure that our special ed programs as pretty much everyone made a case today, we need to have manageable case cases, case loads. And I was missing a word. And at the same time, we can't price out taxpayers from this town. And so we have been doing that work also of looking at every single number in the budget. As Mr. Gilli said before, we are cutting and cutting and cutting. We cut last year. We're cutting more this year to the extent that we're stopping at the, the point where we're impacting quality of education. We've gone there. This is how far we've moved with a million dollars that we approved tonight. We've gone to as much as we can cut without impacting the quality of education. Beyond that, we are talking about there's just nowhere else to cut, but student facing positions, interventionists, other positions that are, make a direct impact in our students. So I just wanna public, as you're hearing this conversation over the next few weeks, ask, keep asking your questions. Keep letting us know what you're concerned with, but please realize that that's the, the balance that we're trying to make. And lastly, just very briefly as we're still talking about the budget, I just wanna talk a little bit about the budget process as every, as we do every year. And as stated by mandated by the state law, we're gonna be releasing the budget. It's technically due as Dr. Sp said on February 3rd. 'cause February 1st is a weekend. The administration has kindly, kindly, kindly offered to release it on the weekend that that's how hard they're, they're working and that's how hard they are trying to get information out. We are gonna have a joint meeting on February 3rd with the select board and the, and Fcom, which will be the launch of the budget process. That's when the budget will be out. That's when will be first presented to the boards. Each board will then have a whole process by which we examine and eventually in the case of school committee, approve the school budget. In the case of the select board, approve the town budget. And in the case of the income of income, make a recommendation to town meeting regarding the full budget. We're gonna lay out those processes. So this is the beginning of the process. February 3rd, we'll mark the beginning of a process and we'll say more about that. Each of the boards will say more about that on the third. So that's, that's by message that I wanna provide tonight. Any more, any other questions or comments? <v Speaker 11>I just, we have the budget guidelines that need</v> to make it into the budget. So that <v Speaker 1>Has to be Oh, okay.</v> Tonight. So we'll do that. Okay. Ms. Brunell, <v Speaker 5>Just one quick nuance.</v> The budget, or sorry, the override is, is has not been decided yet by the select board. So it, you know, that's something that it's also very important for people to under to pay attention to now. So that if you are communicating about it, about the budgets, we understand how seriously you're taking it so that we understand when and how the select board will put it possibly on the ballot. Right. There's still one more step. We're not even to that step yet, where the select board has put it on the ballot. <v Speaker 22>February 12th. That's</v> <v Speaker 1>Right. Sorry.</v> <v Speaker 22>12th.</v> <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Any other questions</v> or comments about this item? And before we go into the subcommittee updates, seeing none, well that's do, that's the sprint. Three subcommittees in in three minutes. <v Speaker 5>This is the first reading</v> <v Speaker 15>Of</v> of the public participation policy. BEDH. All I was gonna say, and we can talk about it in more detail at the next meeting and we probably should, is that this is to just read the proposed changes. That's it. Out of time. I'm out of time. <v Speaker 1>Very good. Any questions</v> or comments to the policy subcommittee? <v Speaker 15>We've talked about this policy a number</v> of times at the meeting already, so I don't feel like we have to you it's in Novus. Everybody can read it. Are we voting next? We don't have to vote it next time because of this, but just that's all like people should give it a look. <v Speaker 1>So we should look at it and</v> potentially vote on it next time. If people or <v Speaker 15>Discuss it, talk to it. We can discuss it.</v> <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Ms. Corset and if</v> <v Speaker 20>People have comments, do you want them</v> to just email you directly? <v Speaker 15>People from the school committee? Yeah. School committee.</v> No, I think we should. I mean you could. I mean you can, people can email. I think we should make time in the next meeting to discuss it. Okay. Openly. But <v Speaker 23>Comments have to go to one individual that</v> <v Speaker 15>Cannot Yes.</v> The entire policy. Right. So you can either email me directly or wait for the next meeting. <v Speaker 1>Okay. Community engagement.</v> Can we do that in a minute? Do you want, sorry, I didn't mean to put you in a spotlight. 'cause actually there's a bunch of us. But you've created a beautiful spreadsheet. I was too <v Speaker 5>Shy.</v> No problem. Thank you. It's beautiful. So yeah, just please everyone look at that spreadsheet. So we are committed not just in this season, but as we move forward as a committee as we always have to, sorry I'm so tired for, from family and town members feedback. So we will be coming to the farmer's market near you on Saturday's, February 1st and March 1st given, and depending on the response we get there, we may continue that in the future. We have coffee hours scheduled and we will send those out in the engage. So we'll work with the administration team and of course there's the forums coming up. So just really committee members. I need everybody to fill out where you can, would just be so helpful if you just put your name in one of those slots. <v Speaker 1>Yep. And sorry I just passed</v> to you 'cause I'm too tired too. Just to, just to take a step back, the context of this is that the school committee made one of our goals for this year, the sec, the school year, I guess community engagement. So this is really our opportunity with or without a discussion of our budget overrides an op, an a point to be out there in the community and engage the community in a two way communication. So that's, this is what this is about. Obviously we'll talk about any topic that people want at the farmer's market and some of the other opportunities in addition to the override and budget specific forums. Budget guidance, budget guidance documents. Any, any questions about community engagement? No. Okay. So budget guidance documents. <v Speaker 11>So we updated, you said both are in the,</v> both are in Novus, our final proposed language. Then the track changes. I mean I think we captured what everyone's feedback was. If I wanna do very quick run through of that's the wrong version. The other one? The final. Yeah, the final one. Because that one doesn't seem, oh yeah, because that didn't capture the changes. But I can say the changes are, we had meet contractual agreements. We added in, I think this was from Isha, to allow NPS to hire, develop, maintain the best educators. So just giving it a little color. We took out the one that was just about the detailed school department's five year capital plan and added it into the support the superintendent direct developing the next strategic plan, including the detailed five-year capital plan. The biggest changes were made to the one that was previously maintained afterschool offerings. And just gave it some meatier language that tied to kind of our profile of a graduate maintain robust set of offerings, both during, and we wanted to consider electives during and after school to provide students with diverse experiences, life skills, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem solving, creativity. And then we had this one the, we had the five-year detailed capital plan. So we changed, we had one in for developing a comprehensive long-term capital plan and just came to change it to strategy so that we are developing strategy for the long term and a plan for the five year. So that's the highlights of the changes that we made. <v Speaker 1>And you want us to vote to approve?</v> <v Speaker 11>Yes. So go in the budget.</v> <v Speaker 6>One other thing was because</v> <v Speaker 1>We only have a week left. Yeah.</v> <v Speaker 6>One other thing was we took out the line about</v> the override specifically because we are advocating for the budget we think we need and that, so advocating for the override is important and it's incumbent on each of us, but it's not part of a budget document. It <v Speaker 11>Was the structural deficit one we got rid of.</v> Yeah. Oh, okay. <v Speaker 1>Sounds good. Any questions or comments</v> before we make a motion to approve? <v Speaker 10>Just a quick question. These are all things</v> that would be accomplished next year. <v Speaker 11>This is our guidance to the administration</v> and their development of the budget of the priorities that we're setting forward. <v Speaker 10>But just for next year. Yes.</v> So we would expect that all of these things would be done next year. <v Speaker 5>Yes. When you think about how,</v> how is the $95 million going to be spent in big themes? These are the themes of how the 90 million, $95 million will be spent. Okay. And that's <v Speaker 6>Not accomplish them all like developing the</v> long-term capital strategy. But we need to begin that process. So we may not have a finished document by the end of the 26th school year, but we'd like to make progress on it. <v Speaker 11>That's why it's a stra.</v> That one in particular is a strategy, not a plan for participating in the MSBA. Understanding what the impacts are for brown loja I think are gonna be an important part of that conversation. <v Speaker 1>Any other questions or comments? Say now take a motion</v> <v Speaker 5>Move to approve the school committee budget guidance,</v> values and priorities for the FY 26 budget. <v Speaker 1>Second. Matt was ready right there.</v> Any any discussion before we vote? Say none. All those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions? The motion passes now we have budget documents. Yeah. Thank you. Anything else? Well that is the end of the agenda and it is 10 12, so I'll take a motion to adjourn Aurn. Second. All those in favor? Anyone against any abstentions? So goodnight everyone, thank you for those of you still watching us at 10 12 and we'll see you next week. We'll do this all over again next week.