Speaker 1: To order. And it's the Natick School Committee. It is Monday, March 23rd, 6:30 PM So we'll start with roll call Mr. Patel. Here. Ms. Flas. Here. Mr. Brand. Present. Ms. Collins. Here. Ms. Brunell here. And I'm a yes. So we have a quorum. So we'll stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in a moment of silence, Speaker 2: Reified at the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation invisible with liberty and justice for all. Speaker 1: And we take that moment of silence to honor our troops
who are serving us here and abroad. Do we have any announcements, Mr. Brand? Just Speaker 3: A, a quick, I just came out of fourth field. The name always the Field Study Group. It's got a longer name. And so I just wanted to give a quick update. Like tonight we met with representatives from Natick Soccer, Natick, little League Natick Football. Last week, art Goode from the town was with us. So each time we've been meeting with experts and stakeholders who use the fields
and who maintain the fields to, to continue to gather all of the, all of the data to ultimately put together a report that we will present at town meeting in the spring. So again, again, for those who haven't paid attention to the whole process, our goal as a group is not to make a recommendation on natural or synthetic turf, but rather to sort of gather all the data and put it into one report. And so we've been asking the same types of questions to all the stakeholders and so far so good. That's it.
Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. Other announcements? The, the advocacy day? Do you wanna announce that? I Speaker 4: Was Speaker 1: Oh, okay. I think we should. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: I have one. Okay, go ahead. Speaker 5: Just very briefly, we wanted to share that on Wednesday, native public schools will will be participating in Tech Accelerates teaching, which is a new event hosted by tech and it's a regional event that honors the skill care and impact of educators across member districts.
Our district went about this by asking our principals and instructional leadership teams to nominate people. We did what we call the blind review process where we took all the names off and kind of read all of the different narratives and we nominated or move forward too. And they're being recognized on Wednesday. We're really excited about this and we will write a, a good fun piece about who these people are and what they are recognized for in our next Engage newsletter. So I'm not gonna say the names here 'cause it's on Wednesday, it's a bit of a teaser, but we're very excited always
to recognize our great educators. Speaker 1: Thank you. Any other announcements? Okay. So we'll move to public speak. Public speak is scheduled for a period of 15 minutes. Each speaker will be permitted 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 through the school committee chair. Public speak is not a time for debate or response to comments by the school committee. I did not receive any emails. Nobody in the room and nobody online. Speaker 6: Okay. Speaker 1: Alright. So we will close public speak.
So we're going to do, I think, we'll, we'll we're gonna do things in a little bit of a different order. So we're gonna go to the chairman's report and we have a special and slightly sad thing today 'cause it is Ms. Lather's last meeting with us as a school committee member. So we're gonna honor her today and I think we have a little presentation, Speaker 6: But it is not her last meeting as a school committee member. It's her last school committee meeting. Okay. We raped her for one more budget. Oh, Speaker 1: Excellent. Excellent. So last nighttime school committee meeting.
Speaker 6: Can't let it go. Speaker 7: Which is a good thing 'cause not all the books are here yet. So 10 Tree Books is helping us out by, by ordering the books that we were jamon. And I looked for books that would represent your work here on the school committee the last three years. So those are in this slide presentation. First I'll say, Kate, you have been a steady and analytical member, no surprise there over the past three years in the midst of a leadership change, a town override, and while you were raising for teenagers, that is time
that you spent away from your family to give to other teenagers students in our district. And you will, CER certainly made an impact. The budget subcommittee recommended its first budget priorities and they were better because of your crystal clear thinking. Kate has an unbelievable ability to synthesize information in real time. It's as if chat GBT is sitting next to you, doesn't she? I mean it's literally like she can take all this input and like make it into a pretty sentence too.
So it was impressive to watch. I've always heard about how smart you are and know your jobs and then to see it in action was pretty awesome. I know I could brag about you a lot. In addition to the hours of meetings you sat in this room, you also leaned into things like the net zero committee and the community se senior center and you brought them back to this table. So anytime we were making a decision, you were often helping us center those conversations around our commitment in as natick as a community to become a climate leader
and to remember to include people who are oftentimes forgotten that has been in your advocacy for the literacy in our district and has been across all of the, all of the decisions, even in the decision to, with the the cafeteria program, the, the careful reading that you did as we made those contracts, you had things in mind that I don't think, I don't think would've been kept in at the forefront. Were you not there? So we found these four books, one for each
of our current elementary schools. That has been a interesting, tonight we're presenting on the elementary schools, right? So the, it's a, it's a, it's a good meeting for you to go out on. That has always been your passion. And so these four books are all about belonging, community and doing things to build people up and build the community up around them as a friend. I want to say that during COVID you gave, I'm gonna cry, you gave me a mask with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's quote that said, fight
for the things you believe in. And you are one of the people that does that every day. So thank you for being my friend and thank you for serving on the school committee. And those are the books on the slide. We have one that's here and the others are coming. Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you very much. So thank you so much for your service and we have cake for everybody. So there's cake, there's fruit. I think we'll take a 50 minute recess and just have some social time and, and thank Kate. Would anyone else like to say, oh yeah, one moment. Mr. Cruz. Yep. Would anyone else in the committee like
to say anything before we get to the cake part, Mr. Brand and then I'll go to the public Speaker 3: As well. I'll always say something. Of course I do like cake. I just wanted to say, so I haven't, we haven't known each other that long, but we've sat next to each other. Kate and I have sat next to each other for the last three years. We haven't done it recently, but I, I do feel like now's the time to, to share and she knows I don't at the, at the beginning of of this term, we would, prior to every meeting make a guess to the minute of when the minute the meeting would end. We always, and we did pretty well, right? Within minutes we could nail it from the beginning.
And I think that's, 'cause Kate and I both love data and I, I think a lot of analysis but what I, what I was gonna say and I'm gonna say no nerds. That's right. You can say it. Yeah, we are, what I would say is this. One of the thing I have a lot of respect for anybody who is willing to serve on these any boards and committees in town, but one of the things that I appreciate the most for anybody who's watched the meetings, K and I don't always agree on things, but we've been able to have, I think healthy conversations and debates and,
and hopefully model for people how disagreement can work. And, and so it's been, you know, I have appreciated that about working with you and it's been a pleasure serving in the next oh boy hot mic in the, in the next seat and good luck on whatever board or committee you decide to get roped into next. But thank you. I Speaker 8: Heard she's moving to the think calm. Speaker 3: Oh, Speaker 8: I'm Speaker 3: Joking. Isn't town moderator around? Speaker 8: I'm just spreading a rumor Speaker 3: That's how these things start. Jeff s's about to walk in and I Yeah, yeah Speaker 4: Are you should replace it.
Oh cool. Thank you. Speaker 1: And Ms. Ms Vickers. Speaker 8: Hi Brinley Vickers Precinct eight. I would never say I speak for the entire community but I talk to a lot of people in the community and so I'd like to say I speak for many of us, we were really happy to have Kate run. I, we understand how challenging the decision was. It's a lot to do to volunteer to do that. And we've been really, really grateful for your time.
And I just wanted to say every year we do this and if you ever wanna come back to the school committee, there would be a lot of us that would support you in that. And I'm very grateful for your words, your pragmatism, your gift of time. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Okay, are we ready for cake? Okay, so we'll take a 15 minute recess, we'll come back at seven o'clock and continue meeting. Okay, so we are back from recess. So we are going to go to an update from the MSVA building committee chair.
So Mr. Miler, Speaker 9: Good evening. There's a slide deck or I'll just wait a minute. Take your time. All right, thank you. We can go to the next slide please. So I'm gonna just touch a little bit on the committee itself to remind everybody about the committee and the dynamics and how many of us we are. I'm gonna talk about the summary of the committee activities that we've done, projected activities through 2026 and a little bit into 2027. We got a lot coming up and we have a possible vice chair assignment that I'll be coming up with most likely later in another couple months. A nomination I've talked to an individual
and then obviously any related questions that you might have. Next slide. So just to refresh everyone's minds here, we have 17 official members of the committee. It's a large group, it's a great group, it's a diverse group. We have 14 voting members, we have four members of the public that have different backgrounds. If you remember when we assigned them, we have one architect, two civil engineers and one environmental scientists. And we also have multiple town boards and departments represented on the committee as well. So we've got a diverse makeup across the board as well
as the top administration in the town. So it's a great overall committee and you can see the committee members over to the right, their names that we have and highlight it. The non-voting members, they usually, what we have is the people who don't necessarily need to come to every single meeting and nor do they need to be part of the quorum, which creates a challenge as the Natick fire and police representative. We have the sustainability director and the director of facilities now the director of facilities and all these people, the fire, police and sustainability director, they don't necessarily need
to come to all the meetings all the time. So it allows them to come in as needed based upon the topics of the day or phase of the day. Next slide please. So summary of the activities that we've had, just to kind of remind everybody, we did go through kind of a, we have been following more of the norming, storming, I mean the forming, storming, norming, performing type team dynamics with a big group. And we've been doing all kinds of different activities to kind of support that. It was a very new committee, very green committee in terms of getting together, working together as well as even working within the town government itself.
So we did a lot of review of the different roles and responsibilities I covered that reminded folks on a regular basis to try and get people aligned. We had discussions around current site limitations. These are preliminary discussions about site limitations that we have at the current memorial school. We did talk about possible other site locations that we could look at and evaluate in the near future. We toured multiple new elementary schools that were built across the state and we also toured some of the Natick schools here, inclusive of elementary in the Kennedy Middle School.
We also did a lessons learned discussion review and tour for the Kennedy building. And we're in the middle of the finalizing that I've summarized those details and we are trying to get together and better understand what our actual lessons learned versus observations that we had and what can we do or what we cannot bring to the new design development of the new memorial school. Speaker 10: Excuse me. Speaker 9: We're in the process. The administration's in the process of drafting school administration project needs so
that we can have the input to figure out what exactly the school needs to be built to in terms of a needs assessment. And then we were approved for going into the feasibility study, which is projected to be about a 12 to 18 month time period and that occurred in December. Next slide please. This is kind of small writing, sorry about that. But for the most part, the 12 next 12 to 18 months starting in December, we have a number of different activities. These are at the macro sense we most important piece right
now is we're in the middle of trying to hire the OPM, the onus project manager as well as the architect. We should hopefully have made a decision on the onus project manager in April of this year, which is next month, which would be fabulous. Then we will be moving to a bidding process as well as an assignment working with the MSBA on the selection of an architect. Once we get the OPM and the architect on board, we're going to immediately dive. I expect that probably in the fall timeframe in September after school starts, we'll be looking to try
and define not only the building requirements and bring it into the the committee itself, but we will be looking at the different site options. When I say site options, it means that we'll be looking at questions. Do we renovate the current school in this case, the current school is, does not have the current capacity to meet the school needs. So we'll be looking at a combination of renovate and build or renovate and additions versus tear down and rebuild. The other option we'll be looking at in the fall, we'll also look at because of some of the site restrictions that are going on at the current
memorial school is we'll be looking at a different site location across the town. There are our couple of sites that we've considered in a draft perspective, but we are going to go through a much more detailed analysis in the fall it will be a public analysis and we will come up with a decision as to what we decide whether we're gonna try and build an existing site or move the school to a completely different site. When we do that and we're looking at potential different sites as well as the existing sites, we will do a high level traffic summary analysis. There will be a much more detailed traffic analysis
that will occur later on in the process. But we will do a a traffic analysis at first to see what are the capabilities of like having two entrances or an entrance and an exit. So better control the flow of traffic going in and out of the school. Also understanding the inflow of traffic and the impact around the surrounding areas if we do put the school and expand it both in the current location or in a new location. And then once we make the final site selection, we'll be moving on to the preliminary design review and early cost estimates. We'll be looking and putting cost assessments on most likely
two or three options and once we come up with those two or three options, we'll be voting on a final option to bring forward with that option. We'll develop a preliminary draft plan and we will do risk assessments. Risk assessments means trying to identify the risks and potential costs and exposures that we might have with certain areas within the building and construction before we go forward. So we understand the potential variability of cost impact to selection of a specific site. Some of those could be and not limited to by any means.
How do we move forward with the destruction of the current building or sections of the building in a rebuild if that's the option that we choose. How do we fit the site building onto the existing site itself and what impact does it have on the environment or does it, what impact does it have? Like I said earlier on the traffic flows, Once we get to that point, we will have a preferred solution. We will have a preliminary design review and we will have some high level floor plans and we will use this information to submit to the MSBA for a preferred schematic report. It's still not decided yet.
We're gonna have to decide how do we go forward with town meeting appropriation for a potential debt exclusion override, do we go in with a simple 2020 5% or we go try and do and sequester more money to go for a higher level of, of accuracy with a 90% accuracy or 60% accuracy of a design complete before we go for the final amount of money. So that's to be decided too. Okay, next. Next slide please. So we had a very green committee, particularly I was looking
for vice chair to be an individual from the member of the community. I have been having active discussions with one individual and I'm not gonna say whether it's a he or she because that will identify that I want to try and keep this individual confidential at this point in time while they're contemplating their role. If they take it, I'm assuming right now preliminary wise that they're going to accept it and I'm very much looking forward to working with this individual. I can't tell you that the role will be a supportive facilitative role. It will be a backup in meetings. So there'll be facilitating meetings if I can't make it so
that we don't slow the process down by any way, shape or form. It will be a person who has technical expertise and can apply a lot of the concepts and to help facilitate through that meeting if I'm not able to be there or to assist me in trying to get the group to move forward through some of the more technical discussions that we will most likely have. And then some of the common concerns that they usually have when you're talking to somebody like this, it is a project that can last up to five years. That's usually overwhelming. That's quite a bit of time. They're worried about their overall commitment and their lack of institutional knowledge since most all
four have not been on any boards in the town to date. So it's trying to get them comfortable and it's something that I've offered that I will mentor this individual so that they can hopefully take on, maybe if there's another building project on on the town, they can step up and carry some of that institutional knowledge and previous building experience forward to future projects. So I think it's, overall it's a good thing. I anticipate that I will be coming next month to get a vote within the building committee. Once I get a vote within the building committee endorsement on this person, then I plan to come back to this board
and make a recommendation for approval for the vice chair. I'm not sure if it's required or not yet for you to do that, but I think I'd like to do it anyways if you don't mind. So that's kind of the plans that we have in front of us. It's going to get very, very busy. I'm gonna move very fast. Starting in September we've been kind of moving along slowly trying to get the group used to each other. Like I said, we were in the norming and forming and storming and what that means that entails people are trying to figure out how to work together and work within a community and respect others' opinions. It also has been a committee that we've tried
to say you can't be an individual and just go off and do things on your own. We've had to reign some people in and say you need to work with the confines of the rules because this is important to the community. And I think that's gone so, so far so well overall. I think that's about it. If there's any questions I'd be more than happy to answer any of them that you might have. Speaker 1: Thank you very much Mr. Miler. Questions from the committee Dr. Fugman, Speaker 11: Two very quick clarifying questions. One is for the vice chair. Are you, I dunno if you wanted to say this, but are you selecting someone from within the current building committee or someone you would bring from outside into the committee?
Speaker 9: It's a great question. We have a, as you probably heard me say this before, we have a very large committee. I'd prefer to try and get it first from within. Okay. Because we've started the work already trying to get the group together to work together and the other members of the committee have already been exposed to each other. So the person will be from within is my plan right now. Okay. Speaker 11: Okay. The second one, my sense is that the site location might be the kind of decision that, well the decision of the committee of the building committee that the committee want will want to provide input.
So I'm wondering what is the process for engaging in the broader community? Speaker 9: So when we get to preliminary, I call it preliminary design, there will be a few options that we will look at. We will end up having community meetings. I will be asking the school committee to attend those meetings with us. I will come to you first and you will see those options before we go out into the community so that you'll have the opportunity to be educated and ask any questions around where the building committee has landed and why we landed in the position that we did. Once we get that done then we will come to this committee, we will review what we've done in a summary
and then we will schedule a community input meeting to try and get and facilitate any input the community might have. And if it is a different site, I am absolutely sure we will have a lot of community representation we have in the past. Yeah. Speaker 11: Well thank you. And not only for the answers but all the work that you do, it's, it's exciting. Thank you to see it moving forward. Speaker 1: Any other questions from the committee, Mr. Patel? Speaker 3: Thank you. Just regards to the OPM. Yeah. Do you out, do you put out an RFQ or whatever for that?
Speaker 9: We have put out the RFQ, we work through the procurement agent, which is the gentleman sitting to my left over here. Matt and he has been driving the procurement process for us to make sure that we're compliant with state procurement laws. So yes and we take into consideration any town requirements as well. Speaker 11: Thank Speaker 9: You. It's a highly regulated environment. Speaker 3: I was just curious how many like companies reached out? 'cause I know Speaker 9: I think it was 17 Matt that went to the tour. We did a, he did a tour recently. Go ahead Matt.
Speaker 12: Yeah we had, we sent out 34 35 total proposals. Not all of them were OPM firms. Some were architect firms, some were engineering firms looking to partner up with architects. Did have a walk out. We put it out on the fourth. We had a walkthrough on the 11th that was where I think about 17 different firms like showed up to walk the site. Relatively small school, easy site to walk through. Didn't get many questions. And we should get proposals in on Thursday.
Speaker 9: Thank you. And we are pre, we are currently planning to do, there's a subcommittee that has been formed within the building committee to narrow down the focus of those applications and bring it down to three. Once we get it down to three then we'll be conducting a, a public interview of the three companies with their capabilities. It'll be a highly regulated meeting they required to do so. They will have approximately 20 minutes to make a presentation and how it reflects against the RFQ. And then we will do is we will have scripted questions
that we will give each of the companies that we need to maintain only those questions for parody and equity that goes across the three companies that we'll be interviewing for the positions. Any other questions? Speaker 1: Any other questions from the committee or from the public? Seeing them from the committee? Ms. Vickers. Speaker 8: Hi Brinley Vickers Precinct eight. I know I'm gonna sound like a broken record here, but it's been since like I think last May when the awesome Memorial School Building committee website was created and there are still pages on there
that have absolutely nothing on it. And I understand that we were looking for tech help and I understand all of that, but I still consistently get questions from the public looking for certain things that aren't on there. And I've offered to help in the past with the questions that I get asked for. In the very least, I'm hoping that under the project schedule play page, we could at least put up some of the incredible slide decks that you guys have already created in terms of how we work
through the MSB project timeline and, and those slide decks are already there. Not asking for new information, I'm merely asking for the information that we already have to be updated on this page. Thank you. Speaker 9: Just to, to add some, so all of the meeting minutes we were lagging behind on some of the meeting minutes. They're all up to date. There is one outstanding, which we'll be voting on on the meeting of the 30th. So we're up to date on those. The timelines that we have re represents the feasibility study. It is under the website, under other documents. And we have been adding a few documents under there.
The larger project timelines won't come about until we get the OPM on board and we do more detailed planning. If you notice with the presentation that I gave, it was not timeline based, it was based upon buckets because we really need to get the professionals on board before we do anything but preliminary review of some of these topics. Otherwise we're, we're, we're duplicating efforts in advance of actually having our individuals. So we will continue to focus on trying to add more information as we go forward. Speaker 1: Can I just ask a clarify clarifying question to that?
So the original documents we had that sort of outlined the whole MSBA project, I think they actually, they may have come from you Dr. Bash, right before we formed this committee. Are those up there? 'cause I think those might be, they are Speaker 9: Up there, there, there is a timeline with the feasibility study beforehand. Okay. And that is up there in the under other documents? Speaker 1: Under other documents, yeah. Speaker 9: Okay. I have not, I've debated whether I was gonna put the RFP on the, on the website. I probably can, but I'm not sure. I just thought it was premature. Matt, Speaker 12: It's on there. Speaker 9: It's all there now. Okay.
Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. Thank you. Just Ms. Collins then, Ms. Collins. Speaker 6: Yeah. You mentioned 17. Am I correct in understanding that even if 17 return proposals that not all 17 would necessarily move on to the next stage of being filtered because they need to be qualified first and I think that, is that your job Mr. Gillis? Speaker 12: So yes. The only, the top three will go to an interview. So the the top three most qualified. So I'll go through all the proposals as will the other volunteers in the subcommittee with some
guidance or direction from me. We'll meet and then we'll agree on the top three. And then the top three will come in for interviews that are open to the public, you know, to listen in on. But the public can't ask questions because we have a, a structure that we're trying to follow in a public procurement process. The only one that's not really allowed in the room are the other, the other interviewees when, when they're not up for their turn. Otherwise that's kind of the, that's kind of the system. I mean I expect to get half a dozen or so well qualified firms applying. Speaker 6: Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't think I was clear.
Even if 17 return proposals, it doesn't mean that 17 will make it into the review by the subcommittee necessarily. If they haven't, if they're missing something or they Yeah. Don't have the experience or Speaker 12: I won't, I won't make people read a proposal that's gonna be rejected. Speaker 6: Okay. I just wanna be clear to people that even if 17 return it, it's not necessarily a group of 17. Yes. We are only looking for those people that meet all the parts of the request. Speaker 12: That's correct. And M ms MSBA, you know,
has some requirements that are baked into the, the RFS 'cause it's their template, but it's our process, but they approve what we put out there. So yes, like if, if somebody's, if they don't meet the minimum criteria or they didn't sign their proposal or you know, whatever reasonable way to disqualify themselves, then they, they don't, they don't get reviewed. So generally most firms that apply have reviewed the requirements and, and meet the qualifications. But we'll see what we get.
Speaker 6: Thank you Speaker 1: Ms stickers. Speaker 8: Yes. I just wanna say thank you so much. I didn't look at the other documents page for that because people keep asking me about the project schedule. So maybe if I could have a follow up to that to say if you could please say, just put like a little paragraph or a little something under the project schedule page that says for previous schedule and timelines please see here so that people know to look at a different link. 'cause some people aren't like me and don't go through everything. They just see project schedule and think that that includes everything up to this point.
Speaker 9: I see. Speaker 8: Thank you. Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you so much Mr. Miley. We really appreciate you coming to talk to us tonight. Thank Speaker 9: You very much Speaker 1: And we'll look forward to seeing you back hopefully in May with the vice chair. That'll be exciting. Yes. Speaker 9: Yeah. And we'll have, we'll probably ask you if you're interested in having any joint committee meetings as well as we get through some of these more major decisions that affect the community at large. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Have a good night. Thank you. Speaker 1: Okay, so I'll turn things over to Dr. Bash for the next presentation. Yep.
Speaker 3: Is it, can, did we, we jumped over the teacher and student reps. We did. Are we waiting for, Speaker 1: We did. We have some guests tonight so we're just going to go through that presentation then we'll go back to the beginning of the agenda. Speaker 3: Okay. I just, sometimes the student rep leaves. Okay. Before it's, I don't know. That's fine. It's okay. I just wanted to make sure we'll get to it. Speaker 1: Sure. Nathan, are you okay to stay for a half an hour? Okay, perfect. Speaker 3: Okay. Okay, Speaker 5: Awesome. So I wanna welcome several members from, you've been hearing about it, the code of conduct committee. This team has been working incredibly hard.
I've had the privilege of going to several of the meetings and kind of watching their collaboration. So Dr. Ferguson, if you wanna kind of come up and I hope everyone introduces yourselves because thank you for being here and for your patience tonight. And we're going to be providing the committee with a progress update. I'll remind you that this is part of my first goal. It's also part of Dr. Ferguson's goals and the district goal. So we're giving a progress update tonight on that goal and the team's work. Welcome. Speaker 13: Thank you. Thanks for having us. I'm gonna provide just a brief framing of this work and behind me you have, you see an amazing team of folks who've been collaborating really hard
over the past few months and as we invite them to share the parts of the work they are gonna be talking with you about, I'll have them introduce themselves and, and talk with you about the work so far. So my initial framing really is about over the past few years we've seen some of the very clearest patterns over in our student population and much of it has told us that it's not about commitment, that we've had some challenges, it's about consistency with student behavior. And so one of the exciting things that we were thinking about as we put this together was
what can we share with you in terms of the code of conduct that allows you to see how we can go from variability to consistency over the course of the implementation, the building up, and finally how we land this plane on the ground. So a couple of things have come up as we've moved forward in this work. It's been clear that over time we've seen differences in behaviors, we've seen differences in intervention and we've seen different responses to similar situations that variability impacts fairness, belonging, and safety for our students. And as a result of that, the code
of conduct work has become very important. We've also seen over time that the expectation for schools has grown and we've seen the need for social emotional skills to be part of the curriculum. We've seen the need for equitable responses, we've seen the need to reduce exclusionary discipline and we've seen the need to increase safe and connected environments for all students. So the work around the code of conduct is really about defining expectations. It's about ensuring that we have fair, developmentally appropriate responses for student behavior. It's also about making sure we aligned
with legal expectations. This work. Next slide please. This work aligns with the strategic objectives that you see there. In many ways it sort of pulls us to looking at numbers one and two, which is psychological safety, social emotional learning and relationship building and community engagement. However, it actually highlights all four of those objectives because the code of conduct really is about ensuring that we have a robust year one and behavior systems and PBIS happening across the schools.
And you'll hear that a lot of our school improvement goals actually have prioritized PBIS. It's about ensuring that we have the right relationship and community engagement in defining this process, both in terms of the strategic objectives but also in terms of the strategic visioning that's happening right now. It's about deepening tier one instruction, not just in the classroom but also around social emotional learning and ensuring that we have calibration across our leadership teams in implementing our behavior code of conduct and expectations.
One of the things I wanna quickly acknowledge before I step back is I've had the privilege of having Tim Cesarini co-lead this work with me. Tim is the VP at Kennedy Middle School and it's been really a true partnership in getting this work off the ground and engaging all our partners throughout the process. So I wanted to say that and I'm going to invite members of this team to share their parts of their work as we go through the rest of the slides and I encourage them to introduce themselves, they're building their school, their role and share what this the team has been doing thus far.
And we'll go from there. Speaker 4: Do you want Go ahead. Yeah, come on up team. Speaker 13: I'll come back later. Speaker 4: Yeah, the chairs. Oh yeah, we, oh I'm not on the second slide though. I'm on the A slide later. Yes. Speaker 1: Hi everyone. We're a little discombobulated this evening. Speaker 4: We can pull chairs off. Yeah, it might be easier to pull chairs up on here. Speaker 1: This is actually it. It's just feather Speaker 4: Chair. Let's squish it. I can back up. Speaker 1: Alright, my name's Amanda Frost. I am a school counselor at Brown and if we go to the next slide I can just share a little bit
more about purpose and goals of our code of conduct committee and really what we are coming together to do, a lot of it is what art just mentioned, but aligning we, you know, really want to align our goals and purpose with the strategic plan that art just walked us through. But really just that, that unified framework. So we want consistency. We know that kids thrive in consistency and adults thrive in inconsistency. And so we want to create a unified framework so
that those behavioral expectations are clear, but also that they are flexible and that they respond to where kids are developmentally and they're up to date with what we know about how kids learn best. Also, like Art just mentioned, really strengthening our SEL at the tier one level as a school counselor. That's some of my most important work is making sure that our students have the foundational social and emotional skills to be able to be a part of their school in greater communities.
And so our code of conduct committee is really just putting all of that thinking onto paper and having it be not just implied, but clear and stated and easily accessible to families and accessible to students when it needs to be. And not full of jargon and not 150 pages long, but an, you know, an accessible document that is actually meaningful. And yeah, just, you know, promoting fairness and clarity and behavioral expectations was another one
of our most important goals. Cultivating that trust amongst between students and teachers and other staff members and community members. So, so that kids feel like they belong because we know that that's one of the most important things. So that's some of our, our goals. Speaker 14: Tim Cesarini Art introduced me a little bit Vice principal at Kennedy Middle School. And basically all of this is aligned back to those strategic objectives and kind of thinking of it as like a pyramid, right? We've got our district objectives to our school improvement plans, which our principals
and admin teams are implementing. And this kind of ties in with that all directly. The code of conduct is actually one of Dr. SP's goals, right? So all of this is very much aligned with kind of the same types of things that Amanda was just talking about. We, you know, if we're focusing on tier one instruction, we wanna make sure that our students are in the classroom and that they're not disruptive and that staff know how to respond to students that they may be having a challenge with. Behaviorally, we can't focus on instruction if we don't have kids in the seats ready to focus. So all of this is kind of, you can do that for each of our strategic objectives. I won't do it for all four, but you can kind of see
how each one re links back to behavior and clear expectations and consistency for staff and students. And that's kind of why we're focusing on this and we'll hear a little bit more about how we came to focus on it specifically in the next slide. Speaker 4: Excellent. Do you wanna start? Speaker 13: Sure. I'm Chris Jackson. I am at Wilson Middle School. I'm a music and band teacher. On a side note, I was just telling Kate earlier I got to work with her son Tim earlier, a fantastic trombone player who dazzled the students
of Benham and Lilja today. So Kate, thank you for, for your family's musical endeavors. When, when we're looking at this process, it's important for us to take stock of what are the needs of the community, not just the families in the community, but what are also the needs of the staff and what is, what do students need? Part of that is there is a lot of inconsistency or there is some inconsistency rather, but in discipline between the schools. This is something I see personally a lot as someone who works in a K 12 PLC with all the music teachers where
I speak a lot with teachers who teach the littles and the p, the teachers who teach the bigs and then me who's kind of in between the, the difference from one grade level to the next or certainly one school to the next can be challenging for not just staff but teachers and families to kind of wrap their heads around. Speaking of staff, a lot of staff members have expressed a need for greater clarity in understanding what behavioral expectations are and also how to respond to some of them. As previously said, in the efforts to increase the strength
of tier one instruction, we obviously want to keep the students in the classroom as much as possible, but sometimes exactly how to respond to that can be challenging for a staff member, especially when you're facing a large number of students in a classroom. And as previously said, families have, families have expressed a need for consistency and clarity in the application of our discipline. Speaker 15: Hi, I'm Andrea Rogers. I am a 12th grade English teacher at Natick High School. A couple of other points, just to add to what Chris said, looking at it from the high school perspective, we also have
administrators who help support teachers who also help support students. And so the consistency among the faculty members and the administrators are is also really important. I know staff really value having open conversations with our administrators, but then something gets lost sometimes in translation between the document, between the administrators, students, FA faculty, et cetera. So part of the goal in looking through what it is that our faculty and our students and our, our community and other stake stakeholders need is really to make sure
that that document is clear. It provides a roadmap for not just our faculty and administrators to hold students accountable but also provide some opportunity for students to see themselves and grow in their own behavioral choices. It's not just a discipline document, it's also a document that enables students to see how it is that they can progress in our school bu from our school buildings and then also into the greater community. And then just speaking in terms of family transparency, I think a lot of times we consider code of conduct to be
that discipline document and the, the way in which we're building our code of conduct is not really just discipline focused. It helps to define some of the things that are unclear. PBIS is not a acronym that I think every ordinary person knows. And so really we really are seeking to define some of those important things so that the family members and the greater community can understand what our work is. I think that's Speaker 4: Anything we missed. Next slide. Speaker 13: So Speaker 4: Don't go too Speaker 13: Far. So in terms of goals, and Tim had mentioned this earlier, that
coherent K to 12 code of conduct is one of Dr. Spa's goals. It's one of my goals as well for this for this year. And the goal as it reads currently is that we incorporate inclusive practice, engage, engage stakeholders, establish clear behavioral expectations and response for all students. I think one of the things that's sort of emerging in this process is how we started the idea of a code of conduct, but it really has sort of expanded into something. But more than that, as we've sort of delved into what it is
that we think students need, it was also important for us to acknowledge that they needed to know what their rights were as students and what their responsibilities are as members of a community. So again, I think the growth of that and we got an opportunity to see examples of lots of different codes of, of conduct. And as this team delved into that work, it became clear that our goal was beyond just coming up with a document that establishes, you know, what one does and, and what the consequences are for certain behaviors.
But it's how we really teach our students who they are and how they can be parts of a, of a community that cares for them and a community that they feel invested in. So we started with an idea, it's expanded into something slightly bigger than that and really responsive to the needs of this community. And I think we'll talk a bit more about how we've engaged the larger community students and families and staff in this process. But the goal has slightly expanded and we're, we'll talk also about the timeline for this goal. Speaker 4: Next slide please.
Speaker 16: Hi, I'm Michelle McCann. I teach social studies at seventh grade at Kennedy Middle School. And just like we want the code of conduct to be inclusive, I would argue our committee is quite inclusive and very diverse. It's represented pretty well across the district in terms of grade levels departments. We have the district leadership obviously kind of steering us and driving the bus. But amongst the group, within our group and I think about 20 total, there's a link at the top that will list like all of the committee members,
but it's well represented by, we have principals from all three grade level, all three levels. Middle, elementary, high school general ed staff that covers all the grades, all the subjects, science, math specials. We have special education staff kind of looking out for our, you know, our kind of most vulnerable population as we navigate through this mental health. The union, I mean several of us are in the union already, so it's in concert with the union and the contract
and kind of the obligations that we have to adhere to. We also have administrative staff that work with the students and in fact one of the high school administrative assistants that works directly with students every day and her input has been invaluable. So, so I think part of why this committee sort of or the purpose has evolved is because the people have sort of brought different things to the table and held each other accountable for, you know, what's important to all of us. We also sent out surveys to engage the community, the faculty and the students and we were able to get some feedback about what we had done
so far and kind of spent the last meeting looking at what we were doing and sort of making sure we're aligned with what is expected from us, from the community at large. So it's a very collaborative process. Oh, sorry. Speaker 17: Next slide please. Alright. Hello everyone. My name is Antwan Hodge. I teach fourth grade at lilja. I'm gonna be talking about the what and the why behind the code of conduct. So the what student rights, responsibility and code of conduct co-created with the staff, students and families. And with that we sent surveys home so parents can had a voice.
Students took surveys at schools and a staff also took, had a voice as well. And all of that information was gathered and we used that data to, to take consideration when we were revising our working drafts of the code of conduct. We want all voices to be heard, the why, to build shared agreement that reflect our values and guide behavior across schools like Art was saying, to eliminate inconsistencies from school to school. That's pretty much it. Speaker 13: We've learned a lot in the process of going through these surveys from faculty and from families, which has been really invaluable
and from students and, and students have some of the most interesting and very thoughtful pieces of advice and guidance that they offer us in the process. And so we have taken some time going through those individual responses and integrating it. Actually we've engaged in the process of after starting our revision, integrating the student feedback, the staff feedback and the family feedback into our draft and doing a checklist to make sure that we're really paying attention to what we're being told and how we're being guided in the process.
So thank you. An next slide please. Speaker 4: Sorry, Speaker 13: Go ahead Tim. Speaker 14: So this is just kind of a summary of what we've done so far and where we're headed. So Art and I met and put out a form to staff for interested surveys. There was sort of an application process. People talked about why they would wanna be on the committee. We consulted some district leaders to make sure we had rep, that representative body that Michelle was talking about that was put together very thoughtfully and kind of based on a wide variety of people that expressed interest. We built kind of out our timeline and our meeting dates. We've been meeting about once a month. We've gotten a little bit more frequently frequent recently.
And we've also, people have been diligently doing work in between each meeting, which has allowed us to make those meetings much more productive 'cause people have been great about kind of doing the assigned work in between. And we have I think two or three more meetings on the books and we are hoping that we are nearing a final draft pretty quickly. As everyone mentioned, we kind of got the stakeholder feedback and are using that to make sure that what we have in draft state is aligned to the main concerns and the main priorities of all the different stakeholders. But we're hoping that we will be presenting to you all in the near future with kind of our final draft
and our final update. And then moving forward, it kind of feels like we're really only gonna be halfway there once we have done that. Because then we have to do the rollout and we have to train all of our staff and our students and our families on what we have created and we have to get it out there in front of people and help support people in implementing it and making sure that we are actually sticking with it and that people know how to implement it and know what it means. So that we're excited to do that work. That will probably be over the summer and into all of next year and we'll be doing PD with staff. We're hoping that some of our committee members will kind
of stay on and help lead that work as people that can, you know, be kind of the experts in their buildings, maybe do some of that PD with the lens that they have, you know, as a high school teacher, as a middle school teacher, as an elementary school teacher. And that is kind of where we're headed with all of this. So we're maybe nearing the end of, of part one. Speaker 13: That's our last slide. Thank you. Speaker 1: Okay, thank you so much. Questions from the committee? I have a, oh, yep. Mr. Brand. No, I'm gonna save mine. Okay, Speaker 3: Great presentation and it's awesome to see so many educators in working together to do something like this
is part of the plan. How, how are you measuring once you adopt and start launching and training, how are you measuring and then how leaving space for evolution, my assumption is that this work is never finished. So is that a correct assumption? And if so, what is the, is that part of I, I guess part two or whatever is next? And you can all answer at the exact same time. Speaker 13: Does anyone want to take it? I can answer but yeah, sure.
So I think part of the process really has been making room for that evolution. So even in the drafting of the document we've seen, we've had conversations about, well our students can be reading this and how do we make it accessible to our different stakeholders. So that's part of the process I think having teachers be front and center In designing this, we're planning and drafting with the intention of having PDs in the classroom and talking with students about how we want them to learn
what it is we've designed in the code. And so, and we're all obviously gonna be gathering feedback both from, as we build the PD plan for the fall end of the year and the fall and adoption process, inviting feedback from the community, inviting feedback from students, the students already giving us a lot of feedback and the faculty is always gonna give us feedback because ultimately they have to be strong partners in delivering this, teaching these values to students in a way that students can, can understand and embrace. And so we're gonna be looking for an ongoing loop
of cycle of feedback and information gathering and data gathering and review. One of the things that we're gonna be looking for as an offshoot of this process is how we capture these behavioral incidents. And right now we, we have a lot of different processes across the schools and looking at the data we choose to capture and whether or not our processes and whether or not our responses to students are actually driving our targets. Fewer infractions, less office referrals and some of those things.
So we're gonna be looking back to the data to tell us what tweaks we need to make in the process, whether it's staff pd, whether it's advisory lessons that we need to build for students, whether it's a family engagement session that we need to talk with families about what we're doing and what we, how we want to partner with them. We're gonna be looking for opportunities to calibrate by information, by gathering information from the process. Speaker 1: Okay. Ms. Speaker 7: Brunell, thank you. Thank you for coming here tonight. I hope that you enjoy some of the cake on your way out too when you leave. So one practical question are things like the ROAR slips
and the pink slips, maybe it's not a pink, what's it, Wilson, the yellow slips at some point they had, are those systems going away or are they, is that to be determined? Speaker 14: I, no, I don't, I don't think so. Things like the ROAR slips and stuff like that, like that's our PBIS system, positive behavior enforcement, right? So like things like that are not going anywhere. If anything, we're making it more clear for families and students and and staff that we value those things and we want schools to continue to use them. In terms of, I think at Wilson those are like, that's
how they document things, which Art was referencing a little bit of like different schools have different ways of documenting behavioral incidents. So I think that we're not looking to completely blow up what schools are doing if they are doing things that work well for their staff and their students and their families. I think that we are trying to build a guiding thing that says, you know, hey, if this specific thing happens, we would expect it to warrant this level of response. Right? And so it's something that is hopefully translatable to every single level. And so buildings might have slightly different,
or grade levels might have slightly different ways that they are going to handle that or document that, but it should like not different ways of handling it, but if something is working for a building, well right, this is hopefully not going to supersede that. They might have to do some extra steps on the other end of documenting if we change how we're asking people to record things from like an admin side of things, but like the student to teacher, to admin communication. If that's working well, we would hope that would continue to happen. Speaker 13: Yeah, and just to add to that briefly, our schools have
a culture on their own. They've developed a community of practice and a culture with their families and their students and we, we wanna preserve those things because across different buildings, those have evolved over periods of time and we honor that and I think it's really important for those buildings to carry on with those cultures. So things that are going that are really about the school's culture, those things are preserved. And in terms of documentation we, we want to calibrate and ensure that we're gathering the same information for the same purpose, but specifically how
that information is gathered might differ from school to school. How it's recorded, however, has to be something that the whole system actually invests in. So we could look across the district and know we're comparing apples to apples, however, but there are specific climate and cultural pieces that schools have that they should retain. Speaker 7: I, I'm really hopeful for this. I mean, our, you and I have talked about this, that at some point I think your work is gonna be so important for students who have had experiences at one school and then go to another school because sometimes that follows them.
And that is not what we want for students, right? We want students to be able to find themselves and be their strongest self. And when you can't sometimes leave something behind, you can't do that. And I, I'm hopeful that this will maybe get some more communication across school systems so that if somebody's being bullied in middle school, the high school is ready and knows about that if you're talking about this type of language. And so that's really hopeful to me. I was, I, my last question is what are you, if this is successful, when it's successful, what will,
what will you see in our schools or what do you hope to see in our schools? Speaker 13: I can answer that, but I wanna invite other voices. Andrea, Speaker 15: You go. I can speak. I think from part, part of my purpose in joining this committee was to get to that point, having worked at the high school for many years now and have through several administrative changes and building changes, the, the consistency piece is what's so valuable to us. And I think part of my hope is that this document will guide that work and will kind of help us start fresh to say,
I know all of these things existed in the past. Everybody did something a little bit different. But as an entire building we're now going to regroup and we'll be able to use this document to set that, that pace. I do hope that over the course of the next year as we're rolling out this document, we'll start to see student buy-in as well as faculty and administration buy-in. I think that's the most, the key piece that we'll limit some of the behaviors that are distracting and will support the behaviors that will encourage our students to bring their best academic self. Whether it is participating in a study hall
or whether it's roaming the halls during lunch. Like we'll figure out a way to get all of those things and then of course the much more significant challenges that some of our students face. So that's my hope as an educator. And also I think I, I just, in my conversation with all my colleagues over the last couple of months, I think we, we saw that in the survey results but also in our conversations together. Speaker 14: I think to me it's comes down to building trust, right? Like I think if this is implemented well, we should see higher trust between our staff and in our administration.
Like staff knows exactly how admin is gonna handle something and they can trust administrators to step in and follow up when they need to. Our students will trust staff to hold them accountable and say, I can trust that if I do something and Michelle does something right, we're both gonna get the same response even though we might have different teachers or be at different schools. And then I think it's gonna help families trust, right? Like we know exactly how this is outlined and I can trust that if my kid does something or if something happens to my kid, right? We can trust on the schools to follow up and follow through with the same level of response regardless of where they're at.
Speaker 7: Thank you. And my last comment is that I hope that you're involving the coaches in this too, especially at the high school. Speaker 4: Yes. Great. Okay. Speaker 1: Any other questions? I was gonna ask the question about what it would look like, but it got answered. So yeah, thank you so much. We appreciate you coming tonight. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing, seeing the next iteration. Great, thank Speaker 4: You. Speaker 1: Okay, so we'll go back to the beginning at the agenda. And do we have a motion for the consent agenda? Speaker 3: So moved. Motion to approve the consent agenda.
Speaker 1: Second. Oh, all in favor? Speaker 4: Wanted to put a motion to pull the minutes out. Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Sorry. That's okay. So what do we, how do we do that after it's been seconded? We, Speaker 3: I Speaker 1: You withdraw? Speaker 3: I'll withdraw my motion. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. Speaker 3: Sorry about that guys. Speaker 1: That's okay. So you're gonna pull the minutes out so then Yes. Speaker 3: Motion to pull section B. You don't have to approval. There's no motion. You don't need motion. Okay. Not a Speaker 1: Motion. I forgot. I forgot there were January minutes. So yes, thanks. Okay. Speaker 3: Move approval of the consent agenda without the minutes. Speaker 4: Okay. Second. Speaker 1: All in favor? Anyone against?
Okay, so then we'll go to maybe let's wait till the other members come back since they're minutes. That's fine. Shall we do that? Yeah. Okay. So we'll go to representative updates. So our student representative Nathan? Speaker 18: Yeah. I wanted to kind of talk about something that's been a little bit of an issue at the high school over the past this year, which is parking. So I'll kind of give some context. So parking upperclassmen have had the option to park, they've been given parking passes at a first come, first serve basis until they're all taken. They usually start in the summer
and we have around 306 spots for Jews and seniors to park. That being said, you have to give a copy of your license and some other paperwork and it's been hardened kids who may get their license later in the year or the winter. 'cause when they go in they're already all sold out and add that with the snow. This year it was pretty tough on kids to find parking and especially the junior class right now has o over 400 students, so pretty tough to find parking. And then on March 12th, juniors and seniors got an email about stricter enforcement of the parking policy.
And if students weren't parking with a pass or parking in the teacher law or things like that, consequences could be detention or repeated instances could include an outright loss of parking privileges on campus. And then the following day of March 13th, principal blocker emailed stating that next year only seniors could have the option of parking and no juniors would be permitted to park. In terms of the student body, we, I'll say it was a little frustrating. I think we kind of felt like it came outta nowhere with no opportunity to really share how we felt about it. Actually the following days I talked
to principal blocker about it. I only had a one-on-one conversation and I felt left feeling like it was pretty productive. I think she was extremely receptive and kind of understood where the student body was coming from and she indicated she would be more than happy to speak to students, to parents, even this committee if needed to kind of just give, explain the context in, in her decision making process. I think with a policy that's so like directly affecting the students, I think in the future it would be helpful for students and parents to have more options for input
before finalizing a po. A policy that had such a big impact. I mean next year it's gonna be really tough for the juniors, especially parents to get their kids to school. And this was, I think parents used park driving as a way to, you know, get their kids to school. So I think it's gonna be tough but I just wanted to give an update in kind of where the student body's heads at with a policy. Speaker 1: Okay, thank you very much. Do we have Ms. Gomes online? Don't see her. Okay. She did say she had to leave a little early. Yeah, she was here earlier. Yeah, I guess I missed her. Okay, we'll get her next time.
And our teacher representative. Speaker 19: Hello, I'm Shayla Ian, co-president of the Teachers Union. I just have some exciting news to share that at Behem in kindergarten, three of the five classrooms have incubators and they all have gotten chicks from the orga, the Natick Organic Farm. So they're hatching chicks in kindergarten. I'll keep you updated as they hatch. Speaker 1: Thank you. Very exciting. Yeah, thank you so much. I might have to wish I knew had a kid at Ben, him actually, but I guess I'll miss out. Miss out on that one. Alright, so we'll circle back
to the minutes that were pulled out of the consent agenda. So can we have a Speaker 3: You motion to approve open session minutes for January 26th, 2020 sixth, Speaker 18: Second. Speaker 1: Any discussion on those? Can I ask a question? Yep. What was the purpose of pulling them? I think Mr. Patel was not here on that date, right? Yes. Yeah, so he wanted to vote for the consent agenda but he couldn't because he couldn't, didn't wanna abstain on the, he couldn't abstain on what part of it. Yeah. Okay. All in favor?
Anyone against anyone abstaining. So we have six in favor. Zero against one abstaining. Okay. So I'll turn things back to Dr. Stash. Speaker 5: Excellent. I just wanted to say thank you to Nathan for your eloquent kind of capturing of that Principal of locker has also kept me up to date, so I appreciate you bringing this here And more to come. We'll go to the elementary and early childhood space and programming report. Mass driving. Okay. I've put animation, hopefully we keep up as he's pulling it up.
I'll kind of explain. This is a report that really started back in November where as we anticipated moving forward with the MSBA and having heard the committee's kind of desire to see this process in MSBA, at least how I heard it was to be bigger or wider, broader than just one school. And so this was an attempt really to just document in about 20 pages of a report, which is why I didn't wanna like present the whole report here because frankly it would dilute it. It's a dense report of about 20 pages. It's, there's a QR code in here, it's linked in our agenda.
It's there for anyone to read. But the idea here is to actually present kind of some facts and figures and like a context of where we are starting right now. So that's really the intent today I am gonna present the executive summary and address a few questions that were shared from the committee ahead of time. Next. Yes. So the purpose tonight is to go through the executive summary to field some questions that we had in advance and just ensure we have a shared understanding of some of those key takeaways or implications we don't propose recommendations that would be a bit overstepping. I'm really just trying to ground it in facts of today
and we're really hoping a lot of people read this. I think it's my hope that this document becomes something we refer back to as we move through the MSBA process is kind of data, a data point, a set of data points. And it's designed both to kind of support the building committee as well as the school committee. Next slide. The structure of the port, there's the QR code, the structure of it is an executive summary and then findings with a narrative and some data across key domains and an addressing of kind of the interconnectedness of these different pieces.
So the system wide needs. And then really just entering into how does this even get taken into account with MSBA feasibility, which right now, as you know, feasibility is really the selection of the OPM. And the next stage, which our team will be working on, the instructional team, district team over the summer will be the development of the educational program. That's where really where we are. And the analysis came from memos, which are actually linked into the report from different district leaders, transportation, high school, pre-K, sped, et cetera. As well as the enrollment report
that this committee first heard about over the summer, I believe in August where we had the think future think present enrollment and then the M-S-B-B-A documents. All of those are also linked for transparency as people kind of move through this process. And we'll go through fir the first finding. So I kind of loop these into four main pieces. One has to do with the high school high school capacity. And you've heard that here before. We're operating with, it's about 1632 kids depending on where you take the time. And it was built for 1300. So we're already operating above intended capacity. From what I understand, we were 14% higher.
The, our population was 14% higher than the building when it opened. Not a surprise to anyone here, but it's a key factor in this. And also we have preschool located there, which was originally designed to do, but it limits that flexibility to kind of use that space for the high school needs. The next one, yeah, enrollment and capacity. So overall enrollment's stable, we presented that throughout our override conversations. This also isn't new news. If we take the moderate scenarios, it's intended to go up within the next five years, like 0.5%. That's very, very flat.
But there's capacity pressure at the high school I just mentioned, but also at elementary and preschool, not so much at the middle schools. So our pressures are in kind of on the, on the outsides of the sandwich and there's a bit of uneven distribution of where our students are and kind of how the buildings are configured early. The top right here, early childhood and elementary program access, early childhood programming or our preschool is actually at three different sites. There's one class at behe four at east, which is really on loan from the the town. It's a swing space. And then five at the high school
specialized services in terms of like special ed programming. Not available in every elementary school memorial right now doesn't have it there. And then non neighborhood placement is very common. That requires busting and movement around the town. And then facilities and capacity solutions. We have mod classrooms, as all of you know, that serve about 250 students at two different schools. Those are aging, they're not at the end of life but they're aging and they reflected the localized capacity needs we needed to add on there based on where our kids were. And that has been a good temporary solution. So, but not designed as to be permanent.
So those are like those key takeaways in terms of the, can you back up please? I've talked fast but not that fast. So we had like six questions and the first one kind of deserves its own slide, but I'm gonna go through it here. Some schools are near or over intended capacity, should we include each building's intended capacity for context. I'm gonna add this actually to the report if you can go to the next slide. Matt. Mr. Gillis, this is really small but anybody wanting to see it can take a look and I'm gonna kind of narrate it on the left. You see the preschool, you can see Behe is the first one listed.
It was originally designed in, you may not know to have four pre-K classrooms. Right now it only has one. So we essentially are under capacity for our preschool by three classes or 47 kids. Those happen to be at east right now. So, but the building itself Behe has, is under capacity for preschool. NHS is about at capacity. It was intended to have five classrooms, it has five classrooms and as you know, preschool we continue to add as kids become 2.9, we keep adding more throughout the year. So right now it's eight under, but it's essentially flat.
And then the eSchool, which was never intended to house our preschools when, when all of this was sort of built up. We have 62 kids there that were never part of our building configuration plan. So you can see the pressure on the high school and some of the details below in elementary, these figures don't include the mods. So Memorial was originally designed to have three classes per grade and 375 students. It has 4 33, which is again, over capacity by about 58 kids. Ben hem five, it was supposed to be five sections per grade. We're 38 kids under capacity there.
So we have a, our, our capacity in elementary is mainly at Behem right now. Brown and Lilja are both under capacity based on the original build with the mods, we kind of make it evened out. So that does not include the mods. You could add the a hundred kids per mod ish and you'd be roughly at capacity there. So you see the reliance on the mods based on our, which are not permanent. And you see Memorial really has more students than originally intended. And if you look at the space there and how they built out the space, it's pretty innovative. And then on the secondary side, I mentioned before that there is extra capacity right now at our middle
schools and you can see that there on the right 1 77 and two 13 under capacity. And then Natick high school being over capacity. So hopefully that makes sense of where capacity sits based on where we are with actual students compared to original design. The little gray block at the bottom, we just wanted to mention this is like full classrooms. This doesn't include any small group space. Pullout spaces for special ed or small group learning. Okay, great question and hopefully that kind of answered it. The next slide, just that red box we had a question on, do we have access
to even a rough estimate of the average time a student is spending on a bus going to or from school. We actually gave a little bit more information than that. Not only do we have average student ride time, which is 19 minutes and 15 seconds, that's actually based on data pulled from the transportation depart department. The range is from six minutes to 47. So the shortest ride is six on average the longest 47, the average miles per bus route is a little over five and the average number of bus stops is 15. So you might not have seen that before. Appreciated the question. Question three,
Do you have a question now or you, okay, question three. The early childhood education program, this is what I, what I kind of call a pathway, but basically at the high school, kids who are in, kids in high school who are interested in early childhood education actually have opportunities to work with the preschool, which is the beautiful thing when we don't want to end. And so the question really wasn't a question, more of a statement saying like that's a little worrisome. If we were to move this off campus, what we wanna say is we would highly recommend to the committee that we figure out how to transport kids to
that, wherever that would be. We don't want to discontinue a pathway for early childhood connections with high school students at all. That's a wonderful thing. And the other, the last three questions, four, five and six have a little bit to do with classroom layout. How have they changed over time? They've kind of shifted as we all probably just intuitive now, but from rows like how I definitely learned to flexible groups with flexible seating and different ways we can group in a classroom supporting collaboration, small group work, et cetera. Kids moving kinesthetic, kids bouncing on a chair or you know, rocking on a chair.
Lots of different ways kids can sit that match how they need to learn and different space configurations and a lot more spaces for small group instruction. Question five, do modern classroom models require more space? Not a formal increase in defined size at this time and greater but yet a greater need for flexible adapt, adaptive space to support instruction. And then lastly, should the report define what constitute a constitutes a classroom in a modern context? We anticipate we'll cover that when we do the educational program. Good question, but we don't have the answers yet. But we wanna emphasize again, appropriately sized flexible spaces rather
than redefining classrooms. So those are the questions that came ahead of time. And one last slide really, it's just to kind of say what comes next. So hopefully this is a good grounding document that we use in the future as well. But the next step for us, I already mentioned the committee itself is working on hiring the OPM, but the district piece, which would then come to the school committee is to develop the educational program scope that kind of says like how big of a school, what do we wanna build based on what we received as a, as a proposal from MSBA
that would be funded with reimbursement. Once we have that scope, we don't wanna have like five scopes and have to build five educational programs. We want one because it's gonna take a lot of effort to build that program. And so we wanna bring it to the committee for input before we move forward because we anticipate a lot of that work happening from now until October, which is a lot of the summer, summer work. And so we don't wanna kind of work without the school committee's input prior to summer. So during the summer or really from March, once we kind of hear back from all of you to October, we'd wanna engage school leaders, program teams.
You all have an a goal around engagement, perhaps you'd wanna engage some people on that. We wanna coordinate with the school building committee and then just refine our program assumptions. But we would anticipate bringing the full educational program to the school committee for a vote in October. And we'd anticipate really covering that earlier, even in September. So you had a chance to kind of go back and forth with, with us before we refine it. So that was hopefully an orientation of the purpose of this report and kind of where we're headed. I'm happy to take questions. Speaker 1: Okay, questions from the committee. Dr. Figman then, then Ms. Collins.
Speaker 11: Actually I don't have a question but it is a quick comment. This is great. It's 'cause it's really helpful to see it all in one document. I think this is something that would've been helpful to have and we, we have, we have it now. So. So thank you so much for doing that. Thank you. Oh, one quick question. Sorry, the 47 minutes on a bus, is that within the district or does that include kids who are being bused either in and out or of the district? Speaker 7: That's, excuse me, that's within the district. Okay. And that's the longest. Yeah. But very few students are
Speaker 11: Actually that's not Medco or special ed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Correct. Speaker 5: Yep. Speaker 1: Ms. Collins. Speaker 6: Yeah. I just wanna note as we go forward, the problem with relying on averages, because if you look at that bus on average you grilled cheese is fine even though it's burned on one side and raw on the other, you know, six minute trip versus a 47 minute trip. Yeah. On average this is what it is. But those kids experience it very, very differently. Speaker 5: Yeah, fair. And I think we could give all sorts of mean median mode.
We could give all sorts of things to round out the data for the purpose here we were kind of giving a glimpse, but as we move on it's, it's well received feedback to kind of give the deeper story. Speaker 6: Yeah. And I'm not sure that you need the same, you know, mean median mode kurtosis and everything on all of them. Yeah. But when there's something that's yeah. Kind of like this where it's very, very different, it would be helpful. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. 'cause 47 minutes times two is an hour and a half out of some kids' day. Right. To get to and from school. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean that's a good point. I mean I think it begs a different question which is just perhaps a glimpse of how transportation works and experience by students here. In terms of, for this, I think, you know, in terms of feasibility there will be full transportation studies that kind of take that into account. But I'm hearing some curiosity around kind of the student experience with transportation in general and seeing heads nodding. Okay. Thank you. Speaker 1: Other questions? So something I wanted to bring us back to was the last slide talking about engagement. So this, I think this is our opportunity now if we want
to engage as a school committee on any kind of community engagement around this. We had talked about this, you know, in the context of the MSBA committee and their, their work that, that we'd like to, to do some kind of engagement or awareness. So I think this is our time between now and June to get this done because we know it's really hard to get people over the summer. So I don't know if we wanna take an action item to go back to, you know, incorporate this as part of our communication goal and see if there's something we can do. Or is there an appetite to do this work? Speaker 11: Can I, there's a little miscommunication
that I could just wanna bring up. Sure. No one's fault. But you had asked us to develop a plan for engagement last meeting. Yes. And then we didn't do it and then we all that it agenda, it's fine. All that to say, I, I think it's kind of relevant to your question. Yes. That we, we did meet to talk about, we had a conversation about engagement efforts. So we can do a maybe a full report next time. But one of the things we talked about was that engagement initiatives tend to work best or at least intense engagement initiatives tend to work best when, from the committee perspective,
when there's something specific to engage them on. So, you know, we engage the community for the override. We engage the community for the, the strategic plan surveys and focus groups. So this is a great opportunity for another engagement campaign of sorts. Anyway, we can say more, and I'm not upset or anything that we didn't talk about this time, but, but we can talk more. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I, I think it's good timing actually that this has come, come to us and apologies that I forgot to include that on the agenda. So, 'cause it would've been good to have that full conversation here. So yeah. Okay.
So let's make sure that we put that on the next agenda so that we have plenty of time to do any kind of planning around engagement. And thank you guys for putting that report together. I'm looking forward to hearing it next time. Any other questions, concerns? I just wanna thank you for this report because never before have I seen all of this information in one place and I, I think it's just great to have this as a resource as we move forward. Thank you. So I, I really appreciate all the work that went into it and you bringing it to us. Speaker 5: Thank you. I learned a lot. Probably good.
Okay, great. So we will move on. The next piece of my report, if that works for you, you is to go through strategic plan. We just felt like, because all of our school leaders, all of our cabinet and two members of the school committee are actually on this team. But it might help to kind of just give the whole committee a little overview of where we are. You've seen this slide before I act, I just put it there to kind of anchor it, which Jackie presented a gosh in the, in the, in the library about a month and a half, two months ago. Go to the next slide. I'm not gonna repeat that one.
So this is just to remind you, we do have a steering committee and who's on it? We have four high school students. I, I've been thrilled yeah, last, last time to watch their deep and thoughtful engagement. The process that the high school used to pull them in really worked because they are active and they have a lot to say, a very poised young people. We have caregivers and I'd say the same about them. Like what I was so happy to have one of the people on the team, on my team because she had already done a ton of pre-work kind of on a drafting of a mission based on looking at the deck ahead of time. So deeply engaging
and talented professional people, educators in union leadership. We have seven members. Again, they've been fabulous like you saw today with the code of conduct, you know, dedicating themselves to this work. We have three fabulous school committee members on there as well. School leaders, eight of us and nine members of myself in the cabinet. So a nice nicely kind of mixed team. The first, next slide please. This is really the agenda that our partner teaching and learning Alliance puts together. And this is what we did in the first meeting, which was now a couple weeks ago. The next meeting is tomorrow and that's our data meeting.
But the first meeting was just welcome intros. It was kind of understanding our work, what the purpose and the timeline was going to be, looking at where we were. So taking a look at some of our current initiatives, our bridge plans, SIP plans, our entry plan, et cetera. Clarifying our foundation. We spent quite a bit of time in breakouts talking about our vision, talking about mission, starting to draft one. And we did draft four in our sub all of our different groups. We kind of, we ended the meeting sharing those out and we're gonna revisit 'em I believe tomorrow or the next meeting. And then looking ahead is really looking at a bunch of data.
So everything from the bridge plan, the entry plan to survey data, remember we did that massive survey, we're gonna look at that, our forum information, et cetera. So that's kind of what's coming up and that's gonna start moving full steam ahead because the meetings are getting more frequent. And then as part of the first meeting, and I'll go through this fairly quickly, I was asked as a superintendent to kind of give a little bit of a statement about how I saw what my vision would be, which I felt a little strange doing. 'cause I really believe in a vision
that's developed in collaboration with people. But I was like, I, I can readily kind of give a stab at that understanding. It is one voice only. And that's what I did. So I wanted to share that with you. Next slide. So I covered it. I called it deepening excellence 'cause we're pretty awesome here through coherence. So this idea of cohesion, next slide. I'm gonna do this fairly quickly and you can go through the three different plugs till you get the whole thing out. 1, 2, 3, there. From strength to consistency. So we are already very strong. We outperform the state. Our educators are fabulous families value our schools,
our school values are very aligned and there are pockets of really exceptional practice all over our district. We're driving here. The shift is more towards moving from that strong overall performance to consistency and excellence for every single student. And so that starts to look at subgroup outcomes, which you saw in my entry plan. We have some gaps there. So wanting to kind of close those gaps. Access to advanced opportunities that is predictable and not dependent on schedule or building and making sure we're sup. Layering supports intentionally not reactively. And then expectations that are shared
and visible across schools. You kind of saw that again today with the code of conduct that's a step forward towards that consistency building. The next slide is, is I just did a deep dive and looked at the vision, mission or values statements that were out there for all of our schools. And we have a lot of kind of unity in cross district themes right now. Belonging and community. We have high expectations for our learners focusing on academic and social, emotional growth, respect and responsibility. And then partnering with families. So that's really the themes that are kind of going across our district with our existing vision
and mission and values that are what our schools say they believe in. And the next slide, current performance realities. What we've learned, and this kind of takes into like 18 months of my lens, we have really strong educators, people who are deeply committed to here, yet there's variation in our instructional practice. We're improving that a lot with our work this year on our instructional vision and learning walks. We have some uneven outcomes across our classrooms and I would say that that is shown in the entry plan where we have some gaps for some of our kids. And then persistent performing gaps for students
with disabilities, multilingual learners and low income students. Next slide. I see multi-tiered systems of support as support as the operating framework we need. That takes into account the whole child, behavioral, social, emotional and academic. And that requires a lot of focus on tier one, which we're doing already in our bridge plan. And then using data a lot to identify the needs early and to help intervene on time targeting those supports. And then integrating all the different arms of MTSS and then ongo ongoing monitoring the data, the performance of our subgroups.
Last one. Next one. A coherent district requires that focus on tier one, alignment of eval coaching and professional learning. Hopefully this is sounding a lot like the bridge plan to you. Consistent use of formative assessment so we know where kids are and what, what their mastery is. Ensuring we're seeing our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities and making sure they have core instruction that's extremely strong and foundational. And then that we're able to scale that across the district. And then the last slide, oh sorry. This one is like what the next phases of our work requires. This would be kind of my set of values.
I would add a few things in there. Every student reaching high expectations with the right supports. Every student is experiencing joy, has fun at school, feels they belong and has strong relationships. Closing those gaps. It's important to me kind of once we stabilize things to, to move up and expand opportunities or pathways early. College is on my mind things. Things that expand and help to give an opportunity for all of our kids to grow from the high school side out, but also our youngest learners, right? Also having that opportunity to kind of expand and
and see things and experiencing school in broader ways. Strengthening tier one instruction across all schools and then aligning with really towards responsible growth in terms of finances. We don't wanna break the bank in realizing such a plan. And so the last slide really just outlines what one person would kind of suggest as a start of a vision understanding. I have no, no need to have this become the actual one, but if I were to offer mine in every single student feels known, challenged, and supported. Learning is engaging, rigorous and meaningful opportunity expands at every single level.
Students are partners and have voice. Nathan talked eloquently to that today. Educators, families and community work in authentic part. Partnership and success is measured by growth across classrooms and student groups. A district where excellence is shared, opportunity is expanding and every student can see their future here. So that was well received and we are now doing the collective work, not rooted in this, but rooted in all the members of this team and their voice. So I'm excited to see where it goes, but we wanted to make sure you were all plugged into that process. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Sp. Questions from the committee? Questions or comments? No.
Yeah, Mr. Patel, Speaker 3: Just a comment, but I do wanna say, as of right now, my preschooler loves going to school, so she's finding joy there. If that changes, I'll let you know when, Speaker 1: Of course. Yes. I hope so. Yeah. Dr. Fixer, Speaker 11: I'll just make a comment. I just to reiterate some of what Dr. Sp said, as people know, I've been really excited about this process for quite some time. It was, it was, we were moving towards it for a long time, but it was very theoretical. Being in the room with 40 amazing or so individuals from across the community engaged.
You know, at one point, as Dr. Sp said, we actually two different types. We broke into small groups and just seeing all the conversations and all the thinking and the different perspectives being shared by students, teachers, parents. It was just such great beginning of the process. And I'm really excited to see what comes out of it or to be part of it, obviously. And I was just reflecting as I was driving back home from that first meeting, how helpful this can be specifically for the school committee. Obviously it's gonna be helpful for everyone, but for the school committee in particular, to have a strong
vision, mission statement, specific goals that we know are solidly supported by the community because it was developed by the community, the broader native public schools community. It will help us and future school committees, at least for the next five years, bring that into the budget conversations, bringing in the, to this, the evaluation of the superintendent, bringing that to policy conversations just to make sure that we all we're all aligned based on what the community has really asked us to display. So I'm just sharing my excitement about the process.
Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. McKenzie. Thank you. It's a fun and exciting process for the district to go forward. Somewhere in there you had something about three ways you were gonna address the achievement gap, I believe. And it was with English language learners and it was with income, it was by income. I wondered if there were other specific ways you were gonna delineate the achievement gap. I'm thinking of when Art Ferguson came to the school committee and talked about the achievement gap in terms of our black students
and our other ethnicities using the data from the Metro West Health survey. And I thought that was really important in really interesting and not something to lose sight of, like going forward. I thought that was good and I wondered if they would be like more a break of a breakdown on some of that data. Also by, by gender, male, female. I mean, do we have, is there an achievement gap? I don't know that there is, but it just would be interesting to look at it in terms of data. And I, I worry about that a little bit.
'cause I think it's great. The high school quiz team, it's amazing. And the young woman on that team was turned to so many times for the answers. But we kind of don't have as many girls students on that as some of the other teams. It's not divided equally. So I mean, I just, what can I say? I'm a feminist, so I always wonder about that gap too, between male and female learners. So just a thought because I thought what, especially what Dr. Ferguson shared was so interesting and so important
and historically there has been an achievement gap within ethnicities and races within the district. If we were gonna keep tabs on that. Thank you. Thank you Dr. McKenzie. Speaker 5: I, I can respond in brief. So the gaps as identified right now are those published by Department of Ed and so we kind of use the categories of that for now and kind of link to my entry plan. What you're talking about is kind of a broader look at just equity. So I think, I think it's something that as we get better with the data and we get more targeted with our questions, there's always opportunity for more.
But it was anchored right now in what Desi's categories are. Speaker 1: I wondered if that was the case. Speaker 5: Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay. Any other questions or comments from the committee? Okay. Exciting to see this move forward and thank you. Speaker 5: That ends my report, I believe. Okay. Speaker 1: So I have one more agenda item and it's really just an update from the audit advisory committee. So you'll see attached in the agenda, the, the audit reports and the other documents associated with the fiscal year 24 audit, which was finally completed and just sharing it for information.
There were no findings specific to the schools at all. There were a couple of findings that had to do with financial operations on the townside, but that's all detailed in the report. So yeah. So we're moving on to the fiscal year 25 audit and hopefully that will be delivered sooner than the fiscal year 24 1 was. 'cause it was a bit of a delayed process. Yes, Mr. Gillis. Speaker 12: Yeah, the 24 audits started late and took a while to get off the ground, but the 25 audits fell underway and hopefully that that will be delivered by the end
of the, by the end of the year. Speaker 1: So yeah. Yeah, we we seem to have course corrected, so Yeah. So if anyone has any questions about those, I'm not the person to ask, but I can tell you who would be. So Yeah. But anyway, that was, that was just an update. And then just a little FYI that if anyone's really excited about being on the audit advisory committee, I will have to be resigning from that position after four years. So think about it for when we get to the reassignment meeting. 'cause I, I can't continue in that role. So, and I think that is it for our agenda.
Ms. Flas, do you have a final motion? Speaker 5: Move to adjourn. Speaker 1: Second. All in favor and we are adjourned. Thanks everybody.