Speaker 1: We will call the meeting to order. Speaker 2: That goes yeah, Speaker 1: So we have a quorum. So we'll start our meeting. So this is the Natick school committee. It is Monday, September 29th and we will start our meeting and we will start it with a roll call. Ms. Flas Here. Mr. Brand Present. Ms. Collins? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Ms. Brunell? Here I am here. And then do we have anyone online? Kiani was gonna call Ms. Collins. Here Speaker 2: Present. I'm present. Speaker 1: Okay, super. Thank you. Free. Alright, so now we will move to the Pledge of Allegiance,
which is going to be kind of special today. Ms. Brunell will tell us Speaker 3: About that. Thank you. We have our first winners from the raffle for the Pledge of Allegiance. We have two students, Edward from Kennedy and Julia from Memorial. Please come up to lead us in the pledge Speaker 4: Allegiance to the back Speaker 2: Of Speaker 4: The United States of America and to the Republic for EGT stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and Justice Bra. Speaker 1: We take that moment of silence to honor our troops who serve here and abroad.
And thank you so much for that lovely leading of the pledge. We really appreciate you coming. Good job. Good job. Okay, any announcements? Okay. None. Alright. So we'll now move to public speak. Public speak is scheduled for a period of 15 minutes. Each speaker will be permitted a maximum of three minutes during which time they can speak about topics within the scope of responsibility of the school committee. All remarks will be addressed through the school committee chair. Public speak is not a time for debate or response to comments by the school committee. So I have one person who emailed me. Is there anyone here in the room? Okay. So Dr.
Mackenzie, Speaker 2: Do Speaker 5: Thank you very much. I'm Donna Mackenzie, former school committee member and town meeting member presently for Precinct eight. I have three quick points I hope. First those of us who are working on an advisory for a three year moratorium on the construction of new artificial turf fields, which is Article 33 on the fall annual town meeting. Want to invite you to a public forum on Thursday, October 16th from seven to eight 30 in the vestry of the First Congregational church. We are happy that we garnered a majority of the votes
of those present at our recent FinCon hearing with a six to four vote. But of course we are disappointed that we fell short of the eight votes needed to get a recommendation. But we're grateful to FinCon for a robust discussion and look forward to continuing discussion with the public at large. Please join us to learn more about what we hope this advisory will accomplish, including a town wide discernment with both health and environmental ex experts. Again, October 16th, seven to eight 30 there'll be fresh cider and donuts.
Second, I only learned that there would be a chairman's report on this article last Thursday and at the same time I learned that consideration of Article 33 would be on the agenda for the select board on the same day and at the same time. Lastly, I have a favor. Town meeting last spring appropriated $220,000 for a field study for which you issued a request for proposals and I think began it. We have a copy of that request but we just would ask and look forward to an accounting of
how you have spent this money thus far. Something that one of my colleagues has been asking from you for a while and I suspect Tom meeting members would be delighted to know this too. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Thank you. So, we'll now close public speak. So do I have a motion for or? Oh, let's do updates. Teacher representative update first. Speaker 6: Thank you Madam Chair, I have no comments at this time just for the record. I'm saving them all up. So in one of our December meetings I plan on talking for an hour and a half. Okay. Speaker 1: Thank note. Note of Mr. Wood, just send me an email to confirm that. Thank you. Alright, our student representative,
Speaker 7: Just two quick updates. This FRI this Saturday, it's the freshmen and sophomore homecoming and the sophomores and are very happy with the PSATs being available to them on October 25th. It wasn't available to my class but for the class of 2027 and the class of 28, it's available for them and they're very happy with it. Speaker 1: Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate that. Ms. Gomes, do you wish to make an update about metco? Speaker 8: Hey everyone. So yes, I believe back to school night is gonna be on October 15th if I'm not
mistaken, but although I'm not looking at the calendar right now. So we're just looking forward to that and I'll be sending an email out shortly to families just introducing myself and hopefully they'll be able to put a name to the face when I meet them in a few weeks. Speaker 1: Okay, super. Thank you for that. Okay, so do we have a motion for the consent agenda? Move to approve Speaker 9: The consent agenda. Speaker 1: Second. Second. Any discussion I guess we can't discuss. All in favor of the consent agenda. Okay, so I see six members, four, nobody against, nobody abstaining.
And shall we move to superintendent's report? Okay, Speaker 9: Sure. Thank you. So we'll start with the first item on my report, which is very exciting. Tonight I'm inviting four of our eight school leaders to share their school improvement plan overviews teams began this work late last spring when we outlined the district goals continued at the June two day retreat and refined them over the summer with input in consultancies from our executive instructional leadership team. They were finalized as drafts in August and then continued in the fall with engagement of teachers inside the building.
So we're really excited for them to give the reports today. Their focus on alignment and cohesion has been truly admirable. I'm so grateful for your hard work. You'll hear from the other four schools next week. So without further ado tonight, we'll begin with Josepha blocker, our principal of Natick High School who will share her school's plan. You will notice that all of these are on the same deck and that's on purpose. So you can kind of see the flow and we can be efficient with time. Speaker 10: Alright, good evening everybody. I am here to talk about NA kai and our school improvement plan. So a few highlights from this year will sort of dovetail on
what our sip looked like last year. So you'll see that one of the major highlights was improved algebra retention that we did as a result of our school improvement plan last year where we did embedding of key algebra skills through the geometry classrooms and then tried to see if that would improve math achievement. And just today the MCAS results were dis embargoed and we could see a real impact there, which was very exciting. We also completed phase one of multi-tiered system of support implementation and tonight you're gonna hear how that dovetails with our plan this year, which will contain phase two of
that implementation plan. We reduced our suspension rate by more than 50% by using highly structured day and other restorative strategies as an alternative to traditional out of school suspension. That was a really big win for us. Also doing some work in concert with, with our whole team here with from central office around different suspension protocols and legal advice that's come from counsel. We were really able to do that as a collaborative approach and that was a, a big win for us and our students. And then we really fully embraced the instructional learning walk process last year and use that to calibrate our practices
across our leadership team. Our, we have a very wide swath of educators that are doing evaluation in classrooms, including our department heads, our special ed administrators, vice principals, deans and myself. And so it's really important that we got to spend some time doing that and really honing in on what we find to be important in instruction. And you'll see how some of that work has provided the impetus for one of the school improvement plan goals this year. And then I couldn't resist putting some of our student successes on there because there were so many notable successes. We had 94% of our kids go on to further education
after graduation, which is a huge accomplishment. Seeing the wide swath of schools they chose and also the various different pursuits was very remarkable. We had 42% of our kids taking at least one AP exam, which means across grades nine to 12, nearly half of our kids are engaging in college level work. And within that 94% of them getting three or better means they're achieving at the college level, which again is a pretty, pretty high bar. So we were really proud of that work in the arts. We had numerous accolades for our wind ensemble,
our concert band, our chamber singers across all of the different ensembles in the school through both medals and various competitions as well as individual student successes. There were a number of ways in which kids did some really remarkable work around civic engagement, including raising close to $15,000 for Make-A-Wish Foundation, raising money for Special Olympics through our polar plunge, getting a grant to pilot the first environmentally safe vape disposal process, presenting at the Governor's Annual Healthy Youth
Summit as one of the first high school groups to do that. And then there were some notable successes in athletics. As you all know, Natick has a tremendous pride in in its athletics program and last year was no exception from indoor track nationals to the three-peat with the unified program. A lot to really be proud of there. So. So then moving on to this year. So I'm gonna do something a little unconventional and I'm gonna skip to goal two and then come back to goal one if we can do that. 'cause there's a little bit of a, of a rhythm for why we might do that. So for goal two, that is our
professional practice goal for this year and really that focuses on building data literacy and formative assessment strategies. This is a really important growth out of last year's work with our leadership team. One of the things we noted was that formative assessment is a growth area. As we started to use the look for tools in the UDL look fors, we noted that across our classrooms in the building we had a lot of relative strengths around forming objectives that were targeted towards agendas that were targeted towards standards that were rigorous. But that when we, when it came to that continuous cycle
of formative assessment, figuring out where students needed some growth and then addressing that growth, that that was a place where we needed to focus. And so this goal really comes out of that work from last year and it also aligns really well with the strategic objective around tier one instruction. And so the, the hope is that teachers are gonna use this year in the majority of the subject areas to hone their skills on data literacy and to hone their skills on creating formative assessment with the goal of next year really moving into creating meaningful tier two intervention in all classrooms.
And so this year, this is why this is the professional practice goal because this is really about growing our staff and growing their skillset and getting them to be more comfortable with data, which is a really key piece of MTSS across across any system. So the idea is that they are going to use at least three different data-driven formative assessment strategies that allow for real time information gathering of meaningful data on student progress. And each of those words is really purposeful and required some unpacking for staff. But the idea is that in real time we can see where each kid is and then we can take data on that
and then give some intervention which will be the part that most people engage in next year. This year we're really just honing our skills on can we create the interventions, can we come up with some mechanism for tracking who needs that form, who needs that intervention? And then can we come back as a team and discuss which modes a formative assessment actually work well and are trackable so that we could propose interventions. So that is the cycle we're we're working with right now. We're engaged in the professional development stage. Different departments are in different places with this work. So some of them are getting more targeted intervention from
our vice principal of teaching and learning. Some of them are doing more targeted work with our new, I'm gonna mess up his title, but direct director of curriculum and instruction and others are working with Sandy Lemon, our Coordinator of Data and Student Success. And they are working on this process of do I have a way to create data-driven formative assessment strategies that are targeted at rigorous standards-based daily objectives. Can I figure out who is on track with getting that material and who needs more help? And then can I figure out if this is a system I can manage over time?
And that is what they're gonna be working on in their PLCs this year to try to track their progress so that next year they're on track to be able to create small group instruction for tier two. So now we can go back to goal one, which is our student learning goal for the year. So our physics team, not surprising that it is our data science people that are all over the data already, they are already in a place where they are ready to do that next step. So they have collected data over time that has informed their practice. They are used to going through each element of the MCAS and really picking out which areas we are doing very well in
and which ones we maybe have relative weakness in and targeting intervention. So that group is going to sort of be our pioneers out in front and they're actually taking on that next step in the process. So we noted from Dr. SP's entry plan that there were significant gaps between students with disabilities on IEPs and STU and then all of our student population in terms of MCAS performance. When we went back and looked at grades in in ninth grade physics, we also saw that there was a similar gap in grades. And so it was an important place for us to funnel down
and do some more focused work. And so our goal is to decrease that gap on the summative assessments by 15%. So we already have the data on how each kid did, on how the kids did as a cohort last year on these summative assessments. They've already done the work to make sure that they are standards aligned and up to the rigor of the MCAS. They've done that work already, so they're in a good position to be able to track this over time, create the formative assessments, pull the data quickly on the fly, do tier two targeted intervention with students
and then track whether or not that had an impact on the summatives. And so that is the process they're engaging in right now. Their PLC has had some really robust conversations already about what kind of data trackers are too cumbersome versus not cumbersome. What really allows them to be focused on students rather than on tracking, which is very important. They've had really meaningful conversations around specific disabilities and how it comes across in the science classroom. And they're doing some broad partnership with special ed as well. The science department chair and the administrator for special ed
and for alternative ed are gonna do paired learning walks together to make sure that they are all seeing the same things when they're in physics classrooms. Do they see proper accommodating and modifying for students with IEPs? Do they see good differentiation? And then the last place we're gonna really double down on this goal is having the ninth grade skills teachers come to the physics PLCs once a month at least, so that they can learn along with the physics team, what content will be covered and they can support students then in turn during the skills block.
So that will both help our teachers who do skills blocks know more about the physics curriculum and it will also allow for greater partnership around how to create better differentiation strategies. So we are piloting, like I said, this process with the ninth grade physics team. They are already very invested and engaged in this and doing some great work so far in that arena. And now we can go to goal three. So goal three in reality is, is a hodgepodge of several goals that are sort of embedded in it. But the overarching idea is that it is phase two of our MTSS
and the first two goals are a part of the academic MTSS process. But this last goal is really focusing on the SEL and behavioral supports in the building and the next steps in that in that work. So last year we piloted a process around graduation contracts where we noted which seniors where we initially thought they might be too far behind to graduate on time. We had early intervention meetings. We came up with a contract with realistic conversations between them and their families saying, you know, what is it you're willing to do? Tell us and we'll make it happen.
What are you willing to do through that? We put in vacation programs for credit remediation during February and April we were able to also get kids greater access to Edgenuity and then we created a greater partnership with the students who were behind rather than having it just be a notification process. And through that we were able to help some kids who were significantly behind graduate on time. So this year we're gonna expand that process and so our guidance department is having this be their student learning goal. They are working with a coordinator of data
and student success to come up with a process for tracking students who might need graduation contracts. They're gonna do that in concert with the competency determination process that you're gonna hear about in a future meeting around where DESI has taken us as a result of the ballot initiative. So that's gonna be partly embedded in this. They're working on coming up with a list of best practices that they're learning from what we did last year and from some other districts. So that and a template for a Natick high school graduation contract. And then the goal is to apply that standard for
who might need one of these support plans to the juniors and seniors. We're gonna focus on seniors first and we hope to get to juniors this year if we can. That's a little ambitious, but I put it in there to try to push us so that we end up with the hope is a list of best practices, a way of tracking the students' plans for each of these students that include a parent meeting and a student meeting. And then subsequent monitoring and support and revision. So if you are on the plan, but it doesn't quite come to fruition that you come to that February vacation program.
Okay, after February break we meet again, then we're gonna redo the contract. What are we doing now? So it's this cyclical process. So we're hoping to put that in place for a hundred percent of our juniors and seniors that are behind. And we're creating the standard by which we adjudicate that at this point. That's one of our action steps for that piece. The second is an outgrowth of some of the work we did last year with the core program. So core we piloted with a group of 10th graders last year and we saw somewhere, depending on which term, but it was each term quarter over quarter from their ninth
to 10th grade, at least a 30% increase in their academics and GPA. So it was a really big success. The kids all wanted to stay in the program. They reported having trusting adults in the program, their behavioral referrals went down dramatically. And so we have, we are extending that into the 11th grade this year to keep these kids in the program and then add a new cohort. This is not a special ed program, although you can be on an IEP like any of our tier three programming. It's really about forming a small learning community where kids feel known and seen and where they are looping with some teachers that they already had the prior year
and where they are doing their same co-teacher in their English and social studies is also in their skills block. They do field trips together that is a positive behavioral intervention where they are able to, you know, with some good academic and behavioral performance, earn the right to go on field trips. And so we are giving some support to that program this year. One of our deans is assigned to be their point of contact to support them in their growth there. And we're hoping to see the same kind of meaningful growth year over year for the kids who were struggling a little bit in ninth grade. The next part of this is the implementation
of tier one social emotional supports, which is our wayfinder curriculum. So last year we had a group as part of PD creating a scope and sequence for the high school. We heard from our students that like SEL blocks per se didn't resonate with them, it didn't work for them. And so what we decided to do is embed the SEL in classrooms in subjects where it made sense. And so each subject, each year we'll have a certain number of lessons that they're going to deliver. And that ends up, there are six core, six core standards within the Wayfinder curriculum. It ends up with each grade level getting like two bites at
each standard, at least spread across the year in a way that doesn't make it feel like it's an SEL block. It's just a, an activity they're doing in class. And so teachers have been trained on that. They're in the process of implementing it. And our goal is a hundred percent fidelity and we are gonna be doing some very quick surveys of kids at and teachers after each lesson around the ease of implementation and the seamlessness and whether kids thought it was hokey or not, basically. And then like the next piece of this is around doing a program review of our guidance department.
We've done program reviews of a lot of different areas of the district, but guidance rarely gets that kind of concentrated focus where we get to take some space, have them spend some time thinking about what their strengths are as a department where they'd like to grow. And so we're working on with masa, which is the Massachusetts Counseling Professional Group, and they do a process of doing program reviews for guidance departments. It's, it's a newly formed thing and Dr. Ferguson and I have been in talks with them and creating a proposal
for them to come in and work with us. And we've also started the process by talking to our guidance department and preparing them for it. And so one of their professional goals is gonna be participation in that program review. And then the final piece is aligning with the district's work on a K 12 code of conduct as the high school. We recognize that we are present in that work. Some of the more complex behavioral challenges emerge at the high school level. And so right now my team is really going through our handbook to see what are the redundancies. They're looking at handbooks across a lot
of the towns in Metro West to see where we have alignment, where we might be different in preparation of joining the district team, just getting some background knowledge. And so there definitely is some eagerness at the high school level to be part of that process. And so we're looking forward to informing that work as well from the behavioral support perspective. And so those are our three goals. I know I threw a lot of information out there, so thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Did you wanna say anything or? No, I'm Speaker 9: Okay.
No, I was asking Linda to go to the last slide in case you the committee had questions. Yeah. Speaker 1: Super. Thank you. So much of questions from the committee. Speaker 10: Yes, Ms. Collins, Speaker 1: Ms. Polls, go ahead. Yep. Speaker 11: So I just wanna make sure they followed what you said about working on tier two next year when this committee had been told at least in the budget subcommittee Yeah. That the focus was gonna be more on tier one. Yeah. Speaker 10: So this year we are focusing on tier one, right? And part of tier one has to go really, really well or else you overwhelm the tier two and three process, right?
Tier one is the foundation of the house. You can't build a sturdy house if there's no foundation, right? So that is the work we're focusing on is the strategies in the classroom that are already taking place. Teachers are ready as part of good tier one organically collect data. And if they're seeing in that data that the whole class doesn't get it, what they do in response to that is good tier one. The process for tier two at the high school is, is different than at the other levels because it's not as seamless to just sort of have kids pulled out for various things. So creating the process of doing small group instruction based on the data
that we would gather in the classroom in real time, that is tier two. We're not really doing that this year except for that one small pioneer group. This year we're really focusing on good solid tier one and building the data literacy skills of the school so that next year when we really can look at tier two, everybody is, is ready to step up to the plate for it. Speaker 11: And my other question, you talked about data, which is, you know, is a word that gets my heart pumping and you called it data tracking. Before I ever joined this committee, there was discussion
of a data dashboard that we were going to create in partnership with IBM and it never came. So what I'm trying to understand is, do you have a process, and I don't need to know the details, but do you have a process to make sure that, for example, whatever the physics department creates is usable by the English department, by everybody else in the building and potentially even in other grades? Speaker 10: That's a great question. So what we have, as we've been looking at this, what we've noted is that
it won't be effective if they're all using the same tool because they're all, they're all assessing different standards in different ways. And the goal for data tracking in real time for formative assessment is gathering the information you need to intervene in real time. And so what I've been emphasizing with the team is that you want a process, a data tracking tool that allows you in real time to identify kids so that you could pull them into small groups and some way of tracking who it is that you intervened on. And for some teachers that's happening electronically organically in some
of the electronic systems. Like if they're using, for example, Delta Math, they can see which kids aren't getting certain things and then very quickly pull them aside with that data. Right? That's very different than a rubric an English teacher might use to identify that, you know, the topic sentence lesson didn't go so well for half the class, right? And I don't want them to get bogged down in the mechanics of a tool. I want them to just be able to, so we are not emphasizing one tool for the school. We're letting each PLC come up with a tool that allows them to collect the data that makes sense
to inform their practice. And we have a clearing house that we're using for everybody to write down the formative assessment strategies they've tried, which standards they've aligned to, which daily objective they've aligned to, and the data tracker that they've used as part of that process. And so part of what my VP of teaching and learning and I will do is take a look at all that at the end of the year and we will see if there are some best practices that emerge. But I already know that there are teams that have way different needs from other teams and we want that process to emerge organically so that teachers are invested in it rather than having it become
like a compliance task they're doing for me. Does that, does that answer your question? Speaker 11: Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why the data dashboard never came, came to fruition. Yeah. Putting aside personnel issues at the time. Yes. Got it. Was that this each teacher or each curriculum? Yeah. So with ninth grade English or 10th grade needed to personalize it and yet there was always the push to standardize it.
Yeah. And I guess my feeling is as long as you're looking at it to make sure that it's covering what it needs to cover, that personalized, at least at this point, works the best. So that's Speaker 10: See Melissa and Sue kind of talking. Does there anything you wanna, Speaker 9: We are just loving this conversation. Yeah. Wow. So sometimes I think there's some nomenclature we might eventually as eight schools. Yeah. Right. And as a district kind of land on to help us frame this. 'cause I am gonna use a term that isn't really
what always happens, but might take it away from data dashboard thinking or data tracking. We used to call it just clipboarding. Like what goes on your clipboard? Interesting, right? Yeah. Are you in a math class, you might literally be going down every single kid and who got the question right or wrong? But in, if you're listening to a Socratic seminar, you might actually be having a very different thing on your clipboard. So it's this idea of kind of how do you just capture the evolving mastery of the student in that class. And so I'm okay, we told our team be messy. 'cause what I know is every time we shine the light someplace in Natick, pe, the the teachers make it rise.
I really believe that. And so we're gonna watch them make it rise and we're gonna learn and we're gonna kind of come back with a bit of a story that, so that's what how I would encapsulate. But clipboarding is kind of how I think of it. 'cause it's really not a data tracker that's like a dashboard. Yeah. But we'll have much more to share Speaker 1: Dr. Fugman. Speaker 12: So I have two comments that I'm trying to turn into questions 'cause I think that's more reasonable. But honestly it's comments. Yeah. They both have to do with challenges that I've seen. Yep. In with the implementation of MTSS for SCL specifically in high schools.
'cause MTSS looks very different in high school than elementary and middle. The first one you've already touched on. I'm curious if you want to, if you're able to say more, which is SEL tier one in high school is very challenging. The, I don't think I've seen a good program yet. Same programs work really well in elementary and middle don't work in high school. You mentioned, which I think is absolutely the right direction. The more of more of a integration to academic instruction approach of wayfinder as opposed to like, now we're gonna do Wayfinder for 45 minutes and then next period is math. But I'm curious, how does that work? Is that through every academic subject?
Are, is each department kind of looking at wayfinder and saying, here's how this lesson can go well in math versus ELA? Yeah. Is it through advisory? How, what are your, what's your vision for SCL integration? Speaker 10: So, so I'm right in line with where you, you are, I think one of the beauties of Wayfinder is that it's one of the first SEL curriculums that was actually created by high school people and then brought to the lower grades afterwards, which was kind of unheard of. 'cause most, as you know, most programs are, they try to like pull it up and then by the time the high school kids roll their eyes, right?
So the first year we had Wayfinder teachers were dabbling, they were playing, they were picking and choosing. Some people went whole hog in and some people barely touched it. And it was really more of like a sandbox for some people to do things. And I also recognized a lot of what you were saying. And so one of the PD strands we had last year was a representative group of faculty across all of the disciplines and across all the grade levels. And their task was to do a deep dive into all of the wayfinder modules and to keep in mind what are those six competencies?
What lessons are best suited to which grade levels, what lessons are best suited to which disciplines? For example, if we know we're gonna push kids in something hard, maybe that's the day we do the resilience unit, right? And so how do we pair those lessons to times in instruction where they make sense, right? Maybe we do the collaboration one when we're about to do some sort of major group project, right? So they spent the time really thinking about that as an interdepartmental cross grade group and went through a lot of the different modules in wayfinder, picked out lessons
that they thought teachers would find palatable and doable without a lot of ramp up time. And they created the scope of sequence that was by grade and then by subject and then by focus area. And so right now what we have is we have a full scope and sequence that's linked at the end of the sip if you're interested in looking at it. And that is organized by grade and by competency. But we also broke it out for each department so that like the English department has a schedule where like grade nine you are gonna be doing lessons in collaboration and in resilience today.
And you're gonna do it in tier in term one. And in term four, those two lessons, they're linked. You click on them at some point in those units and then we're gonna see from the kids and the staff after they do this implementation plan, was it as seamless as we think it was gonna be? Or did they find it hokey still? Or did the teachers notice an impact? Would they advise us, do it again? What would they advise us to do in the future? Because really this is gonna be at the end of the day about building the relationships that exist in the classroom. And if the kids and the teacher kind of find it unpalatable, we're gonna have our answer. But this was the way with no one teacher doing more than two
or three lessons a year and no one kid having it in one specific spot where they're having at least 12 lessons across the year. But today it just happened to be an activity you did is, you know, 10 minutes in art class. But then maybe in a month it's an activity you do in social studies before you do a group project. And so they aren't gonna feel like we did wayfinder. 'cause as far as they're concerned, they never log into wayfinder. Yeah. Their teacher's just doing activities. So Speaker 12: That's actually a very impressive approach. And I wish more high schools did that, but we're focused on ic. Yeah. The second
comment slash question Yeah. Has to do with the challenges of identifying and referring students when it comes to SCM behavior supports. Yeah. To tier two and tier tier three in high school. Yeah. Elementary school. A teacher spends all their time with a classroom. They identify them, they support them, they can refer them at a high school. You know, you're a physics teacher, you have a hundred students or so, and every single student has eight different teachers. So there's, it's much more challenging at the high school level to have the, that adult who can observe and support
and refer students to tier two and tier three around SEL L. 'cause you don't have the same kind of math scores or literacy scores. Yeah. Or the amount of interaction you do elementary school. Is that, how have you been thinking, and again, this is a challenge that I've seen. Yeah, I, I'm reading it up now because yeah, I'm testing you. But because it's a challenge that so many people have not been able to figure out. Yeah. Speaker 10: It, it is a big challenge and I don't claim to have an answer to it per se. What I can tell you has worked for us is when we're doing the, the highly structured day, we call it that instead of in-school suspension, they are
outside of the classroom for the day. So we do all the procedural legal process that attaches to in-school suspension. However, what their day looks like is very different. So in a traditional in-school you would be in a room with a monitor all day and maybe you did some work, maybe you took a nap and then at the end of the day you went home for hours. They have a schedule. All right, so for this 45 minutes you're doing math, your math teacher might stop by. We also have a teacher in the room who knows why you're there and might be able to help support you during that. Your guidance counselor's gonna stop by for the next, for 20 minutes and do a module and wayfinder with you. Then your dean's gonna come by and take a walk with you
and talk to you about why you're here. So we have a fully structured day for it. And that is really, you know, one of our tier three behavioral interventions when we get to a place. 'cause we really try not to do the highly structured day until we've gotten through a number of different sequences because of how we track the behaviors in PowerSchool. The deans and VPs can see kids who have high patterns and they will often bring a case conference together based on that data. And that's kind of how it emerges. We'll also find that guidance will say, okay, I've gotten like four emails from different people on this
one kid with the same challenge and they all bring the team together for a case conference. And so that is how we have organized ourselves around intervention. But it's definitely harder because finding a time, like it's that 15 minutes between seven 15 and seven 30, like that's when we can pull everybody together at once. That being said, like deans do, do individual behavior plans with kids when it's, but that's the level at which it happens. Sometimes they will pull the teacher out and do and say sort of, okay, we're gonna try this plan in your classroom, can you help implement it and let me know how it goes. But it really is very organic as opposed
to formulaic at the high school level because it's challenging. We don't have the same structures. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, Speaker 12: I'm glad that we're on the right track. Speaker 10: We're on the, we're, we're definitely throwing some things at the wall and finger painting with it right now. But some of it is starting to look like a picture. Yeah. So I'll take it. Speaker 12: Yeah. Speaker 1: Other questions? Ms. Pelle? Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you for all the answers you've given so far to very thorough. My question is specifically about goal one. Yeah. I believe, how did you come to the decision that the gap would be, the reduced gap would be by 15%?
Speaker 10: So, so I talked with the science department head and the, and the, some of the science PLC members and said what feels manageable given what you've experienced with kids over time, given the strategies we're gonna try to implement. And we said, okay, this feels like a stretch but manageable goal. And so we ended up picking that number. I'm curious to see sort of how we fare. Maybe it will be much higher, maybe it won't be. It's for some kids gonna need to be really individualized and for some kids it's gonna be able to be accomplished using the tier two
strategies that that group is gonna pilot. But that's how we came up with it. Speaker 3: And you're measuring the ninth graders this year versus how the sophomores performed last year. Speaker 10: So, right. We're measuring this year's, this year's ninth grade against last year's. Ninth grade. Okay. Yeah, this year we're doing the, the meaningful tier two intervention and last year we did not. Speaker 3: Great. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate that. This goal. I, I love how specific it is and how you're gonna learn so much from, you know, for the rest of the school too. So that that can be a district-wide goal to reduce the gap between the students with IEPs
and students who don't have them. I am curious if as we move forward, how that number shifts depending on what the actual gap is. Yeah. Right. So if the gap is 75, 15% might look good on a slide. But Yeah, and I don't, to be honest, I don't know what this gap was last year, but I appreciate the thought and that you're gonna target so closely. I also know that physics for freshman is one of the hardest classes they take. So I'm impressed that you're taking that on as a goal. Yep, Speaker 10: Yep.
We have a really good team. And I'll say our physics PLC is like, to their credit, they said we'll be bored if you give us goal two. We want to try something more. And so they, they said like, put us in coach. So yeah. Speaker 1: Ms. Lathers, I was just gonna say freshman physics is not just the hardest class for students, for parents. You broke me as a parent. Just, and I just, just in that vein though, I think it's, it's interesting to me in that case is, and things, I don't know whether you'd have a way
of measuring or even to take away from it. It's not even just the content, but I think it is the most demanding class of the high school in terms of executive functioning and be with the labs and the different types of thinking and pivoting from math to reading to then many steps and such. And so I think it, there's a lot of kids that fall into those executive functioning challenges outside of formal IEPs that I think would benefit a lot as well. And so I'm just, you know, curious what, you know, whether it's more content or more of those kind of executive functioning
and neurodivergence that that impacts. Yeah. Speaker 10: Yeah. I think, I think that is when you do good tier one, you're hoping to catch all of that at the same time. And it is really hard. You're absolutely right that physics, a lot of high schools do bio first and that really is heavy on the reading, but lighter on the math by doing physics first, I think a lot of kids find physics engaging 'cause it's tangible and they get to do a lot of fun, like physical experiments that make sense to them intuitively. And you're also bringing math in. And so now you're doing literacy and math together embedded with content. And that's, that comes with a lot of different challenges,
but it also means there's a lot of places we can push and hopefully see improvement. So Speaker 1: Ms. Brunell, Speaker 3: Just one quick, something that you just made me think of. And back to Chi's question about tier one and SEL when you just said, yeah, good tier one in physics. When you, when I hear tier one for MTSS or for SEL in the high school, I hear you talking about school culture. To me that's tier one and one of the pieces, like how do people feel at the school? And I think it's a great sign that the homecoming is happening. Like I know that that's not like on the clipboard, that's not something we can, but it, it's important that students like their high school
and they want to add to their high school. And so bringing something back like a homecoming won't be the event for every kid. But I think that's a good sign for tier one Speaker 10: B based on the ticket sales. It may be the event for every kid we're, we're bag borrowing and stealing chaperones right now 'cause we've had such high interest. So Speaker 1: Yeah. Any other questions from the committee? Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 9: Excellent. Okay, we're gonna move on to our middle school, starting with the Kennedy Middle School and Principal Cohen.
Speaker 1: Hi everybody. Speaker 2: Hi. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 13: Are you gonna put it on this? There we go. Thank you. Speaker 14: Do memory, Speaker 13: I can checking each word. Okay. So I'm gonna first start with some highlights and most of these highlights are related to the school improvement plan goals for last year, or work components of the school improvement plan goal. I'm really excited about how Kennedy attacked these school improvement plan goals as well as the data after being embargoed today. Kennedy is really just a bright spot that I'm really proud of, so I'm excited to talk about this.
So my first goal was around student achievement in math. And we, I put out a really strong goal. I identified that goal basically because of the data that I had seen. There seemed to be a lagging skill or some lagging skills in math. And excitedly the 50, over 50% of our grade six math students in the cohort, which were identified as the targeted group, met or exceeded their target as well as in seventh grade,
which was the other targeted cohort. Almost two thirds of those students in that group reached the targeted SGP. So the goal was lofty. I said that I wanted all of the students to get there, but just by shining a light on what had been done or where, where they were showed huge growth. Huge growth. And you can see that in the data this year. So my second goal was around students' sense belonging and connectedness. So we started our first ever advisory program at Kennedy,
and I have some data here that's not up there from the student and staff surveys to share with you. After putting advisory together, the goal was that everyone would have a trusted adult in the building as well as feel better connection with the school. 51% of our students felt connected to other students through advisory. 75% actually enjoyed the activities, which is really important I think and, and shows how much they enjoyed it. 58% of kids shared that they really liked advisory. And even though my goal was for a hundred percent of kids
to have a trusted adult, 89.7% of students felt connected to their advisor. So that will lead right into my goal for this year when we get to that. So pretty strong numbers that, that I'm pleased with for our kickoff year with advisory, we also, like the high school did use Wayfinder. It was a great start for us. We, we did not have a scope and sequence, which is something that you'll see in my goals for this year, but we had it as an option and staff chose to use it at varying vari varying times.
They wanted to have the ability to use things that were with the students in front of them at the time and choose things that they needed at that time. So we all used Wayfinder in a lot of different ways, but that was the curriculum of that we used here at Kennedy. So improving teaching and learning through learning walks was a really big thing at Kennedy. The goal was around psychological safety, around learning walks and having that be available at Kennedy. Teachers reported that after this goal from this year
and the work that we did around learning walks, they had increased consistency in learning walks and just felt that evaluators in the building were consistent with them. They felt greater psychological safety. They reported in in a survey that they were, had higher satisfaction with the process. And that changed from fall to spring. And as we note, if teachers feel that they're getting feedback that's relevant, we have greater outcomes for students. So no surprise that we got greater outcomes for students in the end. And then our last highlight was around expanded use of restorative practices. That leads right into one of our goals this year
around building behavior management systems and building culture at at Kennedy. But the use of of restorative practices and reflection work was really instrumental with every situation that we dealt with with kids. And we're gonna be increasing that as we go forward this year. Okay, so we can talk about the SIP goals now I'm gonna start in order with the first one. So this year we're gonna be looking at accelerating math and reading achievement for Kennedy students performing in the bottom 25th percentile. Last year I chose to only focus on math.
And the reason why I wanted to expand this goal this year is so that all staff can see themselves in the goal. I wanted staff to feel like they could be a part of and contribute to the goal. As for student outcomes, I wanted them to have a place where they could lean in and that they could help all the children in front of them regardless of the subject or topic that they're teaching. So that was the rationale around that goal. Some notable things for this goal is that the action steps are, we're always gonna start with data meetings. We're gonna be doing that again this year at Kennedy.
We'll be developing plans once we identify the targeted groups for 25% for kids in the 25th percentile or below, teachers will be embedding formative assessment as you were talking about tier one. That's gonna be a major focus for us this year at Kennedy. So teachers will be embedding formative assessment in classrooms to help identify students and to see where to lean in on intervention. We'll be building staff capacity around that by doing professional development as well as learning walks to see what we see in the classroom and support teachers there.
And then we'll be using that information from data to analyze, monitor, and adjust as needed. So that's goal one. We'll move to goal two. So goal two is to build upon what we've started with advisory as we wanted to get a hundred, a hundred percent of the students feeling connected. That is again, a goal this year. We want every student to feel that they have a connection to a trusted adult in the building. And I've increased the amount of percentage
that we want kids to feel connected to each other, that we had a strong start. But I think we can, we can get in there a little bit more. So I increase that to 80%. We're also gonna be increasing school-wide themes to build consistency. This was something actually that teachers actually asked for that they felt that if there was some more structure, they would feel more connected to the students and felt that there would be more consistency across the building. So we're, we've started an advisory team and we're putting in school-wide themes to build that consistency and scope and sequence.
Once we determine what those themes and core competencies will be, we'll be facilitating professional development for staff on those topics. We will also be implementing student voice, checking in with kids to find out how they're doing, what would they like to see, what do they think is important. And we'll be surveying obviously along the way with staff and students to see how it's going and adjust as needed. And then lastly onto goal number three, school-wide behavior and culture improvement. So during this time we felt that,
you know, we put a lot of good work into restorative practice, but that we felt that there was not enough consistency. So our goal this year is to provide consistency through increasing a monitoring comprehensive, equitable and data-driven management system, which has already been done and put in place. And that that would be aligned to the district goals of coming up the code of conduct. We've already established that monitoring system and it is in place at Kennedy. There's a team putting together, working together already
to roll out a behavior rubric that will be consistent and aligned with the code of conduct. When that comes up, we will be relaunching our PBIS program. We've already started doing that and in fact, included a teacher component. We'll be doing teacher prizes as well as kids for using our PBIS war lip system. We are going to be revitalizing our Kennedy core values, which are the four Rs. You may have seen that o often in some of my newsletters already. We have them kids are already talking about it and I've been using them. In fact, when I do reflective work with kids,
when they're in my office, I bring out the four Rs and I ask, what, what do you see that maybe was missing today? And where can we go from there? So that's already alive and coming back at school. And then we'll be measuring the impact and as I said, aligning it all with the code of conduct when that comes through. Questions. Thank you. Principal Speaker 1: Questions from the committee, Mr. Brand then Ms. Collins. Speaker 15: Oh, thank you for the presentation. You're welcome. For goal two Speaker 13: Yes. Speaker 15: The the trusted adult thing than the a hundred percent.
I mean, I, I love a hundred percent as an aspirational goal. I'm generally an optimistic person. I think a hundred percent might not be attainable, but it's a great goal for the Do you have any current sense for the students who don't feel connected, what their, what the reason is out in so Speaker 13: To harder connected to the, to an adult or to each other, Speaker 15: Either for people who aren't, who don't feel a connection in any way. Why Speaker 13: So it, we have a lot of different areas where kids can get involved.
I don't know if you've seen the club and the club list at Kenny, which is ever-growing and we're adding more and more things. So that's, that's one way in which we may not have something that someone is interested in. We also have a really robust music and theater program, which you probably already know of. That's why I wanted to put advisory together actually. Because even though we have a robust clubs and music program and academic program and sports program that might not capture everyone, but every single student is in an advisory in the building in a small group that meets once every cycle for 20 minutes.
And that's why I put that together so that we could capture those kiddos that don't yet feel connected or close 89.1%. But we have, we have to just make sure that we really know them. And I think as advisory goes on, and the goal is that we're gonna have the same group for four years. So I started with a sixth grade group. I have a seventh grade group this year. It was as if they never left. So I'm imagining that as this program grows and we work with the same same group of students, that that number will go up.
Speaker 15: I mean, and, and just as a little follow up, it is a, an 89% is great, right? It is. It would be. Speaker 13: Thank Speaker 15: You. So we shouldn't Yep. Like we can always strive to get better. Yeah. But it, it's already great. Yes. The, there's, I guess I would, I, concern is not the right word because it's, like I said, it's great, but the, the thing that jumped out at me, the meet with student counselor, student groups. Yeah. Do you know if there's any correlation between the students who aren't connected and students who don't participate in things like that?
And I know advisory everybody participates, or every, at least everyone's in a group. Speaker 13: Yeah. Speaker 15: But I suspect that the people who fall into that 11% are not the students who participate in things like student council. Right. And while there is a, a plenty of groups and I love the theater program, music, all, all of those things, I wonder how you reach the kids who don't,
for whatever reason, haven't found their thing or don't feel like they can do it, or for whatever reason, how you reach those people. It's not a question so much as like Speaker 13: A wonder. A wonder. Speaker 15: Yes. Curiosity. Speaker 13: I think our counselors spend a lot of time thinking about that and wondering as well in, so our counselors, they're amazing and they spend a lot of time getting to know kids. In fact, right now, our grade five counselor meeting one minute meetings with every single student so that she can get a really good sense in grade five of every student that just came in from our feeder schools.
That's what they do. They work really hard to get to know kids and make sure that they feel seen and they know all about them. So that's something that my counselor group is always talking about. We meet every cycle to talk about who are the kiddos that we need to make sure that we see them and that they feel seen. Speaker 15: Great. Can I ask one more quick little follow up, tiny, or we can come back to me too. Is that Speaker 13: Okay with you Ms. Collins? I'm fine. Alright. Go ahead. Speaker 15: Just one a real quick one. Are you checking on these students, so if I'm marked as connected the first time,
am I necessarily counted as connected the next time? Like if you did, if I did the first time and I was in sixth grade in seventh grade, am I just assumed to have been connected? Speaker 13: Well we are gonna survey every year. Every year. Absolutely. Speaker 15: That's what Absolutely. Because teachers change. Absolutely. Friends change. Yeah. Speaker 13: And we're also, we do have an eye on kids in advisory. We met with all the advisors and talked to them to find out are there kiddos that we need to potentially switch? Do they need to be in with a peer? So we're looking at that and have made some switches. It's also the infancy of this program. So we kind of wanted to see what the impact would be a a little bit longer term.
But if, if there are kids that there were concerns, we made switches if needed. Speaker 15: Great. Thank you. Okay, Speaker 13: Ms. Collins. Speaker 11: Thank you. Yeah, always enjoy it Jody. So I was sitting here, I'd like to think it was an aha moment, but I think it was really a duh moment. Speaker 2: I can't wait to Speaker 11: Hear that. Well, it started with when, when Josefa was presenting and, and was sort of more crystallized as you were speaking. When I used to teach and walk around the halls in, in the college, it was always I got an A, you gave me a C.
Inevitably. Okay, maybe you got the C because you only showed up for three classes in the whole semester. But you're right, I did give you the CI also gave you the A, but nobody wants to think they earned the C. What became crystal clear with the two of you speaking and I believe from what I've seen of the other two presentations we're gonna see tonight is The importance of having voice and agency in goal setting. Yeah. Now I don't, I can't sit here and say, well, my younger self would've been very helpful in setting my goals when I was in high school.
Mostly it was just to not get in trouble. And where my parents were called, I had pretty easy goals to make. And I don't know how you do that with kids, but even Matt's question about feeling connected, it's not an easy question to answer directly. What would help you feel more connected? Hmm. I'm thinking you're not gonna get a lot of honest answers there because if they knew they'd probably already be doing it. But you know, the idea that the teachers want pushed for these things, it's a very exciting one to me.
And so I'd like to continue to encourage you, even though it's probably easier to sit at your desk and do it yourself than to hold all the meetings, I'd like to continue to encourage you to go through the process, getting that voice, whether it's with students, whether it's with staff, whether it's with peers. I think it has a lot more validity than I've been giving it credit for. So thank you. Yeah, Speaker 13: You're welcome. Kids actually are the ones who came to me to ask if we could start school council. So they're craving for voice as well. Speaker 11: Oh, I don't doubt that they're craving for it,
but yes, not everyone is self-aware, right. That they could say, oh yeah, well if Dr Fugman just did this, then I'd feel connected to him. Yeah. That's in a lot of self-awareness that I don't know that all kids possess. Yeah, some Speaker 13: Do. You're right, you're right. Speaker 11: I'm sorry. Are we Speaker 1: Already best friends? Speaker 11: Yes, you are important to me. There's no question. You are one of my trusted adults Speaker 1: On the fields today. Miss Brunell. Oh, are you done? Speaker 11: No, I so that, yeah, I was just trying to get out of it a little more gracefully than I just
Speaker 1: Did. Oh, thank you Ms. Collins. Ms. Brunell, Speaker 3: Thank you. I just had the opportunity to go to Georgetown, to the Edge Genomics Conference, partly because of the professional development of this committee and of a scholarship I received. And I have to say to your first goal is everything they spoke about, it's like just double down on math and reading. Especially for the kids who need it the most, apparently eighth grade reading scores are predictive of income success later in life. And I don't know, I had it pulled up, not just not
that success is, it's eighth grade reading scores are predictive of learning and future outcomes like health and income. So it's like that it's so important the work that you are doing with these goals and just saying like, Nope, we're gonna keep making progress. And so I'm just so grateful that you are naming that and you are putting that as a goal for the, it's just very reassuring to come back to my own district after hearing what have happened in other states across the country. And there's states that I think are quite surprising, right? Like Mississippi has just doubled down
on their student growth scores and they're seeing, they're seeing growth from students that were not seen in Massachusetts yet. Yeah. And I think something like this goal will bring, will shift the tide. So thank you for that. And I was curious about How different or how much this is gonna look like the Wilson goals and if they're different and maybe I can wait until Wilson until Theresa comes up if they're different. Why and why that's a good thing.
Speaker 13: Yeah. So I actually don't totally know all all of all of Theresa, I'm gonna let her definitely speak to that. One of the things that I was really excited about last year was that Dr. SP gave us permission to look at what our schools needed. So Theresa and I have always been super aligned because it's super effective that we do work together and our, our, our schools and our kids get the same experience. But there was a real glaring data point for me when we looked at the data together
that said I wanna hone in on math. And just by shining the light on that was magical for Kennedy and the data really supports that and the teachers were amazing and did the work because we just said it. So this year I really wanted to use that opportunity to say it more and give more teachers the ability to see it and, and, and do the work because we have really amazing teachers at Kennedy
and it was just phenomenal the work that they did last year. So, so yeah, that's I and they, they deserve to be able to see every single teacher in the building deserves to see themselves in the goals. 'cause they all have kids they wanna help. Speaker 1: Any other questions? Thank you so much. Yeah, Speaker 13: Thank you. Appreciate Speaker 9: It. Thank you so much. Okay, well we're gonna invite Theresa Carney up to review Wilson's SIP plan. Speaker 16: Hello everyone. I'll get to your question 'cause I was thinking about it as you were saying it anyway.
So just some highlights from last year. So in regards to just academic growth. So our first goal is the same last year as it is the share with some different action steps. I do wanna just say that it was just really nice for the first time last year to go really deep. We've, I, I feel like the middle schools have, you know, we've done a really good job with tier two. We've really had a, a large focus on RTI over the course of many years. We were essentially the first middle school was the first
schools that, you know, adopted renaissance star assessments and really were using that data, you know, at least since I've been here for sure. I think for at least 11 of the 12 years I've been here and have really mastered how to, how to do tier two intervention. And with that said, I think our focus has always just been on the median student growth percentile and we've always hit it, which is great. But I think, you know, with Dr. Bash coming in and really having us focus to, you know, Ms. Pernell's point as well, really looking at who are the kids that aren't making, you know, making the effective progress.
So really focusing on low proficiency and low growth. That was our focus and we did focus on both reading and math and just the gains that we had were tremendous. So you know, I'll just highlight fifth grade, you know, 80% of the students we focused on met the goal in reading and 87% hit it in math. And then, you know, we had some other highlights in like sixth grade we had 79% of the students. It was 23 out of 29 students that we focused on. So anywhere from like 25 students in a particular grade level in content all the way up to like some
with some contents it was over 50. And when you think about, you know, and many of our grade levels, we have two or three teams we really focused in on those students. And again that encompassed, you know, new ML teacher in fifth grade that was a new population to us, you know, case managers and and special ed and a lot of students cross-referenced in both areas. You know, it was a really great goal and we were able to go deeper with that and the gains showed that it was really good. I think the shift for this year is really around the tier one.
So I think we've got tier two down and Melissa had to keep walking me off a ledge 'cause I'm like the RTI girl for sure. And just like Theresa, you have that, it's not like it's gonna go away but now the, you gotta shine the light and we really gotta focus on tier one. So I'll get to that as we get to the goals. So I feel like we've done a really good job with like having consistent RTI focus, really providing enrichment for students who needed it. And then I think just the staff collaboration was really strengthened by this. We really used grade level meetings to really strengthen those data, those data protocols that we had. Really digging deep and looking at each of those students.
We utilized staff meetings to do that as well as, you know, teachers are asked to do a lot of different things with very little time in a school day. So really embedding some of the staff meeting time for professional development for them to dig in and really look at the specific students across their whole day. So although this was like an academic goal, many of those students also were at students. I mean not all, but some of them were also the students that we were seeing were getting referred to the office. They were also students that we were seeing had very high trends of attendance. Ironically those were our other two goals
that we had focuses on. So really having all of the different staff. So certainly the team teachers might be looking at the academic piece and then our school counselors and some of our specialist teachers, even our nurses really looking at what does that student look like from acro across their entire day. So that's, you know, something else in regards to how we're moving some of these of these goals. You know, again really focused on the whole child and and making sure that we're utilizing all the staff to help them be successful. The other piece in, in regards to some
of our other goals which were belonging and connectedness as well. You know, we had really high percentage of students saying that they felt connected, had a sense of belonging. There was 90% of our students reported that 86% felt connected to an adult and 89% felt treated with respect, which is actually really high that we've always been in the seventies for that. We too started with advisory last year we're we at Wilson only do it once a month. We also embedded it, you know, for the first three days of school and we had pretty good success.
A lot of the feedback the kids gave us was that they do like the time, they like the downtime, they like team building, they want less structure and they want just more time to essentially play. I mean when you think of a middle school like we, we wanna get our hands, you know, dirty, we wanna like go for a walk. We don't want to process and talk as much as you want us to. Which, you know, go figure. Especially when you're doing it first thing in the morning. I totally get it. So we've been really embedding some of that and also using wayfinder this year. I do wanna give a shout out to two of our counselors who used Wayfinder to go deeper with some of our lessons
and we have monthly themes for that. So that's been really great too. We saw office referral decrease decreases in our office referrals really with a focus too on restorative conversations, restorative practices and really fine tuning our tracking system. A lot of our students call them like yellow and pink slips and it just, you know, has this negative connotation to them and we've really been trying to shift the language to just like we're tracking when something happens and it doesn't always have to be bad. And really processing with kids similar to what Joseph has spoke about
with like a structured in-school suspension at times. You know, we definitely do that for our in-school suspensions, which thankfully have not been many. But really doing that even for some missed opportunities that kids students have a lot of times with each other. As you can imagine with impulsive middle school students, a lot of times it's just interactions they're having with each other and then really, you know, spending the time to have mediations with them, help them with language and how you apologize, how you look someone in the eye to really rectify that. And we have really good success.
I would say like 99% of our mediations have been really successful without further complications with students. And then lastly, our last school last year was all around attendance and Dr. Stash warned me, she said, Theresa, you have very little control of attendance a lot of times. And I said you're right. But we definitely can improve our systems and how we're communicating with families and how we're supporting students when they are chronically absent. And that is something that our school counselors, our vice principals and our nurses meet monthly. They connect with families after five absences.
Many times families are like, why are you contacting me? And again, it's just so you're, you know, we're really just wanna make them aware of absences. I mean certainly if they're calling out for a vacation after the fifth day, we're not necessarily calling them for that but they creep up, you know, absences. And once students start to get to 10, we, you know, we invite the families in and we're meeting those. So really proud. I didn't think that this was gonna be a goal that we met, but we actually, the number of students with 10 or more absences, it dropped by over 12% last year. So I think just again,
really implementing some more practices and having those conversations I think I think helped. So for this year, again, our goal is the same. I think the things I wanna highlight here in regards to some of the changes with the action steps again is with that focus on formative assessment. We had two of our data meetings already today. They were our first ones with the Renaissance data. Dr. Stash and some of our central office staff were there for it. It was, it was excellent to have them there. And I, I'm just so proud of the conversations that teachers are having about the data,
really looking at like, you know, how are we, I mean again, emphasis about voice and agency as you, as you mentioned Kathy, really in including the kids in these conversations around like, you know, do you understand your score? Do you know what that means? What can we do to support that so that they find meaning in why they're taking this assessment three times a year. You know, starting now in fourth grade and going all the way, I mean I know it's moving down to the younger grades as well and, and moving up to 10th grade now and this is why, you know, this is how we place you for RTI
and these are why we're having these conversations. So we've had several teachers who've had a lot of success and a lot of growth using, you know, a particular strategy and and protocol for conferencing, making it feel doable for other teachers who, you know, obviously are worried about the time with that. And that has definitely helped. And then the other piece is really just making sure that we're progress monitoring all of the students and intervention. So those are two of the big pieces that are essentially new to add to the goal for, for this year for goal two, it's really around,
it's really around MTSS around like the, our positive behavior intervention system. So you can imagine at a middle school how, how critical this is to help students understand what expectations are. And what we found from, you know, serving students and teachers last year is that we have expectations in every classroom and every setting that students are in. We're just not always consistent in how we communicate it. And we're not always as consistent in, in actually following through. So you know, students are really bright, right? Like I, I can, I knew like if I wanted money I was gonna go
to my dad 'cause he would always, I could always badger him enough to get it. And my mom was the one that like I wanted to ask if I wanted to go out because dad would always say no. So we know like how to play parents off, you know, friends off with certain things and kids are pretty good with that, with teachers, right? So one of the big things that we focused on at the very start of the school year was talk to each other as team teachers as you know in middle school they share, you know, their content teachers talk to each other about what are your non-negotiables, what are your three
to five non-negotiables in your classroom every day. And then talk to each other and see if they're the same and then does it look and sound the same for a student? So we really focused on that across a student's day. We put that together, shared it back out to to staff and interestingly they were like, so Theresa what are the school expectations? Right? And that's a great question. So we are doing that work as we go. I mean I can recite them but does that mean that what I expect from kids And I'm saying is that the same as Mr. Carney, is that the same as Ms Dino? Is that the same as all the other people they
come to contact with? So we're just trying to get tighter on what our expectations are for kids and then how are they we rewarding them for just doing the right thing. Now that doesn't necessarily mean they have to get a prize or they have to get, you know, a pat on the back all the time. But just making sure that we're recognizing when kids are doing the right thing and then we have some systems in place when students aren't. So that's a big focus really trying to create a leadership team to look at this. We too, like Jody said, we're looking at our core values. The core values at Wilson have been there I think for a very, very long time.
I mean I'm going on my 12th year and they were there I wanna say 10 years before that and, and they're fine but they probably need a revamp and, and some monitoring. So the staff is really eager to kind of look at that as well. And then, you know, really encompassing our expectations for students around that. And then for the third goal, really again kind of tied into the, to the second goal around PBIS, but really just again looking at that smaller population of students who are getting referred to the office or you know, being, being for our tracking system, having difficulty in classes
or throughout their day. Really honing in on the why and helping strategize with students and families around helping them make better decisions. We have several programs in our school. For example, our compass program is for students with, you know, a therapeutic program who have emotional or behavioral disabilities. And what we found is that many of the students in that program were obviously many of them were the ones being referred to the office. So they have this stigma already. And really working with the staff in that program. Corey, who's here, our SPED coordinator from last year
really was instrumental in this and really looking at with our staff, like creating some sort of a system for the students to earn certain things and to get feedback. So we created a point system and implemented that really in the spring of last year and have seen some really great gains and growth for that. Started that already this year. We do have one of the staff members who is out on maternity leave. So for the younger grades it's been a little bit more difficult. We've had a lot more absences but really eager when she comes back to continue that work. But then also bringing those students to like case management and you know, with the, with the larger school community
to really make sure we're focused in on that. So we're trying to catch every student and help them be successful and feel like they belong. So I'm gonna answer your question now about the differences. So Jody and I work very closely together and We kind of have very similar goals this year more than we even did last year. I think we're just in different places with some of the goals. So like for example, I can say that Kennedy has a really good PBIS system in place. Like they've had, you know, ticket systems and that's something we developed a little bit later. We're still struggling on how to make that feel, feel right
for seventh and eighth graders who are a little bit older and the tickets don't necessarily like work for us and they seem to work at Kennedy. So really u utilizing the expertise of some of the staff there. And similarly with like the third goal around the tracking system. That's something that Wilson had had even before I got there. And, and Jody and her team has u you know, utilized discussing and talking to our vice principals about what's working at Wilson but then obviously trying to make it their own right? Because you can't just adopt what's happening in one school and make it work in another school
because they're different cultures. So we've really utilized each other and the expertise in each of our buildings 'cause we're just in different places with those goals. But knowing that they're all really important goals. Speaker 1: Thank you. Questions from the committee, Mr. Brand. Speaker 15: Thank you. That's three outta four outstanding presentations. No pressure also thank you for making me realize that I believe my daughters have been manipulating me for the last, I'm the one who they come to for the money. See, Speaker 16: See it must be a dad thing. I don't know.
Speaker 15: So in in the spirit of equity I have a question about the 89% treated with respect. I actually, and again it's an outstanding, these numbers are very high and that those are great. I actually have a suspicion that it's in reality higher than 89% depending on how one defines treated with respect percent to Kathy's point before. Yep. You know, if I believe I deserve something. Do you have any, this is the only, do you have any sense for the 11% who said they don't feel like they're treated with respect, what that actually means for them?
Speaker 16: I don't, you know and I was thinking as you, as you were asking Jody that question about the students that don't feel connected several years ago, and I used this example a couple of times and it's not, doesn't capture everything 'cause we know there are kids that don't feel connected for sure that we have to work on. We did a connectivity survey and we left their names optional because we were worried that if we forced them to give their names that they wouldn't necessarily be honest. So we kind of left it optional. It was fascinating. 75% of the kids actually put their name on it because I think they just followed directions and probably weren't even realizing it was volunteer.
With that said, several students who said they weren't connected, I would argue they were connected, their parents would argue they were connected. These were students that were in our mentoring program, these were students that did a sport. I, again, and I'm not minimizing the importance of that, but that's why I think these numbers are somewhat skewed. And I think sometimes there might be skewed in like probably too elevated for sure because in the moment you just don't know if it was like in that moment when that kid came in, you know, maybe had maybe had a situation where they got into like an argument with a teacher or they, something happened. And again, to your point Matt,
like I think it also depends on how they define it, right? And, and so I think we're somewhere there and we always know we have work to do. It's just a matter of how to figure out who those kids are. A fascinating very quick activity that we did with staff three years ago that I actually found on the web was you put a high school did this, you put every student on a piece of paper like you know, on chart paper around a a gymnasium for example. And you ask every staff member to go and I think there's like three questions and I don't remember off the top of my head,
but basically they can only check, put a check next to the student's name if they had the answer the, you know, the three questions were like a yes, they knew something about that student and it had to be something personal, it had to be something, you know, you probably know it off the top of your head. And it was fascinating when we did that and we did that across the whole school. So think about it. So like for an eighth grader, even their fifth, sixth, seventh grade teachers filled this out and it wasn't a large number but it was very eye-opening who the kids were that had no checks.
A very small number. But that was like our first step to be like, who are the kids that we don't feel connected to? Nevermind how they're feeling. And we started there and then actually put some things in place with those students to pair them up with someone. So that's like a good first step. I don't really have an answer to the second piece because again it depends on if it's anonymous and it also probably depends on how they take it and how, how they define those things. Speaker 15: Yeah. And so I would just say, I mean a connection of course requires two, right? So if the, if the teacher doesn't feel it, the student probably doesn't either. Correct.
Speaker 16: And that would, that's always a good starting point, Speaker 15: Right? But and also any survey that is based on emotion is subjective. Very true. And going to be influenced by whatever's go I didn't have a good breakfast. Yeah. And therefore, right, which is why a lot of those types like with in the mental health space, right, you do assessments regularly to, to make sure that you are properly capturing the feeling over time. So I mean I think this is, these are great anyhow, I don't know why I'm so curious about these number, these types of things today, but I am so, okay,
Speaker 1: You Speaker 15: Have breakfast? I didn't have a good breakfast today Speaker 1: For dinner. Speaker 16: Catherine, I'm fascinated with the Mississippi data so we'll have to connect 'cause I'd love to know like a contact there to figure out what they're doing. Well Speaker 3: Also interestingly, the Mississippi State director just moved to Maryland, so we're all gonna have to watch Maryland too because he's, he's bringing what he just did or she's bringing what she just did in the Mississippi to Maryland. That'd Speaker 16: Be cool. Speaker 1: Other questions from the committee Mr. Patel? Speaker 17: I'm just curious how many different kids, how many different teachers do each middle schoolers typically interact on
Speaker 16: A daily basis? That's a great question. So a fifth grader's a little bit less because they have the same teacher for two of their contents. So their math teacher's the same as science. So a fifth grader it would be five. And that's just teachers, nevermind then like their school counselor. Actually no, I'm sorry that's over a course of a day. But on any given day they would have a different teacher for some of their specials. So over the course of like a six day cycle, they probably have 10 different teachers. Approximately sixth, seventh, and eighth. I would say it's about seven on a given day. Okay.
And then that shifts every day. Speaker 17: So it seems closer to the high school model as opposed to the elementary model. Speaker 16: Correct. Although what's cool about middle school, what I love about middle school is that there are four main content teachers. So math, science, social studies and English. They all share the same group of kids and they have time built in their day every day to kind of like just chat with each other about like things they're seeing. So you know, academics kind of plan, but also like, hey, like I noticed, you know, Sally was feeling really down in your class or that she's been off the last couple of days.
Have you seen that in your class? And then really like then bring in other people like the school counselor or anybody else if we're concerned and bring in like the parents in to have a parent meeting. So they share students and it's easier to then get at what Joseph has said. She has those 15 minutes at the very beginning of the day to like talk about students. Our teachers have 50 minutes, three times a cycle to be able to do that. It's built into their day. It's fabulous. Speaker 17: Great, thank you. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 1: Any other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you Principal Kearney. Speaker 9: Thank you so much. Thanks.
We have one more school today and that's memorial with principal Gani and vice principal Pat Mara. Speaker 1: Yes. Pat volunteered to join us here this evening. Speaker 17: Sidney Speaker 1: Speak from historical perspective, right Pat? That's right. Hi everybody here, gani principal at Memorial School. Speaker 18: I'm Pat Mara, assistant principal. Speaker 1: Nice to see you all. Pat's gonna share our highlights because he actually did the work. Speaker 18: All right, thank you. So our school highlights from last year. So some things we can, can really be proud of and it's going to bring us momentum into this school year.
So our first goal was about, was about SGPs bringing up our student growth for the bottom 25% of students in literacy and math. And we were able to see a huge improvement from just 20. So we wanted them to move up with their SGP over 50%. So we were able to do that over 55%. And this year, this past year, 70% of those students achieved an SSGP of 55 or higher from just 29% the school year before.
So that was great. And that's a, that's a significant subset of students that are seen by a lot of different educators. Some of those students have IEPs, some of those students have in tier two intervention goals. So it's multidisciplinary and there's lots of teachers involved in that process. So certainly more work we can do diving into that data and looking at these students further. But it's exciting to see that such a diverse subset of students what made such growth. Our second goal, we had a goal around
just increasing our, our belonging, but also this, this part, this one right here, our whole school assemblies, we reinstated those last year. And this was an organic effort that started from our teachers, which was great. We had a committee of teachers that came together and we hosted assemblies that went along with our core values and we're gonna continue that work into this year. Karen will talk about our goals around PBIS and school culture. And then our third goal, we, we had a behavioral goal in which we looked at
our office referral data. We saw a decrease in some of our office referrals, especially in the playground from 20% to 11%. A small dip in the bus from 30 to 4% to 30%. So we targeted our PBS systems last year. That's a, we're gonna reinforce those expectations this year. It's also the third year we've used consistent office referral data. We're looking at the same markers that are aligned with our core values and we've tweaked those this year.
But it, we've also looked at the office referral form and we want to make sure that that referral data we're getting from counselors, from teachers aligns with what our expectations are for kids. So we looked at that last year, we looked at those referrals a few times a year at different faculty meetings. We look directly at the playground during one faculty meeting to be able to look at the data, align that with our values and you know, talk to teachers and talk to counselors about how we can make changes and support kids better. Speaker 1: Thank you. Great.
Okay. Oh, title of goal. I didn't enter titles of goals on my It's okay. I'm gonna share that with you tonight. I'm so sorry. It's the title, I'm gonna enter the title. That's the goal. Speaker 11: They should be achievable. Speaker 1: Let's call that a win. All right, so when I moved to Memorial in July this year, I had a lot of time to look at data and not a lot of people to talk to about it. And so one thing that stood out to me pretty clearly is
that we have a really high proficiency rate. Like we had an 86% proficiency in our reading scores first through fourth. That that's great, right? As as a principal, I've always tuned into SGP and student growth percentiles as like a focus area. And interestingly enough, when I looked at SGPs, we had a lot of students that were very high proficiency but low growth. And then we also had a collection of students that were low proficiency, low growth. So it wasn't just one profile of a learner that needed
to be targeted, it was more of an overall understanding as a school community of who are the kids in front of us and how do we make sure that everybody's getting a year's growth or earning, earning a year's growth in a year's time. And I felt like that was an important place as a new principal in a community that we could lean into that work together and do it thoughtfully because we're not on fire. And when you know better, you do better. And maybe we just didn't know better in
that perspective, in that lane. So goal one and goal three are going to both focus on SGP. First one is for literacy. One thing that we did notice is that our oral reading fluency, there were some gaps along the way for students and there are some high leverage moves that we know if we were to implement them tier one, that we would see strong movement, right? Including repeated practice. Because practice makes permanent opportunities for students to understand what goal they're working on
and then chart their progress as they move across their repeated practice opportunities. And then partner with families so that families are aware of what this targeted skill is and then create kind of a, a replica that they could bring home with them. So if practice makes permanent practice at school, we're gonna give you that opportunity across the, across the week. But then if you also did it at home, imagine what your chart's gonna look like at the end of the week, right? If you're, if you're tracking yourself as you're doing this work. So that's something that we're really leaning into.
And from the fluency we also lean into just high leverage comprehension, comprehension strategies too to increase that growth for students. We will also, and then just for growth percentiles, we don't really progress monitor as much because we're using the benchmark scores to really see the change over time. So if we do the high leverage moves from the fall to the to the winter, we're gonna see some growth there, right? Or we would anticipate that we're gonna see some growth and then continue like what's the next set of moves
that we need to implement to help our kids show that they are high proficient and high-growth. Can we go to title of goal three? Speaker 19: I'll fix that tonight. I'm a little embarrassed. Speaker 1: I don't embarrass easily, but that is doing it for me right now. This is the second goal. Also following along with the, the idea of SGP. Because what I noticed is that high proficiency, low growth happened across both math and literacy, right? So we're leaning into the opportunity
for students to engage in strong tier one instruction, be aware of what are the things that they might need to work a little harder on and then how are we differentiating like extension to intervention. Like all kids have an opportunity to, to get access to the challenge they need to show that they're growing. And the other piece to this is that challenge isn't moving them up to fifth, sixth, seventh grade standards. It's looking across the standards that they're expected
to master and how are they going deeper and showing higher levels of like understanding within those standards with more complex tasks. That makes sense. Two. And then PBIS is a, is a clear focus area for us. As Catherine said earlier, it's culture, right? It's the understanding of how schools run. So was able to onboard with Pat and Lisa SEER as our administrative team and could really celebrate some of the things
that were there and acknowledge that here's our next steps, right? Did some data collection right before school started from staff figuring out like what they felt was in place and not in place yet. We're working through that information to help us form really clear expectations with kids. We updated our core values so that it was just a little bit easier to remember what it meant. We're using it every day in the things that we talk about in our morning announcements, whole school assemblies focus around those core values.
We are going to use that beginning of year data and then have a mid and end of year data set from all of our staff to see if they are aware and acknowledging and implementing the expectations that we put together. And the way that we're finding time to do all this work is that our, all of our faculty meeting time, we're focused on PBIS, our curriculum time. We're focused on student growth. So we'll be leaning into data literacy, we'll be leaning into the high leverage moves
and the our using our coaches and staff from central office to help us plan for that in our PBIS goal settings, not goal setting in our reinforcement, we have an intermittent reinforcement system in place for students. We're doing shout outs at all of our monthly assignments, assemblies. So we are finding ways that kids are being recognized where it's ongoing and it's reliable and, and it happens in a couple of different ways so that there's not just one thing that they do
and get recognized for. And it's not about a trophy or a prize. It's about how you, you were caught doing that. Tell us more about what that meant for you and how that looked and what did you do? How did that make our community better kind of thing. We have a golden plunger that's now part of our PBIS system. Our bathrooms. Kids weren't throwing the, the stuff away and the, and not in the toilet. The toilets are fine but they weren't throwing their paper towels away in the trash. They were on the floor in every place. So we had an assembly on Friday and now there's a beautiful sparkly golden plunger
that doesn't stick yet, but we're gonna work on that and the custodians are going to stick it outside of the cleanest bathroom in the building. And it's such a simple thing. But the kids are looking for the plunger and they're like, I had two kindergartners come out to me today and we're gonna get the plunger tomorrow. I know it. Like sad to say those kindergartners have a single stall in their bath in their classrooms. I don't even know if the custodians are thinking about them, but we'll have to work it into the multiple. Gonna say Home Depot, that's a, the staff bathrooms. Oh I don't know, maybe we could not yet.
We're letting the kids live in the moment right now. That's awesome. But just tangible, easy and reliable in terms of offering feedback. And then the only other thing I was going to say is I just read it up there, whole school assemblies. Nope. I guess I don't have anything else to say. Great. What are your questions? Thank you very much. Questions from the committee? I actually had a question please. And it's, I, maybe I should know the answer. In the progress from last year,
you talked about office referrals and percentages. Is that like percentage of total referrals to the office? So 30% of total referrals come from incidents on the bus. Correct? Correct. Okay, I understand that now, correct. Right. Thank you. And to be proactive, this year we let in with bus talks already had 'em. Yep. We've already them expectations and we changed our dismissal system so kids are a little calmer as we walk them out to the bus and it's been better but it's not a hundred percent yet. We're working on it. Curious, any questions Ms.
SLAs? I have a, I guess this was more of a middle school question. I don't know 'cause I guess we didn't have buses in the elementary school in my family but I know and it just came outta nowhere 'cause you're talking about the bus and I've heard a lot about bus behavior things pre COVID. There was just sort of a standard kind of organization of kids by grade, like the youngest in the front and the oldest in the back and then COVID went by name and that broke down completely. Has that been reinstated at this point? It has. Kindergartners are always in the front and then it typically goes K 1, 2, 3, 4 sometimes.
Sometimes kids get a special seat in the front if it's gonna make them be more successful. Ms. Brunell, Speaker 3: Thank you so much and thank congratulations on the SGPs from last year. It's really tremendous. I mean, and there again there's a chart that you can look at that it does show memorial as an outlier of our med of our elementary schools. And that's the reason it's an outlier is because of the data that you're sharing here tonight. I'm curious about your goal one, and I'm not sure if goal three is the same, but you're assumingly intentionally left kindergarten,
first grade out of goal one. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: Could you speak to that? Speaker 1: Sure. So when I actually looked at the data sets, the growth was actually higher in first and like kindergarten and first graders showed more growth. Speaker 3: That's a great answer. I was so hoping for that. Yeah, because they're the youngest learners, you're hoping that like they are the sponges, right? They Speaker 1: Get a lot of at bats too. Yeah. Okay. They get a lot of practice and their standards are more succinct. Yep. I think when the standards expand and sometimes gaps widen a little bit for kids, if they haven't kept PACE all along that that can lead
to some opportunities for more growth. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, it wasn't warranted. Yeah. Speaker 18: We have more ways to measure fluency and comprehension as they get older too. Like they move from like rapid letter naming to more comprehension based assessments. So we can also measure it easier as they get older as well. Speaker 1: Yes. Dr. Fugman, Speaker 12: This is a question by the way. Representation there Jody, your titles. Yeah, so no. Yeah and Jody and Theresa as well. I didn't comment on yours 'cause I didn't have a question.
But all three plus obviously just have as well. So the big headline today from DESI is was how many districts have MCA scores at the same level as pre COVID, right? Like that's, that was the big goal. Like can we get our mc CA scores to pre COVID levels? And the first question I had in my mind when I saw those scores was MCAS. Obviously we have academic scores, but what about everything else? Behaviors included elementary school in particular,
that age group has been identified as struggling the most with behaviors and self-regulation post COVID. I, because you have a pbi because you have both A-P-B-I-S successful goal from last year and continuing to expand this year. I'm curious if I was, or if any someone were to walk into the school building today, would they see someone who's been at the school building five years ago? Would they, do you feel like the behaviors are pre COVID or are we still struggling with post COVID behaviors?
Speaker 1: I think we are still sounds Speaker 12: Like middle school also. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I, I, I don't even wanna say it's post COVID anymore. I'd say it's our new reality. It's just the way that our kids are coming to us. You know, at the elementary level we actually changed kindergartner's special tracks to include two art blocks because the fine motor skills are just not as good as they used to be as they were 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, right? So what can we control for? We can give them more opportunities. And so art's a natural place to do that when it comes
to executive functioning. I think that that is a major area of focus for a lot of teachers and and looking for ways to support whole groups of kids tier one and how do you get started? How do you sustain, how do you prioritize? So there's, there's that work. And then also I think the socialization is coming around but still requires more support. How to be a good friend, what does kind look like?
How do your words have power? Right? And like those are the, we would talk about that. But usually that was like having been a principal for a long time. Those were conversations that I would normally have with kids that were just making poor choices and we had to kind of help them learn new, new strategies to engage where it's more of like a tier one whole group. Like we all need to work on this. And that's why Wayfinder is so prevalent. That's why we're spending so much of our collective faculty time, building our capacity as instructors so that when we go back to the classroom,
we feel empowered to use the tools we have to find exactly what it is we need that day the next day. Speaker 12: So I'm glad you're doing that. It, it is interesting to hear a perspective about the new reality that this is, we don't even mean to talk about COVID anymore. This is just the reality we have. The other thought I have, and this is just me reflecting and I hope you don't mind, but is the other challenge around behavior in middle school and high school is oftentimes attributed to, in the new reality is to cell phones. And not only at school but also at home. By the way, I went to this amazing event
with amazing panelists on phone, cell phone use Must Speaker 1: Have been phenomenal. Speaker 12: Yeah. Oh my god, the panelists were amazing. Must have been most of 'em. But elementary school is almost like a test case because cell phones aren't there yet to think about. Are there issues around focus concentration, soc you mentioned socialization. Yeah. That cannot be attributed to phones for the most part. 'cause most kids in elementary school not using phones yet, but maybe, maybe they are. Speaker 1: I don't, I don't, there's a lot of kids that walk around saying, oh, did you see that on YouTube last night? Or I spend two hours,
I spend four hours on YouTube every night and I'm just like, oh, I feel so bad for you. Like why? But they're, they're trying to throw out the language that they're hearing and they're just being exposed to concepts too that are maybe a little bit beyond them and they don't have a context for it. So they bring it into our school setting and I'm like, oh, you're 10. We don't do that here. Let me explain what that means. And then they're like, woo, are you calling my mom? And I'm like, yeah, we are gonna call your mom. 'cause it's important that she partners with us. Speaker 12: So. So that is part of the new reality for elementary schools also?
Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah, I think so. Between the gaming and then just access to content that maybe they're just not ready for. Good luck. Oh my god, no. I mean seriously these are, yeah, all real challenges that because we can control what we can control for. Yeah. But there's so many other things that come in. Yeah. And so just helping them understand what's appropriate and, and sometimes we have to be like, that's a, this is a school rule and that's a home rule and we just like divide and conquer that way. And sometimes you can teach into like here's why
that's not a good use of your time. So. Oh well thank you for all you do. It's balanced. I know the challenges are great. Yeah. Any other questions from the committee? Thank you both so much. Appreciate it. Thank Speaker 9: You. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks to all of our principals for staying through everyone's presentation and just, Speaker 1: You Speaker 9: Have a great night. Please, please, please leave you have an early morning. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Speaker 1: Bye. Thank you. Yes. Awesome. Go. Do you want me to keep going or do you want, if you have one more thing.
Okay. It'll keep going. Yeah. Speaker 9: Okay. So I'm gonna finish out the superintendent's report. You'll hear the next four schools next week. So thanks for that. The next item is article 10, the memo to the fin com, which I sent earlier. So I just wanted to kind of bring it up here in case there were questions. But just to note briefly that we'll be presenting those materials that were in the memo to the finance committee tomorrow evening. Article 10 requests $2.6 million as you all know because the school committee is a sponsor of that article to fund the feasibility study and schematic design for memorial. It's a ne next step required in the MSBA process
and would allow us to hire an OPMA designer access options, et cetera. And so we're excited about this, we're excited to go forward and kind of present this to the fin com tomorrow and you have the memo, so if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them Speaker 1: Questions. Ms. Collins? Speaker 11: No, I was just wondering whether you wanted the motion now or at the end of the meeting. Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah. This would probably be a good place to put it. Thank you for Okay. Yes, thanks for that. Speaker 11: In that case, I moved the town of Natick, appropriate the amount of 2,006,000
in numeral 2,600,000 for the purpose of paying costs to conduct a feasibility study for the memorial entry elementary school building project, currently located at 1 0 7 Elliot Street, Natick, mass, including the payment of all costs incidental or related there too. And for which the town of Natick may be eligible for a grant from the school building Massachusetts School building authority set amount to be expended under the direction of the school building committee to meet this appropriation.
The select port is authorized to borrow set amount under and pursuant to MGL chapter 44 or pursuant to any other enabling authority, the town of Natick acknowledges that the Ms B'S grant program is non entitlement discretionary program based on need as determined by the MSBA and any cost the town of Natick incurs in excess of any grant approved by and received from the MSBA shall be sole responsibility of the town of Natick. And that the amount of borrowing authorized pursuant to this vote, excuse me, shall be reduced
by any grand amount set forth in the feasibility study agreement that may be executed between the town of Natick and MSBA Speaker 15: Second. Speaker 1: Okay. Any discussion or questions about the motion? Okay, so we'll vote all in favor? Anyone against? Anyone abstaining. So that's 7 0 0 for the vote. Thank you. Speaker 9: Thank you very much. Speaker 1: And for fin com tomorrow night, do you anticipate that we'll get questions for the committee or do you think they're more me questions about
the substance of the motion? Have you had any feedback from, I've Speaker 9: Had a little bit. I had the town meeting today and I just asked, I'll just say I just asked if anybody was hearing anything and I think there might, there could just be questions about the timing of this in the context of what some folks may feel is quite a recent Kennedy ask and bill and in the wake of an override. So I think we need to be sensitive to that and be prepared for that question. I think that might be something that goes through the committee for those of us who are familiar
with the M-S-A-B-A process and the statement of interest, which is extremely rigorous process and very hard gate to get through. And the fact that this school is built in 1966, it's so clear to me why there's need, I think a lot of the towns in this area kind of saw growth of schools around that year where this part of the state was expanding. And so it's not surprising to me that a school of this age, you know, is needing to be replaced. I mean, we have all the data to show that our other schools are also at capacity. So those are the things I'm thinking about is just having
some, you know, tidy answers around the timing of this. That it's not frivolous and it's not just kind of wanting to be asking for the next thing. It's truly needed. And we have pictures and all sorts of data. We, we transparently through this memo, shared the statement of interest with the fin com and others we're not hiding a thing. Like we're just kind of putting it all out there. Which sometimes I think is just a really smart strategy. Like I feel that it's convincing in and of itself. So I think if we're fluent as this committee, which many of you were part of the team that voted that in in April
of 2024, to support the SOI and the MSBA sanctioning it or kind of inviting us in is very powerful to validate the fact that this is needed. We, we shouldn't forget that they actually came out for a site visit last year, so they saw the space, they asked us a million questions. So I feel like that is such, it's such a check to kind of the fact that this school now, it's about putting it in front of the voters and seeing if it's the right time. The thing I think about too is from what I understand from my coach who's done a lot of building projects with the MSBA is, it's roughly a,
and Mr Gillis could speak to this too, it's a five to seven cycle year cycle before we get invited in again and we get paid roughly the base rate is 45 cents on the dollar, but it's likely to be higher. Mr. Gillis put the historical reimbursement rates for Kennedy and NHS, which I think ranged from 48 to 54%. You can correct me, but they were, that's on the dollar. So this is money. And I don't, and I don't, you know, I, I'm very aware of that the school is needed, the reimbursement, I mean, we need to get the money back so we're not paying
for it on our own or waiting another five to seven years. So those are the compelling arguments for me. Does that make sense? I answered way more than you asked, I think. Speaker 1: No, no, I appreciate that. No, I think that that's a really good summary of, of the, of the situation we're in. Thank you. Okay. Alright, so keeping on the same topic, we'll go to the Memorial School Building Committee update. I understand that there was a tour last week of a school in Lexington. I know Ms. Brunell you weren't able to attend, but I think that there were others to, and perhaps if you wanna give us a little update about what
that tour was like Dr. Speaker 9: Bash. Sure, sure. Mr. Gilli and I were there as well as Karen Gani. We toured the Hastings School Elementary school, which is what, around 600, 6 50 kids in grades K to five. They have a geothermal set up for energy. It was extremely impressive. So we're all in the process right now because we kind of, no one took pictures or kind of kept, they took their own notes. We're sending them into the chair of the SBC and I'm sure they're gonna be summarized. Kind of our main takeaways I took, I think I spent quite a lot of time more on the educational space.
Many took a lot of time on the geothermal space when they were experts in that. So I don't have a summary or a synthesis of kind of the takeaways. But we will be creating that. Mr. Myer will, and I'm sure it will come up in our next meeting. We're in the process of, he reached out to me today with the consensus of the team on another two schools that this team wants to go see. And we might also see Ben Hem here in town. So we're in the process right now of kind of going to see schools. I think it was a really excellent exercise to do as a team. I would say the majority of members of the school building committee were able to attend
during the day, which was great. We saw it with in session with kids and just seeing the learning spaces, the size of the rooms, the storage, the configuration of tables, little things where they're like, don't get lockers. Get, get cubbies. Right. Little, little things. Don't get fancy doorknobs with punch codes. Just get normal locks like don't overcomplicate. Things like those little things that we all kind of captured. This school had sort of pods for a grade with a lot of tables outside and in this instance they were like, we don't use them a lot, it's too loud. So little things like that where we, the principal was
with us, the superintendent, the cus head custodian for the district as well as for the town facilities for the town. They really brought out everybody and it was very, very informative. So I look forward to getting a synthesis for all of you. And all of this is gonna, I think, inform kind of the vision we have ultimately, if we're invited to move in the town, you know, chooses to vote to move us into feasibility. Speaker 1: Thank you. Ms. Brunell, did you, oh, I just wanna see if there are any other updates about the committee before we go. Go to questions. Okay. When is the next meeting? Just for the public's interest
Speaker 9: Noted scheduled. Not yet. Determined. It was going to be on the 20th of October, but that's Ali. So we're trying to work on, there's a lot of Monday holidays in October. Yeah, so that's the, it's probably late October. October or early November. Okay. Speaker 1: Super. Can I say something? Oh yeah, go ahead, Speaker 3: MRNE. Just one thing. If in the future if there's another tour where I can attend during the day, my work is just not as flexible. I've asked Elise if other school committee members could attend. We weren't able to do that this time, but I would definitely want a school committee member there. And I know some of you have maybe more flexible time in the
day than I might have right now. And then the, we're not meeting as frequently right now because there's really nothing to do until Article 33 is decided upon by town meeting. Because until we can move ahead with funding Article 10 or 10, article 10, my bad, getting the two of them confused, article 10. Until we can move ahead with funding, there's not much that we can do. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Speaker 12: Fuman. Yeah, I have, like I said before, a comment that I'm gonna try and make it into a question, but you mentioned the Lexington Elementary School being the word was thermo.
Speaker 9: Geothermal. Geothermal, Speaker 12: Geothermal. To your point before about the importance of not leaving money, being on the on the table in terms of MSBA last year at one point we had a, I believe it was a school committee member from Lexington or a administrator that actually Jillian Wilson Martin organized to hear about all the ways in which they build the building in a sustainable way. And one of the key things, one of the key points that resonate a lot with me and and I think is important to share with the community is
that not only is making a su a building sustainable good for the environment, the MSBA also gives more money. So you were talking about how do you increase that 46 cents on the dollar. There's points, and I don't know if either of you want to speak about that, how important it's to make this building sustainable again, both because it's the right thing for our planet, but also there's actually a financial incentive as well. Speaker 20: Yeah, so MSVA does have a, a reimbursement point. System base rate is largely calculated each
calendar year based on the statutory formula, right? Ability to pay. And then you can add points to that for good maintenance history, being more energy efficient, being more innovative, if there are additional points that you can, you can earn, you know, for, I'll call it best building and best environmental practices. So those things sort of get flushed out as we go through the feasibility study. And then pick a preferred schematic option that gets approved by MSVA
and then we start designing it in. And before we enter into a, a final agreement for them to, to fund the project, they'll add the, the points based on what we, what we're planning to do. So it, it is good to see how other communities do this and how it's worked. They opened in 2020 and then they had to close for COVID like so many other folks. And they've been functioning as well since like, interesting point that really stuck with me was that their elect annual electric bills, like less than 10,000 bucks because of all the solar panels on the
roof in the parking lot. And that powers the geothermal, so they don't really have a heat bill either. So did we get all the information we wanted to see if that's a match for us? Well, no, but boy, we have some ideas to, yeah, to, to look at and explore and what worked for incentives in 20 17 20 18 when they were designing the building might not be available now in 2025, but we, we are gonna look at that. And it was, it was, the hosts were great, but it was also great to see how engaged SVC was.
Natick Natick's. Pretty lucky to have that many folks taking a keen interest in it. Speaker 12: Great. Thanks. Speaker 1: Thank you. Any other questions from the committee? Speaker 9: Okay, can Yeah, go ahead. Just one more under MSBA if I can, just a reminder to the committee that last year, the MSBA had reached out to ask us if Natick would be interested in completing the new module nine, which is a post occupancy evaluation. And while this is currently optional, we said yes, we thought it would be great to kind of see what that would look like, but also to get that report for Kennedy. So module nine entails a one day site visit
and review of the Kennedy Middle School while in regular operation. And the MSBA provided us with a few dates and we're in the process of assembling the internal team that will participate. And we wanted to extend that out to a member of the school committee if they'd like to join us for that visit. Speaker 1: Yeah. So if anyone's interested in part, do you know what the time commitment is or when the approximate might happen? It's, Speaker 9: It's, Matt might have read that more closely. Yeah, Speaker 20: I, I've been through it before. It's probably about an hour and a half to two hours. The date hasn't been determined 'cause they gave us like nine, 10 days and going through a doodle poll.
So when we have a date, then they'll give us a, a little later a time. Sometimes they wanna see arrival and dismissal, sometimes they don't. They, you know, times I've been through this, they did wanna see lunch and see how the cafeteria was working and how people were using it. So it's a good exercise for everybody. Like, so you, you planned it, you built it, what worked well, what would you do again? And what didn't go exactly as is planned. So they can incorporate things and it'll be a great exercise for us as, as we
kind of keep that fresh in mind as we start like another project hopefully. Speaker 1: Okay, thank you Mr. Ellis. That's helpful. So if people are interested, looks like lots of people are interested feeling, so how about this? Why doesn't everyone who's interested, send me an email and then I'll have you on record and once the timing is announced, we can put it out and see who's available and then we'll we'll go from there. Sound good? Okay, great. Speaker 9: And just to wrap that up, we obviously will share any report that we have with the whole committee. So eventually, even if you're not on that actual tour,
we'll we'll bring it forth. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. And is it, oh, just one sec. Is it possible if we have many people interested, could we have two people attend or do they really want to restrict it just to one? I'm assuming that our, our view would be just to listen and observe, right? Yeah, Speaker 9: For sure. Yeah. Let's learn more about the process. I'm not even sure that people ever bring a school community member. I just feel it's necessary given where we are with Memorial and kind of the history there. So, but let us learn if we can. A hundred percent. We're happy to. Speaker 1: Thank you. Mr. Patel. Just
Speaker 17: Curious, do they have the module nine, like a physical report for Lexington, Speaker 1: For example, Speaker 9: After Speaker 1: They did their school? Speaker 9: I don't know. I mean, do you know if they have some of these reports already posted on the MSBA website? Speaker 20: I, I don't like, I don't, I I could look, but having gone through it a couple of times, it, it takes 'em a little while to get to it where it was optional. But you know, anybody that wants to keep a good relationship with 'em don't, doesn't really say no, we wouldn't like to talk to you about what went well and what didn't. Right. I think just about everybody says yes, we can,
we can book a time, walk you through answer questions and yeah, it, it's, it's a good exercise Speaker 17: And feel it would be valuable for us to learn from Speaker 11: Lexington. Speaker 9: If you just Google it Model nine, model nine MSBA, they'll give you a heat map and you can just click on any of those. It's like 20 districts or so and read a report. I'm not sure if Hastings is in there, but there's definitely exemplars of those reports out there. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Gilles and Dr. Sash. Yeah. Great. Super. Okay, I just wanna give a quick update on town meeting Article 33.
So this was the article sponsored by a town meeting member about asking for a three year moratorium on building turf fields in Natick. There were two parts to that article. It was heard by fin com last week. I was at that meeting. They had some questions for us. So I was very appreciative that Dr. Sp had put the working group together to kind of assess all the information around that topic because we were able to answer questions that FinCon members had in terms of the, the process of, of how FinCon evaluated it.
The town meeting moderator actually deemed that article like motion, article three three motion A was like out of order that they could not bring an actual moratorium vote to town meeting for various technical reasons that I didn't really understand, but, so that, that was ruled out of scope. So the only thing that fin com assessed and and voted on was the second part, which was an advisory moratorium, which is more like a, we really think you should do this, but doesn't have any binding action
that it can be resulted in. So if FinCon did vote on it, they did not have a quorum. So they, they made no recommendation because they did not have a quorum, Speaker 11: They had a quorum for the meeting, they had quorum for the meeting. They didn't have for the vote the minimum number of votes. Yeah. In favor or against to make a recommendation to town meeting, right? So they had 10 people outta 15, they needed eight and I think the best vote they got was six to four. Speaker 21: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 11: Yeah. Speaker 1: Thank you Ms. Collins for that. Speaker 11: I just don't want people to walk away and think they met
and they didn't have a quorum. Speaker 1: Fair enough. They didn't have the right quantum of the vote. Yes. Okay. All right. Thank you. So it's actually being discussed at the select board tonight. So they're going to decide if they're gonna make any recommendation or any alternate motions. So we'll find out after that. In terms of what we might do, obviously I'll be, I'll go to town meeting just in case there are any questions for the school committee on this topic. But as we don't have any turf field projects planned or in process now, I don't think it really affects us in the short term. One thing that they did ask about
various FinCon members asked about the, the design work that we had commissioned. And as it hasn't been on a school committee agenda, I wasn't able to say that we had even evaluated the report. But as we start to talk about the capital items, which are due I think in October, then we will be, we'll have an opportunity as a committee to review that field study design and speak to it at that time. So any questions on that topic? Ms. Collins? Speaker 11: I just wanna correct something that I said in a previous meeting. It used to be that the five-year capital plan was due out
to the public on December 1st. CBRC changed that in a recent town meeting that it's due 30 days before the operating budget, which right now is early beginning of February. I don't know what the first business day of February is. Speaker 1: Yeah. So we have some more time to, to work on things. Right. Speaker 11: I just wanted to correct that I misspoke earlier. Speaker 1: No, no, thank you. I appreciate that. Okay. Alright. No questions on that. Okay, let's move to Mr. Gillis for our finance update. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 20: Lemme just scroll back up here. So if you're following along in the digital packet,
it's page 76, summary of the fourth quarter report. Some folks that were here last year might remember we crossed a hundred million mark. We spent over $100 million on total spending on the schools last year. This year was 103 million, 103.7. We ex, we expended 99.3% of our revised budget and that is any transfers in or out and any encumbrances that carried over from the previous year. And we encumbered about 0.7% of our original budget.
And so what we returned to the town was $1,328 or two 1000 of a percent of the general fund. As folks can probably imagine, if you wanted to jump ahead after the memo and look at the two page summary of the general fund, the, the different categories or functions that we report to Desi, some accounts are over, some accounts are under we, we manage that as best we can to make sure that we try to live within the function. But we more importantly try to live within the bottom line because it's really difficult to determine exactly
what you're gonna spend 18 months in advance when a budget basically gets put out. And then when it closes on June 30th, there's always things to change with the staff, with the students, market changes, you know, a variety of different reasons there. Grants we took in about 2.9 million and we spent most of that as well. And the revolving funds, just to summarize, we spent about, we took in about 13 million and, and spent about 12 seven. So our overall bottom line balance there was up
just a little bit where last year that went down. I did include general fund reports that show some of the major funds where folks can see the money going in and out. I won't, won't get into the details, but if people have questions on any that were in the report or outside of it in the report, I can answer outside of it. You're rolling the dice. I might have to get back to you depending on what your question is. Speaker 1: Any questions, Ms. Brunell? And then Ms. Collins. Thank
Speaker 22: You. Speaker 3: Thank you Matt, for the fourth quarter report and for getting this all closed out. It's $103 million is a lot to close out, down to a thousand dollars, so congratulations. Thank you for keeping us in the black. I do have one request to put some of these accounts that are over on a, a budget subcommittee agenda so we could get into some finer details if that's agreeable. Sure. I think it would be interesting
to just go a little bit into the weeds in the budget subcommittee is something like the substitute budget or student activities might as well just take a finer point. Happily Speaker 1: Tell that painful Speaker 3: Story. Yeah. Okay. I I just think it would that those, to me, when I see those overages or underages, that's exactly where the sub budget subcommittee should be bringing some eyes. So if that's agreeable, that's just something I would like to refer. And I was curious about the, in this meeting,
just the, the electricity and telephone. I, and again, this might be for the budget subcommittee, to be honest, I still don't really understand the difference between our shared services. What is shared services and what is coming from the school budget in terms of our utilities? Speaker 20: So, fair question. The heat in utilities that are in the schools, they're tied to meters. They're in our budget. We work with the town facilities department to, you know, build the budget, but they're in our budget, it's not really shared.
Obviously we're not sharing the heater electricity across town when they procure a contract for the supply. The, the whole town might be all the buildings might be getting the, the same price, but we're not really sharing, you know, something that is really directly being consumed by the schools. So that's, but that's in our budget and it's pretty common for most every other school system I've worked in at least that that isn't really shared. The, the staff that support it might be sometimes supporting the schools and supporting the town
and that's on the, the town facilities budget. But the actual heat and utilities are custodial supplies, other things of that nature that are just really using the schools. They're, they're in the school budget. Speaker 3: Okay. No, that's really helpful. But, and earlier tonight you said like, oh, the Lexington school, $10,000, it sounds like that's a pretty low price in terms of paying for electricity for a school. Speaker 20: Sure. Speaker 3: Yeah. So the, okay, so again, something that we should be talking about in our budget subcommittee potentially as we look at opportunities.
Speaker 20: Fair question and good question because e every dollar that we spend, every dollar that we have basically gets spent either inside the classroom or to support what's going on inside the classroom. So from a finance perspective, if our mission and our goal is to deliver the curriculum to students, we want more, as much of the money going into that as possible and as little going into as, as practical going into all the other things that we do. Right. So we want the money in, in the classroom
more than we want it supporting classroom environment. Speaker 3: A hundred percent. Thank you. Speaker 1: And just before I get to Ms. Collins, you mentioned the accounts that you wanted to bring to the budget subcommittee. I heard you say substitutes, what were the other ones? Just for my own personal knowledge, Speaker 3: I, well I just said in general those that are the overages and underages, so I dunno if we wanna set like a percentile in the last column of page six. For example, medical therapeutic SVS is 150%, 156% over.
So I, I don't wanna go through that detail right now, but I think if the committee is open to just letting us look at major overages instead of naming the line items point by point right now. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I, yeah, I just wanted to understand your approach. I just wanna make sure that, that we are not, that we're using the time with our administration really effectively. So I guess I'd ask you to come back to, to the committee once you've kind of identified the, the accounts that you wanna review and just give us sort of a, an estimate of, of how long it might take to do that.
Speaker 3: Okay. I heard something different from the administration tonight. I heard that they were open to taking this sheet in general. I can give you those nu those lists right now if you want me to. Speaker 1: Ms. Lathers, I, I mean I think this is something we've kind of already had some conversations around of, and so I think it's just part of my understanding is that the administration wants to use those meetings as they develop the budget and any storytelling about where outliers existed from the previous year just increases the understanding of it all. So maybe I'll ask my question a different way. How many meetings do you think it will take to go through all these? Or do you anticipate it's something
that's gonna go on like sort of for several weeks or months? No, Speaker 3: I just think they, it would be part of our regular meeting, Speaker 20: So Yeah, I I okay, sure. Hope it wouldn't take weeks or Speaker 3: Months. Months, Matt. It's gonna take months. Speaker 20: I hope we could get through it. Oh, Speaker 1: Oh, well, well my understanding it seems like there's just some stories to it. Like if it, you know, it's probably one agenda item on one meeting to run through it just to say are there Okay. Any outliers that might have happened? Oh, and, and Speaker 20: Okay. You know, previewing the, the budget that we're in now, I think folks may recall for FY 26 that we increased the sub budget significantly
and we also increased the student activities budget to deal with what I think were planned shortfalls that were inherited, that we're no longer we're, we're on track with, with those things as well. You know, there was one in there, it was really kind of a management change where we stopped charging paraprofessionals to grants to avoid benefits surcharge and started paying tuitions out of the grant so that we could stretch our dollars a little farther without basically paying a, a 10.5% increase. So I'm happy to kind of go over those, those stories.
But the FY 26 will be much closer than FY 25 was, or FY 24 was. Speaker 1: Okay. That helps me to frame it. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, Ms. Collins Speaker 11: First, I think that 1328 is my new favorite number. I may have to go play it in the daily numbers. Why I more information's what we returned. Oh, oh, Speaker 2: Oh. I was like, what Speaker 11: A couple of questions. One is on encumbrances and I know at the beginning of the year we encumber a lot for things like electricity, salaries, all sorts of different things. And you talked about the encumbrance as as regards
to the grants, can we at some point get a list of what is outstanding in the encumbrance file that is not grants to I'm looking for an aging, basically. Speaker 20: Yeah. 'cause e eventually we closed them out for the year. So yeah, we, you know, you can kind of see by function what's there, but if you wanted a list of like, the vendors and, and what's, what's being held? Speaker 11: I'm just trying to understand what kinds it leads into the next piece of the unpaid bills. Right. So I just trying to pair them up in my mind.
Speaker 20: So encumbrances are always goods or services, right? So an easy one is any of the utility bills or the heat bills each year you get, you have 12 months, you have 12 bills and you're usually waiting a little bit behind for when you're gonna pay. So we encumber some money for those bills that we know are coming in June. Speaker 11: Bill doesn't get here till at least July, Speaker 20: July sometimes August. Right? Speaker 11: I said at least I covered myself on that one. Speaker 20: Right. Or, or, or sometimes even later. And then if we've ordered some supplies
and there's been a delay for whatever reason and it's not gonna get here until July, August, September, or even October, then that money's encumbered and held for that particular good. But we can't encumber payroll for that type, that type of thing. Past the end of the year. Past the end of the year, we, we could, but we do lump sum payments for the teachers. So, you know, everything is really tied out. We have a, a final warrant. So prior year I think we, we, we were close to
$900,000 in encumbrances this year we were 6 0 1. Trying to make that tighter and cleaner. But there are just some things that when orders go out, the vendors can't always get it to us in time. And you know, the with you can kind of see the, the bigger ones there. You know, we had some computer equipment that we were able to, to order when Dennis combined a couple of his functions to, to live within the bottom line and make it work. And it takes a little while sometimes for those, for that equipment to, to, to get here
because very few things now are sitting on a shelf just waiting for you. So many things are made to order. So hope that summary explains it. But we, you know, we can produce a list, Speaker 11: Which is why you eat at Davio's and not McDonald's. Speaker 20: Right. Speaker 11: My other favorite question, which I will continue to ask, has free cash been certified? Oh, stop. Has it been submitted? Let's give you an easy one. Speaker 20: Not, not that I know of. I, you know, last talking with town officials,
they were still working on it. Speaker 1: New growth. Speaker 11: This new growth is a question and there's so much that's a question there. You've gotten no indication though that it won't be ready for town meeting? Speaker 20: I don't want to, I'm Speaker 11: Not asking you whether it will be, I'm asking you, have you got any indication that it will be delayed? Speaker 20: I I don't wanna speak for them. Speaker 11: That to me says you have not been told it will be delayed. Speaker 20: I have not been told it will be delayed. But I don't wanna say it'll be ready either. I, Speaker 11: I'm, I, that's why, that's why I changed it around to find out whether you'd been informed
that there may be a delay as opposed to we're submitting it on Speaker 1: Pick your finger. How about this Ms. Collins? I will ask the chair of the select board if he's hurt. That'd Speaker 11: Be helpful. Speaker 1: I would appreciate it. Okay. We've also learned that Matt is not the parent to ask for money. That's true. That Matt Gillis well Speaker 20: For Theresa, I was like, wow, your dad would give you money but wouldn't let you out of the house. Speaker 1: So Speaker 11: Were you gonna spend it? Speaker 1: She had savings. Speaker 20: She knew exactly Speaker 1: How that was Speaker 11: My father for the car. Speaker 20: Well I just had, for my mother's fault, flashbacks to my childhood with the Portuguese girls, with their parents that were, as we would say, off the boat,
they, they, they were a little stricter and, and it was just, it just made me think of my friends growing up. Kind of the same thing. But like, oh yeah, I could work dad, but I couldn't, you know, couldn't get out for the party. Get that one. Speaker 1: Any other questions for Mr. Gillis? On the financial report? Okay. Speaker 11: On fourth quarters, right. We're not, we haven't done unpaid bills yet. Yeah, Speaker 1: You're right. Okay. On fourth quarter. Yep. Because Speaker 11: I do have one there Speaker 1: On the unpaid bills. Yeah. Okay. Okay, let's move on. Speaker 20: So the unpaid bills we had, we had four of them.
My computer shut down. So for the most part, there a little bit out of our control at times when, when we're gonna get these bills that come in late. 'cause if we had them on time, we would, we would pay them. One of 'em, somebody closed a, a purchase order early. And when you close the encumbrance and the year's over, there's no putting it back. So it's a late bill that goes into late bills. Other ones when, like, we have some staffing changes, whether it's us or the vendor and things don't come to us or we, we can't get an answer.
This is how this happens. But you know, again, it's, it's kind of fractions of a, of a percentage when we're paying $24 million in, in warrant for goods and services. So I, we'll try to make it get to zero. Just, it's very difficult to promise that it's, it's gonna be zero and it, and if it does, then you can almost guarantee the next one. Statistically we're gonna have another late bill somewhere. But we, we try to keep it as, as clean and clear as possible. And that's kind of in the spirit of the law, that, that,
that requires town meeting to approve late bills so that municipalities do, are, are really encouraged to have a good clean closing of the books so that people can get an accurate viewpoint or snapshot of how, how the town or city is doing financially. Speaker 11: And I, Speaker 2: I wanna do it after, but that was not okay. Speaker 1: Okay. Sorry, go ahead. Speaker 11: And I, I do recognize that you know, of all the, given the number of bills that we pay,
we have done a good job this year better than we had done last year. But as you sort of alluded to, there is a reason that the town meeting the quantum of vote is a four fifths vote for unpaid bills. And I just wanna tell you that this community is not used to paying unpaid bills. How they did that, I don't think I want an answer to, but it is something that the town meeting frowns upon. And you know, one of the few that sticks in my mind from 20 years on town meeting
was one year from Murphy Hessey to Lehan. Okay? Speaker 21: But Speaker 20: E even a vendor that knows the rules could make a mistake with the Speaker 11: Right, but I'm saying that was a very tough fight, okay. To get them to pay their bills. It's all I, I'm not trying to throw shade in any way and I realize that some of these things are not really preventable from, you know, one person looking at it. But I just want you to understand the landscape that in this town we don't pay unpaid bills because we pay everything.
That last part is me being a little bit facetious I think. But I just want, I just want you to know that if you get a hard time, it's because there's not history of having to pay it with the four fifth quantum. Speaker 20: Understood. Speaker 11: But I'm not throwing shade. I just, Speaker 1: Any other questions about the unpaid bills memo? And then just before we close Mr. Gillis, I just wanted to address something that I, I thought I heard you say in referring to new immigrants to our country and just wanted to say that
we like to refer to people who are new to our country as new immigrants and not off the boat. So would appreciate you, Speaker 20: I apologize to that convention. Apologize that offended anybody. I was just sort of reverting back to my time growing up in the eighties. Speaker 1: Okay. I, I appreciate the apology. Thank you. Okay. Alright, so moving on to the policy subcommittee, Mr. Brand. Speaker 15: Okay, so I'll start briefly and then maybe Dr. Stash and Ms. Miller and Dr. Ferguson and Ms.
B, all of the, the people who are smarter than me can go through it. So just as a quick thing, we have three policies to discuss. Why I bend over this thing is adjustable. Three policies to discuss tonight. We do have action items on the agenda for all three, but those are there so that we have the option, the only, the only policy and Dr. Sp talk about this a bit more that I would recommend that we actually vote on tonight is B-D-F-A-E two, which is the submission and approval of the school improvement plan for the other.
And there's a good reason for that. The, for the, for the other two, this is the technically the first reading. And so because there's a time constraint on, on the school improvement plan, that is why we, I, I would recommend that we vote on that one tonight after we discuss it. But for the other two, this is the first reading for the, and so I'll just summarize all three real well the other two for the cell phone policy. That process, we first started talking about it at the policy subcommittee maybe six months ago, maybe longer.
Wait, it has gone through a handful of revisions that I'm sure Dr. Ferguson will cover. And for the Title IX sexual harassment policy, we took that up in 2024 and then didn't have, or 2022 Speaker 23: Is the last time it looks like it was maybe Speaker 15: Revised. But then we talked about it, it was like on the agenda last year. Yeah. And then it's complicated than we weren't to make changes. Now we're updating it. So these are first readings for those two, those are more complicated.
So I would maybe Dr. Bash, maybe we start with the school improvement plan one because that's, I think a little less complicated if that's all right. Sure. I'm gonna pass Speaker 1: It to Ms. Feloni. Speaker 24: Thank you. So this policy, we only made one change to it, which you can see on the red line version. This policy always said that the school committee would review and vote on the school improvement plans by July 1st, which makes it really difficult for our school building administrators
to write their school improvement plans at the end of the school year when we've just wrapped up the school year, we're still analyzing our data and trying to think forward when we haven't really built our plan at the district level for the coming school year. So we have not met that timeline in, I don't know how many years that I've been in the district. Thank you. Ever. So really what makes the most sense is
to change that from July 1st to the third week of October. We didn't wanna give it a specific date because every year that date of when we meet is going to change. So we thought the third week of October made the most sense because principals could come and present their school improvement plans to you towards the end of September, beginning of October. And it would give you enough time to review them and then vote them. So the only change really is to change it from July 1st to the third week of October. Speaker 15: So now I'll defer, that was the whole discussion. That was a quick one.
Speaker 1: Okay, great. Speaker 11: Do you want an approval? I'm gonna motion Speaker 1: First. Any questions about that? Okay. Yep. Speaker 11: Move to approve the revised policy BDFA dash e dash two submission and approval of the school improvement plan. Speaker 1: Second, we'll vote this all in favor. Please raise your hand. Anyone against? Anyone abstaining. So we have a 7 0 0 vote. Thank you. Speaker 15: And now I, I guess whichever you would prefer either. So let we go back to order. Why don't we do that? So, so maybe it makes sense Dr. Ferguson for you
to take over now. Speaker 25: Sure. I'm gonna just briefly review the history and progression of the policy that was submitted to this committee for update. And just sort of recall briefly that it had started back in September of 2024. There was an initial referral to the subcommittee. There was a first read and revision in May of 2025. There was an update provided to this committee, the full committee on June of 2025. And there was review with principals in June of 2025
and there was a second subcommittee read and revisions that was completed on September 9th, 2025. And I submitted a memo to this committee with a red line version of that initial draft and a clean version that was submitted. And so, I mean I think this is really just an opportunity to echo and review sort of the impetus for why this policy update needed to be made and sort of anchoring that back in the mental health needs
of students and the growing research that suggests that students with increased use or excessive use have negative outcomes in terms of mental health, in terms of behavior regulation, in terms of social socialization. So those were the, the drivers for this policy revision. It's also sort of aligned with an ongoing legislation that's being reviewed by the Massachusetts Senate, which has been deferred to December of this year. But in many ways, in many respects I would say
what we are proposing is really proactive because if that actually passes much of what this current policy aims to do would've been addressed in whatever law is passed. And I think the proposal is that is ready for schools to implement by 20, the 20 26, 27 academic year. So that's sort of my, my overview. I know this committee has reviewed or at least read some of those policy recommendations for update and I'm happy to address any questions
or concerns or discussions about what was submitted. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Ferguson. Questions from the committee? Ms. Collins, Speaker 11: What was it? Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to say not I resist, but something like that. I believe this committee has already seen this policy made some, some, some sub some changes and that it went back through the policy committee to make sure that those changes are what was made. And they in fact were, because I know that it was came before this committee because I asked about my glucose monitor. So I don't think any nothing's changed here from
what the committee requested to be changed the last time we saw this is all I'm saying personally, I think it's ready. But Speaker 1: Ms. Lathers, Speaker 26: I'm confused. I don't, the red line version doesn't line up with the draft version. So that's, so I that's confus that's a little bit confusing to me. Like I'm seeing sections in here where the, there's substantial differences between the red line version and the draft version and not called out as a red line version. Speaker 25: That is correct. And I can speak to that if you want to hear some of my revisions. Some of the recommendations that were made by school committee were went beyond edits and
and redrafts, they really suggestions that sort of required us to look at the sort of the larger framing of the, the policy, the initial draft that was, that was made. And so you are right, some of the, the revisions were not just simple edits that could be lined up directly. So some of the things we had to look at obvious included addressing issues related to what exceptions could be made for students. You know, with five oh fours and IEPs, that really required us to sort of input new sections and new paragraphs really that that tried to address that.
There were other broader recommendations to suggestions, use of cell phones, emergency situations off campus, school sponsored events and such. So yes, you can't directly line up so we should Speaker 26: Ignore the red line version just, Speaker 25: Well I needed to submit it as I was directed to, but I think the reviewed policy really moves beyond the, the scope of the red line to include some new concerns that were raised by this committee. Speaker 26: Okay then yeah, so I guess my only other question is
what is the rationale for not being more aggressive and moving towards where we think the legislation's gonna take us? Speaker 25: And that would be banning of cell phones on school property Speaker 1: Dur Well during well Speaker 25: Much bell to be much Speaker 1: Yeah, Speaker 25: I think that's a great question. My initial and and welcome all the reflections here. I think my initial response to that is we do anticipate that despite the language being more forceful, I think our teachers gonna are gonna need to enforce that. And I think if students, and we expect students to show up on campus at times
with their phones in their bags because they have afterschool activities that they need to be in contact with parents for and a host of other reasons why they may have it with them. And I do think it's beyond the scope of our teachers to be more forceful in engaging those students if the phones are actually out of sight and out of use. And so there may be considerations to be made around how forceful we can be and I think that I'd be happy to sort of hear more of sort of what those concerns are around the forcefulness of this policy and, and try to respond to them.
Speaker 1: I mean I think the one thing that that jumps out at me is it feel, I'll just speak to the high school, it feels like somewhat arbitrary and done and inconsistent. I also, I'm very concerned with the just use throughout mean, I'll give an example on my side. I had a freshman who had CDS and then had a first period study hall and happened to have a second period where there was a lot of substitute and I would, there would be three consecutive hours of phone use on those days, which is, I don't, not good for anyone I don't think.
And so I mean I it's the use during lunch, the use during, I mean my kids will be, if they hear that I've said this, they'll be this right me right now. But I'm just gonna lay it out there like the use during study halls, the use during CDS, the use during lunch. I feel like we should be finding better ways for those kids to be interacting and doing things during those periods. That's, I just, in my opinion, you ignore me. Okay. Mr. Brand, Speaker 15: Just for a, a little bit of context about some of the discussions that we had at the policy subcommittee and, and Jamon and Kathy certainly feel free we had a,
some discussions about the distinction between the enforcement and the education with what the policy should should do. So while I agree with you that three hours during school of direct uses of the cell phone is not good, I'm not sure that that's the responsibility of the policy. If there, if there was a policy in place that allowed for more structured guidelines on what should be enforced and what the education, we spent a lot of time talking about education for families, then that might solve the problem. The the thing, and we talked about a couple
of scenarios specifically and Dr. Ferguson alluded to some of them that make it hard for me at least to say you can't have your cell phone on your person at all, which is grandma and grandpa are picking up my kids on a Friday after school because my wife and I are going away and they need to have their phones with them and it would be in their backpack if properly enforced and they should be off if properly enforced. But then after school it's no longer,
you know, our purview. And so like, and that's a small example but I think a lot of people, my, both my daughters go to work after school that they need their phones. So we had a lot of those con this is just for a little bit more context about some of the discussions that we had in the multiple meetings. Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just, I can totally appreciate that piece of the enforcement and the challenge often the way, but then we are specifically saying at the high school level that it's we're it's only restricted during instructional time, not in the hall. Like we're that, like that's a decision made
and I'm just curious about it. I mean just being a little provocative to push at that a little bit more because those are, you know, Speaker 9: Do you wanna go first? No, go ahead. So it's a good question and a fair one and the best way I can authentically answer it is I think there's some evolution of this that's going to happen, right? And that we could readily, I'm a big believer in like make a brave and calculated change, hear feedback like you're saying, I don't disagree with you actually with if it's being used in CDS or some study halls. But I would say in the learning environment I'm really
seeing and and with looking at our scores, I feel good that there's a lot of learning going on and there's a reduction of the use in a learning space. I'm really interested to see what law comes out on this. I think whatever law comes out, it's gonna have some prickliness alongside it because there's going to be stakeholders from all the different intersections of people in this who are gonna have something big to say, I'll just leave it there and people can guess at it. But we have teachers, we have parents, we have students and we have administrators all sort of intersecting in the space. I would like to ask if you know, how many people would like
to be there kind of having that kind of conversation when they're supposed to be teaching content. I think it's a really awkward place to put people. I also think it needs to evolve. I also don't think we need so much use in every part of the day. So that is something I'm gonna think about and I think it'll be part of an evolution of this. We've evolved already, right? 'cause we largely see at least myself, I haven't been in Natick so long to have seen that evolution, but I think people here could speak to the evolution of much less electronics that are prevalent. I can also state that I think a tighter model in middle
school, which is what this policy delivers and a looser in high school is part of a gradual release of responsibility to students who very soon will be out on their own monitoring their own use of tech. And that is something we should be teaching and having kind of quality conversations. I'm excited about the advisories and other pieces of curriculum in the schools that can help kids get think metacognitively about their use of these devices. So I'm not even giving, I'm giving you more philosophy, which may not be what you wanted, but I really do see this
as like the first place we're gonna stake, put a stake in the ground. We could have taken, you know, a more conservative stance and actually done nothing frankly. And we could have just waited to see what the state did and we were like, nope. We had conversations and our advice was, I don't think we should do that. I think we should take the step because I think whatever the state comes up with won't be hugely different than kind of where we're landing. We could be wrong, but that's what we think. So I think it, this is, I think about models of complex change and one of 'em is you gotta do the thing the digestible unit people can handle and be successful with.
So we can celebrate it and then move to the next iteration of the work. So that's where I am on this for one, one voice here. Shai. Speaker 12: So now that Dr. Sp spoke, I wish I had spoken first 'cause you stole my much of my thunder. No, but I was gonna say the, this issue of cell phone use and digital being more broadly is one that is getting a lot of attention and a lot of research, including colleagues of mine. And there's a couple of key things that I think are important to that I'd like to share.
One, I'm really glad that we are taking a position and that we are moving in this direction because, you know, this policy I think is so critical and updating it is so important. So I appreciate all the work that got that went through it. In terms of the a a general philosophy that I have, and I know obviously a school committee member in particular, there's a a, a purview issue. We're focused on policy, but in general, I would say addressing cell phone use with policy only is not a good approach. There's policy has to be, is one
of the tools in our toolkit. There's other, as you know, there's obviously education, there's talking, there's, you know, advisor or health education helping students think about how does digital media or digital tools, including social media impact them. So much of the negative impact of cell phone use happens outside of school. You know, they're using it late at night as Mrs. Kelani said, you know, if even elementary school kids, if they're watching YouTube till midnight. So there is a lot of things that we need to do beyond just policy. Obviously policy is an important tool, but shouldn't be the only one.
And that speaks to Dr. SP's point in general. I've, I've noticed a lot of districts going the same route that we are in, which is a much more restrictive middle school policy, less restrictive high school for those reasons. So basically you're, it's not that you're saying it's okay to use cell phones, you know, not okay to use in middle school, but it's okay in high school, but rather it's an educational process by which in middle school is a very rigid policy. And then over, you know, over time in high school you're trying to transition between policy and education. You know, where kids are now regulating their own use.
'cause by the time they get to college, there's no policy at all. They can use their cell phone whenever they want or or in the real world. So I think it is that, that makes a lot of sense and it is kind of what I've seen in a lot of other districts as well. And so it makes a lot of sense. And again, especially if you think about it as policies and the only solution, it's one tool and a toolkit in high school, we also start adding other tools to the toolkit, which is that education piece and that self-regulation, self-management piece. Speaker 1: Yeah. Ms. Brune, Speaker 3: Thank you. So I have my own opinions, but I, I'm speaking as a school committee member, I feel
as if I'm not certain how the parents will react to this policy. I don't know if it goes far enough because like we've said, there are different levels of ways to approach this bell to bell seems to be one method and then a progressive method like this. And I, to be honest, I have not sourced this with anyone. I haven't, I've waited for people to call me. It's buried, not, it's not buried, but it's like on our agenda and it's like midnight right now. I at least I feel like it's that late.
I, I personally would want our committee to let this sit out in the public domain for a little while and see what response we get back. So that's, I'm curious if the committee is open to that. Speaker 1: Can I, I have a comment too. And then, then Dr. Figman. So I'm wondering Ms. Brunell, if, are you, are you thinking that the feedback you would get from the community is that they would want a more restrictive policy? Speaker 3: I just don't know what feedback we'll get back Speaker 1: Because if we vote in this policy, we'll then get feedback from the public on how it's working.
That's true. So I'm wondering if that actually might be more valuable feedback since, you know, this has been kind of a thoughtful, you know, progressive approach to, to limiting use to, to get to test it and see what parents think. I don't Speaker 3: Know. Speaker 1: I hear that. I mean I'm all, I'm all for banning cell phones, but, and I, I would argue, you know, if we're gonna say that, but, and I would argue that this idea that they're gonna be out in the real world, the consequences of using your phone inappropriately at
college or at work are much greater than in a school. Like being professionally embarrassed, you know, having, you know, your performance review affected, you know, being called out in front of, you know, a hundred people in a college classroom. I would argue that those are much more damaging consequences. You know, so don't we want people to experience some of those consequences now so that they can kind of practice and, and get a sense that maybe this is something they do need to be able to control. So I guess I'm in favor of this progressive approach,
I guess I said a lot of things and then said some of my own things too. I'm sorry. Well, Speaker 3: Back to your first question, whether or not we'll get a response yes, we'll get a response, but do you, I mean that's making policy without input and so maybe what we're saying is that the input we needed came from the administrators and the principals and the teachers. And so that's the admin, that's the input we were looking for. We, we are acknowledging however, that we have not gotten feedback from families. And I'm not sure if you got feedback from students and if that committee wants to move forward with that. I'm prepared to make an argument tonight and vote,
but I think it would behoove us on a policy that impacts students' lives and there's no timeline to, to see what, how this bubbles to the surface. Speaker 1: Dr. Fugman and then Ms. Collins, and then Ms. Lathers. Speaker 12: So first of all, I think it's important to clarify that if you have any, well, your respect, if you haven't received feedback from parents, I mean, we haven't received, I have had these conversations because it's a topic that I'm interested in. So I have talked to a lot of parents. I think that not surprisingly, you get the whole range of opinions. Like you just won't get consensus from parents, which is,
I think in general, and also I was joking before about the panel, but it was a really interesting conversation. This is the Spark kindness event. They had the screen ages movie. The night was in theory designed for elementary school parents, but the audience was actually very mixed. Right. And it was interesting to really hear, again, the rage and perspectives. So I don't think we're gonna find a consensus among parents. That's not what I'm hearing. That's not what I, we saw in the audience that night. It was interesting 'cause some parents are looking to schools to figure out, for the schools to figure out how
to solve my child's cell phone issue. Even be school hours. Whereas others want to have more autonomy and say, I want my, I, I want, I'm the parent. I want to be helping my child figure this out. So in general, I would say the feedback that I've received so far is really a, a range and, and we won't get consensus. I personally think, especially given, you know, you provided at the very beginning, the long history of this policy changes. I do think it's important to move forward on this. It's an important policy and I think it's an important message that we'll be sending by approving a
this policy tonight. And I think that to Dr. SP's point, or or MS course one of you talked about, by putting the policy out there, we, we, we would get input once it's, once it's actually in effect. I think that again, at this point, even if we were to, to focus groups, we would get very many opinions once it's in, which would be all speculation. But I think that once you put in, in effect, then parents could have a more informed decision to be like, this is great, or this is not really working for me, or this is so that, that's what I think. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Fs and Ms. Collins.
Speaker 11: Yeah. As I said, we've essentially heard this before. The changes that have been made were changes that were made at our request. I don't know about other people, but my phone didn't blow up, my email didn't blow up. So it's not like, and, and it's not like this is, you know, makes us one of 351 cities and towns in this commonwealth that are choosing to ban cell phones. The conversation is out there. Will we ever make everybody happy about anything? I'm not gonna hold my breath for it, but what delay does is it means our teachers have
nothing to back them up. They don't have the right really to say, no, this is the policy, we're gonna follow it. And I think that would be a huge disservice done to our teaching staff by our, by this committee, if we choose to delay it in hopes of getting some input somewhere other than what we've already heard and already seen on the mom's group. And in Natick talks, Speaker 1: Ms. Lathers and then Mr. Brand and then Ms. Brunell. I can, I mean I put out there of what, you know,
what are the arguments to be more progressive. I can, I can appreciate those. I do continue to urge, you know, to find what are alternatives in the high school for downtime and like looking for creative ways to give kids options so that I can appreciate, I'm struggling a little bit because I'm, I guess it's just the lack, I don't think I have the version that's currently the policy because I'm just not seeing very many changes. Like is the policy that's in effect right now doesn't say because it, the red line version, both versions say for middle school, the peds must remain often securely
stored during the entire day, including during transitions. I just don't see any kind of meaningful difference. But maybe it's 'cause I'm just not seeing the original version. Speaker 11: It's the red line. No, you're, what you're seeing is the red line from the previous version we saw. Not from the original version that's in the policy manual. Speaker 1: Okay. So I'd have to go back to the policy. Okay. 'cause that's what I Yeah. Had, would have to go see. Yeah. Okay. 'cause that's what is make was making me confused. A little confused too. But so that, so basically this is just codifying the behavior, the things
that have already been implemented in the schools in policy and the current policy book does not have, you know, middle school offered away in there. Speaker 25: Yeah. So yeah, this, Speaker 1: Sorry if I'm behind to just Speaker 25: No, it's, it's okay. I mean, I, I think this has taken quite some time to, to get here. The actual policy that's currently in place does not address much of what we're trying to address with this updated policy. Okay. And yes, some changes have been made last year when the principals came and presented to you. We've been working on some changes. Those changes have not been codified in a policy.
And I think that's part of what would be really helpful moving forward. Okay. So I, and, and I think there's always gonna be room to update the new policy once legislation comes through, which might be more conservative and a little bit more forceful in how we wanna frame this. And those changes will have to be made because there'll be a law. Speaker 1: So I would just request that if we're voting, we vote next week. So I can just at least look at what the current written policy is. But if we really think we wanna move forward today, I'm not that word, Mr. Brand. I saw you had your hand up. Speaker 15: Thank you. So I be a couple of things mostly on process,
but for starters, I like the policy the way it is. I've spent a lot of time looking at it and talking about it. I think that there is a, from a process perspective, the compromise for me, because while I agree, we did look at this and we've talked about it in, in this meeting, I think for many people who might be watching, I don't know if anybody's watching right now, but for many people who might watch the recording who are interested in this topic, this will be the first time that they will see what I would consider to be like a final draft. And I don't have a, i I am not opposed to waiting
until our next meeting, at least to give people the opportunity if they want to study it, if they want to come to the meeting and speak on it so that we can hear that feedback. I, I think waiting two weeks is, I don't know if our meeting is in two weeks, one week next month, waiting another week so that we follow our norm. Particularly for impactful policies like this, that doesn't bother me at all. However, if the pleasure of the committee was to vote on it tonight, I would support it because I support the policy and I wouldn't vote against it because of the process. My preference would be to wait a week so
that at least there's the flexibility for those who are interested to provide us with the feedback. Because I do believe that for most people, this will be the version that they look at. They're not gonna remember a conversation from June and think about sort of the differences. I think they need to see a final product. This is a big deal. It's behavior change for a lot of people. I, you know, so I don't have a problem waiting a week on something like this. I wouldn't have a problem waiting two weeks. But like, so problem with three weeks, three weeks is a, is a red line for me. Red line that you can actually see in the document. But, you know, so that's, that to me is a,
is a compromise that I could, that I could be all right with. But I understand all, you know, all the, and I just want to make it really clear. I like the policy and I, I love the work that went into it and, and so that's what my thoughts are. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you Mr. Bran. Dr. Spia. That Ms. Brunell, is that okay? Sure. Yep. Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm totally okay to wait as well. Not that it's my say, but if it matters to the committee, I'm happy to just offer that. A guiding question I guess I'd offer, as you do review these, which I think is smart to kind of go back to that I have it in front of me right now is
what is the problem we're trying to solve? Because we're not trying to solve the pro I would offer, we're not trying to solve the problem of cell phones with our youth everywhere they are. We're not trying to set up one specific group of people to be the police of it in one specific space in a way that's more extravagant than would be reasonable. We're trying to protect the learning environment and distractibility of our students, which we have a lot of research around it, which I think Dr. Ferguson offered one of the first times he brought this to us. So I offer that humbly. 'cause it's a hard question and I know, especially when we have kids of varying ages.
I've had them my own four and had my struggles with this. But I'd ask, what is the problem we're trying to solve as an and is it a reasonable next step to give to the people in the system? Because as I said in my first interviews with this committee, there's a difference between aspiration and being able to operationalize change with very well intended people. And so we might have aspirations, but I wanna be able to put whatever we put into place, have people be able to make happen and still protect the learning space. Speaker 1: Thank you Dr. Sp, Ms. Brunel, and then Mr. Patel.
Speaker 3: Thank you. I I really appreciate that guiding question. IIIA hundred. That's helpful and I think it would be helpful if the policy is not voted tonight to hear from constituents about that question. I would push back a little bit that I think that in addition to the learning environment we're, we also have a school culture. And so we know that cell phones can be a problem in school culture. We've seen it. And I also like a lot of this policy, I actually love that the MP three player is out of the policy. So good job bringing us to 2025.
I, my personal opinion, I'm not saying this is how I'm gonna vote because I don't vote in this seat as a personal, as a parent, but my personal opinion is that the middle school line could be clarified about where the peds must be secured. I think that we know the research that a student that secures their phone in their pocket is automatically distracted because they feel their bo their phone on their body. If you see your phone, if you feel your phone,
your your brain is already like going like, oh, do I like the, the pavlonian? Like whatever, you know, like you're thinking, oh my goodness, did I get a notification now hopefully the phone is off. But you don't know. I would like to see the middle school phones in the backpacks like off the body cannot securely stored does not mean on your body. I also think that, I like that the high school one says is not permitted during academic instruction time, but I think that's gonna need to be clarified. Is that CDS is that study halls? Is that the library?
There's just an article in the Boston Globe this week about a school that did not permit phones in the library and the, the library checkout rate went up by like 800% because kids were finally in the library without their phones checking out books. You know, I, I know that there's an experience that some kids have where they go to camp for the summer and you don't have a cell phone and parents love it. One of the reasons they talk about sending kids to camps is because there's no cell cell phones because they build, it gives kids an opportunity
to sit face to face and talk. I think our lunchroom potentially at the high school could use that for school culture to break down barriers between kids and give people that like ability to be with one another. Now I understand the idea of wanting to make it a progressive policy that rewards kids for getting more mature and making decisions, but I think we could be stronger. We, I don't think we have to say bell to bell, but I think that this could be stronger in a couple of ways. Speaker 1: Thank you Mr. Brunell. Mr. Patel.
Speaker 17: There's a lot going on here today. That's a good discussion. And I think I, I agree with Dr. Fugman and what Mr. Brand said. I don't think a consensus is feasible on this. Even just seven of us have had a lot of differing opinions on where we land and my wife and I, my, with regards to a preschooler have difficulty deciding what to do with her on her phone policy. So I think that's outta the question. She has learned to take selfies recently. Wait until she hits kindergarten. Yeah, she's, she's taking selfies with everyone's phones now. 'cause you don't need to log in to do that.
But anyway, I, I think in this policy, there's one thing I might want to change. Maybe study hall be considered an academic time, right? Study periods, but I don't think lunch or hallways, I think maybe it's allowed a little bit, but I think reaching out to giving parents time to giving this week to essentially get their say in I think is valuable. So I'm comfortable voting for it today and also pushing it back. So whichever makes sense for everyone else. Speaker 1: Okay. Alright.
It seems like we've come to a point where everyone's had had a chance to say what they wanted to. Are we comfortable Mr. Brandy, you suggested that we vote next Monday on this. Speaker 15: That is what I suggested. Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. Is everyone comfortable with that plan? Anyone not comfortable? Okay. So we will take a vote next Monday and if there are members of the public who would like to write to us in the interim, please write to the school committee. Yeah. Speaker 15: Is it worth potentially in, I don't want to write newsletters for principals, but in the weekly, maybe it's worth thinking about including that this is going to be on the agenda.
I don't want to create a storm, but if, if we want, if we're actually specifically asking for people to give us feedback, this is, they might not know. I dunno how many people go to the agenda every week just for fun besides me. I'm, we don't have to do that. But if the, if we think that that would be valuable, Speaker 1: I suppose we could, even if we don't share the policy, we could just ask people to share their thoughts about cell phone use. Sure. I don't know. Speaker 9: I think we have to be careful what we open up there because I think if we offer it to families, we should offer it to students.
We should offer to teachers to have a say and then I think you're gonna have even bigger lack of consensus. It's true. So I, I personally think sometimes there's things that have like consensus bubbles, there's things that require consensus and there's things that don't. I, I, I agree with the delay of the vote or, or I especially think people need to look at that original policy. It's been a while. This is not gonna be an easy decision. But I would highly, I think we're at a point in time a few things converging. One, we don't have anything from legal in the state yet. Two, we've had a team that very bravely has adopted
a new process around cell phones in the last year and a half, two years. We should applaud that It's going okay. Yes. Are there holes in it? I think Ms. Filer's really gave some things I'm gonna bring to Josepha to think about. And I'd also say, we haven't done the code of conduct. You heard plenty about that today. So what consequences are we going to be giving? That's a whole nother layer of this that we, that's the difference between what we aspire to and what we can actually operationalize in a way that feels fair. Because the second a kid has a cell phone out twice and they're not supposed to, and then the parent gets the call that says, we took your kid's cell phone
because the consequence is now you have to come pick it up. That's gonna really detract all of our principles away from the beautiful work you just saw in their four sipps. Trust me, I've been in that position as a principal. So I think we have to be very careful and I'd argue take some incremental steps in what we vote. That would be my advice. It's not because I have low expectations. I came from a school environment when I, where I did be on cell phones in 2014 and I did it in conjunction with parents and with a lot of communication we have to do this in partnership with our staff, with our students, with our families, with our committee.
And it's sometimes not a full consensus is what I would argue. Speaker 1: Ms. Brunell, do you had your hand up? Do you still wanna speak and I see you Dr. Speaker 3: Fix Smith? I mean I, I guess I, I'm wondering how we do this then, is it about setting a implementation date in the future? Because it sounds like even where we devote this tonight, there is not the other pieces in place yet that really need to be in place. Speaker 9: I think we could implement this policy as written right now. I, I think the issue, the bigger issue is if it got more stringent, we'd have to think about that other piece
and link it to our handbooks and our code of conduct. And I think that the committee can make some asks of us to monitor the rollout to talk openly about how it gets integrated into the code of conduct. I'm not trying to argue to rush a vote tonight at all. Yeah, I I'm just cautioning us to take reasonable steps because I'm personally not hearing from any staff saying that cell phones right now are, are making it difficult for them to teach. I can't speak to the SEI agree with you Ms.
Brunell, that there's definitely learning environment to me is the culture in the classrooms as well. And I do happen to believe what the research says, which is that cell phones are having a very tough effect on our kids. I a hundred percent agree that with that. But the problem I'd be trying to solve right now is one that I think we've largely done, which is the actual learning environment right now. And I think we can bite off a piece at a time and then watch the process and bite off the next piece so that we can all absorb it and operationalize it in ways that we feel like a team and that we don't feel like we're pitting groups of people against one another. Which is what I'm afraid of.
Speaker 1: Dr. Sen, Speaker 12: I dunno if what I'm about to say is a little bit controversial or not, but I'll say anyway, you guys let me know. Definitely will be, definitely will be. I'm all for talking to parents and again, I, I have, and in the research that my colleagues have conducted, we did a lot of focus groups including in the metro West region or here in the United States in Massachusetts. I also, going back to something Dr. Sp said, which I think is absolutely correct, is we also want to make sure that we're weighing all the data in different, you know, research, opinions, perspectives, to make decisions.
I think that's, I I would invite us to think about what is the outcome we're looking for and then including what does the public, what does the community, as representative of the community, what is it that, that the community wants to see parents want to see happen? And then figure out what are the best strategies and sometimes the best strategies are based on not necessarily perspectives of different individuals, different opinions, especially when, you know, different opinions as a parent, but based on research, based on experience, based on the experiences of educators. So I wanna make sure that we're weighing different
sources of data, including research rather than making this be a popularity vote that we kind of invite parents or whatever opinion most parents go with. Let's go with that. 'cause again, I, I think I'm, I'm sure that we'll see as a range of opinions anyway, but sometimes the most popular opinion is not the most correct. I mean apparently there's people out there who think that Tylenol causes aut autism, you know, that might not be the right, that doesn't mean there's science behind it. So I wanna make sure that we're making decisions based on science and data and, and, and that includes professional experiences. That's not, I added the last piece just to me.
Speaker 1: Okay. Alright, let's move on to the last policy. Speaker 17: Just, I think Ms. Baker's had her hands up on Speaker 1: There. Oh, Speaker 15: She's not there. Did Speaker 1: She put it down? I'm not sure. Okay. Ms. Vickers, you can write to us if you'd like. It's getting late Speaker 15: Last policy of the night. So Title ix. Speaker 23: Yeah, so this one I think while equally important, I think it might not have as much kind of variability going on with different policies and, and and so forth in the schools. So this is obviously Title IX is, is federal statute. So it's a little bit more cut
and dry about what our, our policy needs to look like. So just a quick understanding of the background. In 2000 last summer, the regulation changed and we were charged with updating our policy. The regulations quickly reverted back to the 2020 regulations. So our policies were, didn't they, they weren't updated in that timely manner anyway, so it didn't, it was, it worked out to be okay at that moment. But in looking at the policies, it's clear that ultimately our, our our policies are kind of embedded in other policies
and they're just, there's just kind of tidbits about Title IX throughout our policy, our, our policy in, in general. And I think it's important that we have a very clear Title IX policy that's very clearly stated about what that looks like. We worked with our attorneys who have been, who have guided us on everything Title IX that we ever do. They, we, we work with them. They actually shared a policy that, that they have adopted with other districts that we shared with you. So the recommendation today is to adopt the new policy, maybe not today, but for for future consideration, is
to adopt the policy as written by our attorneys and, and eliminate and delete the, the previous policy that's written in the policy. Okay. Guide books. Speaker 15: So similar to the previous discussion, do you mind or am I I don't, I'm gonna confuse it. There was, there was a specific policy that combined a bunch of things that, one of which we would replace and one would be a new policy like separating like, Speaker 23: So the policies I named were a CAB
and which is the sexual harassment policy file from previous. And then there's also a non-discrimination policy including harassment and retaliation. Ac my recommendation is to is to replace a CAB with this first policy with the revised Title IX policy. That's in my memo. And AC would deleted completely and that would be, it would be, we'd name it different. We call it the sexual harassment policy, not Title ix. So it would be kind of other harassment policies.
And that would be, and that's here as well to, to for your review. Speaker 15: So that would be a new, a new code. Speaker 23: Yes. There's no code names on those. Right, thank you. There's no code on on either of them. Speaker 15: So this is the reason I ask is so for anybody who might be looking to see where this one was, there it wasn't. So this is, this is a new policy, so, so now pleasure of the chair. Okay. Speaker 1: Questions from the committee. Ms. Brunell, Speaker 3: I appreciate all of the work on this especially 'cause it's gone back and forth, so thank you. I think it's very important to protect our students
in these vulnerable situations, so thank you. I am curious about our process linking our policy book with MASC. I know that we've talked about that because they, they do have a file ac that many other committees across the state. I guess I would want to make sure that our Title IX was in the same place that other committees across the state have their Title IX policy. So I don't think I I'm not arguing with what you said. I, Aaron, but I Speaker 23: Don't know if it, I I don't, I think it could still be called policy ac, but we're just, we're just recommending a,
a brand new policy Speaker 3: And you would recommend policy AC called Speaker 23: AC right now is non-discrimination, including harassment and retaliation. We'd like to change that to the harassment, not Title ix. So it's, it's really the same thing. It's just using the language that the attorney shared with us. It's just updating the, the the actual text. Speaker 3: I see. And then you would like to have a Title IX policy? Yes. Speaker 23: 'cause there is not a clear just title IXs, so we need to re rename that. Speaker 3: Okay. Yes. Speaker 23: So AC would stay, could stay the, potentially stay the same policy.
It's just putting the, our, our revised policy to replace what's currently there. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 23: And the other one would be, I mean A CAB is our sexual harassment right now we could replace a CAB with Title ix. Speaker 3: Interesting. It's just not what's done at the state level. So I'm Speaker 23: Yeah, I, I don't know. And that's, I apologize I'm not familiar enough with, but I, I understand what you're saying. Yeah, Speaker 15: We, we were in the, in the meeting this came, this, this is like a jigsaw puzzle of like policy codes and things moving around, but ultimately the, the content
of the policies is based on guidance from the attorneys. Speaker 3: A hundred percent. I don't disagree with any of the content. I just wanna make sure that policies are easily accessible to families, especially when they need them. And so that's why I would be more interested in making sure that our policy was in line with other district's policies. But I a hundred percent support the content Speaker 23: You've done be be honestly right now, that is the biggest barrier. It, if, if you query Title ix, it's awesome. In the policy book handbook, it comes up like hundreds of times. Yeah. Because it's referenced on every footnote.
It's referenced, but there's not a clear Title IX policy. Yeah. Speaker 3: And I also really like that you added the links to the other supporting documents in what you've written for us tonight because it's, if you're going through a Title IX investigation, it's a, it's a really stressful, difficult thing to go through. So to have policies and procedures to rely on, it's very important to our families. Speaker 23: And that is a public facing document, the Title IX process and procedures that came out of some, some, some things we learned last year and there was some communication with families about how our timely our timeliness in our response, that's more
around our process, our procedural, how it works, whereas the legal, whereas the, what we're sharing with you today is more around the policy, legal, legal federal kind of guidelines around that. Yeah. Thank you. But this, this document is something that I, I do think should be, we've, we've recommended our schools to put it in their handbooks. Speaker 1: Okay. Any other questions, comments? So this is something we'll vote next week as well. Okay. Super. Great. Do we have one last moment? Motion
Speaker 3: To adjourn? Speaker 1: Second. Second. All in favor? Anyone against? Anyone abstaining? 7 0 0. We are adjourned. Thank you everybody.