Speaker 1: It is 6:35 PM on Monday, October 27th. And this is the school committee meeting. So we'll start with a roll call and the Pledge of Allegiance. So roll call Mr. Patel. Here, Ms. Lathers here. Mr. Brand Speaker 2: Present. Dr. Speaker 1: Fuchsin here. And I am present. Ms. Collins will not be here tonight. And Mr. Brunell will be joining us between seven 30 and eight virtually. So let's rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. In a moment of silence, which we take to honor our troops, serving us here and abroad, Speaker 3: I pledge all pledge allegiance to the flag,
the United States of America and to the Republic for Religious fans, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Speaker 1: Okay, do we have any announcements? Speaker 3: Okay, Speaker 2: Great. I wanted to take a moment to thank representative David Linsky for his steadfast support of Natick Public Schools and for securing a recent earmark that will fund several critical student items. The earmark will help us expand our Multilingual Learner Academy, a highly successful program that builds English language, skills, and confidence. Continue our AP bootcamp
for underrepresented students in advanced courses and support school year credit recovery programs that help students stay on track for graduation. It will also fund classroom translation tools to improve communication and access for our multilingual learners. In addition, funding was provided to multiple towns in Metro West, including Natick, to support mental health in schools. This funding will allow us to continue to address the growing mental health needs of our students. These initiatives represent the best of what we do, removing barriers, expanding opportunity, and helping every student to thrive. We're deeply grateful to representative Linsky Fors ongoing
advocacy and clear commitment to the success of Natick students. Speaker 1: Great, thank you. Any other announcements? Okay. So we will move on 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. So I have one person who notified me in advance that they have public speak.
Ms. Bickers, I see you online. Are, are you asking for public speak as well? Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: Yes I am. Speaker 1: Okay. So that's two. Anybody else in the room? Anybody else online? And Mr. Richardson, I do have you on my list. Okay. So we'll start with Mr. Richardson, if you could please just state your name and your relationship to Natick Public Schools and then you'll have three minutes. Speaker 6: Wonderful. Thank. Can you hear me? Speaker 1: Yes, we can. Speaker 6: Thank you. Madam Chair. My name is David Richardson. I am a Nat resident
and we, we have a kindergartner this year going to Brown Elementary. He's riding bus 25 in the morning and then bus 26 from Brown to Longfellow each afternoon. And first and foremost, I want to thank Ms. Robin Elli, accidentally Sullivan for her level of communications regarding school transportation. It's probably a thankless job just handling, being the bearer of bad news, but she just does it with, with such grace. And so I wanna thank her for that. But my second point is that it is bad news that she's usually delivering, you know, buses being late and drivers getting lost on route, et cetera, et cetera.
And on top of this, the buses that our son rides doesn't, don't appear to have a consistent driver or consistent set of drivers. Whereas, and this is anecdotal, our friends tell us that they don't, they haven't really seen the kind of turnover that we've seen with our bus drivers and just getting our son and then our, our son just has to wait for up sometimes up to 20, 45 extra minutes, 25 extra minutes getting too long, fell in the afternoon. And I, I know that Natick contracts his buses through Michael J. Conley and Sons
and I know that there's a, a bus driver shortage nationwide that miss a Elli Sullivan and Sue Aloni, the deputy superintendent, are in constant contact with Connolly working to keep them accountable and responsible for, for the, for the, for all of this. But I still wanted to just bring it to the school committee's attention that these shortages just do seem to have a negative outsize impact on some of the later buses. And I just wanted to thank everyone for your time. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you very much Ms. Vickers, you have three. Speaker 5: Thank you. Brinley Vickers.
I am precinct date resident and I just wanted to express interest in the fact that I am not seeing on the agenda something that was discussed two weeks ago. I realized that it can't be a conversation right now. Maybe it's hidden been something else, but I was looking forward to the conversation this evening about the request from the chair of the select board for input regarding the Johnson School property and potential uses or needs that might be. And I was really looking forward
to there being a conversation about the fact that perhaps we could use some space for our after school programs or something else. So I am sorry to not see that on tonight's agenda since I believe the letter said it was due by the 31st. And then perhaps maybe you guys could ask for an extension in putting some of that information in because I, I would like to hear that conversation. And I'm sorry I'm not tee on an agenda. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. ERs. And I'll just answer that because the actual deadline is the end of this year. It wasn't the 31st. And we do plan to put
that on an upcoming agenda. So you will see that. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 1: Yes, Ms La I Speaker 7: Think we're supposed to notify them by the 31st that we intended to have input, which I think we did. Speaker 1: We did notify them. Yes, that was the third. Yep, that was the deadline. And we did notify them that we will be submitting a paper position. Paper. Yep. Thank you. Okay, so we'll now close public speak and we will move on to our representatives teacher representative, Mr. Wood. Speaker 8: Thank you Madam Chair. Honestly, I don't have anything to share at this time. Okay.
Speaker 1: All right. Sure. Speaker 8: I know. No, we so look forward to this. Speaker 1: Do we have either of our student reps online? Okay. Alright. If they show up we'll come back to them. Do we have Ms. Gomes? Ms. Gomes, did you have an update at this time? It's okay if you do not. Speaker 9: Hi everyone. Yeah, I mean I have a brief update. We had the MET call back to school night a couple weeks ago and that was awesome. Ms. Brune also joined Catherine and about, I wanna say four to five families showed up and it was just a good night to get everyone together.
We had great discussions about, you know, how far the METCO program has come, but also some of the areas that we wanna continue to improve in. And a big theme of the night was kind of like building community both within the Meco community but also building like more bridges with Natick partnerships and some of the discussions and some of the things that families were interested in was kind of starting sort of hosting program.
Obviously I'm new to Natick and so, but they were, there was discussion from families had there for longer about, you know, this being kind of a topic of discussion for some time now. I think with the pandemic and and things of that nature, like things kind of took a halt. But that's definitely something that we are trying to foster within our own community. So that was good, good discussion to have. We also were able to distribute a survey, I apologize if you guys can hear my kids in the back, but we were able to distribute a survey
and kind of gather some information from families as far as, it was pretty generic and pretty standard. We just kind of asked some background information, made sure that families connect to their home, their child's and like receiving newsletters. So it looks like a hundred percent of families are receiving newsletters. There was something else, majority of nat, majority of the families who filled out the survey, 54, 55 families. We got 12 responses, which is, I mean not the greatest,
I wanna continue to push for more participation in the survey, but it's definitely a good start. So definitely looking at more creative ways to get more in involvement from the, but from the 12 families that did answer about 50% of that were high school families, 33% were Wilson and 16% were behe. So it's kind of nice to see the behem numbers are starting to rise 'cause now we have 11 families, just a little there and majority of family. One of the questions that were specifically
to the school committee was how families share ideas and also how they would like to receive communication from the school committee and about, they would prefer communication via email and then followed by 41% text and then kind of similarly 91% so they would like to share their ideas via email and 41% said through text. And then lastly, just an open ended kind of open ended wanted to create at least an outlet
where parents like I want to share with them, let them know that this questionnaire is gonna be ongoing. So if things change, I want it to kind of be like, of course they can talk to me directly, but it can be another outlet where they can share their ideas with the school committee if they choose not to to join or not to join our meetings. But aside from, I didn't get much aside from transportation, which I know is maybe not in the realm of school committee, we have families share that potential after school buses for students who play arts.
And then another family reported some information bus stops for elementary and middle school things. And so, but it's kind of maybe out of the realm of the school committee. But I just wanna just at least share that those were the two responses that I've gotten. But I think the work that needs to be done as far as from my standpoint is just continuing to make sure that families know that this link is out there if, if things arise in the future that they wanna share. And of course they'll share our link meeting
with everyone too so they have that accessibility accessible to 'em as well. So that's all I got. Speaker 1: Thank you very much Ms. Gomes. We appreciate that. And if you've, if you want to forward any information to us so we have a record of it via email, feel free. I'm sure we'd all be happy to Okay. To see the survey sounds. Yeah. Thank you. Speaker 9: Awesome. Speaker 1: Okay, consent agenda, Speaker 10: Move approval of the consent agenda. Speaker 1: Second. All in favor? Anyone against anyone abstaining? So 5 0 0 consent agenda passes. Okay. So we're going to take some items out of order
'cause we have a number of people here as guests tonight. So I will turn things over to Mr. Brand for some policy subcommittee updates first Speaker 10: And I will turn things over. Now I think that the two that we're gonna start with are the competency, determination and the graduation requirements. So if you don't mind, we have some guests who are much better about talking about these than I am. So while they're moving we, this is a first read of of these policy updates. So no vote intended for tonight.
We discussed these at our most recent policy subcommittee meeting and I won't put my thumb on any scales so I'll let you take it from here. Great. Speaker 11: Alright. Thank you for having us. My name is Josepha Blocker, I'm the principal at the high school and I wanna introduce my vice principal of teaching and learning. Dr. Cole Harms. Thank you. And we're gonna be talking tonight about competency determination, which is an outgrowth of the ballot initiative that passed last year, eliminating the requirement for students to pass MCAS as a graduation requirement. Do we have the Yeah, the slides to project. Okay.
Alright so as we're, as we're getting the slides set up to be projected, we're basically gonna go through a little bit of where we've been and then where we're heading now into the future, what things have changed, what things remain the same, and then what our task is this evening. So we came last year to talk a little bit about the four main parts of graduation requirements in Natick public schools. Three in the past have been firmly entrenched within the school systems purview. And that is the overall credits for graduation. The distribution credits meaning specific courses
that kids need to fulfill in order to graduate here and then 30 hours of community service. Those have all traditionally been within the purview of Natick public schools. The one that remained outside of Natick Public Schools was competency determination, which was linked by law to MCA scores that is no longer linked by law to MCA scores. But students still need to fulfill competency determination to graduate. And so right now that ballot initiative basically disconnected those two things. So we still have to administer MCAS, it still is important
for our accountability. It still is important for students who can earn scholarships through MCAS. There it is, but it now no longer is sufficient to determine that students have attained this legally required competency threshold because those two things are now disconnected. So we are, we've slide four. Slide four. So we went through that. So now these two things are now no longer connected. So districts have been tasked to develop some way of certifying that their students have met the competency threshold. So right now, so we can go past this too as well.
So this is the, this is the legal ease of what remains in the law. Basically instead of it being the assessment instrument, they will need to satisfactorily complete coursework that is certified by our district and show mastery of skills. And we'll talk a little bit what that means in practice next. So we can go one more. Great. So we've been since this point of November, 2024, DESI eliminated that connection following the ballot initiative. DESI then said all districts need to create their own plans.
And you might recall we came to this body last year and presented a plan for CD that then aligned with Desi's requirements at the time that plan successfully allowed all students in the class of 2025 to graduate. Then in late July they released new requirements for determining CD for the class of 26 and then for the class of 2027 onward. And so those two plans are gonna be slightly different and we'll talk a little bit about that tonight. And then they also have as a requirement, last year we came because we partner with you typically on various things. But this year it is a specific requirement
that this body votes in to implement the plan that we're seeking for DSI approval prior to our submission of that plan. So I'm gonna go through that tonight and then we will submit it by their deadline of December 31st. So what remains the same as last time and what is different? So it's still us defining it. Kids will still need to pass certain standards aligned courses. Kids who passed MCAS prior to January, 2025 will retain that competency determination assessment if they earned it at that point.
And then for the class of 2026, the three subjects that remain for competency determination are the same. English, math and one of the sciences. What's now changed is this additional requirement that kids will need to attain mastery. And that is not the same as passing the courses. And we'll talk about that shortly. We are also required to create an appeals process. I talked about having the approval of school committee we're required to submit the plans to dsi, which they did not require us to do prior. They've given us greater clarity in terms of our requirements vis-a-vis kids who earned certificates
of attainment prior to 2024 and then all the way back to 2003 that those students can now request of us a transcript review under our new process to see if they would meet our new threshold. And then most notably for the class of 2027 and onward, they will also be required to attain competency determination in US history. So that's an addition. So we're gonna talk a little bit now about the distinction between class of 26 and then 27 and onward. Before we do that, just a little bit about our consultation
on who helped us develop this. This will go to school council following us, talking about you, he about it here with you. Our leadership team in terms of developing this, our English, math history and science department heads our multilingual learner department head. Our guidance and special education administrators, including our alt-ed administrator, dean's, vice principals, and then the central office executive instructional leadership team all weighed in on this process here. So the class of 2026, they have to either have passed an MCAS, which all
of those kids have had the opportunity to take English, math and science. That is one way or we're gonna lay out a plan by which they can achieve it through an NPS process that we're hoping to vote in through the school committee for, just in terms of numbers, more than 80% of our kids passed all 3M CAS to the requirements that are necessary for cd. So for the class of 2026, we are really down to a small cohort already that we would be applying this process to because the vast majority of them already have CD in everything.
So our process is gonna be important to that remaining chunk of kids. And we've already done a bunch of analysis and it's now down to a very, very small number, which I'll talk about later. Class of 2027 is a little bit different. So if we move towards them, they have only had the opportunity to take MCAS in science and have it count towards CD because we've sort of rolled past that January 20, 25 time period. Right. So for the class of 20 27, 90 3% or 94%, something like that have already gotten CD through MCAS.
So it's a very, very small percent that we're gonna have to apply this rule to for science. But they will have to use this plan for ELA math and US history in their entirety. And then the following year, class of 2028, it'll be all four subjects using this plan. 'cause nobody will have had a bite at the Apple through MCAS. So I'm gonna go through the process. You've had the slides hopefully, so you've seen a little bit of it. And so I'm gonna go through it for English and then you'll see the way in which it's sort of parallel in the other subjects. So for English, they have to pass four semesters of high school English, right?
Or the equivalent of two years. They have to pass four full years of English to graduate anyway. So the coursework piece is not, they have to do it no matter what. The mastery piece has to be something independent from just passing the course. And so DESI allows us to do something that is a summative or capstone project exam portfolio. So for English, that'll be an average of the midterm and their term four grade, which in English is largely where they have a summative large project or paper. And so the average of those two is where we will determine mastery from.
And then down there you'll see it says or the equivalent and we'll talk about why we have that language in there a little bit further on. And so for math, the main distinction for math is unlike English where all English can count towards it, math, its specific courses. So they need two semesters of geometry and then two semesters of algebra. And that can be either algebra one or two or the equivalent. And and for mastery it's the average of their midterm and final or whatever end of year project or assessment they have in math for geometry and algebra one or for geometry and algebra two.
So for math as opposed to English, it's specific subjects and courses as opposed to just the general. And for science, similarly, it's one of the four subjects, physics, chem, bio and engineering. So they have to pass both semesters of those. And then the average for mastery of the midterm and the final project. And then for US history, it will be very similar where both semesters of US history and then the average of the midterm and term four, which will be a larger summative project. So we recognize that for the vast majority of our kids that will be sufficient.
We will be able to, based on grades and past track record, that will get the vast majority of them to this competency determination. But there are also alternate routes for kids who need additional support. So we already use Edgenuity or online courses for kids who need credit recovery. For English it's a little bit easier 'cause they're gonna pass another year's course and do the Edgenuity no matter what. Anyway. For math it would be an EDGENUITY course. And for science it would be passing a different science course or Edgenuity depending. So that's if they struggle with the coursework,
the benefit is that if they are struggling with the coursework, there's a final embedded in that online course. And that can also suffice for the mastery piece. For mastery. If they're taking Edgenuity, they can pass the final to show it. We're also creating this sort of sub score for some kids. There are some kids who, if you were familiar with the MCAS alt process in the past, who will do very well on an exam. If you tell them, for example, it's a test on exponents, but if you mix the exponents up with all the other algebra and geometry, all of a sudden they can't pick out
that it's the exponent problem. So for that subset of kids, if we just take all of their unit assessments and we average them and we use that as the determinant of mastery, in other words, assessments on individual skills as opposed to a mash of the whole, they would very easily show competence. And so for that cohort we will be looking back at all of their unit assessments, creating like a sub score as a portfolio and then using that to demonstrate mastery for that cohort. And then finally, we can also are creating some portfolios in advance with the department heads that kids can work
through on during our February and April break boot camps and or during our, during our workshop blocks, we can assign them to that as well. So for the vast majority of our kids who have been through the Natick system, that is gonna be able to catch them. The kids who are a little bit harder to track through this process are transfer kids, especially kids from outside of Massachusetts. We typically only get their transcripts now we're going back and telling, sending schools we need their exam scores as well in order to define competency. Sometimes the course names are different.
So we're going through a lot of sort of heavy transcript review and communication with sending schools kids in out of district placements. We'll talk a little bit, that's another consideration that we're accounting for. And then how to support this, the kids who had prior certificates of attainment, those are some other things that our proposal contains. Kids with disabilities, we will of course follow all of their IEP requirements, accommodations and support that is demonstrated there. It will also now become part of the IEP transition planning just as MCAS is. There'll have to be a piece in the
IEP that talks about that. And then for out of district placements, this is the language that the collaboratives are using most generally. Basically saying that as an out of district placement that's certified by Massachusetts, they are basically tasked with helping kids attain competency and that we are gonna be putting our faith in them just like we do with credits to certify competency determination. And so that is the way that they are working with all of the sending schools. And so we're collaborating with them to, to work on
that together for our multilingual learners. It's really certifying that ESL classes are meeting the ELA coursework requirements during, especially for our level ones and twos. And then integrating great appropriate ELA and English language development standards, which our new assistant director for ML and our new department head for ML are working on currently and making sure that all of our ML students have equitable access in their current classrooms and the correct support to meet the threshold for this. So in conclusion, the impact on Natick class of 2025,
virtually everyone attained CD through the MCAS. The few that didn't applied our plan to graduate class of 26, 80 2% had CD in all three subjects. 15% have satisfied CD through this plan already if we use this plan. And then the list that 1% that are still remaining are currently enrolled in coursework that will enable them to meet it by the end of the year. And we're just sort of waiting for them to continue to succeed in those classes. The class of 2027, we are now doing bless you transcript reviews of their past successes in English, math, English and math.
They're currently enrolled in US history. So we are working with the social studies teachers to make sure that they understand their obligation under this. We've also worked with the biology teachers who currently have students enrolled who are part of that 7% or 6% rather that don't have cd. So that they can be supporting their students towards earning it in biology right now with the hopes that our graduation rate does not go down at all. As a consequence of this, we're also required to have an appeals process. And so our appeals process, both for the kids
who have earlier gotten the certificate of attainment and through the kids who whose parents and guardians may wanna appeal our competency determination. DESI used to be a, an appeal to them now it would be app an appeal to us. So we've created a web, an email address specifically for that and a process where people can, from central office will review those requests and then make a decision through the appeals process, which might include transcript review or other additional assessments as needed. And then lastly, a plan for communication and training.
So teachers are already aware in the subject areas that are affected by this, we're presenting to you now, once school committee has voted on this and it's certified into policy language, we would be communicating to families and via newsletters. We would also hold off open office hours for parents who had questions. We would put it on our website and then teachers would be communicating with family, with students in class. And then linked for your purview is the final submission that we would be intending to send to dsi, which has to be in its own format, separate from policy language.
So we have both of them linked for you this evening. And just as a final sort of summary of needs, this obviously has increased, has created some increased necessary support for students because it's a completely different process than they're used to. So prior our boot camps allowed kids to use the online learning platform with a pair there. We're gonna hire licensed teachers now in math ELA and science at the boot camps. And that's gonna incur a little bit of additional cost. We've noted that transportation is sometimes a barrier to those boot camps and in the summer. So it would be super helpful to get transportation covered
for some of the kids who are coming and then funding for some summer curriculum, time for math ELA and science teachers to work on those alternative portfolios we talked about. And so those are the projected needs that are sort of falling out of this new, new process that we're managing. We've also been working a lot with Beth Laucer, our data data manager and Erica's done yeoman's work between her and guidance, trying to make sure that PowerSchool can manage some of the tracking of this in the future for us so that we move out of the land of spreadsheets and into PowerSchool. And so I know that was a lot of information,
it was very dense, but happy to take questions, clarify anything that would be helpful. Speaker 1: Thank you very much. That was a lot of information. Oh yes, Ms. Speaker 12: So just this sort of lays the groundwork for the policy that we're bringing to you. Yes, thank you. Which is actually two policies. One is the competency, determination, and mastery policy, which will also align with the current policy for graduation requirements, which you'll have a red line version of that as well. Speaker 1: Thank you. Questions from the committee,
Speaker 13: Dr. Fon, you tell me when to stop 'cause I have a bunch of them, but they're clarifying questions. Not nothing, go for it. So this is just to clarify, probably not the best option, but just to clarify, the MCAS are still being offered. We definitely don't want to use the MCAS anymore. However, and even if me, I'm guess they're not letting us. They're not letting us. Okay. Yeah. Speaker 11: So that's, Speaker 14: They said in, in only extreme situations I believe was their exact wording. Speaker 13: Okay, so it's not that you don't have to, it's you can't. Correct. Speaker 11: We have to administer it. We'll be held accountable as a district for our performance on it.
It will be used towards giving kids scholarships based on their score. Yeah. But we cannot use it for this. For Speaker 13: Competency. Yep. Yeah. Oh, when for students who are, I forget the slide, but there was a slide that talked about in English, for example, scholarship space. If you, I guess it's if, if you don't pass all four classes or you don't pass exams, you would use the mid, the average of the midterm. And term four is that of your, their senior year. Speaker 11: So for each of those, for each of the, they're supposed
to pass two years. 'cause most high schools don't do the semesterized grading. So we do semesterized grading, so it's a little more complicated. So we're saying four semesters of English and I guess technically that could be one from their sophomore year and one from their Oh. But in in reality it that checks box A, but it doesn't checks box B. Box B is, we have to check off that they've also attained mastery. And so the way we're doing mastery is the average of term four and their midterm, because that is where we've done the summative projects Speaker 13: Of any two years Speaker 11: Of any two years of English.
That's how they, they give a midterm and then they do like a big term four paper that's like a summative project. Speaker 13: Okay. I was thinking it was just senior year and I was like, isn't that too late? No. Speaker 11: Oh yeah. That would be, we are hoping that we check both boxes by the end of 10th grade because it's supposed to be the 10th grade standard we're assessing them on. But some kids might need 11th and 12th. And so that, so Speaker 13: I have more but do you want me to pause 'cause I asked to Speaker 1: Anyone else have, I think you can Speaker 13: Continue. Yeah. Thank you. And again, these are just to check the box boxes. So you mentioned collaboratives basically with collaborative
for out of district students, basically with collaboratives in essence, you're trusting or we are trusting whatever competencies they determine for their student population. I'm assuming that is not only collaboratives but any out of district placement. Okay, Speaker 11: I let Sue Speaker 12: Talk talk, I just wanna clarify the expectation is that they are meeting our competency requirements. So we're working closely with them. So our out of district coordinator is working with them to ensure that they're supporting their students, our students in meeting our mastery requirements.
But this language that they've provided, all of the collaboratives that we're working with have adopted this language. Yeah. Which supports our, our students who are attending the collaboratives in meeting our competency requirements. And so we're working collaboratively with all of our surrounding districts to be as closely aligned as we can. The problem is that not all of the districts that we collaborate with and that all attend the same collaboratives have the same
mastery determinations because they don't all give finals or they don't all have the same grading systems. So we are a little bit off because of that, which is why all of this has become so sticky, such a headache. Yeah. Yes. But we are working very closely with the out of district placements to try to ensure that they are meeting our mastery requirements. But they have to certify all of their courses, which is what they are doing. Speaker 13: And that's true for any time you place a student in out
of district placement, you're going through that process with that school. So it's not just collaboratives, right? 'cause you have private school. Yeah. Okay. And then Edgenuity, I'm curious to know more about how that's used. Is first of all, how long is an Edgenuity course and do students take it in school or is that something they do at home or can they do either? Speaker 11: So that's a great question. All of the above. So the edge annuity courses are managed in conjunction with our online learning specialist. And so typically when students are have failed a course
or if we know that they're sort of close to passing a course but not quite there, we can go in and adjust the course. So we can for example, give them the part of the course that we know they need help on or we can give them if, if we really feel like they didn't do well in the whole of algebra, we can give them a whole algebra course. But we use it as remediation, not as a first bite at a course. So they're using it as a support Yeah. To continue to develop skills. And so kids, typically what we like to do is if you, if a student was to fail semester one,
especially in a subject like math or science, it's very hard to pass semester two. So we try to put them in Edgenuity during their si, during their study hall block and we'll enroll them in online learning. So they're going to the online learning room to do the Edgenuity course so that they're trying to make up the content from semester one and while they're in semester two to give them a higher likelihood of passing semester two. So we do that sort of organically anyway. And then we also have students who might do some at home. We have them doing it during the bootcamp sessions during the breaks.
Now that was something new last year and during summer school as well. Speaker 13: Yeah. Honestly, the reason I was asking, I'm trying to make sure this is equitable for all students. Of course. So my concern was if it was only at home, no, it would create all kinds of issues. But you have studies study hall time. Yeah. In the, in the, yeah. Perfect. Speaker 11: In fact, most of the time it's in school. Speaker 13: Yeah. Yeah. And then lastly, this was the last point you were talking about the appeal process. Yeah. So if I understood correctly, a parent can either appeal the whole process or their student specific. So the appeal is, you mean like within the next
few months in, in your timeline, like you're gonna get appeals from parents about the whole process? Speaker 11: No, it would be appealing their child's competency determination. So we, so there was in the past, right? If I go back to when it was MCA determined MCAS had three roots for appeal. And so you could do these three different routes. So they've now put it on us to have roots for appeal. So this would be, so all of the students right now who are on our short list of like you are in danger of not attaining competency determination, those families already know. But if we got to May and we were like, okay, like this is where we are right now
and we don't believe you've attained mastery and their families wanted to appeal that decision, they could email that email address within 15 days of our formal notice to them that that was the barrier to graduation and file an appeal of their competency determination. So they could do that. Or if there was a family that felt like, you know, I think I attained it with my, you know, integrated math one and two from, you know, the school I went to across the globe, right? And I want a renewed examination of that course
through a transcript review. I don't agree with what the high school decided internally they could put that forward. Right? Or the people who've gotten certificates of attainment prior to 2024 can also come forward and say, I believe that based on your new policy, my child would've earned it or I would've earned a diploma from Natick High School. I want you to now decide if I've attained mastery and coursework in con in that is in accordance with this. Speaker 14: And I was just gonna say for clarity, a certificate of attainment would be a student who was unable to graduate
with a diploma because they, the only thing was that they did not pass MCAS. So that would be a, a student who would be eligible Speaker 13: In the past in the past to appeal. So an appeal is in a situation which I disagree with, the way you've applied your criteria, met the school's criteria as opposed to I agree, but I wish, but I wanna do something about it. That's a different process. Right? Speaker 11: Right. I think that if it's, Speaker 13: If I don't have, if I don't reach competency and I want to fix it, that's Speaker 11: Different that then we would continue to work with those kids anyway.
It's more that I think what I've done should suffice based on Speaker 13: The established criteria. Correct. Okay. That's it. Thanks. Thank you so much. That was very helpful. Of course. Speaker 1: Other committee members for questions, I have a question. Yeah. So for the coursework and for the mastery, does it, is it required to get all that done in four years? Speaker 11: Yes. And a lot of kids will do the English and the math and the science by the end of 10th grade because that is when they would've been taking these MCM CAS
exams anyway, where it's meant to be reflective of the 10th grade standard. So it's meant to assess mastery on English up till 10th grade math, which would've been algebra one and geometry, although, because some of our students take Algebra one and middle school algebra two. Right. So, and then the only new thing would be US history, which we currently do in 11th grade. So most kids will be done at that point. And then we have two years to help kids remediate moving forward. Speaker 1: Okay. So at and at what time of the year is the competency determination done?
Like when does someone find out whether if, if they're not going to graduate? Speaker 11: So, it's a great question. So part of our school improvement plan was graduation contracts for kids who were not on track to graduate and then routine cyclical meetings with families about it. And so we're embedding this into that process now for, so all the seniors who are in danger right now, all of them know all of the, the kids in the class of 2027, the juniors, they're currently taking US history. So we won't know that answer until the very end of this year because it's contingent on them passing the
course and the exams. However, kids who fail US history first semester, we will snatch them up and put them in bootcamp in February or April where we will offer it to them and we will explain to them all the, if then, like, if you don't do this, then you can do summer school. If you don't do this, then we might enroll you in it next year if you, and we work with families through that graduation contract process to do this iterative decision tree about how and when and where. Right. And that's sort of a iterative process that we do with families as time marches forward. 'cause it's never really a, it's never really a yes or no.
It's more of a not yet. How about now? Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 12: Can, can I just add onto that? They've been, the high school team has been working very closely with our data office up here and they've been able to do some work within our PowerSchool system. So there's a checks and balances so that as students hit their mastery requirements, there's a check system within PowerSchool. So we will know as soon as they've met the requirement for their math competency. So there's a checks and balance. So we'll know at the end
of 10th grade if a student hasn't met that graduation requirement and they can start creating a plan and having those conversations, the guidance counselors with the students so that they can say as they're planning their courses for 11th grade, okay, you haven't met the requirement for this, so let's talk about summer school, let's talk about bootcamp, let's talk about what courses you're going to take next year so that you can meet that competency. So we're not waiting until senior year so that we're addressing it early on and creating a plan so that the students are invested,
the students are aware, the parents are aware. So obviously the earlier the better and that we're all in communication on the same page so that we can figure it out. The goal, just like with MCAS, the kids know at the end of ninth grade if, or in October of 10th grade, if they pass the science requirement and if not, then there's a retake opportunity. Same with at the end of 10th grade, they were taking English and math. They would know in October of 11th grade if they needed to retake that. We're giving them the same opportunities with their course requirements and the mastery requirements so
that they have multiple opportunities to hit that. And there's communication through the whole process. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. No, thank you. Yeah, of course. Any other questions? I have one more question, but I don't wanna, so then, and I, I appreciate that. That's super helpful. So is it very, how often does somebody realize or get into trouble in that 12th year right, in that final year and there's not enough time to do the boot camps in the summer school? We're, Speaker 14: We're in a little bit of a bottleneck right now because this all just came out essentially in August.
So we don't anticipate ever being in this position again where we're, we're we're saying, okay, we gotta figure out what to do and notify parents like, you know, in the fall of the, their child's senior year. It's only like that now because, because Desi frankly moved the benchmark for us moved the end zone, whatever the sports reference is that we wanna use. So, so as much as, as Sue was saying, you know, we'll we're before the end of this year, we should know
where our juniors are at because we're, we're in process with that right now. And then, you know, and then it'll just sort of become part of our routine with guidance with teachers, with deans and vice principals in terms of our current 10th graders on, because we'll be able to know what's happening and then the, the students who move in will be working with them through that registration and intake process. The, the guidance secretaries will be able to do those check boxes and, and are asking for all of this information. So right now it's, it's tight
and it feels a little a, a little anxious. I, I get, but we shouldn't ever be here again. If this, if this proposal passes, this policy passes and we're able to just move forward with the plan that we have in place. Speaker 11: Like I imagine if, if this passes and this becomes what we're doing, I imagine that at the end of the school year this year, we would be running reports on all of the semester one, semester two and exam grades for all the ninth grade in physics. And then we would mark everybody as completed CD and science except this small cohort. Right. And then they would become our
watch list for that class. And then we would do the same thing at the end of the year with the ninth grade with English. And then all right that this cohort now is halfway there, then at the end of 10th grade that cohort is all the way there. And then we would keep, keep whittling the list down. And that is something we do now with all our graduation requirements anyway. Like for the distributions for the community service, we have like lists of kids we're keeping our eye on. And so this is just sort of one more specific piece to that that we're keeping our eye on as we go through the iterative process.
Right now we have 13 kids who are still, we're still waiting to see how they do this year in various courses and all. But we, one of those kids potentially has been in an, I think all but one have, are kids who've moved into Natick during high school. So some of them this year. So basically saying if they've been regularly coming to school and if they've been in our system, our system has supported them and allowed them to attain competency. And then for the kids who have come in late, we're trying
to figure out what their entry point is and support them towards getting to the same level of mastery by the end of 12th grade. Okay. No, super helpful. Thank you. Speaker 13: I do have one quick question. Is there any chance, and I thought there was some talk about this and I don't know if anyone knows but that, 'cause right now each district is figuring this out on your on on our own. Is there any chance that Desi at some point will say, we're gonna help you coordinate across the state people are laughing at. Speaker 11: I know, I know. I mean I just curious if Speaker 13: That, we Speaker 11: Never know what DESI is going to do. Oh, okay. It was like some sunny July day and this just landed in our inboxes. And then who in all seriousness,
Maura Healey did come out with a statement 'cause she has her own graduation sort of task force that she's now looking at. And when that task force releases their information, that could change our landscape. Again, I mean somebody in one of these meetings recently joked with me, wouldn't it be great if the state just put out a test? Oh wait. Right. Because that's kind of, I think, so we, we really are in a mode of responding to this and trying to have it not, we are already doing standards aligned instruction
that supports all kids. And so the goal is to not have this sort of managerial task impact that to the degree that it changes everything we're doing. It's basically not, it's basically a lot more paperwork and spreadsheets than anything else that we are maintaining rather than the state maintaining it for us. Speaker 13: Well you had nothing else to do anyway so. Speaker 11: Exactly, exactly. We were getting a little bored Yeah. Over there. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's a great question and well answered. And the only thing I'd add to it is when that does come down the line from the state,
I think we would be looking to edit or review this policy again and kind of line it up again. But it's due on December 31st. Yeah. So we have to come up with something and this is kind of what many smart people pull together for here that we feel like we can do. And I just wanna commend the high school for their granular work student by student. It's really like a big RTI process response to intervention where they're kind of trying to make sure they're catching every single student. So it's really admirable the level of detail you and your whole team have put towards this. Speaker 15: Okay, Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Brand.
Speaker 10: So I, I think Ms. Palone alluded to this. The other policy that we're gonna take while we're here was just IKF, which is really, if you look at the policy, it's just a policy that refers to the policy. So there's not a whole lot to discuss on that, but we'll take those up probably hopefully at the next meeting, both of 'em together. So that's really it for now, unless you wanna finish this section. Speaker 1: Yeah. Just any questions on the other policy, the graduation requirement policy from anyone? No. Okay. Speaker 10: It really, the, the whole policy if you haven't looked is
a paragraph barely and it just changes the reference to what it's talking about. Yeah. Speaker 1: I think it just says our graduation requirements are in our handbook. Right. Something to that effect Speaker 10: And it references IK Effie. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. So we'll see these at our next meeting for a vote. Is that the idea? Speaker 10: That's up to you. I hope so. Speaker 1: Sounds good. Okay. Thank you guys so much. Yeah. Yeah. So do you wanna move on then to, I saw Mr. MCA. Sure. Let's do MCA. Yeah, that follows on nicely. MC.
Speaker 2: Great, thank you. So we have Sandy Lemon here who's going to bring us through our presentation on the spring 2025 MCAS and Deputy Superintendent Aloni will be there with her. We did kind of change this up slightly to align with the entry plan finding. So you might see a little bit different from the prior presentations that we've done on MCA. So take it away. Speaker 16: Thanks. I'm Sandy Lemon, a coordinator of Data and student success working in Lion alongside Sue here at Central office.
Glad to be here. This is a lot of information on the heels of a lot of information. We Speaker 1: Go ahead. Speaker 16: I broke down some of the data to share with you into four different distinct categories. We're gonna look at accountability, achievement, growth trends, and then our opportunity gaps. These should sound familiar. They echo Dr. SP's entry plan that she shared with you back in in February. So the first category is accountability,
which is a measurement for how the state measures how schools are doing. They take into account our MCA results in English, math and science. They look at our student growth, they look at high school graduation attendance data. And why this matters is it gives a full picture of school progress. It highlights and strengths in areas for improvement and it helps guide state and local support port. So the first graft you're looking at is our spring accountability for two years.
So last year and this year, this year is in the red. Each school, for those of you who are sort of new to accountability, gets a score out of 100 and it's comparing itself to other similar schools statewide. So they look at the grades that are offered and they sort of bucket them. So there's a three to eight category that our elementary and middle schools fall into. And then there's a high school category that's the high school falls into the scores reflect our progress toward state targets
that have been determined and extra attention is given to our lowest performing students. When we look at our accountability, Looking at achievement, the achievement is measuring how well students met state academic standards in English, math and science. It reflects what students know and can do at that time. And we are compared to our DART districts. The definition of a DART district is a district analysis and review tools.
And what that does is it looks at communities that have similar enrollments, student demographics, grade spans, et cetera. And the state will update those. Sometimes they change, sometimes they don't. They're not currently out for 2025. So we've used the 2024 DART districts for for the report. What this does is it helps to identify our strengths, it helps to identify gaps and it also can prioritize improvement. So the first graph is the ELA in three through eight.
You'll notice in the lower right we did grow by two percentage points, which is a win. But our DART districts did similar growth. So our position in the DART remains the same at seventh math. Sorry, Speaker 12: Just to interrupt, you'll see that that red line across Oh yes. Is where the state is. So you'll see that we, along with all of our DART districts, did achieve higher Speaker 16: Than the state overall in math.
We had no change from our, our position in terms of percentage and we remained the same. And again, that's seventh in our dark group science. We decreased by two points and we lost one position. So we are an eighth position in science in three through eight and science is administered in grades five and eight in the three through eight category Grade 10 ELA.
We lost a point but our position remained the same. It is still 10th out of 11. Yeah, this is a bright spot. So our 10th grade math MCAS increased by three percentage points from last year and we actually jumped two positions in our dart and we can link this to a school improvement goal that the high school had last year focusing on
integrating algebra into geometry so that they don't take a year off, so to speak, from algebra while they're focused on geometry. So they infused algebra into geometry. So the 10th grade MCAS reflected growth. There is really a win Growth trends. SGP, you'll hear me say that's the student growth percentile. Growth looks at students and they compare them to like peers who performed similarly on the previous one to sort
of rank their growth compared to those. So it's progress over time and it highlights group of groups of students. When we're looking at this, this is a five year span. So you're looking from 2021 to 2025 in three through eight on the left hand side and grade 10 on the right. So the SGP for example, in grades three through eight increased from 53 to 55 and it decreased from 51 to 49 in grade 10 math both in three through eight
and grade 10, they, the student growth percentile increased. And again in grade 10 after the previous slide, knowing about our SIP goal, a five percentage increase in growth is, is significant. One might ask where are the gross scores for science? The state does not report gross scores for science, just ELA and Speaker 12: Math. And that would be because we don't take science consecutively, right? It's fifth grade, eighth grade, and then it is in ninth grade. But because it's content specific, you can't show growth over time.
Speaker 16: Lastly, we've got opportunity gaps. This is a way to look at access, differences in access and resources. Desi's goal is to ensure equitable high quality education for all of our students. And the opportunity gaps that we are focused on are low income LS and students with disabilities. We're moving to call them mls. The state calls them ls. So you'll see LS here. And the note is, when Dr.
SP's entry plan came out in February, she really shined the light on these opportunity gaps. This is sort of a, a different way that Natick has, has a lens that Natick is using to, to look at our students. And that was in February and they took the MCAS in April and May therefore very short duration in terms of being able to make measurable gains. We are making some gains. We still have work to do. So this is a lot. I'd love to take grade 10, ELA and just sort of unpack it quickly for you so
that you understand what you're looking at. At bottom is the Natick and state percentage of meeting and exceeding in grade 10. The first line is all students. So you'll see that Natick is 71% of our students are meeting and exceeding. And in the state it's 51% So as you saw in the previous slides with our DART district, we do excel above the state. However, when you dig into some of these
gaps, you'll understand that, for example, low income, only 40% of our low income students are meeting and exceeding. So if you take that 71, you subtract the 40, that's where you get the minus 31 in the blue up above. If you do the same thing with the state, they have 51. 31% of our low income students in this state are meeting and exceeding. So the gap is shorter. For our special education students, it's
36% at the state, it's 35. And then we have a, we have a win over in our L category. We are actually closing the gap more than the state is in our ML learners with a 32% gap versus a 39. Again, gap still exists. We have work to do, but this is a way of looking at our, our growth toward closing those gaps and supporting those students without
sacrificing our grade level rigor and content. So the, that's ELA for Grades three through eight and 10. These are the gaps in math, significant, but then again, we have the LS who are closing the gap in math as well. Speaker 12: I just wanna check and see if you wanna take questions at the end, because Ms. Brune has her hand up. Speaker 16: Oh, Speaker 12: It might make sense to just go through the whole thing and then take questions at the end. Yeah, I think so. I just, we're close. Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take questions at the end. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 16: Sorry. And then science is similar in terms of our numbers. They're very similar in ELA math and in science in terms of these groups with gaps that we are focused on, one of the outcomes of the work that we're doing with district priorities is, and and on formative assessment will, will hopefully begin to shine the light on these students
and be able to support their achievement. Lastly, I think we'd be remiss not to link this to sort of where the states are in, in their reporting. They did report that 63 districts have returned to pre pandemic achievement levels, either in math or ELA or both. The magic number was 13, I believe that were both, but five of those 13 were charter schools. So that's kind of an interesting Hmm. So really eight districts have returned to,
to pre pandemic levels despite progress we're finding, or the state is finding, most students still remain below those performance levels. The ELA scores improved slightly in three through eight. Math remained largely unchanged in science scores were flat in grade five and decline in grade eight. Natick echoes that high school scores declined. They note that this was the first year that the MCAS did not need a qualifying score to graduate. They're hesitant to make any kind
of definitive link at this time. They have more research to do and they also are still continuing to look at the ongoing need to address the post pandemic learning and chronic absenteeism. Speaker 12: You, you'll see in the slide deck there's also an appendix, which gives you more information and broken out data if you so Speaker 16: Choose to dig in. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you so much. So questions from the committee. I sim to brand, but I think Ms. Brunell was also online. Ms. Brunell, did you want to ask your question?
Speaker 17: Sure. Thank you. Hi everybody. I'm on. I'm here by the way, participating real remotely. Thank you for the presentation. Sandy and Ms. BA. Were the school improvement plans, will any of them shift given the MCA results or do we feel as if the school improvement plans that were, that were presented in the last couple meetings will cover the gaps that you're showing here in this one snapshot? Speaker 12: We had preliminary results prior to the development of the school improvement plan.
So all of that was taken into consideration when the school improvement plans were developed. So I don't anticipate that that will shift because they were really targeting the lowest 25th percentile, which encompasses these subgroups and our math and ELA scores. Speaker 17: Okay, thank you. And if I may just with one comment, I really appreciate that you're showing those gaps and I am most concerned about that ELA gap with our special ed students. And so I appreciate that you've highlighted that for us and it, it gives, it gives the whole district a goal. Speaker 12: I agree. Ms.
Brunell and I also am excited that with our current literacy pilot, that this will hopefully be moving us in the right direction to find a high quality instructional curriculum that will meet the needs of all of our learners. And the focus on formative assessment and tier one instruction for all students will also address that need. Speaker 1: Okay. Mr. Brand. Speaker 10: So I think I actually worked out my, I I was going to ask for further clarity on how the gap, what
that actually meant, but then I figured it out, but I, I, I think I figured it out. And so I might just say, and then if you can say if I'm wrong, yes. Speaker 16: It's confusing Speaker 10: For anybody who is listening and who, so the way I sort of pictured in my head now is that like, so I'm looking at the ELA grade 10 ELA opportunity gaps. So 71% of all students are, are meeting or exceeding MAS in natick, 51% in the state. What I got myself hung up on was
why would you subtract it's, it's not 40% of 71. It's, so in my head, the way I worked it out now is that if we picture the 71 as like a trajectory, almost 71% of students are doing it. The, the low income students are under pacing. So it's, so I suppose in a perfect world old you would have, well, not in a perfect world, I guess you wouldn't have any low income students, but like a hundred percent of the low income students, like a hundred percent of all students would be meeting
or exceeding, but the gap would be zero if the same percentage of low income students. But it's still not exactly great math for me because the denominator's not the same. Right. So the percentages aren't exactly, it's not one-to-one. Right. So anyhow, this is just me working numbers out in my head, but I think I actually figured out what it all means. But if other people are confused, I just thought maybe I would, did I get it right? Do I understand? Speaker 16: I think you do. Okay, great. Speaker 10: That was my question. Do I
Speaker 16: Understand And, and I think the idea here and the messaging here is that they, those groups of students deserve every opportunity an equitable opportunity to, to achieve that, Speaker 10: Right? Yep. That's it. Dr. Fon. Speaker 13: Yep. Thank you for, I really like the data presentation. It's very clear and so clean. Not that before, it wasn't in previous years, but it's nice. So I think I understand the data
and I know that I agree with Miss what, what Ms. Brunell said, and, and, and Ms. Ney what you said about, it's important to have an honest conversation about where we are because it's the only way that we can grow and identify the challenges and address the challenges. I know we have a whole three to five year strategic plan to address these issues. So I don't mean to like ask you for like what's the quick solution for every problem that is identified here, but I'm curious if you can just start share with us just what, what are the initial thoughts about three specific areas? So the first one is just like a three part question.
The first one is spring accountability. So the differences between 2024 and 2025 for any school is not that big. It's like one or two points plus or minus plus or minus one or two points. I think Brown has five four points positive. But is this how, how do we make sense of this? And is how important is, is this like I know some of the other areas are important, but I'm just curious, accountability specifically like this slide, how do we make sense of it? Why is it important? Does this tell us anything about the schools that went down from 2024 to 25?
Obviously we don't wanna make this a competition between schools in any way. Speaker 2: I can start on that. Okay. It's a great question and we sort of anticipated it. Small changes and this would be echoed in what Desi's advice would be, small changes up or down should not be reason for concern. Yeah, they're like splitting hairs. They're also much more concerning at the lower ends of the percentiles. So if you're talking about a school that's like a 10th percentile that goes down to seven, that's much more concerning than a school that goes from 89 to 88. Does that make sense? So there's a lot of things that kind
of, that's a context mattering. It's different groups of students. So I'm much more interested in just shining, I don't know how much this district has talked about accountability at this level before. So we should be looking at trend lines and kind of looking at where this goes. I think our principals and school partners are very into this now. Their sips are aligned to it and they're very fluent in it. You asked the accountability question, but prior to that I think you were asking kind of like what are some of the things we're doing to move this forward? Did I hear that? Speaker 13: Well in general, so one was, so I'll just say all three questions.
Yeah. So one is an accountability, the other one is on the opportunity gaps. And the third one is, so you mentioned the 63 districts, Natick was not one of them. So how do we, what do we do about that? How do we bring ourselves regardless of how many, whether it was 500, not 500, 300 districts who were on that list or just, or zero either way. For Natick specifically, how do we bring ourselves up to pre pandemic? So those are the three areas I was most curious about. Speaker 2: So to me this is like the metacognitive thinking about like strategic planning. Yeah. And it's, it's about supporting our staff
to feel they can kind of take and want to take the next steps in a way that keeps our team whole but overall and our families and our students. But there's a lot of pieces to this. You've heard about our literacy audit next year. I think we're likely to take on science, which the data would say is very important for us to do. So we'd love the committee's support on that. So high quality curricular materials are an essential part of moving this accountability or anything else forward because it helps us know exactly what we're teaching and it's sort of vetted. I'd also say, and Sandy said it earlier, the focus on our instructional vision
for formative assessment was deeply intentional. The whole point of it is so that we have rigorous objectives and we see every student every day in our teaching and we know to capture it when there's a miss so that we can reteach. So that's like at the, that brings the vision down to literally a student in a classroom every single day. So to me that's the highest operationalizing, if that's the word of kind, that vision is going to bring every student's mastery front and center for the teacher. And then I think those would be the main ones. I think the other one is just having separated our SIP sips
because that allows people to really tailor their own goals to their own data for their school. So those are like the big strategic moves we've been taking. I think I'm sounding a little bit like a broken record because you guys have been through that journey for the last year and a half. But those are all deeply intentional to move this forward. I'm not worried about a single little change in that data right now. Speaker 13: You know, you wanna be say the same thing over and over again. Yeah. 'cause otherwise if we keep changing our plan, that'll be an issue. So I'm just curious, and again, these are just initial thoughts and obviously we'll do more as a, as a community and as a, as a district,
but also specifically about the opportunity gaps. Like how do we begin to untangle the data and say what is happening with all three of these groups except for the 10th grade ELL students who are the only ones who are doing well, right? Not well, but better compared to the state. Speaker 12: I think one of the things, I mean hiring an assistant director of AL MAL is already making a significant impact. And I think the other thing that we've talked a lot about and Mrs. Miller and I have done a lot of collaboration around is
what does special education services look like? We do a lot of pullout instruction and when we do that, they're not in the classroom as much as they need to be to be getting the tier one instruction. And while we may be doing tier two and tier three and special education really well, we need them in the classroom getting that high quality tier one instruction and supplementing the instruction with the additional supports. And so we really need to focus on that along with the formative assessment. So I think that's, that's the lens
that we're looking at right now. So how can the office of TLI and the Office of Student Services and the Office of ML be collaborating together to really hone in on how are we providing the highest quality instructional materials, instruc and that tier one instruction in the general education classroom to meet the needs of every learner that walks into our door. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 13: And the last piece of it was the pre pandemic. Like is that even, should we care on like it's an honest question. Like should we care if we're doing better than
or at the same level as pre as we were as a district pre pandemic? Or are we saying it's a completely different group of students? Different world. Speaker 12: I think it's a different world with the different human beings in front of us who have lived completely different experiences. We still need these humans to learn and to grow and to obtain mastery with these same standards. How we get there, I think and in what timeline is going to be slightly different, but I think we can get there and it's our approach that needs to change. Speaker 2: I do wanna add a bright spot.
Totally agree with everything you just said. A bright spot on Natick's performance of MCAS results by student group is in science. We are head of our 2019 levels in science in both the three to eight and the 10th grade group, which interestingly they don't publish growth scores in science. I wonder what they would be, because I think we grew a lot, even though we haven't outplaced our dart yet, there's some nice, a nice story at least versus the 2019 levels for science. So it's really something we put out here because if you've read the Globe, you know, that's kind of where the state made the comparisons this year
and we anticipated the question. So we wanted to be sure we had it for you. Speaker 13: Yeah, and just to add, I, I think there's a lot of bright spots. There's a saying, what's a saying? You know, a mom is as happy as her saddest or struggling student. Yeah. So I was looking at where challenges just 'cause that's where we need to grow, but not, not to say that there aren't any bright spots. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1: I just have one clarifying question. So on the gap data, and I think I know the answer to this, but I just wanna make sure I know that there's the three categories, low income, sped and L are, if a student qualifies in all three
of those categories, are they counted in each category? They are. They are. Okay. Okay. That's what I thought. Alright, thank you. Yeah. And again, I really like this data presentation as well, so thank you guys. Any other questions from the committee? See anybody online? Okay. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Really appreciate you coming to talk to us tonight. And then if we could move on to the METCO update. Speaker 2: Excellent. Welcome to Mr. Lynch, who's going to bring us Sum Meco. Thank you so much Mr. Fons Lemon. Speaker 4: Welcome. Speaker 18: All
right, good night everyone. So for tonight we'll be talking about our department, the meco department, and just a quick overview where we'll be talking about the current structure of our program, our supports, our priorities, and of course we want to talk about some of the great wins that we've already had this year and what we're looking forward to doing in the coming weeks and months. So our, the MECO program in general, instead of Massachusetts is the oldest desegregation program started back in the early sixties and Natick joined the program
in the early inception of the program of meco. It is designed for an educational opportunity to promote racial and cultural and economic diversity. Primarily our students coming from the inner city of Boston to our district. Currently we have to do one students here in Natick, K through 12. And our students are currently attending the Benham Elementary School, Wilson Middle School, and also the Natick High School. Our team is Chris Cord, so he's our high school coordinator.
He's also an alum from Natick, also a, a macro student alum, Mr. Gary Coles. He's at the Ben Ben he way elementary school and also the Wilson Middle School. He's also a football coach and a track coach. Our primary responsibilities, of course, is making sure our families, our students and our community has a voice here in the town of Natick, but also being in partnership with the meco headquarters in Boston
and all as well as Desi who gives us regulation of how we run our program. And the final part of, in terms of communication, we, we do communicate regularly with other MECO districts, other Meco directors across the state just to see what is the norms or what's happening and how we can also mirror some successful practices in our program. So Benham, for those that may not know is in this third year of inception, started back in 2022. We initially started with six students. Last year we moved up to seven students
and I'm really excited that this year we have 11 students in our program. I try to make sure the incoming students are paired with other students, so I don't like to have singleton. So we started the year with one third grader, but we were able to get a second, third grader just a few weeks ago. And all families are really reporting great, great success. Their students are really happy being a part of the Benham school. At the middle school, we have 19 students. We have a few new first year students in fifth grade,
sixth grade, and also eighth grade this year. And in ninth rather, in high school we have 21 students. Yeah. So in terms of academic supports and dimensions, we have been regularly checking in with our staff, our teachers, as well as communicating with home some of the success points of our students. Last year we had 15 students either on high honors or honor roll. This year we have 10 students currently taking honors
or AP courses and we have 26 students participating in extracurricular activities throughout our 51 students. We've also had some afterschool programs to support our students. Of course, we have our late buses that run Monday through Thursday. And we're really excited that we're studying a new program at the middle school called Young Kings for our student, our Boys of color, to find just their voice, find their leadership qualities and skills. And that's a new afterschool program
that we've recently started this month. So in terms of mentoring and student check-ins, Mr. Cardoso and Mr. Gary Coles are the primary point persons for that particular project. Communicating very heavily with teachers, administrators, going to different IEP meetings or academic support meetings and reporting back either to myself and of course to families. Finding ways to make sure none of our students are falling through the gaps or also putting in necessary interventions,
advocating to stay after school to make sure they are succeeding in all of their programming. As I said before, our students, we have over 40 students that are doing, or excuse me, lemme make sure I quote that correctly. We have over 26 students rather that are doing extracurricular activities in our school district. And in terms of some of the things that we've done this year, we've had a Back to School fair, which was hosted by Meco Inc. The Meco Directors Association, something that I'm a part
of, all of our meco directors have back to school, ice cream social that happened earlier this year and we're really excited that some of our new families were there for that process. As Ms. Gomes also alluded to earlier, just last week, we had our back to school night. Ms. Burnell was there, Jordan Hoffman of Benham, Theresa Carney of Wilson Middle School, and also Dark Dr. Art Ferguson was there in terms of representing our district this year. We had about 25 people in attendance last year we had,
so we're really excited to see more participation and we had a great chance to hear a family voice as stated of as well, a lot of families are looking to have some type of family friends program where if there's programming happening in Natick after school, some of our students have the opportunity to stay with host families or families here in Natick to just be a part of the afterschool events. And families can come from Boston to pick up their students. But they also recommended or suggested, which we've done in the past, having
families from Natick, also have host families in Boston. We've had events at the roller ski, the roller skating rink in Dorchester Chezvous, where genetic residents have come into town or the city to be a part of programming. So we're hoping to do something like that later in the year in our back to school night. Netic 180 was also there for the second year. Just giving some support to families about mental health and just ways that they're in our town to support. So I was really grateful for that event happening last week.
So our priorities is instructional observation, support and joint classroom visits, which we've already done this year. It was really great collaborating with principals just to strengthen academic success, family engagement. I'm really grateful for Miss Gomes, who has taken a great lead in doing the survey and we're, you know, sort of digging into the numbers to see what we can do to get more participation for our families. I shared with families during the Back to school event that their voice is so critical,
especially when we do things at the capital, you know, advocating for financial support. The past few years we've been level funded by the state. And so I really encourage our parents to let their voice be known in terms of the success of this program here in Natick student leadership. We had an incredible session last week with some alum coming back to Natick as well as three seniors speaking to some of our new teachers about what the Mecca program is and getting a lot of feedback that most of the teachers knew
that Mecca was a sacrifice. And I just met with someone today, but he said, I, you know, I wake up at five in the morning, but I had no idea that some of our students wake up at four in the morning just to get here. Some of them have 12 hour days. So just getting our, our student voice out there to make our town our district know what this program is and why it's beneficial not just to students coming from Boston, but all students benefit from the medical program. And so when it comes to some of our, our early wins, we, as I said before, we grew from seven to 11 students, which is huge.
We want to recognize that the earlier our students start the Meco program, the more they are assimilated to the academic rigor as well as building connections and relationships to students here in Natick. I'm very, very excited that it was a smooth start, even for some of our new families joining meco and just making sure that we had the supports to have everything in place in terms of communication, rearranging bus stops, making sure that our students assimilate successfully. We as well as the high turnout last week
at the back to school night. Strong strong collaboration with all of our principals, which I'm very grateful for. They are very, very much a vocal point in the success of our students, always making the necessarily adjustments or accommodations for our students to succeed. And last week we also had a back to school rather an HBCU, A historical back Black College and University Fair at the Reggie Lewis Center. That was fun. I drove the REDHAWK van and brought our students and some of our resident students of color were a part
of this trip to just to give them some insight to different colleges and things that they were academic success, academic bridges that they could take part of for our juniors and our seniors here at the TIC High School. And once again, I'm really proud to launch the Young Kings program. So as it pertains to what our next steps are, of course we want to continue with our instructional observations and just monitoring our successes. We do want to expand our leadership and mentorship opportunities.
Some of our students actually have partnered with the Meco Inc to get some afterschool jobs to give them opportunities to develop their leadership skills. So I'm really grateful for MECO Inc. For reaching out to us. And some of our high school students have taken part in that process. Of course, strengthening family partnership through different gatherings and different events. And we've already begun our recruitment process for our students coming in in the fall of 2026. We sent out a letter last week asking if any families had
any kindergarten siblings to register with Meco Incs as the, the portal is opened for registration. And so I'm looking forward to making sure we have a great start to next year already. So with that being said, I will yield the time if there's any questions, comments, or concerns. Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Certainly. Questions from the committee, Mr. Brand. Speaker 10: Great. I don't need to put on my glasses. I didn't know why it was an instinct to pick 'em up. Great presentation. Just quickly, can you, as a next step expand student, sorry, begin recruitment for new students. Do you have in your mind what the growth might look like?
Speaker 18: Yeah, so we have six graduating high school students. So my projection is hopefully having three kindergarten students join our program next year. There's no students leaving benham to go to the high go to the middle school. So I can't put too many students on our bus. So I'm hoping, I'm hoping to have three K and hopefully three fifth graders because we do have room on our middle school and high school bus at the same time. There is a lot of unpredictability because from year to year, sometimes families drop out
to join exam schools in Boston or just life happens, people move outta the city of Boston. And so we're projecting six, but it could be more. But those are where my numbers are right now. Speaker 10: Thank you. Speaker 12: If I could just add onto that we are limited by the medical grant and how many students we can enroll. So we are pretty much Speaker 18: Right, we're, we're at 52, so we, Desi has told us that we want to have more than 52. That would be on Natick to pay for, but right now that's where we are. Speaker 10: So hope so that the, it's net zero like six.
If six students graduate, six students come in in different levels, Speaker 18: It would be seven. We should have 52. We we have 51 right now. Okay. So yeah. Speaker 10: Gotcha. Speaker 12: And it's not necessarily net zero because for some of those students they fall under special education certainly. So we have additional costs for them for transportation as well. Speaker 18: Okay. Certainly. Speaker 10: Good to know. Thank you. Speaker 1: Okay, miss, I see Ms. Brunell and then Dr. Pickman. Speaker 17: Thank you. Thank you Adi, thank you for the presentation last week as well. I thought that presentation and Ms. Gomes did an excellent, you did an excellent job last week.
Thank you. I am really appreciative that just a week later I can hear the voice that some of the parents, some of the concerns that they had and just opportunities for growth, it's already reflected in this presentation. So I'm really grateful to you for listening to that, especially about building those relationships. A her suggestion and so hear you are speaking about ION is just so affirming that you are listening to student voice. And I would, I, I don't know, I don't know
what the budget looks like for the next, for next year, but I hope that you can come to the committee with your best case scenario. So if it is the best thing to bring students in as kindergartners, I would hope that we would look at that first and think about how we can change the transportation and where funding, and I know I, this could be a pipe dream because I know funding is real, but I would rather dream big first and think about six kindergartners going in
instead of splitting a very small number already. If that's possible. I don't know if that's what you would advise, but I, if, if it's because of funding, I would love to see if our district could put the money towards kindergartners coming into the district. Speaker 18: And I appreciate that. I, I'll defer to my colleague Mr. Gillis because I know he looks closely at the budget. But just a, a ballpark number. You know, our, our elementary minivan, which only seats 29
is $86,000, and that's without a monitor, which our parents have requested for, you know, kindergartners. So I don't want to cause any major disruption to the MECO program as much as I have aspirations, I think I'll defer to the school committee to advocate and those that have the powers to be to, to make those moves. Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. I think we heard the request, so thank you. Certainly. Did you have another question, Ms. Brunelli?
See your hand still up or, Speaker 17: Sure. Just quickly, what, what is the bus cost? If the van is 86,000? What's the, what's the delta? Speaker 19: Off the top of my head, it's around 146,000. It's like $800 a day. Speaker 18: Right. And that's just one bus. We have after school buses, we have athletic buses, we have the special ed van that also has an after school bus attached to that as well. So the transportation, and this is every district from Meco is the greatest line item for this program.
And, and, and it's pretty significant to, to also add, the state has shared with us over the last three years that we will be level funded and DESI has also shared with us that they have no desire to increase the MECO grant. So with insurance going up with gas going up, with everything going up, they're sort of telling us their priority with meco. Speaker 13: Yeah. Thank Speaker 18: You. Certainly Speaker 13: Dr. Fon. I'm just bummed by that answer, but it, we'll figure it out. My, my comment slash question is, first of all,
so the Young Kings program, I love it, I love the idea for so many reasons, the idea of really helping young men of color find their leadership voice or their advocacy. And as you said, that's gonna benefit not only them, but it's gonna benefit the school community for sure. On a related note, one of the things that I know we've been talking a lot about, bless, bless you as an important theme and an important foundation for academic success and social emotional wellbeing, is the importance of sense of belonging for all students. Right? Right. And I'm curious, in your conversations,
in your observations, is there a difference? If so, what is the difference and what can we do about it to around the, the sense of belonging? Does do, do the students who come from Boston walk into our buildings feeling like, this is my school, this is where people care for me, this is where I'm gonna thrive. Yeah. And if not, what can we do about that? Yeah, Speaker 18: That, that's a completely different TED talk because Yeah, in our conversation, just last week with our three seniors and the two alum and Chris Cardoso, who is an alum,
but a staff here, everyone voiced it. And I grew up in it K through 12. My parents still live in this town. A lot of our students of color feel like they have to leave parts of themself at the door when they walk through this, the doors of this district. And it's like a silent weight that does exist, you know, because of just a whole plethora of, of, of social dynamics, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And so belonging is a big priority in our, in our department, Mr.
Cardoso and Mr. Coles, they have meco offices and our students go there to let their hair down, very, very frankly, to just feel just at home and then have to go back out to classes. So it is something that we're acknowledging we're conscious of and that we're consistently working on. Yeah. Speaker 13: And a follow up question, the sense of belonging, the responsibility for a sense of belonging isn't just of the student who's trying to enter, but also for the rest of the community to Sure. Open the door. And I'm curious, any thoughts on
what can we collectively do to make sure that we're opening the doors that we're, we're, we're opening the community. Is it pd, is it education for our students? Is it, Speaker 18: I think that our current leadership is doing an incredible job of acknowledging that this is an everyone lift, you know, and I, I, I really appreciate that essence. I can feel it in our district. I can see it in the classroom, especially this year with tier one being a priority is almost baked into what we're doing.
So as much as there's work to do, I think the work is, you know, the, the ball is moving Speaker 13: The right direction. Speaker 18: Yeah, certainly. Speaker 13: Great. Thank you. Certainly good to hear. Speaker 1: Okay, other questions from the committee, Mr. Patel, Speaker 20: Compared to resident students, how is the METCO student enrollment in sports and extracurriculars on par or subpar? Speaker 18: I think it's all dependent on the cohort. When I was at Netec High School, there was a lot of meco participation. I think this is a different generation where students are,
may not be focused on athletics. So I don't think it's a access issue because we do have transportation or ways to support our families. We have two graduating seniors this year that are on the football team. And I think after that no one is involved in football, but it's more so the, the class. Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay. Other questions from the committee? Okay. Thank you so much Mr. Lynch. We appreciate you coming here today. Certainly Speaker 18: Have a great night. Speaker 1: Okay. So can we go back and finish up the policy subcommittee items? Speaker 10: Yes. Do you, Sue,
do you wanna talk about the, the CTE? This is, I don't think we have a policy for to look at tonight. Speaker 12: We do not have a policy to look at tonight because it is coming to the policy subcommittee next week. But the CTE policy, which I've mentioned to you before, is the career technical education policy that DSI has required that all districts draft and have school committees approve so that we can submit by November 1st. Yes, that's what I said November 1st. That would be Saturday. We have applied for an extension.
We have not heard back yet. We know that they have received it. They let us know that they have received it and they told us that we would be hearing shortly. I reached out to them again today and asked them when we would be hearing because we have not heard yet. That said, we have drafted a policy that will go in front of the policy subcommittee next week. Basically the career technical education policy is something that we actually already have in place and it is something that we do. We just need to now document it. What that policy says is that we are providing our middle school students every
opportunity to explore what high school opportunities and high school pathways are available to them, including career technical education. So that we provide them with the opportunity to explore technical high school opportunities in our area and that they can tour those, or in our case, that facility, Keith Technical High School, during the school day at the cost of the career technical high school. And that we notify parents
that we give parents the opportunity to opt out of the mailing list and that we will support students and families in completing the application process. And that we will ensure that for students who apply that we will make sure that all of their student records are efficiently and timely released to that high school so that they can be considered in addition, while Norfolk Aggie is not within our catchment area.
So we're not required to follow the same process as Keith Tech, we will continue to follow the same process for students who are interested in applying, in terms of supporting them, not marking them absent if they do go for a tour and making sure that we transfer the records. There are some timelines such as October 15th that we make that information available and that we provide parents with the opportunity to opt out. All of that has happened. There's actually a fail trip to Keef Tech for all of our eighth graders at both middle
schools on November 7th. So we've hit all of our required timelines. The other piece of that policy is a requirement that we go use My cap, which is my career, and I can't remember the full acronym. A lot of districts have never heard of my cap. Luckily we've already been implementing my CAP for the past couple of years. So this was no surprise to us, nor was it a, a lift for us because we already have it in place.
But basically that our seventh and eighth graders have the opportunity to explore other multiple career pathways and career opportunities and to learn about them. So we do multiple things, including career day and seventh grade. We have a scope and sequence for eighth grade with lessons where kids can explore their passion areas and their interest areas, which will help them identify their areas of study for high school, whether it's at Natick High School or it's at a career technical high school.
And that we will help that guide them into their course selection through that process. So the policy requires that we outline all of that. You will find likely when the draft comes to you that we included that. I didn't specifically say that we will use my cap, but I did say that we will use a curriculum where students can explore their career pathways such as my cap, in case my cap goes away, or the state decides to change it.
That way we don't have to come back to you if the state changes it and we can just adapt to the new curriculum. I try to do that as often as I could in this policy draft so that we wouldn't have to come back to you as often as the state decides to change their requirements. The policy does require that we come back every three years to review the policy, but I'd like to come back to you every three years and not every three months if there's a change to something within the policy. So I tried to make it as specific
and as general as I possibly could to meet the requirements of that policy requirement. Speaker 10: So I think it's career in academic planning. Thank you. My career in academic planning, my cap. So we did talk about that at our last policy subcommittee meeting. We have our next policy subcommittee meeting November 6th at 1230 in this room. Be well, lemme finish that thought, if that's all right. I guess we have a, a couple of things. This particular policy is gonna be on there. I think looking at the calendar event, it looks like Dennis is able to come. So Dennis Roach is gonna come along with,
I think we have other things on the agenda, but one of the things that we discussed at our last policy subcommittee meeting was the housing and maintenance of policies themselves. And we have a, a nice, I think, incremental first step here, which is to have a, a Google Drive. Dennis is gonna come and talk to us about some of the, the details of that. It doesn't preclude us from continuing the conversation, but it does bring us a one step closer to better discoverability, better searchability while we continue to explore other things. So Dennis and maybe other people from his team are gonna
come and we're gonna discuss that again along with some other policies. Also, if, if it's all right, I will just quickly mention the last item on the agenda, which is the tech quarterly board board of directors update. So if, if it's in the packet. So I would encourage people to take a look. We are required in a good way to share quarterly updates from tech. I am also the school committee representative on that board. I was not, I was not able to go to the September meeting. We have a meeting actually a week from Friday.
So the day after the policy subcommittee meeting. But you can see in the update in the packet in September we're officially King Philip Regional and Sharon Public Schools joined us. Enrollment was up a little bit, I think 5%. So you can check out that update. So we always include that periodically so everybody can see what's going on at Tech. I think that's it for me tonight. Okay. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Brand. Okay. I don't see, I just wanna give any other subcommittee who has any updates to make that may not be listed
as a specific, anything from budget? No, no, we're meeting this week. Okay. So we'll have an update the next meeting. Awesome. Super. Okay, so I just have a couple of quick items under the chairman's report and then we'll turn it back to you, Dr. Stash. So the first one is, I had emailed everybody a copy of the memo of that we shared at town meeting last Thursday, just about the history of the field project that we worked on. And that was pulled together by Julie McDonough,
who led the little, not little, but had led the working group that Dr. Sash pulled together just to kinda make sure that all information was there. Should there be any questions from town meeting about the JV field exploratory work that's been going on. Did anyone have any questions about that? Just wanted to put on the agenda in case anyone had questions or wanted to talk about it? No. Okay, great. The last one is, sorry, Speaker 17: Elise, really quick. Did, did Tom meeting vote on it, Speaker 1: On the turf field advisory? Yes, they voted for the advisory, the three year.
Okay, advisory moratorium. Yes. Speaker 17: And is there year moratorium on her fields now? Speaker 1: Sorry, you cut out when Yeah, you cut out. Speaker 17: Okay. Speaker 1: Could you just repeat what you said? Speaker 17: You said, can you just give a little more detail about what town meeting voted? Speaker 1: Yes. So the Article 33 was an advisory moratorium that would suggest, and this is the way the town moderator described it, town meeting moderat, it suggests to town boards that they should not invest in any new turf fields for a period of three years. That there were some exclusions added to the article
to allow repair of existing fields because they know that there are, there are, there are fields that need repair within that time. Ad town meeting also, Mr. Evans, the chair of the select board, spoke and said that he was planning to appoint a working group to look at fields after town meeting. So that should be starting probably, you know, town meeting is gonna go for another week or so. So I think hopefully after that he'll report this cross board, cross stakeholder working group to look at Fields going forward and bring a report back to town meeting about that.
Speaker 21: You recommend he had Julie? Speaker 1: I think Julie has been talking to him. Ms. McDonough has been talking to him. Yeah, so I think that is the, the summary. But there was a, I think it was like a two thirds majority that voted for the advisory. It was about 73 to 30 would you say Mr. Patel about that? Yeah. So there's quite a bit of discussion. There was someone did move to refer it back that was voted down. A lot of stakeholders showed up at the meetings. So there were people from youth sports, some of the people
who who attended FinCon in September also came to speak about the need for more fields in Natick. I think it was, it was an airing of the lack of field space in Natick and how we, we need more field space no matter what. And then I think that there was a lot of interest in various stakeholders to explore, you know, what materials could be used on fields to kind of meet all of these goals we have, which are sustainability, health goals, playing space,
maximizing, you know, students access students and community members access to the field. So it's a pretty, I thought it was a great discussion, honestly. Did you wanna add anything Mr. Patel, since you were there? Speaker 20: I agree with you. Yeah, I think the main thing was that we need more field space. Everyone agrees. And even the people who were opposed to a turf field, you know, noted that it is a problem in this town and that we need to focus on getting more field space. Whether or not that's grass or not is up to the town to decide, but we need more space. Yeah, Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. No, no, for sure. So we'll see with the select board
of points, this working group, hopefully that will make some progress on pulling, you know, sort of a lot of this information together, seeing where we need fields, seeing what materials as a town we want to invest in, et cetera. Yeah. Any questions from the committee on that? I do see a member of the public, but if any more committee members want speak on that, miss Ms. Vickers, I'll, I'll acknowledge you to speak Ms. Vickers, are you, did you, oh, okay. Sorry. And then Ms. Brunel, I see your hand after that. Okay. Speaker 5: Hi. Yes, thank you. I just wanted to add to that, that
There is genuine interest to fix the JV field. It, it, it's the, the group is really hoping that there can be a very serious look at a natural grass turf field there at the JV field. Really hoping that that can happen. And just one of the things that you didn't report was that there was a question asked about whether or not CPA funds could be used towards helping the creation of a new field. And the answer was that CPA funds could be used to help
build a new natural grass field, but not for a artificial turf field. So it comes up in the spring, so where you can submit another letter of interest, it does need to be the owner of the property that it has is submitting the request, the letter of interest or ha given permission to whoever is looking to do that. So I do think there's a lot of community hope that we can look at that between now and then and perhaps put in a letter of interest
for building a natural grass Speaker 17: Field there. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Vickers. And then Ms. Brunell, just before I call on you, I just, that may be remember as well. So there were questions asked about what these CPA Community Preservation Act funds could be used for. And apparently even if you build a turf field, you could, you use Community Preservation Act fields to build like the seating around it. The lighting can't use it to build the field, but you can use it to build infrastructure around the field. So I just thought that was an interesting point that I didn't know. So I'm thinking of, you know, utilizing all future
possible funding sources, we should keep that on our radar as well, Ms. Brunell. Speaker 17: Okay. So just to clarify, there was a three year moratorium voted Speaker 1: Advisory moratorium, non-binding. Speaker 17: Okay. So it's not, I guess it when you say advisory, I thought I'm, are you saying that there was like an advisory committee formed to study this? No, no. Or it's just an advisement? Speaker 1: It's an advisement. So it's a, a period of three years at which, during which town meeting is advising all town boards to
consider not using or building new turf fields. Speaker 17: Okay, thank you. And then has there been any, was there any thought given to it being a joint committee between the school committee and the select board about this study committee? Speaker 1: So, Mr. Evans talked about forming, he, he named all the stakeholders and it involved like members of school committee, members of the school department. It involved members of the select board recreation and parks. It was like every single board and stakeholder in town I felt like who could be involved
and interested in building fields, members of youth sports. Speaker 17: Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah, it was definitely a cross-functional working group that he wanted to put. Speaker 17: Okay. I just wanna be sensitive also to the thought that we were gonna put this on the back burner anyways this year because of the bandwidth of the administration given the strategic plan and all of the school improvement plans. So I'm curious about what information the working group is going to need from our administration and how we can best support,
because I think we decided not to move ahead with a field study this year. Speaker 1: Yeah. So until the working group is put together and has a remit, I don't think we'll know that. But I, I think we should definitely be very sensitive to that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, would, did the committee agree that we should, we wanna understand the scope of anything we're participating in and Yeah, Speaker 17: Because here's what I, what I don't want to happen is that we don't get enough information to the town, to this working group about what, how this fields are actually used and we missed an opportunity.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So in, and I'm happy to, it might be interesting actually to rewatch that that first portion of town meeting, it was the first agenda item on Thursday because all of these things came up, the 2016 field master plan came up, you know, the youth sports representatives were there talking about how fields were used. So I, I do think that that is on, is on everyone's minds that we do need to take that into account. Speaker 17: Okay. Thank you. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. And then the last thing I had,
Jen Gory reached out from Natick Education Foundation and she is, they're missing us at their meetings and she would love it. We don't currently have a representative from NE to NEF from the school committee. So she said they're not looking for someone who necessarily has to attend every meeting, but they would love to have a point of contact. And their next meeting, they meet the second Tuesday of every month, they alternate between an in-person meeting at the library and a Zoom meeting. And yeah, if there's anybody who would like to be the school committee contact for NEF
speak now you can let me know later, but they would like to, to have somebody, and I think anybody can probably go to the meetings too if you wanted to just pop into a meeting and see what they were like. Yeah. N Education Foundation. So that is a nonprofit that takes don donations and provides like grants to teachers. So teachers like write little grant proposals for things and projects they want to do and then they fund them from Yeah, Speaker 22: I ahead. If no one else is interested, I'm happy. Speaker 1: Do it. Okay. Super. Thank you. Dr. Fon. Can I
Speaker 2: Say a little something to that? Sure. Yeah. So Ms. Bel and I went, was it last week, Sue, or the week prior? We usually go to one of their meetings in the fall. So we went the other day and it was fantastic. We actually reviewed the entire bridge plan. We talked about our instructional vision for the year. They, there's many educators in other towns on that committee and they really understand. So great questions and engagement. We talked openly as everyone here knows about the budget cuts that we did make to areas of teaching and learning and which puts even a higher, you know, need on the funds
that they give and the really beautiful process they use. So we told them like expect to see more and it was a good kind of grounding and norming. So we're deeply appreciative of this organization and we did go and we'd be happy to go again whenever they asked. But they're a great partner to us. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Sp. Okay. So I'll hand things over to you. Speaker 2: We can finish out mine. I think they'll be quick. And then move on to the finance report. We shouldn't hold finance until almost nine o'clock, but here we are. Matt will make it shiny. So the first one is the three to five year strategic plan.
We do have slides for that. They're really sort of a summary of a memo I recently sent to the school committee and I'll start as she's beginning to pull it up. There we go. So really this first page is to kind of give you the visuals that I've already shared. This is nothing new. This is focusing on one of our second strategic objectives. It's that three to five year plan. That's essential piece of kind of launching our work for the next three to five years. And then it links to district priorities where it's more outlined what exactly we wanna get done, which is come up with a vision
grounded in stakeholder input student data. If we go to the next slide, if you've been watching the school committee the last several weeks or meetings, WI have a goal around the completion of this three to five year plan as well as the school committee. I'm very excited about this shared goal and so it's, it's definitely something we feel accountable to this year together as a partnership. So another just anchoring in where we are. And then the next page really just shows the partner we've chosen is the Teaching and Learning Alliance. They have done similar three to five year plans for many
of our colleagues across the state. We took a look, Dr. Fugman and I, who's on the working group for this, for the school committee, took a look at all, a bunch of different kind of completed programs that they had done. Were impressed with them. Our specific proposal include six stakeholder forums, so that gets to stakeholder voice, which will include all sorts of people. Kind of an all the same people who were in the entry plan with some different questions. District wide survey for broad input, some strategic planning committee meetings, which we will assemble a strategic planning committee. And then finally a design plan
that the school committee will see by June. So I'm really excited about this. The cost is $20,000. Mr. Gillis can talk about the source of that funding. A few words that I wanted to say before he does that, which is just what we saw in TLA. And I would say, and Dr. Fugman might add to this, but really aligned an instructionally grounded plan that builds upon our bridge plan for this year. They understand instruction. I've worked with TLA in different capacity. They understand instruction very, very well. They're gonna understand our SIP goals and our educator goals. It's, they're definitely focused on partnership
with the school committee rather than a consultant driven model. There's a solid engagement plan. The best we saw across the proposals or the bids, we the quotes, to use exact word quotes we received and then it's high quality at affordability, which was ultimately a key decision maker. So just to summarize why we chose TLA and Mr. Gillis, can you speak to where the funding source is? Speaker 19: Yeah, we, we have some options, other instructional services. There appears to be a little bit of money available and some money left in professional development. It's early in the year. Pretty sure we can make that happen.
If not, there's a little bit of flexibility left in the business office for endeavors like this. So we're confident we can live within the total budget. Speaker 13: I can just add, I'm really, you know, I've said this before, but I'm really excited by the process and I was very impressed with TLAI ke, I kept telling Dr. Sp that this reminds me a lot of the process that we all engaged with to hire the new superintendent, which I think was one of the most exciting projects I've been involved with. Not only 'cause of the amazing outcome, but also the process itself was an exciting process
to really engage with the community. And this mirrors it in many ways. And as Dr. SP says, aligns well with our, well obviously with your goal as well, but with our goal about increasing that engagement with the community and with the different elements within the broader NATAK public school community, including educators, parents, community members, in particularly in, in different particular groups within the broader community. The other thing that I'll say about TLA is that they also have a lot of experience and that's one of the things that was really helpful
with a superintendent search is having someone who has experience doing the same process. So TLA having a lot of experience in this specific context of strategic planning is really helpful because they can really help us with the process. The outcome is gonna be ours, we're gonna own it. As Dr. Spa says, this is, we're bringing them to be a partner, a thought partner in this process and to help us think through the process. And it just helps to have an organization that knows, has, has done it before. So I'm ex, I'm really excited about the process as a whole and TLA in particular Speaker 1: Questions from the committee. I see Ms. Brunes hands, Ms. Brunell. Yeah.
Speaker 17: So one process question and then one finance related question on process. Are you envisioning TLA presenting to the school committee and the whole committee being a part of the planning process? Or are you envisioning continuing with Dr. Folkman's leadership and partnering through that through him? Speaker 2: I would answer that that's more of a school committee kind of thing to answer the engagement you wanna do, whether it's through that working group or in a different way. We haven't even met with TLA for our first meeting yet
because we haven't gotten the PO converted. And that would be where we really started that deeper dive. And I'm hoping by November 10th, if not November 24th, we could come in and kind of anchor the dates, which might help frame how the committee wants to interact with that. Especially because it is a shared goal broader than Mr. Dr. Fesman. But that I would, I would be eager to hear the committee's ideas of how they want to participate in that. Speaker 13: The one thing I'll just add is that there's also gonna be a strategic planning committee. Speaker 2: A steering Speaker 13: Committee, yeah. Steering committee that TLA is gonna help us form much like
we formed a steering screening committee for the superintendent search. Obviously which roles are gonna be on that committee are not, are yet to be defined and TLA might have the recommendations. But I, I envision that being a conversation in in school committee like, like we have before. Speaker 1: Will the, and will there be sort of a kickoff? Will they come to us for like kind of a kickoff meeting for this like to the full committee? Just so we hear the plan? Yes. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean we ha like I said, we haven't met with them to kind of outline that fir the first thing we did was frantically seek the proposals, evaluate them,
and here we are and I think the next step can get more clarity. So any questions you have that you wanna make sure that we're including or things that you wanna make sure we weave in the proposal itself, which I did share with the committee, outlined some pieces of that, the creation of the steering committee, pres presentation in June and six different forums. But the dates, the questions, the timing of the survey, none of that stuff is outlined yet. We need to meet with them first. But we're eager to hear the committee's ideas on that. And it's, it's true. The first step really is that steering committee
and outlining the membership, which I'm sure the committee will have a great interest in Speaker 1: Ms. Brunell. Speaker 17: Thank you. I look forward to more planning around that. And then, so I won't share any thoughts on that yet 'cause I feel like it's premature. But I have looked at a few other strategic plans and just have some thoughts I about the finances of it. I think at some point we should vote this number when we know where we are, how we are funding it. There was a committee in the newspaper today, given that there was a cost that was just not
as transparent as it could have been. And I just would like to avoid that because this is a great thing for our district and it's because of your careful budgeting and trade-offs that you're making. That we have this, that we'll have this available to the district. It's not because, you know, we found $20 in our pocket, so I wanna just make sure as the school committee we vote a number that could be tonight, it could be in the future when we know the, the exact funding source. Speaker 1: So Dr. Fugman, could you remind us, 'cause I've forgotten of the process that we've gone through
so far to get here. So when we formed the sort of working group and having you starting to work with Dr. Stash, we voted on that, didn't we? Or was, did that come out of retreat sort of informally? IT retreat. Speaker 13: Retreat. Retreat. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Alright. Speaker 13: Honestly, I don't remember but I trust that someone else Speaker 2: Does. I remember it was when, you know, it might've been one of those fir I say retreat, which I'm associating with one of the first meetings where you outlined which committee each of you were going to be on, that that was something that Dr.
Fesman was assigned to. Oh, the Speaker 13: Reorg? Yes. Oh, the Speaker 1: Reorg. So we did vote on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we voted on starting this work. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to take that away, Dr. Fugman, to think about if we need any additional process in, in this involving, you know, moving this forward, having a vote to go ahead with this amount of money that we wanna spend. Speaker 13: I mean I think Ms. Pernell's idea of voting it in sounds okay. Reasonable. I'm trying
to process, but, so as Dr. SP said, mostly they, 'cause I wasn't really involved with the procurement process. Multiple quotes were sought and we compared what, what we got and selected this vendor. So the process, the procurement process was, we went through was the Speaker 17: Process Speaker 13: Required pro. Yeah. Which we've done with other entities before. So the process so far has been the usual, the required procurement process and, and I think having the school committee just kind
of put the seal of approval, assuming that that's how we vote, I think sounds like a very reasonable. Speaker 1: Alright. Do we, does anyone have a motion for tonight or do you wanna take this up at a future meeting? Speaker 17: I can make a motion if I know what the funding source is, so I think it would be better to take it up another night. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright, let's take that away and then we can bring that back for another meeting. Any other questions from the committee on the strategic plan process itself? Speaker 17: Okay, Speaker 1: Well I'm excited about this and I'm looking forward to hearing more, so thank you. Speaker 2: Okay, so my last item honestly, I'm just prepared
to take questions on. I did send a memo and it's posted to the agenda as the committee had asked for recommended indicators to, to evaluate me on this year I provided six and that's in line with the Department of Ed's guidance that superintendents are asked to identify one to two focus areas per standard. There are four standards. And so I did six and I think those best reflect the work of our district and my goals this year. But I'm happy to take any questions or a answer, any question, clarifying, clarify anything you might have questions on.
Speaker 1: Okay. Questions from the committee. Okay. Alright. Do we have a motion Speaker 17: Move to approve the recommended FO focus indicators for the 20 25 20 26 superintendent evaluation as identified in the October 17th memo? Speaker 10: Second. Second. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. Missed it. We'll do a roll call vote since we have members on line. So Mr. Patel? Yes. Ms. Flas? Yes. Mr. Brand? Yes. Dr. Fugman? Yes. Ms. Brunell? Speaker 17: Yes. Speaker 1: And I am a yes. So that's 6 0 0 approving that.
Thank you so much, Dr. Stash. Yeah. Speaker 2: Great. So we have an MSBA update, but first we'll do finance with Mr. Gillis. Speaker 19: Thank you. Good evening everybody. So in the packet, you should have the first quarter financial report and memo. I'll summarize it for folks that didn't feel like reading 12 pages. Good news is we're projecting, if all things stayed static, we'd be about $450,000 to the good, which is kind of where we want to be after the first quarter of the, the school year. But a lot of things can change. Amount of changes in staffing, short
and long-term subs changes in outta district tuitions. So we're in good shape. We're not in panic mode at, at any at, at this point in time. Grants really haven't started that much because the federal grants, we, we get that money in starts coming in in October and November. They always kind of lag. So we were just closing out last year. State grants are still coming in and the competitive season is really just beginning. Folks may remember this from prior years. The number of grants that we have when we start the year and the number of grants come the fourth
quarter look quite different. That's just the way the grant process is. It's not great, but we've been managing it for years and I, I expect it'll be similar to last year where it'll grow. Right now there really aren't too many updates for the revolving funds. We're in pretty good shape. The circuit breaker program, you know, we're projected to get about $4,030,000 in revenue. We already have encumbered 4 million, 16,000 encumbered and expended from that program. So it looks like we'll end the year with about 1.7 million,
which is pretty solid number. Again, things can change, but where we are today, we're pretty, I'm pretty happy and comfortable with where we're at. Athletic user fee revolving fund, we've got a lot of things planning to go into that fund already. We haven't collected the, the winter sports fees. We haven't collected or posted the gate receipts too much as the fall seasons still going on and the winter season hasn't begun. So that'll be close. But that, that's overall looking o like looking okay.
Facility rental revolving. Still a little bit of a struggle. School lunch and Medicaid revolving or federal reimbursement programs. So the revenues lag, but we're in really good shape in both programs. The instrumental music fee, we had a, a little, little slippage in fee collections last spring. They made it up this fall. So that looks like that's better than it normally would at this point in time because we collect those fees and then and pay folks. So at the beginning of the year when you're looking at that, it looks, it looks better than it is. Laptop user fee also looks decent,
but we do a decent amount of ordering for replacement and planning in the third quarter so that all those materials come in in the fourth quarter so that we can clean up and get ready for, for the next year. And then, you know, I noted the high school parking fee there as well. We've been growing the balance. We do hope to contribute to what, what we'll call the student parking lot across the street from the, the stadium field, which, you know, appears to not have been done in 25, 30 plus years.
You can tell by the sun fading and of the asphalt as well as the number of cracks in it, that it's, it's a little worn or more than a little worn. And we've talked about this with town facilities. So all in all we're, we're in pretty good shape if the school committee did want to vote to proceed with the strategic planning, you know, like I said, we can do that. I can, you know, for now say that it would come from other instructional services. We've definitely got the 20,000 available, but in November
or early December, we would do the transfers like we have in prior years because it's, it's really tough to figure out exactly how much you're gonna spend in every category, who you're gonna hire, how much you're gonna pay them in, what trends are going on. So instead of having a bunch of transfers each meeting, we, we try to do it once a year. So again, I'm confident that it's gonna work, but I, I would defer to the committee, you know, I would say we, we could transfer the money from other instructional services, which at the end of October 16th had $63,000 available.
So we, we could, we could make this happen and just hold off on anything until we have a, another transfer at school committee meeting if need be for our, what we're gonna do the rest of the year with those funds. But I'll defer to the school committee and I'm available for questions. Of course. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Gilles. Questions on the first quarter financial report from the committee. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: No questions. Thank you. Oh, Mr. Brunell, Speaker 17: Well, okay, so I can, I can make that motion if the committee wants me to make it now,
given what Matt just shared. And I also wondered if we, we were gonna revisit the, the projections for the out of district tuitions, the memo that, is that gonna be at a future meeting? Speaker 19: Well, the out of, just, so I, I guess to be a little more specific, are you talking about the general fund or are you talking about the circuit breaker program? Speaker 17: I'm assuming it's the circuit breaker, but just the, the idea that the out of district placements are really increasing, some of 'em by 38% this year. And honestly I'm happy to take this at a different meeting or just to see how, like, if you've got your eyes on it,
maybe it's not time to talk about it yet. Speaker 19: We, we do have our eyes on it. Those are requests to the state. They haven't necessarily been approved yet, although some I see be approved. I think there's only, I think we only have students in two or possibly three programs that are seeking a, an exception to the state's request. So largely we're in, we're in decent shape, but it, it, we're just concerned about the potential future trend of, of how this can be. But it, it looks like for FY 27,
it is not Dr. Drastically shifting how we do things, at least as of I'll call it last week. Speaker 17: Okay, thank you. Elise, would you like me to make a motion about TLA? Speaker 1: Dr. Sp, did you wanna say something first? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just one, I'm, as I'm thinking through this, I'm thinking, I agree the transparency of the line in the budget is critical and we're happy to do that. But I feel like this is more about alignment and support, which I also think is important with this expenditure. But normally since it's not, I'm wondering why it's,
the budget of $20,000 requires a vote from the school committee if it's, if it's already an appropriated budgeted funds Speaker 1: MR brand Speaker 10: As opposed to perhaps just a vote supporting Speaker 2: Like an endorsement and alignment in acknowledgement even of the funding amount. I think that's actually politically very smart. I'm just wondering if it, why it's a, it's not additional monies we're asking for and it's not like a switch out of a line that would be 10% over a DOE line. You can explain this better than I can. I'm not challenging the committee. I'm trying to understand the budget rule around it. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Bash. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Am I wrong? In my previous recollection that we, there was a policy related to if you moved more than 15,000 from one line item to a different line item. So if your savings is in one area and you're applying it to a different area, more than 15,000 a required school committee approval, Speaker 17: You're not wrong. We have a policy but the state law is actually, it, it, there's no limit to that. It's just state law is that if you, if you pay for something that wasn't in your original budget under the item, it should be voted at your meeting. Speaker 1: So Ms. Brunell then you're suggesting that we vote
to add this to this year's budget since it's not specifically budgeted for as an activity. Speaker 17: Is that Speaker 1: Ms? Speaker 17: Yes, but not add the $20,000 for the transfer of funds from contracted service or from what it, Speaker 1: I think there's, there's some, I think we need to take this offline perhaps and get some more information because I'm seeing a lot of confused faces. So maybe it's better used for our time to take this offline Speaker 7: And can it still be added to the budget subcommittee meeting? Sure. Just get clarity on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, great idea. Thank you Ms. Yeah. Is that okay Ms.
Brunell? Okay great. Super. Okay, Speaker 19: So the next one we have our FY 25 end of the year report submittal. We completed the report and submitted to the state on October 21st. That's the earliest since I've been here. We did have an extension through Halloween so we were able to make, to make the report on time like to thank Arlene Morris who did a lot of work with that with me sort of providing some guidance and oversight to get that in on time. And the summary is, is here if anybody wants, wants
to see it for a schedule one, the whole report we had trouble printing it's 85 some odd pages. We got the, the summary of the main thing but the breakdown of things that roll up to the first page. We're still having trouble printing and the, the state had just emailed me back this afternoon so when we get it all printed we we will be happy to share it with you for the FY 24 end of the air air report. Auditors review, we, we got that back recently. There were a, to they, they reviewed 48 total areas.
They had three findings, which means things weren't done exactly to the way that that they expected them to be. Gimme one second. One of them was omitted revenue reporting. So it didn't change what we actually reported as expenses or our per pupil expenses last year. But submitted the amendment for that and we made sure we didn't make that same mistake in FY 25. There was another allocation of expense error we made sure we didn't repeat that in FY 25. And the last one that we didn't really have a whole lot
of control over was the last auditor didn't complete the FY 24 review and the town changed auditors. So we're working to get that resolved because they have the information but they're not working for us anymore. So we're trying to, trying to work that out so we don't have to start from scratch. So we will keep you posted on on that. I can take questions on that. I'm sure people really like reading audit reviews. Speaker 1: I read it questions from the committee. I just think it's great. We only had three minor
findings so good work. Thank you. Speaker 19: That's it for finance Speaker 1: And you need me to sign this, right? Yes. Which is certify this report that we just discussed. Right. Which I will do. Okay. Okay. So I think we're onto to our last agenda item MSBA update. Speaker 2: I can start and then if Ms. Brunell as an SB as our SBC person has something to add or that I miss. She might. So first I think everyone knows because I sent the email the happy news that we received the extension until November 30th for the MSBA, just the certification of town meeting
and wanna thank everybody here for that process that we followed. Also, of course the MSBA doesn't slow down. They sent us something today and asked us to submit our first form related to feasibility. So Mr. Gillis and we posted it to this agenda, submitted the feasibility budget and we sent that to the school building committee. So that's what's going on with the main project. We also have three more school tours that are happening. One is for the Good Now brothers in Marlboro and that's on Wednesday, November 5th the major Howard Beal school in Shrewsbury, which is on November 7th.
And then Behe, we're actually going to do a tour prior to our SBC meeting on the 17th of November. So busy November for school tours. I think Elise might have something to mention on that. And then I have one more piece to this. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I, Mr Miler who's the chair of the Memorial School Building Committee has extended an invitation for additional school committee members to attend the school tours if they are interested and available at the time. I mean I think it comes with a couple of caveats that I've discussed with Dr. Bash in that this is a large group of people going into a school building
during the school day. So we don't want to have the entire school committee there. But if there are folks who are available and would like to attend some of these tours, I think Mr. Mailer thinks it would just help build knowledge and understanding of the process within the committee. So I can, I think the, the information was in the memo. Was it about the upcoming or Speaker 2: Was it, Linda can send out an email tomorrow with those dates and times and I wouldn't discount Behe. Behem is our own school, but you'd go through the same process in the tour that we're gonna do with the other schools.
So, but Linda will send an email out with those details and we can coordinate through you and And Linda. Speaker 1: Yep, yep. Sounds good. Through me. So if you or guys are interested, once you get the dates, let me know. And then if there are multiple people interested available for multiple days, I'll try to make sure that everyone gets to go to at least one tour. Speaker 2: I can tell you roughly what it's like. It's basically an hour. We kind of try to arrive a few minutes ahead of time 'cause we wanna start on time since it's their staff we're treated as visitors with somebody with us the entire time. They walk us through both the educational space. Oftentimes sort of suite areas like where you'd put guidance
or you'd put the nurse, things like that. You see the common spaces like the cafeteria, the theater and library. And then we also go through the mechanical spaces. So especially with the geothermal, that was really interesting. But you could see any sort of mechanical space if they had solar panels, things like that. They'll take us through and answer a lot of questions. They usually have the custodians, sometimes facilities people from the town as well. The superintendent was there as well as the principal. So those are the main people. But it's about an hour, maybe a little bit over an hour. And there's time for questions. Yeah, Speaker 1: And I think Mr.
Miler did ask that since it's the work of the school building committee to do this, that the school additional school committee members would largely be there as observers. And then if, if there was time for questions after the committee had asked their questions, we might be able to ask some. But mostly we're there to listen and learn. Yep. Super. Speaker 2: The last piece I wanted to share was that we received news on Friday that LILJA was, we were invited into the accelerated repair program, which the committee had voted on in March, 2025. If you remember, we Jillian came
and we kind of, you reviewed the statement of interest that was submitted. The MSBA board of directors is going to vote on October 29th. They've invited us. I have a conflict. So Mr. Gillis is going as well as Jillian on our behalf. I'm at the accept board of directors that day. The submission proposes replacing Lojas original 1997 gas boilers with a new heat pump system that would provide both heating and cooling that would help benefit the healthy learning environment. Advance state and local net zero goals, provide air conditioning and address classroom temperatures that sometimes exceed 80
degrees Fahrenheit and hot weather. And that's just support students in our access program there who are really sensitive to those 10 temperature extremes if approved the project would help us move critical infrastructure needs while aligning with sustainability. This would be on capital but, and it would not even start in terms of prerequisite documents until July of 2026. That's all I know for now, but I wanted to update you. Speaker 1: That's exciting. Thank you Ms. Flas, I see your hand. Speaker 7: I just had a question going back to the memorial one. I know I get you, you told me Dr.
Stash, that someone has dropped outta the school building committee and I know we previously had a ton of community interest in participating. So I was curious if there's an update on whether that spot's gonna be refilled. I mean gotta keep the pipeline strong for that long process. Speaker 2: I don't have an update for Mr. Myer, but I think we can also advocate from here if the committee feels strongly that, that there's somebody but there's no movement on that. We haven't met since, gosh, eight weeks, maybe six weeks since that committee's met and I haven't discussed it with him since. But we can, we can bring it up again. Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean I would advocate for it 'cause I feel like the original selection from the community
was very technically based and it was a concern that I had at the time and I, and I think that there was a lot of other community interest as well. And so I don't think, given how many people applied and were not selected to leave a voting spot empty seems irresponsible. Speaker 1: I see Ms. Brunes hand. Speaker 17: Is there another person that dropped off or is this the same? This is the same person from the beginning. Speaker 2: There's only been one who left before he even started. Speaker 17: Okay. I just wanted to make it, I sure I understood. Speaker 2: It's not a new person. Speaker 17: Okay. Yeah,
Speaker 2: We're bringing it up with him. Speaker 1: I just have a question about the lja. This is wonderful to be accepted into this program. Can you remind me the details? Like what sort of reimbursement do they provide? Speaker 2: They don't give that until later, but it's along the same rate map might know more, but it's the same base rate of 45 that they kind of do their, we've done a lot of that early work on enrollment. So it's the same type of formula. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: We should expect above 45. But in that range, I don't know if a RP is different or a, the accelerator repair program. Speaker 19: I, I believe it's just the base rate. There's no extra incentive points like there is
for new construction because it's, it's important repairs typically to the roof building envelope and, and the boiler system or he heating ventilation to keep, you know, the building kind of going well in its, I'm gonna call it second half of its useful life. Speaker 1: Okay. And Oh, go ahead. Yeah, so and when we did this at Benham, we actually had a grant, right? So we didn't end up having to go through this program. We did the heat pump at no cost to us. Right. Because we had a federal grant. Is that right? So Speaker 19: There is a, there is a federal grant.
I don't believe the project is completed. Speaker 1: It's not Speaker 2: Okay. They keep submit. I heard about this with the town today at my meeting with the town. They continue to kind of do the requisite submissions that are required to kind of keep it alive, but with some lack of movement right now at the federal level, nothing's moving. I see. So they're doing whatever the hair they're supposed to do to like check the box that they did what's what, what's on their checklist. But it's definitely not confirmed. Got it. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 19: The federal grant was a bit of a match. We got the grants because we had some money appropriated
for some of the work because when I first got here a lot of people called and said, how did you get that? Okay. Had to check with town facilities and that was kind of how they got it. So the federal government, kind of like the state is, is looking for a partner not to pay for everything. And yes, we're I guess cautiously watching what, what's gonna happen so that we don't overextend ourselves too far. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. I'm just thinking if, you know,
if we're in this accelerated report, we're for LILJA people, remember the Behem thing. I just wanna have it straight in my mind who might, who might be paying for what and what stage things are at. 'cause people will ask us. So Speaker 19: Good question. Speaker 2: We'll let you know as soon as we have any new information on Behe. We definitely are watching it and when they would tell us, but I don't have anything yet. I will say in my superintendent chat, there's a lot of other districts who were invited similarly into this program. So we're among many neighbors. Some of them are just cautioning a little bit about understanding the restrictions from the MSBA on it. So I let the Bill Sprat know that today
and he's gonna look into those. Okay. But it's great news. We just need to understand all the devils and the details. We just need to understand. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Super. Any updates from you Ms. Brunell? On MSBA. Okay. All right. I think we only have one other agenda item. Speaker 19: Move Speaker 10: To adjourn. Second. Speaker 1: We'll take a roll call Vote. Ms. Brunell? Yes. Mr. Patel? Yes. Ms. Lathers? Yes. Brand? Yes. Dr. Cosman? Yes, I am a yes. So that is 6 0 0. We are adjourned. Thank you everybody. Thanks everybody. Good night.