School Committee: October 1, 2020

Transcript captured from YouTube auto-captioning. No speaker labels; proper names and dollar figures occasionally misheard. Click any timecode to jump to that moment in the source video.

0:35 hey sarah i think james was holding up a post-it for you to have permission to record thank you i was over starting the youtube okay

3:59 okay we’ll go ahead and call us to order at 7 05 pm does anyone have any commendations john i think you do yeah i want to jump in here and it seemed given your framework that uh for our first opportunity to do this that it fit nicely under accommodations maybe it can become a different agenda item moving forward but um to have school principals bring something to the committee uh that they want to commend and note as something exciting or good that is happening in their school and so i reached out to mr bauer and i think that he actually struggled to narrow the field of things that he would like to commend this evening but i’ve given him some time parameters but there’s a lot

4:45 of good stuff at marblehead high school right now and so i will turn it over to mr bauer to do a few introductions for commendations thank you dr bucky uh school committee thanks for having us here you’re correct dr bucky um trying to whittle this down has been challenging but we’ll do the best we can um as everyone knows i think the strength of marvel high school is not only the awesome people but the involvement of our students and our faculty and i’d like to highlight three groups this evening that have made a difference in our community not only through the start of this year but also through last year as well as we struggled with the closure of school i’m very proud of these groups so without further ado i’d like to open up with our peer mentors ms jen billings is our advisor and she has corey

5:32 mccormick with her uh we’re finishing up freshman orientation part two they did all the training virtually uh miss billings in her first year has done a wonderful job restructuring the program and it’s been awesome seeing the students out there and involved and we’re very proud so ms billings are you on i am i am on can you hear me um peer mentor so we just had day three of peer mentor uh freshman orientation with their peer mentors it’s gone super well uh we essentially took the freshman class divided it into quarters and had a quarter of the class come into the building from 2 to 3 p.m beginning on tuesday so we’ve run tuesday wednesday and thursday from 2 to 3 p.m and then tomorrow is our final orientation

6:18 orientation orientation part 2 run through which involves a slideshow and a tour i’ll let corey speak more to that end but it has been wonderful seeing kids uh everybody’s masked we’re social distancing it i’m not gonna lie to you it has a different tenor to it than perhaps in years past um but it’s been just it’s gone very well kids are respectful i think they feel good about coming into the building and meeting their peer mentors who greeted them out front with a sign and then we go inside and they’re sitting in social distance set up um and uh corey who is one of our we have four leaders there are 50 peer mentors so 50 upperclassmen are in charge of 250 freshmen corey is one of four peer mentors that were selected

7:05 from that group of 50 to be highlighted as a leader so i’m going to turn it over to him and i think he’s going to share his experience thus far hello um i’m cory mccormick obviously i’m one of the four peer leader mentors and i just want to like highlight what my experience has been during this whole entire quarantine and how school is so different right now so it started in january um the pro application process was super different from last year because instead of having like all the kids be peer mentors that are upperclassmen it got shortened to 50 so we had to like write resumes we had to write stuff about us and why we would fit in um i think the 50 mentors worked out pretty well so far because it’s a lot of controlled kids that we all know

7:52 are pretty good kids and it’s worked with the mentees so we have four groups obviously like mrs billings just explained and we have four days so we’re splitting up a fourth of the peer mentor leaders and a fourth of the students that are freshmen coming coming into the school physically um every single day so the orientation has been obviously broken up into four days like i just said um it’s worked out very well so far it’s been pretty spread out um we’ve had a lot of space we’ve split up under groups we’ve been super organized it’s been super distanced obviously everyone is masked we’ve been practicing social distancing very well and i think it’s really helping the freshmen like get accommodated to the school um even if this entire experience for them is hard

8:38 because they’re coming into a new school on top of being in the cohorts and having to get used to our schedule i think it’s worked out really well with the orientation it’s super helpful for them um as an upperclassman i’ve assured the freshmen too that it’s a process for all of us we’re all working with cohorts and all of this new four blocks a day schedule and like all the 20 minute zoom classes so everybody’s like encouraged to be patient we want them to have the best time they can but they need to be patient with teachers and their students as well so we just try to make this process as like comfortable as they can for them and i think you’ve done a really good job so far i’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback thank you thank you cory and miss billings awesome thank you so much looking forward to the day five tomorrow right by day four day four maybe i’ll

9:24 come up for a cartwheel i’m not sure i might maybe thank you love that our next group is team harmony and it goes without saying that each one of these groups have impacted our community and team harmony is very special in the fact that they’ve impacted our community inside the school and outside the school and they’ve just done a wonderful job and bringing attention to inequities prejudice discrimination and bring awareness to bias in our community and i’m looking forward to more work with them in our school this year as we move forward as a school community so i’m very proud of team harmony we have our advisor candace sliney who does a wonderful job with with the students and we also have student alexis

10:09 erp who is at the forefront of her leadership and does a wonderful job and also looking forward to continue leadership so ms sliney are you on yes i’m here thank you so much for having me um i have to say i first got involved with team harmony in 2005 but then took some time off when i had my young kids and for the past five or six years it’s been a pretty amazing experience and i want to send a shout out of thanks and gratitude to to jason silver silva and to the board of selectmen um for really valuing our students and inviting them to one of their meetings this summer so i i really just feel like we’re in an amazing spot to have even more wonderful things happen with the 45 students that

10:55 are involved right now so alexis erp has been involved since her freshman year she is an officer even though she’s a she was made an officer as a sophomore because of her involvement and outstanding leadership so i’m going to defer to her and let her run the show

11:17 thank you miss slimy um could someone from the school committee please give me permission to screen share i just have a slide to go along um as i’m speaking all right you’re officially a co-host now because that’s the only way i know how to do that so yeah all right um i think it should be working can everybody see yes okay so thank you so much for inviting me to speak on behalf of team harmony um team harmony is one of the many clubs at the high school and we really focus on teaching students about their own personal biases and biases that they might see in the school community and every year in the spring we go into the freshman health classes and give a

12:03 presentation on topics like i just mentioned but obviously that had to look different last spring because of um being remote for school but we were still able to have a really successful presentation um online and we still had many of the same important and meaningful conversations that we would have had in school we watched a video of a speech that john boyega gave at a black lives matter protest in london and we also watched some short clips from mtv’s look different campaign which talk about microaggressions um and on the slide i have um one of the slides that we used for the freshman presentation to kind of talk about microaggressions to help students learn about them we were also invited to join a meeting

12:49 with the board of selectmen along with some other groups in town who have a similar mission to ours and we got a chance to talk about what we think needs to change in the school and the broader community and we were also involved more recently with the board of selectmen in helping to apply for a grant um to help us with racial justice work in marblehead at the end of june we hosted a discussion panel for the film just mercy which is based off of the true story of the equal justice initiative and there were high school students marblehead public school faculty members and um just other community members who were able to make it and we had a really great discussion about how some of the events in the film are similar to events that happened in

13:35 marblehead and massachusetts um over the summer the marblehead racial justice team who we work closely with hosted a vigil for george floyd and we had many members and officers attend that event and more recently right before school started we had um the marblehead racial justice team hosted the briana taylor justice fair and team harmony had a table you can see here on the slide there’s a picture of some of us who were there and we were able to tell people about our mission and the work that we do in the schools um and we were really able to kind of share with people what our values are and what we strive towards so that’s kind of an overview of some of the more recent work that we do we’re able to do a lot more obviously when

14:21 we’re in school but i think that we’ve managed to be pretty successful while we’ve had to go remote so thank you again for allowing me to present and i’ll stop my screen share thank you so much alexis awesome job as always very proud of you and team harmony ms salini thank you for the wonderful work and we look forward to continue to work as well for our school and for our community thank you our last group is the national green school society and their work throughout the summer and um has been amazing throughout the community with various cleanups and the organization and there’s lots of crossover with the students involved and i’ve seen them a lot of crossover which is wonderful and i think the strength of our school mr conor ryan is our advisor

15:08 he also has led this group to obviously it’s not an issue now but the recycling program and composting program in our school and i hope we can get that back up someday and also sophie hawk who’s the president of the national green school society so they’re both here tonight i’m gonna turn this over to mr ryan uh thank you mr bauer good evening everyone thanks so much for having us um forgive forgive any thumps you hear uh my kids are rebelling against bath time upstairs um i am the advisor of the national green school society which is marble heads environmental club essentially we have a number of initiatives uh happening right now although some are still on old as mr bauer said and it is my pleasure tonight to introduce you to sophie houck our president hi everyone thank you so much for having us speak my name is sophie houck and i

15:55 am the president of the marbled high school national green school society we are the school environmental honor society and we are dedicated to leading and organizing the environmental programs at our school we’ve had so much fun this past summer hosting our weekly cleanups where we are able to get out into the community and pick up trash around town which we then repurpose during our weekend youth recycled sea creature workshops we’ve hosted uh four week shops workshops this past weekend in another four this weekend in partnership with sustainable marblehead and spur it’s been a great opportunity to show kids how to literally turn trash into treasure and also understanding the importance of eliminating waste in our daily lives so i think we’ve come to understand that whether through remote or hybrid

16:41 learning schedules we are able to create our own little community while still helping the community and we’re so excited to continue moving forward so thank you again thank you sophie thank you mr ryan again just great work and as you can tell um school committee and dr bucky it is hard to limit the comments because we just have such awesome students and awesome teachers and an awesome community so thank you for giving us the opportunity to share some of the great um programs and clubs that we have and and hopefully we can come back some other time and talk more but again thank you for that thank you students and faculty members i’m so proud of you thank you nice job mr bauer and that leads nicely into my final commendation and that is october is national principles month and so we

17:28 celebrate all of our marblehead public schools principals and assistant principals and i’ll be working with the pcos to do some uh recognitions and celebrations but mr brower principal bauer you let off the month well with the high school presentation so thank you and thank you to school committee for allowing uh the school presentations to see thank you thanks uh yeah megan is it appropriate for us to comment here or or would you rather it’s not um what’s commendation so i think if you have something to commend then you can comment

18:06 well i’ll commend adding the um you know what’s happening in the schools as part of this i you know i think that’s one of the things that we don’t get enough of in these meetings so john thank you for adding that and um you know dan including those bringing those um initiatives to light because obviously there’s just such amazing things happening in our schools that we don’t necessarily know on a day-to-day basis and it’s quite clear that our students are leaders in the community and it’s refreshing i think to see the innovation and creativity that they’re employing especially in times like this so you know i guess that’s an accommodation to everybody thanks megan thanks megan david do you have a combination yeah and i and i agree it was it was a great

18:52 flashback for me i remember when ryan was a freshman and he had his mentor like corey and then when ryan was a senior and and he would and he was a mentor and um those friendships uh you know still exist um with with those students and it was a good opportunity when he was a younger student coming in to have have an upperclassman and the same thing when ryan was a senior so that’s great program and yeah thank you dr bucky look forward to more of these

19:24 sarah do you have a combination yes i just wanted to make accommodation to all the teaching staff right now um that is just working overtime double time if you will to to get everything together we’re we’re off you know we’re often in running per se at this point um and i know that what we see in person and what we see on screens is is just the tip of the iceberg for what they’re doing and i wanted to commend them for that but i really wanted to point out the special education department too i’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback with their start to the year and the planning that went into what eric oxford did with schedules and team chairs um i i’ve heard a lot that people will reach out reach out reached out to prior

20:09 to the start of school and that they’ve just been really happy um and full of praise for you know what what the special education department right now is um is providing which is always good to hear

20:31 mine goes back to the high school presentation and i just wanted to commend all the students for speaking because there’s 200 people here and that is um extremely scary and they did such a wonderful job and it made me like super proud to be a part of the marblehead schools and the district and what these students are doing um so i was so impressed and it was so great to hear about these awesome programs that are happening so thank you for presenting and keep up the great work absolutely all right um that will take us on to our student representative dan howells i know he’s somewhere

21:16 go ahead and unmute yourself dan there we go thanks all right um so i believe we mentioned this at the end of uh my bit last week but i think students have definitely become accustomed to the current schedule that being said however we start hybrid next week which will be a new adventure for all of us so students have received a number of emails with details about how the schedule will work but also i want to mention that in the past couple days many teachers have answered clarifying questions about how the schedule will work in class and they have they’ve they’ve also talked about how um

22:03 about their classroom cleaning regimens and as well and also how they will plan to have some classes outdoors um so this has been really reassuring um because uh it can be a little bit nerve-wracking coming into uh you know the school um at this time but with that information i feel a lot better about it so i also mentioned the freshman orientation which had which has taken place the past few days i can second that it went very well and i’d also finally like to give a big shout out to the guidance department for a lot of their work this year so between um getting schedules ready for everyone

22:49 and then having constant shifts and uh amendments to various student schedules they’ve put a lot of work in uh there have also been a number of meetings for seniors and senior parents about the college application process setting up the common app uh financial aid and things like that and also i i forgot to mention last meeting um that when we picked up our textbooks at the high school they each were they each had a handwritten note from a guidance counselor in them so that really meant a lot and they put a lot of work in um and i really appreciate that on behalf of the students that’s great dan thanks so much especially thanks for that little

23:36 commendation at the end to the guidance department that’s amazing so all right we will look forward to hearing how the uh first couple weeks of of in-person hybrid go in our next meeting yes i’m looking forward to it us too thanks dan thank you all right that leads us to public comment um i will have people raise their hands using the hand raising function on the zoom and if everyone could truly uh please try to remember to say their name as well as their address for their record for minutes i just benedetto your first

24:20 hi can everyone hear me my name is jessica benedetto a bradley road um i would like to uh ask the school committee um to give comment regarding i would like to ask you to update our bus transportation policy to include all children in grades k through six that live over one mile from school if their walk to school includes a road that doesn’t have sidewalks we should expand our policy to allow students in grades 7 through 12 to apply for busing paid for by a parental stipend based on my experience and research the bus transportation policy is in fact under the purview of the school committee in august i emailed all members

25:05 including dr bucky requesting bus transportation due to safety concerns i have over the lack of sidewalks in our designated walking route dr bucky found my reasoning quote compelling in a follow-up email but when met with a lack of funding i was told that the school system quote cannot accommodate my request in our town only the bare minimum busing is done this means only transporting elementary school children who live two miles or more from school deci guidelines state that all children pedestrians shall have quote a commonly traveled route with a sidewalk accessible to pedestrian traffic i submitted an appeal to desi which was denied

25:52 the school finance and district support person stated that quote the bottom line is in our view this is a local matter that needs to be addressed locally end quote i have emailed with our local police chief regarding my concerns for safety of my children walking along beacon street he agreed this is a challenging stretch of road for pedestrians for many reasons all parties involved thus far have recognized the problem and stated it is up to the school committee to vote on revising its bus transportation policy and to ask for additional funding for busing in the lynn public schools the school committee’s transportation policy states that quote the students will not be required to walk down primary streets

26:38 that do not provide adequate sidewalks end quote i urge you as the school committee to update our transportation policy to provide busing in cases where safe walking is not possible in 2020 families with two working parents have become the norm there is increased community support for busing as an option to help working parents whose jobs do not allow them to drive their children to school at 8 am with a 12 pm pick up many other surrounding towns including lynn salem beverly and rockport offer busing expanded beyond the state mandated minimum albeit with a fee and including all students without access to adequate sidewalks i urge you to ask the town for more

27:24 money for busing at the upcoming town meeting in october in order to bring us up to the standards of other nearby towns expanding busing will also help with traffic around the schools that occurs during pickup and drop off times this congestion worsens with rain and snow the school traffic also prevents other citizens from being able to commute easily to work or run errands thus busing will help others in town besides parents please remember every child deserves a safe route to get to public school regardless of the neighborhood where he resides this is explicitly stated on the deci website let’s not wait for a tragic accident involving a child pedestrian to bring

28:10 home this point let’s take preventative action now thank you jessica uh next up is colleen mn please state your full name for the record as well colleen hi can you hear me we can okay um my name is colleen nile and i’m at three bowdoin street i would like to agree with dan howells first but all of the communications coming out of the high school from bauer from lindsay page from susan shatford helping with edge annuity excellent excellent top-notch communication you never wait you never are left hanging even late hours in the evening lindsay page has been invaluable to us with two kids taking edge annuity

28:55 classes so um i appreciate uh dan hall’s bringing that up so otherwise i’ll be very brief we also have some really excellent uh experience in this house my sixth grader is a full remote student and she has a day that mimics her typical school day um it’s been an enormous success her teacher is doing a great job they go through the day like they normally would and they return after lunch and she’s reading more she’s enjoying school more than she ever has so um kudos to the sixth grade program at the village um however i also have two high schoolers um the plan that we have in that area is not necessarily the same plan that we voted on here and has been approved by desi

29:43 so the high schoolers have 3.3 hours of structured learning about two to three times a week so they run on a one two one two one schedule during the week um right now that day ends at 11 50. so i have two students ending their school day at 11 50. um two days a week one of my high schoolers has only 50 minutes of school we are hundreds of hours short of meeting the 800 hours that’s mandated by deci this year and as such the high school aspect of the plan at least on the remote from what i can tell is failing why doesn’t the program we have match the program that was approved by the

30:28 school committee and by desi why also are we being told not only does the plan not match but now we will further reduce the plan to match the hybrid so instead of my remote students going day one day two day one they’ll go day one day two every other wednesday day one day two so this will even further reduce our already small structured school day i don’t remember proving that particular part of the plan during committee meeting or the one we sent to dussey we need to find a way to meet structured learning hours set by deci and a system of oversight to make sure that each grade level is reaching this goal with no disparities finally because of the structure of

31:14 school committee meetings allows public comment but not an actual back and forth dialogue i ask that we be given a public forum before town meeting on october 17th in order to assess the program and discuss whether the needs of the district are being met thank you

31:34 thank you colleen aleister connor you’re up next hello um as many of you have seen on all marblehead public schools where i’ve helped you can you stay here yep conner nine cloutman’s lane marblehead thank you sorry um i have canvassed many parents in addition to my own experience and what i have experienced is that although this program is working for some there are areas where we are failing all learners of every age group i i also heavily push towards a public forum as i even feel that not only have we not had surveys asking for parent input

32:22 regarding our remote learning that younger learners had already and the remote learning that older kids are having now while we’re in hybrid but also excuse me we have dishes going on in the background um also i’m not feeling that the results of the survey in the spring where it asked for best practices are being followed i have not seen that occurring with my learners so i feel that the survey results are not made public everyone’s not aware of what other people are saying and we can’t hold accountable for whether those survey results are actually taken into account i also worry that with the all different age group learners

33:09 failing in our current hybrid and remote plans and full remote plans in some cases there are children failing in every area and often that is not the top learners and not the children in special education who seem to be having a great experience from what i’ve heard it’s the middle the big middle so next year or later this year there are going to be so many requests for assessments regarding whether or not these children qualify for services now and i wonder and i have asked this question what happens when our children are not at grade level what happens when a large group of that big middle gen ed becomes special education i also

33:56 have questioned multiple times and there is no setup for feedback and input from parents accountability for what is being taught on the home remote days of the hybrid plan assessment of what the children are learning on those home days consistency across tutors improvement a mechanism by which improvement can occur these do not exist which will even affect you with high schoolers who have yet to see that the hybrid will let you down there is no mechanism by which to improve these problems without that mechanism we cannot be successful and we haven’t even solicited feedback for the remote that has already happened in order to improve that

34:42 improve that improve that we have learning time that is not equivalent to the desi standards my daughter in grade one has 2.45 hours per week am i saying day 2.45 hours per uh week i guess and then 3.75 is the superintendent no daily okay 2.45 hours daily the superintendent indicated they should have 3.75 hours daily which includes individual private instruction where you fill out a worksheet or you watch a video or you do an activity and deci asks for 4.7 hours per day we cannot wait for mcas tests in the spring and wait for further funding from

35:28 the state this seems to be the current plan our other districts are doing better they are having their high schoolers in school until 2 30 they are zooming into the classes when they’re on the remote portion we can’t wait we also i wonder what the space is that we do have available per student is it two feet is it three feet is it four feet is it five feet what actually do we have available when is the benchmark of feet where we could send our children back it’s never been answered and as far as accountability i was told in the listening tour for coffin nan stated that the young learners would have a curriculum that they could independently navigate she has also

36:15 admitted to me that seesaw is not at grade level which i am watching from home and have videos of myself this is not what we were sold for our hybrid plan and the home days are inadequate and i want a mechanism by which we have assessment input and accountability as well as some sort of way that things improve and i would like a public forum where all the parents can state what is hap working for them and what is not working for them so that we can all hear what is going on and then there can be some sort of solution or i feel that our kids will be under grade level we will have a huge special education population next year and

37:01 i can’t sustain the level of involvement that is happening right now at home on hybrid data i need you to wrap it up sorry that’s thank you thank you

37:20 uh hello uh hello my name is luca ferro i’m a sophomore doing a full remote plan at mhs currently luca can you state your address for us please yes i am uh 18 clifton heights elaine thank you i wanted to come on to talk today about what my experiences are as someone who is currently taking a remote what i think is doing done well what i think could be done better and just to generally inform both parents and staff and anyone else who wants to hear about what i think has been going on uh the

38:08 the general the general sense is one of disorganization i do not feel that certain parts are well handled and i feel as though it is impacting the learning environment of many students including myself uh we were told when i’ve when i decided to go to on a remote setting uh we were told that we were going to have a complete teacher roster for every one of my classes that i’d be able to talk with and i would zoom call with and have a full class with since then that has changed quite heavily

38:55 i’m now doing programs on vhs and ingenuity which while serviceable are really not they are subpar uh to say the least in addition i feel as though not enough was really planned out for example many of the vhs uh things for example i’m taking ap era on vhs and when i when i had to do certain ap tests for example an saq which stands for a short answer question i later learned i would had points deducted off of me because i simply did not know what an saq was or how to answer it or how to respond to it so

39:41 i would really hope that as we move forward i doubt it would be possible but having teachers available just doing a open time block for kids who are fully remote to talk and be able to communicate would be extremely helpful because as i’ve talked with many of my peers and of course my own observations it’s very difficult to learn how to do certain things when you’re just looking at a computer screen all day it doesn’t feel right i i like learning a lot but i have no motivation to learn on these systems it just it doesn’t feel

40:28 good it feels just awful and soul draining in addition the we received basically no preparation for any of these programs for example there was a summer project that is currently due tuesday for my vhs aap euro that i have no way of completing because it was meant to do be done over the summer but i only heard about it less than a week ago and there is no conceivable way for me to finish it on time and i never heard of it because i didn’t know i was doing vhs until the friday before school started so these are all issues i think really need to be resolved for kids to learn effectively

41:13 learn effectively learn effectively and to make it through this trying time or else i fear that both me and myself as i’ve already witnessed and other students will begin to suffer both mentally and academically thank you thank you luca alexis erb you’re up thank you my name is alexis erp and i live at 41 west shore drive um i’m like was mentioned earlier i’m a junior at marblehead high school um i also like luca opted to do full remote learning and i just want to talk about my experiences and my brother’s experiences with that so far um so when we got our schedules

41:59 originally it was the thursday night before school started i was in one class with an mhs teacher the rest of my classes had been outsourced to virtual high school or vhs and edgenuity my brother who is a freshman this year was in no classes with mhs at all he was completely outsourced to edge annuity and when he saw his schedule his first reaction was that he wasn’t even a student at mhs and not even was his um education completely outsourced he was also moved down a level in one of his classes because none of the remote learning programs in marblehead offered the level of french that he had been placed in by his eighth grade teachers

42:45 so the plan that was put forth by the school committee and dr bucky said that the uh remote learning plans and the hybrid learning plan would be equitable but that is clearly not the case if students are being moved down levels because their classes aren’t being offered and um like luca mentioned the programs that our educations are being outsourced to are not up to par with the mhs curriculum um i started what was called mhs honors physics on edge annuity and um it was very easy and one of the questions that i had was a matching question and one of the items that i had to match was what tool would you use to measure the length of a book and i had to match

43:32 that to a ruler and to me that’s not an honors level question that’s not a high school level question and it’s not a physics question and one thing just to mention about the physics curriculum they talked about chemistry multiple times in the beginning of the course and physics wasn’t mentioned once not even in a casual way like welcome to physics um the solution that we were given to dealing with the edgenuity courses was to drop down levels in almost all of our classes um and we tried that for about a week or so and we found that those classes were easy for us and so that also wasn’t really a good solution so starting on monday um we’re moving back into the edge annuity and edgenuity

44:18 and virtual high school are asynchronous so my brother who like i mentioned earlier is a freshman is going to be all asynchronous starting monday i’ll have i think one class with the high school um and another thing that i wanted to mention at one of the school committee meetings over the summer um a lot of people were talking about the social and emotional health and well-being of our students and i just think it’s important to mention that programs like edgenuity and vhs are not up to par my family is very stressed about these courses because obviously if if you’re asking a student who’s supposed to be in honors high school physics what you would use to measure the length of a book and it’s a matching question so the answer is

45:05 basically given to you um that’s clearly not up to par i’m very worried about the transition to hybrid learning because we’re switching just because we really have no other option if we want to get a good education and so we’re worried about the transition we’re worried about the general future for high school and i so i just wanted to mention that edge annuity and virtual high school are not fulfilling um i think the needs of the plan that was set set forth um over the summer and we would also like to request a meeting with the school committee and any families and remote learning students who would be willing to attend as well because these issues need to be resolved not just for the high school but for everyone but i just obviously have the personal experiences from the high

45:51 school so thank you for listening thank you alexis uh chris ellen

46:02 hi chrissy liam 34 tidewinds terrace um i have two kids first and third grade um their teachers have been great they were very excited to start school um and very my daughter is the third grader is very excited monday to actually go to school and i think the school so far has been great the remote part of well starting remote has been great it’s been much better than i thought it would be being having the kids on zoom all day um but the the problem started last week with my first grader when he started the hybrid model the days when they are not in school are very ineffective days the asynchronous learning is very ineffective there’s and this is not the teachers are great i think it’s a problem with how it’s set up um

46:48 um um there’s too much time off there’s two there’s too much down time the lessons are very they’re very easy for them and and i can’t even you know i can’t even say well like do more or do extra because they only get a few packets you know for the week um we had an issue this week with an aide that was out sick who was supposed to be doing a 30-minute math zoom and she was out for the week but there’s no there’s nobody to fill in so in addition to the very short time in front of teachers now that’s taken away for the week and there’s no plan as far as i can tell so far of how to address that i was told that the

47:34 aids are all part time so it seems like a pretty simple fix they have them work more hours so that they’re available for this sort of thing and if they’re also part-time i don’t know why they can’t be doing more zooms at least on the days that children aren’t in school and i think come monday you’re going to see a lot more of a pushback from the other grades because monday’s the big day i know that everybody’s done a lot of work to get to this point and i know that everybody worked probably more this past summer than they have in the past 10 summers combined and i appreciate that really do but i just don’t want it’s kind of like running a marathon so anybody that’s running a marathon you train for four or five months before the marathon monday is the day you line up

48:20 to start running the marathon so you have you know we’ve gotten to the starting line which is monday but we haven’t finished there’s a lot to do and plans come apart when you run a marathon too you know at mile 15 you might think differently than you thought you were going to feel i think there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed and i think it’s still early enough that we can fix it but i don’t see that there’s any feedback feedback happening in these two weeks of hybrid that started with k through two i don’t see that any changes going forward for three and up starting next week i think we definitely need a public feedback forum it’s great to come in here and vent a little bit but we need to be able to have a two-way conversation and we need to have some sort of feedback

49:06 feedback feedback loop and we need some sort of improvement a way to improve and i also think you know i know i believe somebody else asked about the the distance it was three feet according to the document that was submitted um i think the goal needs to be all the kids back in school and i think john bucky dr bhakti said this in at least one of the forums that i was on over there over the summer the goal is to get all the kids back in full time so how do you do that and i i don’t have an answer but i think we need to try to start figuring it out and i know like all of the private schools around us are back so whether we start with partitions and you start with kindergarten and work your way up or um you know move to the library or we

49:52 have the cafeteria mclovers mostly unused put classes in there there’s there seems to be a lot to do you know we have we have a lot of space you know there’s an empty school on atlantic ave that we could put that we could take over for the year i’m sure so i think there’s a lot that we can do and i think we need to start doing a little bit better thank you chris kathy kendall hi this is kazzykindle163 jersey street um our school district has a of a few buzz words one of which is vocal minority the other is um you’re the only person who has this issue

50:38 so typically what happens is that parents reach out and they’re gaslighted and told this is not a district-wide issue this is your personal family issue it

50:55 speak out speak out that that they actually hears us and they have to adm

51:05 people are doing just fine and i’ll be honest with you my kids are doing just fine there are many many others who are not doing fine we need a forum we need a conversation not private emails not private phone calls not meetings behind closed doors where things are said and quickly forgotten we need a forum to discuss what’s going on now like a lot of parents who have their fingers crossed that everything will turn out just fine in the end reason tells me that we cannot get through a curriculum in a year with only 25 or maybe a little bit more of actual

51:51 instruction we just can’t do it there is no answer to what’s going to happen to our children when they are not grade level next year we’re hurt we’ve been told that if our mcal scores on up to snuff we can apply for more money i’m not sure what more money is going to do when we can’t turn the clock back and give our students back the year of learning that they’ve lost we’ve also been told that it’s about money well we have a placeholder on the town meeting coming up if we need more money let’s ask for it but we better have a good plan on what we’re going to spend that money on if our goal is to get kids back in person as fast as possible

52:37 i challenge that as a goal when we do not have a plan to reopen our schools in person full-time this year i have not seen that anywhere that we can go back this school year full-time in person so for anyone who’s listening if you’re thinking well everyone said what i’ve already said so i’m not going to put my hand up and agree i’m asking you to please do that we need as many people as possible to say yes i agree or maybe you don’t but it’s only when many voices speak up that this school department seems to do anything about it and i just want to say bravo jess benedetto she’s been fighting for that bus

53:27 years it’s time to keep the kids safe and it’s time to give them an education thank you kazzy uh elsia can you state your last name as well please hello hello yes all right can you state your full name and your address please yeah uh my name is carl rogers i live at uh 15 heinz court uh unit four and uh i just wanted to briefly touch on a few things um so schools officially closed in the state of massachusetts april 7th that was five months before school started and um

54:12 it seems like in those first few months there was never anything done to prepare to get our kids back in school full time um teachers they’re doing an amazing job they have a lot of stress on them and i can’t thank them enough their jobs are not easy and i mean i could never do it my main point here is the fact that in one of the listening sessions in august there was talk about help with child care now i’m a single parent and i have to come up with child care and child care is not cheap i don’t know if you guys know that and it’s hard to

54:58 be able to pay for child care pay for all your bills give your kids everything they want and then be asked to buy extra school supplies for home art supplies for home and for school um it’s it’s kind of ridiculous and now everybody is asking or the school is asking for more money at the town meeting why do you need more money your budget was on balance last year because there was some fraudulent stuff that’s why we have a new superintendent well that’s not my fault

55:41 our children need to be able to attend school

55:48 right now i have a fourth grader and a second grader and i i really don’t know how much they’re learning i go to work every day i have to hire a sitter to watch them and basically to teach them and it just seems like they really aren’t learning sometimes they’re done at noon sometimes they’re done at 1 30 sometimes they’re done at 10 o’clock on the half days on wednesdays and it’s not doing them any good i grew up in marblehead my entire life

56:24 so i feel like we’re doing a very big disservice to our children the way the school district is running right now um so i did email superintendent bucky about the whole child care thing and he said well email the why but basically you’re on your own oh thanks and i’m sure i’m not the only one i’m sure there’s a lot of parents out there who are struggling especially with the schools closed would just like everybody to realize that there are people struggling to make their kids learn and to have their kids learn and

57:10 let these kids have a proper education like i did i moved back to marblehead from california because i knew that marble had a great school system and i knew that marblehead was one of the top-notch schools well it doesn’t seem that way anymore and it’s really upsetting to me and i’m sure it’s all very upsetting to a lot of families who grew up here and they went to school their kids went to school their grandparents went to school here so i mean any help would be great but apparently there’s not enough money to help

57:55 i’ll have to ask you to wrap it up okay well i would just like to thank once again all the teachers for doing an amazing job um and i hope that something comes to resolve from this because it’s a very stressful time for everybody but it’s even more stressful on the parents than everybody on the school committee and every teacher out there well maybe not the teachers but mostly the school committee thank you have a great night thank you um i will continue on but we are approaching eight o’clock and we haven’t moved to the business portion of our meeting so i’m going to ask those uh who are participating in public comment to please keep their comments on the brief side i believe blair nelson is next good evening good evening

58:41 um this is quite the quite the parade of the stories that we’re hearing this evening and these are heartbreaking statements from parents and students and the horror stories that you’re hearing tonight school committee are just a fraction of what’s going on in the community you know we’re hearing stories of teachers telling students they just need to keep one class ahead and learning the material and to get through the course you know having said this that you know there is a cons few consistent themes here i’d like to head on tonight the first of the our teachers are being awesome and that we appreciate their efforts they are really stepping up to the plates under extremely trying circumstances that they’ve been put in we’ve heard some things around the uh elementary school education that the amount of actual education provided by a

59:28 teacher is extremely limited and we’re just getting a fraction of what’s in a normal year we’re not giving an assurance that we’re going to get our children to the same point at the end of the year as in a normal year that the home hybrid model can’t work without extensive parent and home support the tools are not intuitive not easy to learn and not getting any better families have turned their lives and careers upside down to support this program parents are again being so treated as outsourced labor and not a partner in education and we have this overweighted focus on attendance and lack of flexibility for parents the other theme these are not new themes you know these were laid out in multiple times in multiple forums by multiple parents through the course of the summer

1:00:14 as this program is brought together i think the second theme or third thing sorry that i’ve heard tonight is talk to us you know accountability feedback listening to parents school committee please listen please take these questions that have been posed and ask them of the administration this is our medium to provide feedback to try and change the trajectory of this year and finally to alexis and the other students that spoke this evening i admire your bravery and come along to provide your perspectives tonight thanks everyone thank you player don johns if you can just remember to state your um address as well

1:01:00 oh hi uh nine west cottage and marblehead i don’t know if this was asked already or if it was brought up because i got to the meeting late um i was just wondering if other i know um like st john’s prep for instance and i know it’s a private school and they have um a lot more funds available to them but i was just wondering if we looked into these what they’re called owl cameras for the classroom so that one when a cohort is in um in the classroom cohort b would be at home synchronized learning is that has that been brought up can we raise some funds go to the parents to get this because i think that could solve

1:01:50 a lot of these issues and that’s all that’s all i wanted to know thank you john erin noonan erin are you still with us sorry um thanks aaron noon and beverly ave um i just uh all of you you know you all are aware of the concerns that i’ve already that you know that i’ve raised that are shared by parents and students tonight and and i and i want to give you credit and i appreciate and i really do thank you to i mean there’s not somebody in the school committee who i didn’t have the

1:02:36 time to reach out that that didn’t take time to talk to me and listen and be and i did feel heard um including you know our assistant superintendent who spoke with me at length on monday and i and i really appreciate that um i don’t want to repeat myself here you know tonight except you know to say that i don’t know what the solution and improvements will be but i do think that the only place to start from is really a public forum an exchange between parents students and administrators outside of a school committee meeting someone aptly referred to this current plan as like the absolute futon solution neither a couch nor a bed miserable

1:03:22 experience either way i just as i expressed to um you know our assistant superintendent nan murphy i just it’s hard for me to comprehend how this format will be sustainable in any sense and would is not just serving the purpose of creating widespread burnout among our greatest assets our teachers who are working insane hours with impossible expectations they are doing a phenomenal job they are being asked to do what i feel is impossible they are teaching live five days a week setting up remote plans doing assessments troubleshooting communicating with

1:04:09 tutors trying to have an understanding of what their students skill level is when they are physically seeing them you know two half days a week i nor do i can i see how this can provide an acceptable education for our students with the inherent reality that our students will be you know fortunate to make it halfway through the curriculum frameworks this year you know we just simply have to find a better way or we are going to feel the consequences as a district of two or more years in learning loss and regression while we struggle for a cure and to inoculate our country i mean we are going to feel the consequences as a district of low standard edge annuity courses at the high school and the

1:04:56 literacy challenges as we are graduating our earliest learners into the system so i just want to commend the teachers for doing the most fabulous job um mike also my kids are personally doing fairing very well all things considered um in no small part and due largely to the enormous support of the special education department through all of this so i’ll just end and i’ll just say and ask of superintendent john bucky will you accept our request for a public forum for the purpose of finding a better solution to learning in marblehead thank you thank you erin kelly sellowetz hi hi

1:05:41 um i’d like to start by just saying that we you just give us your address please oh sorry kelly salowitz 23 deveraux street um i just want to start by you know quick appreciation for the teachers like everyone else has done they are working so hard and we see it we are grateful um i have three students in the hybrid program eighth grade 12th grade and second grade and i’m seeing a lot of what’s working and what is not working um the plan in place is just not enough to get our kids time on learning taken care of especially given how far behind they are after last spring we’re 13 days into school and my son is on lesson 1.2 in math they start with 1.1 the expectations but on parents right

1:06:28 now is just so great out of my three schools public school students two of them require constant oversight and assistance all morning long this just isn’t sustainable i don’t understand why we didn’t try and make more synchronous learning part of this plan kids or at home should be zooming into classrooms where their teachers are teaching the kids with live instruction the plan in place now has these teachers teaching everything twice once for each cohort and getting only through half of the material if we just had cameras in the classrooms this certainly would work with the older kids especially kids they would be getting through twice as much material this year um other districts are doing this we should be doing this too um um lastly i just would like to say that i know a lot of people are praising

1:07:15 the special education program i was especially disappointed with ours um i went to every eric oxford listening session this summer uh i was awaiting the phone call we were supposed to get where parent input was supposed to happen my phone call never came i got an email with my coven 19 learning model family communication document and found that my son was getting no extra time so i you know and i don’t know why i never had the chance to give any input until after i asked her um i beg you guys just to hear us let’s take what’s going right and take what isn’t going right and learn how to pivot and work together um we could definitely do better than this thank you kelly

1:08:03 all right um that will move us along to the next part of our agenda tonight which are the minutes we have minutes for june 18th july 28th and august 14th on the dock at 4 this evening can i get a motion to accept the minutes for june 18th july 28th and august 14 2020 so moved so moved megan moved sorry davis david second all right are there any um editions or statements on those sarah i had a few um on the last two dates july 28th and august 14th i had a few things that were missing that i wanted

1:08:50 put in there i can i can meet up with lisa offline about that i had my notes i can’t a kid one of my kids must have moved them um so if you’re okay voting them and then me just touching base with lisa that’s fine otherwise i can abstain for now whatever you want okay um so i guess the the vote will be a contingent if we’re voting yes and we’re voting um that sarah is able to work offline with lisa to add those things

1:09:21 any other any other comments all right um i will take a roll call vote sarah gold yes emily baron yes megan taylor yes harris yes fairfax yes all right so sarah will work with lisa offline on that sir can i just ask a question i feel like we’re still missing a chunk of minutes um and i know we’re kind of overdue on getting these posted we’ve had a number of community members ask us you know and push us really rightly so to get all these minutes posted so i’m just curious where you know there’s like 6 8 6 ten six eighteen like basically june and july

1:10:07 some of those are ones i’m supposed to do i had um tried to do i i tried to do them off of youtube and when i tried to do it there was a mix up in the labeling system so like when i went to go type them like for instance the meeting that was labeled for the date that should have been the budget hearing wasn’t the budget hearing but there was there’s no way to correlate what it was so i reached out to sarah to ask her if she could send me the the actual doom files which would have an embedded date in them and i got a reply two days ago that she was going that i think everything’s fixed on yes everything is fixed yeah so i can do that it’s just in my last two days were school days and as you all know uh as you know i’m i’m got the kids home remote so it’s just

1:10:53 it’s not going to be possible till the weekend when i can log back on but i’ll be able to get to those i did have um i’ve been trying to take minutes live the last meeting and then tonight just to note so the theory is uh that will give lisa a break to catch up on what she needs to catch up is as well and then when she’s caught up we won’t also have the lag of these meetings then we can just start fresh and i’ll hand back over the regular twice monthly meetings to her but this will at least hopefully give her a leg up on that i had posted the ones for today earlier today but i don’t think um it got on the agenda right it didn’t get on the agenda so i know that other towns and i think even other boards here and i know legally we can post them at just written draft on the top but for people to get

1:11:38 last weeks and this week’s quicker we can put those up as as draft form and then just tr remove the draft note on it when they’re voted i guess you just get a schedule that says these are the ones like just commit to the schedule and then just work through it because i feel like we had one and we’ve already fallen off track so if we can just and lisa’s on you know lisa’s on tap to do our regularly scheduled meetings are two meetings a month and she’s on these meetings so i don’t want to waste her time so like i think if we just keep her doing what we’ve asked her to do and then just really the right you know like figure out how we get the other ones up to yeah i think now that they’re sorted out and i have

1:12:23 that answer that that can be done but i i didn’t get that answer until two days so i asked the question a couple weeks ago yeah they’ve been sorted out for a little while now um and and everything that is like i think from august moving forward has all been live streamed um and then is is on that youtube site as well so i don’t think we really need to because it is such a hassle to get things posted on the school district website it’ll be a lot easier once we go live and have that whole piece with the new school committee website um but i don’t think we need to post the drafts just because we do publicly have all of the actual meetings where everybody can go back and listen to the entire thing up on the youtube channel yeah i agree and uh thanks for the plug

1:13:10 on the website i know megan will give us an update later all right um john that brings us to the superintendent reports uh so we’ve got a few things up and first is fall one sports update from greg greg you can go ahead and unmute yourself welcome great thanks alright good evening everyone and thanks for allowing me to update the community on athletics here uh we’re just over a week into our season and i feel like things are going pretty smoothly we have a check-in process that is staggered for every program at every level for all of our practices and games or not games yet uh every student athlete checks in with either our athletic trainer or myself every day

1:13:55 they run through a symptom check and get their temperature taken all this is recorded for any potential contact tracing and at the same time allows us to make sure each student athlete is feeling well before participating there are a few small bumps to work out during the first day of check-ins but we adjusted some of the times and procedures and it’s all been pretty smooth since just yesterday we split off some of the jv and freshman teams to different locations around town and again tweaked some of our check-in times and we’re able to manage all of that as well we start playing games next week against other nec schools and are looking forward to seeing our student athletes compete in the game situation a huge shout out needs to go out to our coaching staff who have been extremely helpful and patient with the changes put in place this fall they’ve been an incredibly valuable part of getting this up and running and i’m

1:14:40 very appreciative of them all in all i say it’s been a pretty positive experience for our student athletes and coaches and i’m glad they’re getting the chance to play this fall uh thanks again for letting me speak tonight and i can take any questions you guys may have thanks greg um that’s great to hear that everything is is moving along um and i know that there’s a lot of athletes who are really happy uh that that we’ve moved forward with that i appreciate all the work you’re you’ve done and are continuing to do david greg thanks for the update could you just give a summary of the teams that are playing um sports this fall just for people that are online and everybody else yeah sure we have uh three boys soccer teams

1:15:27 three girls soccer teams three field hockey teams uh boys and girls cross country team and two golf teams that’s just at the high school and we just opened up registration uh yesterday for middle school cross country middle school middle school field hockey i particularly appreciate that you guys have brought it down to the middle school level um i honestly i didn’t think that that was going to happen and i know that it’s all just intra marblehead but i think it’s it’s so good for kids to be able to um to be able to participate in that and i know a lot of them look forward to it i know it’s a whole additional level of work too so i really appreciate that megan um yeah thanks for the update greg it’s great to hear um

1:16:13 and you know i’m just really excited for the student athletes you might have said this and i missed it so i apologize but um did you talk about participation at all like what are the participation numbers comparatively yeah actually believe it or not our our participation numbers are a little bit up um we’re down in in a few sports but not by much but you know with the moving of football and volleyball and cheer to that fall two season uh we had a pretty big push in some of our other sports we had 66 girls soccer players come out we had 34 golfers come out uh just it’s been it’s been uh big numbers for sure so it’s it’s been great to see that’s great to hear thank you and greg i know in our packet we did have the transportation waiver too um

1:17:00 can you you just want to give us a heads up on that so parents know sure yeah so the document i submitted i just kind of edited from what we’ve had before in the past um the it’s the the same transportation form you guys have voted on i guess years ago before i even got here i just added to the bottom of it that in the 2021 school year student athletes are allowed are only allowed to travel with their own parent or legal guardian to and from away games and student athletes are not allowed to drive themselves to away contests um if this gets approved tonight which i’m hoping it will um john uh excuse me superintendent bucky and i have been going back and forth a number of times and we would just put in there that uh

1:17:46 this is a temporary basis during the state of emergency uh pursuant to policy ebc-s which is according to our school lawyer as well so all that’s kind of been vetted through so i would i would put that out there to the parents if this is approved and just that let me know that is temporary uh and then that would also allow me to include the attachment as a form as well great um so i actually don’t have it on here as a vote um for this evening but it sounds like given that it’s been voted in the past i don’t know that we actually need to take action on it um john do you can you weigh in on that i just think the temporary piece that john foskett weighed in on with the ebc-s

1:18:34 that we are using this form uh probably procedurally it wouldn’t hurt to take a vote okay all right we can do that um all right so i will um take a motion to accept the transportation waiver form as it has been written by greg and greg ziglarski and dr john bucky and approved by legal

1:19:03 so moved david moved second second uh i think i heard emily spurts emily second all right um any any other questions on that

1:19:14 okay i will roll call vote sarah gold yes emily baron you’re muted you’re muted sorry yes sorry megan taylor yes sarah fox yes and david harris yes right all right that passes five to zero thanks and thanks for working that out i know that that is an important piece for a lot of athletes and their families all right all right great thanks greg and uh i will just put another plug in on the mask policy as well because i think that a lot of our success hinges on that and that masks are mandatory when anyone is on school grounds so even when outdoors and outdoor practices uh

1:20:00 whether it’s for a parking lot wreck or for the school’s masks are mandatory so all right thank you greg john that brings us to your hybrid model transition update great thank you um and thank you for the families that weighed in this evening we continue to take feedback and look and assess and so hearing uh the comments and the questions and the concerns hopefully i’m able to address them in this hybrid uh update i’m gonna share my screen um just a little graphic uh to begin with just to remind us that we are not in this alone but we need to be in this together

1:20:46 and so these are our surrounding communities and some of the decisions uh that they’re making i’m i find that the north shore superintendents roundtable is an invaluable resource as we put plans in place and consider things and learn from each other and i can say that no one has figured this out there isn’t a district saying our plan is really working well our families are happy our students are happy but we continue to assess and modify and change and i would just say that monday is a major milestone we’re going with the hybrid for grades three to twelve and much like governor baker’s phase in

1:21:33 of the commonwealth we need to give the plan that we submitted to desi and got approved an opportunity to be in practice before we start modifying it my hope is that we’re in this next phase where we are pre-k to 12 in either fully remote or our hybrid cohort remote system in the half days and see that it’s working and seeing that we can transition students and staff back safely add in lunch go to full days and so there is a vision for accepting feedback from people in the community listening tours hearing and so i just want to make sure that people don’t

1:22:20 think we’re going to launch monday and never look back we realize that there will be as we move forward um next slide

1:22:32 so again on the back together mhd website you have followed this timeline since uh the website went up and again i would remind you that we want to have cohort c grades 3 to 12 start monday we will be putting out a survey to families for feedback on how the remote learning phase went and so this next slide you will see some of these benchmarks along the way and this will be in the superintendent’s update tomorrow but we do want to know how was the full remote experience that we were in because if we have to go back we want to make sure that those things that worked were continuing and the things that didn’t work were remedying so after uh

1:23:18 after uh after uh the next week we want to survey the cohorts a and b from kindergarten in first what was working there that would be four weeks from the start of that hybrid then look at grades 2 through 12 the week of the 26th survey them now that you’ve been in the model how is it working what is going well what needs attention so there will be some uh a process that i call stop start continue so what are some things that are not resonating that are not working that we need to stop what are some things that we should be starting and what are things that are working that we want to continue in my

1:24:08 in my uh superintendent’s update last week i talked about a culture of constant growth so we have built something we submitted a plan we started with our remote we phased in the early learners the youngest learners earlier we’re now going to go 3 to 12 in the cohort hybrid

1:24:34 we have uh integrated the uh professional development uh for teachers and the collaborative work that they’re doing on wednesday afternoons we’re constantly measuring what uh how are we doing how are students doing assessment is a huge part of the work that we’re doing whether it’s in fully remote or the cohort hybrids how are students performing so that data is coming in all the time and then we want to launch some principle listening sessions where at the building level principals are hearing what is working what needs attention student voice i was so glad that students spoke up this evening i want to host some leadership luncheons which i

1:25:21 talked about in the update last week i’m starting my entry plan which normally would have started in july but interviewing community members doing school visits participating in community events identifying those things that in order to maintain the high level of educational excellence that we see in marblehead what is the vision for the future school committee public comments tonight was very insightful for me to take feedback and nan murphy is on the call as well or on this evening zoom and i see her taking notes i want to caution that unless it comes from this office the plan hasn’t changed we are taking

1:26:07 feedback in real time groups will get together and say this has been shared as a concern or a shortcoming or something that needs our attention and so they brainstorm things as is human nature people some of those brainstorm things will resonate with some and will not resonate with others and people may leave a meeting and say they’re changing what they’re doing but i would just want people to rest assured that unless it is an official announcement that we’re no longer doing something that we said we were going to do or were changing it that that is not in fact happening and i just wanted to end with some

1:26:53 community uh feedback in examples of where we do listen and we make changes the reopening committee and the subcommittees with the board of health did not support full person return the community expressed that they wanted in-person return so we decided on the phased approach which we are doing and we will use public health data and hopefully move to full days we have established that foundation uh for full remote so in the event that we have to go back to full remote we will have done it taken feedback and improved it so that if we’re in that again uh it will be better for all

1:27:41 families and it really is very personal everyone’s circumstance and as i’ve said many times no one is right no one is wrong when you see your child struggling or sitting at a zoom frustrated as a parent i understand that you want that to stop you don’t want that happening and so maintaining a collaborative approach and working together and sharing uh with us is the way that we will make changes and so i just put this slide together so that you can see um when people express things we do try to make them happen and i know that it’s sometimes frustrating when people think well

1:28:28 they’re not listening and i assure you we are listening we’re just not able always to tell people what they want to hear the variables are numerous and this isn’t a one person plan this is a reopening committee of 20 plus individuals nine subcommittees that worked all summer there are subcommittees of subcommittees that are continuing uh to work and so know um that we’re not just going to hit monday and plow forward to the end of the year that there will be opportunities to expand and review what we’re doing so i will end there and i’m stop and stop sharing my screen

1:29:16 and open it up for questions thanks john any questions sarah

1:29:25 i um i have several questions and concerns from what we heard earlier first i want to commend those students that spoke i was so impressed with how um how brave they were how eloquent they were how just the fact that they advocate for themselves at that age it’s just always so wonderful to to see and it’s just it they should be very proud of themselves their parents should be proud of themselves i i was proud of them um but i i have concerns um i want to start with the students concerns that you know many times i know i personally ask will marblehead students be taught by marblehead teachers and part of that was i wanted them to have someone to answer their questions um and the fact that these students were

1:30:11 hearing from these students that there’s no live person that that is a problem and i don’t know that that solution can wait until we have um you know wait a few weeks down the line that is not fair to these students um i think we need to start we need to implement something sooner i’ve heard really really positive things about you know the response coming from dan bauer from lindsey page and that parents and students are happy that they’re they they’re getting a response but i don’t think that we’re we’re fixing the problem and i think i i my understanding for the plan that we voted to approve gave those students if not a marblehead teacher a marblehead contact point that was always available

1:30:59 to answer their subject questions not just you know not just a remote contact but if you have a question about ap physics you would get to talk to someone who has knowledge about physics um a live person and i think that that is very important and we promise that to people and we need to deliver it now um that’s one concern time and learning is a huge concern we’ve heard it from all these parents um i had no idea until maybe the email came in yesterday that remote students on their remote days on wednesdays were getting no live interface um that being said i was i was part of teaching and learning i was part of these meetings um and i i had no idea

1:31:47 these students were not going to get any live interface with um with someone and in fact i went back and i looked and my understanding was we told them they would so we asked them to commit to a program for a quarter or a trimester uh on a bunch of guarantees that we’re not giving so in my mind we we are asking them to hold up their end of the bargain which they should you know you commit to a section but we need to hold up our end of the bargain we need to provide what was promised and we promised them people um to ask their questions to to troubleshoot with to to have support from they need a person um a live person and i i want to make sure that we’re meeting our frameworks that we’re meeting

1:32:33 meeting meeting these things and i appreciate what john said is you have to wait till the information comes out of your office but i i saw no update come out officially saying there would be no live interface on wednesdays but that is what is happening um so there’s there’s a disconnect somewhere i think we can work collaboratively i think we can work as a team and figure out what that is but i don’t know that we have weeks or more months to do that i think we’ve heard loud and clear people want an open forum um and i think they deserve one um i think that is i think it’s i think that that is a reasonable request to the current situation um it’s

1:33:20 a and i and i would like us to set a date to give that to them in the near future

1:33:31 so john it’s my understanding that um that the remote students particularly at the high school i know i know at the lower school levels they definitely do but the high school seems to be and we said this from the beginning the trickiest one to really meet all of those needs in a way that is similar to what an in-person experience would be um it’s my understanding that each student that remote cohort does have teachers assigned to it they have support right they do have support yes okay um all right so i’m not i don’t i don’t know where it’s coming that they that they don’t have teachers it just came from the students like i just heard that from student after

1:34:17 student that they don’t they could be i could have misinterpreted what they said wrong but the students who are living through this are saying they have no one and and the idea that um a new student in our system has no marblehead like group to work with collectively that is not not only is that not what we’re promising from a marble head education standpoint but that is that’s not that can be socially emotionally health healthy for these kids to not be in any peer group where they work with students and and these children chose remote because that was felt they felt was the right choice for their family and now they feel that they have no choice whatsoever but to leave that

1:35:03 and go into buildings and i think we can do better

1:35:14 nan did you want to speak to any of the wednesday remote or dan bowers still on the call if he wants to talk about the complexity of the high school schedule i know that it is trying to get each student their leveled specific course and having the capacity internally of a teacher to teach an honors language course at an individual level and science and history and so i would just ask nan if you want to speak to the wednesday question first sure i’d be glad to thank you for the opportunity um i i want to also commend the community members and the students that came forward today

1:36:01 we only get better by hearing what we can do differently and and we um i feel like are pretty receptive and been able to respond in real time to a lot of concerns we’ve only somebody said 14 days we’ve only been at this 14 days and i really liked the analogy of the marathon a lot of preparation we’re just inching up to the the starting line and we’re already trying to pace ourselves and figure out what we need to do differently i see a hand up is that should i continue um because this is not a public background so i i’m sorry otherwise we we border on um some open meeting law

1:36:48 stuff okay great thank you sarah so i just want to um reframe the piece around wednesdays to acknowledge the real time shifts and changes parents had brought to a couple of concerns to my attention within the last two weeks and one was around assessments and students at home being asked to do tasks and parents were saying um how much support do we give kids and worried about un their their students not their teachers not getting accurate representation of assessment pieces that were done in the home so wednesdays really right now at the elementary level um we are concentrating

1:37:33 a lot of our real-time assessments when we have kids in person so we have our paras and our teachers focusing if you look at the expectations guideline that was sent home in the hybrid model on wednesdays we do concentrate on getting our students assessed and for early um readers and writers that that is a link that is a lengthy process and it is done one-to-one so in order to get those assessments done well we do we are using our real time um with kids on wednesdays which reallocate some of the support that we were hoping to be able to have pairs and tutors supporting the remote model that’s not to say it’s not going to change

1:38:20 we currently have three postings available looking for three additional people to hire to support remote learning uh in terms of pairs and tutors so we’re looking to fill that that block in and we’re hearing what peer parents are saying about that block and so we’re looking to make those changes um and it additions but the the wednesdays the removal of that support remote comes from parent feedback around assessments and the teachers need to really being able to communicate and commit to those assessments and get them done with kids in person so that that’s kind of where we are on wednesdays but we are hearing that parents do need a little bit more support and organization from the school side

1:39:08 and we we’re we were we’re already working to see how we can provide that thanks nan mr bauer did you want to comment on high school schedule

1:39:23 i think it might be something on your computer side okay how’s that better there you go yep yeah i mean um obviously you know part of the reason our schedules were delayed was because you know as we filtered through our 106 students that opted for full remote you know we had to pivot quickly to make sure that we could service all the needs and as you know we have multiple levels with multiple subjects advanced placement honors college prep and college prep two in a lot of our areas and i took i tallied up 192 courses that we had to find staffing for in the remote and that’s including special education curriculum supports literacy labs and all that so we did the best that we could because we also have students in the hybrid as well so we were looking at ways where we could pull a teacher we couldn’t just dedicate a whole teacher because we have

1:40:11 the staff that we have so i thought our guidance department and assistant principal michelle carlson did an outstanding job i couldn’t be more prouder of the work they’ve done i can understand the frustrations i totally can because typically in a normal year we have a multitude of levels and we have a multitude of subjects of things that we offer so we made sure that we plugged in teachers to the areas that we have the the greatest need in terms of the most students there are some students or some courses that are honors level that have a marblehead high school teacher in the remote and also an advanced placement or two courses as well we tried our best but we also employed vhs uh which is a very reputable uh program uh very well regarded in terms of being able to pick up the the slack from some of our um advanced placement and honors courses

1:40:58 where we just couldn’t find or uh you know have a marbled high school teacher in that particular piece as well so and obviously we have ingenuity that we’ve used we have uh miss lindsey page has done an outstanding job coordinating that effort we have the contact people we are adding teachers in as we go because we’re trying to not only work it’s like two schools within one and dr he was correct but our our group never shied away from the work that we had to do and i appreciate the patience of all the parents and students because it was a difficult challenge to get the schedules out when we did we’d like to have them right at the uh right before we begin at summer vacation which typically do and then give them out again with all the teachers but um and again i understand the frustration of our students as well in different cases

1:41:43 and and we try our best if we have situations that we can remedy we will and certainly i know i’m not going to put the cart before the horse because it’s not my place to do so but i know that working with our lead teachers and our staff we all know that we’re taking this in phases to make sure monday the emphasis is to get us into school safely and making sure that we can make this work and then we go from there and work we’ve been looking at creative ways within our schedule again within alignment with the district that we can make changes if appropriate to make this and our and certainly it’s been a huge adjustment we can tell from the remote learning um fact that you know at the end of the day our teachers were exhausted and those students were too and i know we’ve tried to build in purposefully opportunities there were a lot of small group meetings that took place during these three weeks there was also other opportunities we’ve had

1:42:29 senior seminars we had the freshman orientation so we knew we’re trying to build up and if you look at our hybrid schedule coming up next week you can see that we built in scheduled afternoon blocks specifically for the alternating cohorts so we’re adding more time in there in the afternoons at some point that may translate into additional instructional time as we go forward but we can’t put the cart before the horse you know we worked hard to make sure we could get in safely on monday and make that transition and our staff is working really hard to make the curricular adjustments as well and and certainly um you know we’re we’ve had some technological challenges but we’ve overcome that so i’m proud of our staff for that and but again i do hear what the parents are saying i hear what the students are saying and i totally understand that piece too and um we’ll

1:43:16 we’ll keep trying to work as best we can to help every student and and certainly uh welcome any feedback thank you thank you dan you guys are doing uh really good work with a very complicated situation with the variety of courses i appreciate you giving context uh to the number of courses that you were trying to find specific educators for thanks dan i want to just clarify i’ve heard nothing but positive um ever but particularly this year um in regards to the response that people are getting from you and lindsay page’s name comes up endlessly in in how happy people are i i really have not heard a negative word about that i think the issue is

1:44:02 it’s an imperfect system and i think every everybody is dealing with an imperson or imperfect system and we just the only way to get through this is to to really just identify what pieces of this are working really well and which ones aren’t and how can we use use those to get everything working really well and that’s why i think the forum would be so helpful but i just want you to know that i have heard nothing but good things about the response people are getting um from you at the high school it’s just it’s we have to figure we just have to start identifying what’s working what is it and move from there ali

1:44:46 so i just wanted um i’d like two quick things so i think what alexis was saying when she was the high school student that would because i heard this from another parent whose daughter’s taking ingenuity classes is that they have a marblehead teacher who they can go to but it’s not necessarily a teacher in that subject matter so if they have a question like i think alexis was saying of her brother had a or no someone else who she knew sorry one of the other high school students said well i had a question and i had no one to go to so i think that’s the issue so i’m just like quickly thinking of

1:45:32 ideas i don’t even know if any of these could work but would it be possible to get those ingenuity students who are i think it was ap physics can she connect with the ap physics teacher at the high school for questions during the second half of the day when there’s that time of when they can get those small groups um i so i don’t know if any of this is feasible or possible but like if there’s a way for the ingenuity students taking ap or honors courses to connect with the marblehead high school teachers that are doing that even aft not i guess not after school but like even if there’s a time to have a quick um meeting just to go over any kind of questions they have like if we could set

1:46:18 up some kind of connection for them that way and then also the ingenuity student who because i know a freshman who is only taking ingenuity classes and then i think alexa said her brother was and they’re both freshmen so is there a way to get all those students together in a zoom because i know they’re remote but maybe by grade get them with a guidance counselor or someone to just meet with them a weekly to say hey how’s everything going you know these are everyone else this is everyone else in your remote section these you know just to get them connected with other kids because being a freshman and not having that experience of actually seeing children or i mean students i mean that is not great for them and i think it’s just

1:47:05 like maybe little ways because their schedules can be kind of set up by themselves so we can find times to get them together and i think just like little ways to help them out because it is a really different way of going to school for them so just a couple of thoughts that i had thank you emily i think that the high school and middle school both have advisory programs and that is probably a really nice avenue for all the high school students to have a connection uh regardless of the cohort that they’re in and so i’ll work with mr bauer in the high school administration to make sure that there are those opportunities that you’re talking about for a contact in a discipline specific department for a

1:47:51 student that’s taking an edge annuity or a virtual high school class and also for that connection piece via the advisory program so that yeah to get the engine to get those students into an advisory and that’s even better with other students too who are in the hybrid so yeah so just ways to get them involved in the school um a little bit more so yeah megan um so man if you don’t mind i think some of my questions are more directed towards you you’re in the thick of it with the teaching and learning and working directly with our staff um i think you guys all know that consistency’s kind of been the little um you know bug in my bonnet for a while you know since since spring um so i’m wondering if you could just talk a little bit about you know

1:48:37 you know you know some of the feedback that you’ve been getting and what steps you’ve kind of taken based on that feedback kind of immediately or you know what you have plans in in that regard sure i’d be happy to the feedback early elementary has been a level of frustration from parents around students being being able to be self-directed in some of the tasks that are being assigned and i think a parent alluded to it today when this evening when she spoke about see-saw we did have a conversation that tool is a platform developmentally appropriate for kindergarten through second grade

1:49:22 second grade second grade but the task that she shared with me was too difficult for that particular grade level to um be able to manipulate there was a lot of executive functioning skills required to move the mouse click on this drag your assignment into this box it was it was challenging and so that’s immediately something that we addressed we are immediately able to go back and remind teachers i sent an email midweek on wednesday kind of capsulizing some of the points that i’d heard from parents over the course of the last week one was around the need for

1:50:07 differentiation in the remote assignments so when kids are tasked to work alone at home we really need teachers to think about how are we differentiating those assignments how are we making them different for every student based on their ability to work independently so we can’t just send home one assignment to all 25 first graders or one assignment to all third graders because the various levels of skill so we have i i reminded teachers around whatever you send home on those remote days really need to be accessible by kids independently parents i’ve heard over and over again

1:50:53 um that they are having to be near so nearby there’s child because they can’t access the text they don’t understand how to read and they’re asked to read directions to be able to do something independently where the child can’t read directions yet so i in the conversation i had with the parent i reflected as my my own experience as a as a third grade teacher i remembered you know when my third graders would leave they were fourth graders and when i started in the fall my third graders were really second graders and it took me a while those first couple of weeks to remember and shift gears that oh right kids can’t do this yet oh right i have to back off on that so it’s about kind of reminding teachers that when kids are working

1:51:41 independently we need to be super aware that they have to be able to access it um and that and that’s on all spectrums the big middle the the kids that need to be challenged and advanced we don’t want them going through an assignment that is designed and created for an hour of application and practice of a skill and they’re done in five minutes so as you might imagine everybody is talking about how phenomenal our teaching staff is and and you can only imagine the level of expertise and the level of time to differentiate that kind of assignments we’re getting there we are providing our teachers we’re very targeted district-wide professional development

1:52:27 on wednesdays k-6 we um i’ve heard over and over and over again megan from you and from other parents that they want the same experience for their child that other kids at the same grade level in other schools are having so we have all of our grade level teachers part of a district team so traditionally teachers are part of a second grade teaching team and you might get together and meet with your colleagues and co-plan at your second grade level but in this case we have developed a district-wide grade level team for every grade level kindergarten through for uh sixth grade where they meet with their grade level team to their district grade level team to

1:53:14 analyze standards to look at the curriculum to select what is going to be covered in that particular week what would be great asynchronous teaching points so that is happening across the district uh on when every wednesday um so that’s another shift that we made based on that feedback um we i let’s see we’ve talked about access to shared google folders at the i talked with the dan bauer about this at the high school where some students that are working remotely at home that want to access additional challenges having classroom marblehead classroom

1:53:59 curriculum and and materials that are generated by content teachers placed in a shared folder for students to be able to access on their own if they want enrichment and and they want to see what grade level uh what in person students are accessing while they’re in the hybrid model so we we heard that and and now dan and i have talked about how we can make help help teachers provide that as a resource i’ve heard from parents that are talking about not knowing how much support to offer their students how much guidance so i emailed a couple people today asking about their willingness to help me create some um parent tutorials you know what is phonics what what is what are the

1:54:46 critical components of phonics k through um two and how is a parent how how what do you need to understand about blending and consonants and vowels and then um taking it further and upper up the grades and trying to find out how we can assist parents with with that kind of learning and support at home we we um we we are really really focused on alignment and consistency in both curriculum and assessments so our goal has always been that our kids no matter what model you are in you are getting very rigorous on point instruction and you are regularly progress monitored and that remediation

1:55:33 and intervention is provided so we’re working on those systems as a district team and we’re working on those systems with our staff to where they fit how do we progress monitor how do we ensure a lot of conversation in the district around how are we going to cover this year’s worth of content in a reduced setting and um it’s a great question and one that we talk about all the time um last year the commissioner of education presented districts in the commonwealth with priority standards uh that hasn’t happened yet but we i’ll be working with rebecca brand and district leaders to look at our standards look at our

1:56:20 curriculum and really pull out what we as educators call power standards the standards that are essential to be able to access further development in the curriculum and making sure that we really get those power standards in front of kids and give them multiple opportunities to practice them both in person and remotely so that we are staying on pace we may not be able to cover all the curriculum and practice opportunities in person with kids those are the opportunities that we would typically have in a classroom with kids working in small groups at small tables that’s what we’re we’re designing our asynchronous learning around so how do we give good solid instruction in person and plan that asynchronous review and

1:57:07 practice and application for at home so those are some of the things we’re talking about based on what we’re hearing parent concerns are and and honestly our our teachers share the concerns around pacing and coverage of material and wanting to ensure that they get all their grade level content in front of kids in the in the most efficient yet effective manner we um i’m going to continue to encourage teachers to think about curriculum in terms of skill development and go in and mastery as opposed to teaching for coverage we can get through a pacing we can stay on pace we can move through curriculum but we’re going to definitely be leaving people behind if we do that so

1:57:52 we’re just we’re con we’re working on formative and summative assessments to keep ensuring that our kids are making the games they need to make and we’ll be addressing deficits and we’ll be continuing to design instruction to enrich and um i hear the concern about the big middle and um we’re where they’re on our radar and we we will we will be consistently overseeing student progress and growth throughout the year okay so that was a lot i know i’m sorry no no it was good it’s really helpful to hear that because i think you know i’m a you know obviously have a child in the district and i’m you know from a parent perspective but i think you know

1:58:38 it’s good to hear the tweaks that are going on you know yes we’re going to do a survey in x number of weeks but it’s good to hear that tweaks that are happening with with the model on a very regular basis as you get feedback so i think you know that is useful for me to understand where you’re seeing some of the issues and how you are addressing them as quickly as possible so i appreciate that piece um and to be honest the uh parent tutorials and the training that was that was going to be one of my next questions and i think we talked about this um as a group over the summer making sure that we’re providing that type of support to parents as well because it’s a learning process for all of us as well um and the grade level collaboration so i’m hoping they’re you know when we talk about consistency that teachers have the

1:59:25 opportunity to learn and share from each other because it is all new for for everybody and what works best for better maybe is it is the right word and then that we can then put that into for lack of a better word kind of best practices across that across that level right so the other question um i had for you and i think you know i’ve probably gotten more feedback from early you know from the kind of younger um parents set but i don’t think it’s specific to them i actually think it’s across the board um is around organization for what the expectations are right so um i think i can probably speak just from the feedback i have on the early learners and then you can kind of

2:00:13 extrapolate that to the um middle school and high school type students too but if you know what and let’s just take a time period a week is going to look like and what your schedule is what you’re going to be focused on from a from a learning standpoint and then what the expectation is in terms of you know if i take my third grader what math worksheets is she going to be responsible for on monday is she going to have um if she’s going to have an art class what materials is she going to need to have ready on that day on that time so she’s going to need crayons on paper watercolors whatever it is and if she’s going to um be going to the library and they’re going to be doing that virtually on a remote day does she need to log into

2:01:00 a different application and how do we make sure that we know exactly when that needs to be up and running so we can test it in advance so it’s almost like that picture of that time period with organized in a way that everybody knows what the expectation is right and then it just makes it easier i i would hope um you know especially for parents of the younger kids to have that stuff set up for them and hopefully make them a little bit more independent so that you’re not kind of having to kind of insert yourself because your kid’s like i don’t know what math worksheet i’m supposed to be doing now you know um you know i think that probably translates you know maybe it translates in a different way to older students i i appreciate you asking that because it gives me an opportunity to say that that conversation has already started

2:01:47 so i had a conversation um a couple of conversations around from the level of frustration from parents with um as at certain points um recently about the the schedule changing in their mind so that you know they would get a schedule sunday night saying that their what their child needed to do the next day and the parent had to shift a conference call or move something around in their own professional day and that that was a real hardship for them so i’ve already i addressed that with the particular principle asked that principal to um brainstorm with staff in the building how those expectations for the week can be consolidated and perhaps sent out in a weekly friday letter so that parents

2:02:34 could plan for the following week what demands would be made of them if they have young children on the days that the kids are in the in the remote setting so we are thinking about it and i’ve also um have it noted to bring that to our next leadership meeting on monday afternoon to talk to other principals about how are we communicating with families in well in advance of what their time with students is going to look like the following week because if they have a conference call or commitment at work and then all of a sudden they need to be engaged when in reading directions and helping us a child through an assignment they have to know that well in advance so that is something that we are working

2:03:22 to address and and to make more concise and more um accessible to families in a more um an advanced time frame okay all right thank you yeah do you want to see a like um nana actually because to give a positive feedback our teacher has been giving us we’ve got been getting some of those look-aheads and i know that we’ve heard how the remote kind of is is some given some giant hurdles at the high school level but i think at the the elementary level the k-6 um i’ve had the opportunity to see a full remote setup um four for three of those levels and we’ve seen a lot in the emails that when they were in full remote even the hybrid learners i think we’re having a more positive experience it’s nailed this juggle up back and forth

2:04:09 so maybe if we you know at some point instead of just you know if we do when we do this forum identifying what’s not working if we make a list of the positive side of what’s really really working in the remote setup for for those um elementary kids because i do think the full remote at the elementary side is working um well right now there’s some blips but it’s i think it’s working well i’ve heard from parents that that piece is working well so um maybe if we like even at some point reach out to those parents and say can you give us a bulleted list of what is working the best and kind of try to share that with the hybrid side and implement that and then also try to as we can morph that into you know

2:04:56 sorry if someone joining me um as much as we can if this is working at the elementary level it’s not apples to apples at the upper level but what is working at the elementary level that could be somewhat mirrored in the upper if you know what i mean obviously it’s not a one for one but there are pieces that i i think if we identify clearly what’s working and what isn’t we just use that list yeah

2:05:30 all right um i think that looks like questions were asked thank you everyone thank you dan um john that brings us along to the superintendent’s goals that you’ve been working on yes thank you i think uh each of the members of the committee got a copy of my goals for the year following the deci format for superintendent evaluation which we went over in the workshop which seems like two years ago but it was just last month i have a professional practice goals student learning goals and then district improvement and so the professional practice goal is my participation in the new superintendent’s induction

2:06:16 program i’m meeting regularly with my coach in that program there are monthly sessions that we participate in um and so that is my goal is to be active in that process and to capitalize on the learning uh of being a new superintendent participating in an entry plan which you will get more details on in tomorrow’s weekly update um that will be stakeholder interviews from across the district that will help inform what will eventually be our next strategic plan so all of these pieces fit really nicely together

2:06:59 my second goal is developing the leadership team here on widger road many of us are new and so working together and really building that collaborative process of being the leadership team for the marblehead public schools we did a two-day retreat this summer at the high school library we hold weekly leadership team meetings to talk about what’s going well what needs attention

2:07:32 we will do some professional development together some professional reading student learning goal is improving instructional practice in the district and to that end focusing on educator evaluation and feedback we adopted the teach point evaluation system all administrators submitted their goals to me today assistant principals submitted to their building principles using the new program in teachpoint making sure that leaders are getting into classrooms and identifying what is a solid instructional practice and though it wasn’t done last year in the remote setting also providing educators feedback for how they’re

2:08:20 educating in this new normal and so desi has not changed any of the requirements or expectations for educator evaluation so that’s my student learning goal is improving instructional practice and working with building leaders to that end the district improvement plan is to uh work on work on uh the diversity uh within the system and i think the resolution uh that you all passed at the last meeting hearing from team harmony at tonight’s meeting i think it’s an important goal for the new superintendent to look at the programs in the district and institute instructional practices that

2:09:06 recognize and support the needs of students and families in a diverse system and to that end having uh recruitment of uh educators that look like our students and so those are my goals uh for the year lofty uh as they are i’m looking forward uh to engaging that work because i think each of them supports our overall mis our overall mission of improving the marblehead public schools

2:09:37 thanks john i see your mentor chris mcgrath has joined us hi chris welcome good to see you

2:09:46 thank you sarah um i think you know these are exciting to get um it’s it’s nice to look them over uh and and think about the fact that that in spite of kovid these big picture things are still happening and still moving forward and you know maybe not quite in the same way that we would have otherwise been able to have them happen but that they are still um ongoing and that’s exciting to me um emily i think i saw your hand up um just real quick um i learned this last night that once your goals are set um it’s good to make an agenda of presentations of where all the information that you

2:10:32 get in all um you know all the evidence that you collect and data to present to us um throughout the year so at the end when we do the event like like um have to go back and find everything so that was just something that um was a point that they said that can really help with the whole process is to just make set those dates of when you can present what you found to us but maybe you already know but just well two cents that’s great it could be a regular agenda item just to update the committee on progress uh to date on goals that’d be great yeah because i think you know that the whole that whole process is a slightly confusing one so and as we’ve as we’ve noted before one that’s

2:11:17 new to almost all of us on this committee so you know i would just follow up on that john because i think those regular updates would actually be very helpful um you know i think the year goes by you know you think you have nine months and it’s gone like that so i think you know as long as we’re on top of them in in that type of regularity that would be very helpful happy to do it

2:11:44 i know in the past i know last year on the school committee put together a list of goals we had for bill and i believe that’s had happened in the past will at some point we be discussing if we have a set of goals or or is this more self-directed

2:12:03 um i’m happy to entertain goals that are put forward by the school committee these are just my personal goals but if there are things that the committee identifies that they would like me to focus time on this year i would welcome that i think just to clarify for last year because we did we absolutely did do that for bill but that was because he was an interim and there was no evaluation process needed so it was sort of putting forth his priorities um just to sort of make it clear as to this versus that all right um yeah emily do you have any even another question so it was also suggested that the school

2:12:49 committee creates goals and to make sure that our goals align with the superintendent’s goals so throughout the process we can all kind of evaluate ourselves just talking to me about that earlier today that that i know how i feel about school committee goals so we will yeah we’ll uh we’ll get that moving along i think that’s a great idea emily yeah i’m sure that megan will make sure to be to not let me forget that on the next agenda project manager 101

2:13:35 uh thanks john for presenting these so i’m just wondering from the mentor perspective and what john’s presented of course all of these goals depend on the appropriate funding to make sure these these things can happen so

2:13:57 is there a way within those goals somehow there can be something that that talks about um aligning the appropriate budget and the needs to make sure these things happen i don’t know if it needs to be specific as the word budget or funding but um i think obviously those things don’t happen if we don’t have the proper funding and we’re not focusing on the areas that that bill did last year for instance to realign whether it was based on enrollment and various things to to move um move different pieces of the budget to make sure it helped set the stage to meet the goals

2:14:45 yes that makes that makes good sense to me my goals are not necessarily budget contingent but i hear what i think you’re saying is should i develop a goal that is budget in nature right it’s budgeting budget in nature and it or identify areas where you know you where the district might need that additional support for you to achieve your goals maybe maybe that’s one of the outcomes of the goals that you’ve outlined that will throughout the year will will come out as well are you talking more like the the um

2:15:32 the teaching evaluation tool that making sure that that we have adequate funds to continue to do that and then you know if there was a curriculum that was necessary for the for the district goal of increasing diversity um you know this is just all off the cup is that kind of what you’re asking about like so budgetary pieces like that that would need to be added in to make sure that that were that we’re setting john up for success well well i think not so much that we’re we’re setting well in in agreement right that we would be setting setting john up for success but for instance um you know under

2:16:19 you know the the student learning goals um

2:16:25 there are some areas there or under district improvement potentially there there are things that will that will come out throughout the year where there could be additional needs that i guess that get identified um but i but i think as an overarching um i mean we all we all know how critical it is that this year will certainly throw things out of whack with with covet 19 and depending on where monies are allocated and where the needs are and once we get back to um you know a stable moving forward but you know i and for instance thinking of thinking about the new school you know how do we budget for the new

2:17:12 school when it opens up to make sure that the combined new school has an appropriate budget so i’m just i guess i’m just wondering if there’s an if if there is a goal that is that is a a financial related goal or something that’s more fiscally related um as opposed to i mean john mentioned there they are his professional goals but should you know do we need something that is more specific related to those kinds of things yeah i would i think we do david and to be honest i had a technology goal and a budget goal and i didn’t want to set up so many

2:17:57 goals right that’s good i narrowed the focus but i i think with the new school coming online and looking as the first year superintendent at the budget and the process that is used here and how we allocate resources and what out what resources we have um i think i will develop a budget goal to bring back before you for the second october meeting yeah i mean you’re right i mean technology is another area i mean you can be more um focused on those individual things other than the overarching educational goals that that might be uh that might be more more specific but um yeah i i appreciate that thought and whether it gets built into this document or not but just the fact that you’re you

2:18:44 know you’re considering it and obviously i’m sure we’ll be working on it with with your mentor as we go forward and with michelle um it certainly is is a critical piece moving forward for success yeah i think a lot of though i i like the idea of that we need to have budget um align we need to no budget drivers without any any item any new goal um and i think that’s going to become even more important as we set up and move into our strategic plan because everything in our strategic plan will have a budget driver attached to it and i think that we’re really going to need to dig in and and note those and make sure they’re as as clear as can be most definitely

2:19:33 all right great thank you john like i said this is thanks john john you have your uh work cut out for you all right that brings us on to the schedule of bills uh we had a schedule as well as all of the um all the scans were in the dropbox um so can i get a motion to approve the identified schedule of bills totaling two million six hundred thirteen thousand five hundred forty dollars and eighty five cents so moved so moved emily moved second any questions on any of those

2:20:17 well when i first saw them the memo that came together and i was like whoa where did we spend two million dollars in the last couple of weeks and lo and behold it’s the school project building it’s the school building and um just for purposes of the the committee i think um most people know but um so the building committee gets a a full update and a review of invoices and bills that are to be approved and they’re authorized by the building committee and then they come forward to the school committee for approval so they’ve also had a second set of eyes when you see these numbers they’re going to start getting bigger and bigger

2:21:05 um over the next couple of months so yeah thanks david all right i will uh roll call sarah gold yes emily baron yes megan taylor yes sarah fox yes and david harris yes all right passes five to zero okay so that brings us on to the school committee communication and discussion items um so first off i put on an masc updates uh discussion item um with a few different subheadings underneath it um the first is the annual meeting and reports booklet so did you guys all get this

2:21:45 all right um i don’t know why you didn’t because it it came to my personal address um but i will i’ll give it to lisa and i’ll have copies made for everybody um and maybe we can circle back to this then um at our next meeting um sorry i was hoping that people would have gotten it because it’s really weird because it did not come to me addressed as chair um but i’ll get that in there’s one of the pieces that i wanted to bring up just to kind of point people i mean there’s some interesting information but just to kind of let you guys know where it’s where where my head was at was the um there’s a whole section on reporting of resolutions from the state resolution committee and so some of these like the anti-racism one that we talked about last time um and and some of the other ones that

2:22:32 we’ve had on are on here um and so i just was as was interested in hearing from people if they were interested in bringing any of these other resolutions forward so um i’ll work with lisa and try to get this um maybe maybe even easier to just get it into a dropbox for people to look at and then um and then we can we can bring it back up next time and if anybody has one of these resolutions that they would like to see possibly come up for a boat then just let me know that so that we can make the um make the note on the agenda and then uh move forward with that uh a little bit more swiftly so all right that’s that um

2:23:15 annual meeting goes do we need to let you now that it’s virtual do we need do we have a limited number of people that can sign on to those forums i think you know when we had to travel that as many people were up for that but now um now i know that i would definitely take advantage of those but do we have a limited number of seats and do it to register additional people so i need to follow up with dorothy on that because i think you’re talking about like the conference correct the conference and also these various webinars they have right okay so yeah so that’s a perfect segue into the next bullet point um because so the conference has been in my understanding officially canceled this year and what they’re doing then is putting on these various webinars so we’ll we’ll hit the social media webinar

2:24:02 that sort of popped up uh negan and i went to after we after this conversation but i what they how i’m basically understanding it is they’re going through they they’re offering the charting the course which emily i know you’ve taken um hopefully all of us have taken that i know megan and i did um david it would have been a long time ago for you um when you were first school committee um sarah i don’t know if you finished that up last year so if anybody didn’t take any of those courses it would be great because they are all online um and and they’re they’ve been offered multiple times already and they’re going to continue to offer them but then the way that i heard it and megan i think it was on this social media call so correct me if i’m wrong is that they’re going to offer a deeper dive as well for

2:24:49 for school committee members who have been on for a while and so they’re going to go back and look at very similar topics as the charting the course looks at but again do a do a deeper look into it so that it’s it’s more comprehensive than um kind of that overview for new school committee so i don’t think that that is going to cost money this year because the conference always costs us money to to go to to attend but um i will have to look back on it but i don’t john you gave me a funny look um that i don’t think that they’re charging for those courses yeah that was that was my understanding right and so they’re

2:25:35 some of them are similar to the charting the course you know as refreshers for people you know who maybe have taken them a while ago but i think that’s where they talked about those friday lunchtime sessions exactly so you know there’s a schedule out on i think there’s a schedule out on the masc website and then you just register i mean just like we did with the social media one it just there was no cost for it and they’re really good you know they’re really good i’ve sat that’s not the only one i’ve sat in on over the past couple months over the summer um they’re really a they’re a good refresher but because there’s kind of a broad set of other school committee members from different regions um you get into a good conversation and questions you know that maybe haven’t arised here but just gives

2:26:21 you kind of pause and things to things to consider so yeah they’re set up in a bit of a train the trainer type um format so it was it’s helpful to hear you know whether it’s just one person leading it or there’s usually a couple of people leading it it’s helpful to hear you know what what this school committee member in worcester is doing or you know the this other one out in holyoke um so that that’s kind of nice to just get other people’s perspectives uh so yeah so like mike said that’s all on the misc website uh so everybody feel free and then if you do attend one of them and you want to give an update like megan and i wanted the social media one on here um just you know let me know that what what you know what you

2:27:08 what you attended and we’ll put it on for for an update at the next meeting

2:27:15 so that’ll lead us on to the social media webinar um megan i feel like i’ve been doing a bit of talking if you want to uh start off on that talk away um no i think this one came up i know it’s been a hot topic this summer we’ve probably like talked it to death at this point but again this one was useful because you’re hearing and kind of working through issues that other school committee members are having in their own district and what has again best practice if you will what has worked well and maybe where they’ve tried things and they haven’t worked um so it’s useful for that from that perspective and what came up again and again i swear every single district that was represented was

2:28:01 talking about the balance between being a community member but also the fact that you actually never take your school committee hat off and that’s just a fact and so you have to keep that in mind when you’re then representing or commenting on social media and i think especially you know i think there are a few public or at least you know marblehead specific groups that a number of us are members of and that does open us up for open meeting violations and we just have to be very careful and conscious of um of how we’re utilizing that tool so i’m not saying we don’t use it that’s

2:28:47 not what i’m saying i’m saying we have to be very conscious of how we are using it and i don’t think it’s well let me take a step back the good thing is we’ve got a new school committee website coming out so we can push a lot of information out there but there’s still you know questions that arise that you you know that won’t necessarily be able to answer right away but i just think it’s something you know that’s always on my mind yeah no and i agree and i think one of the biggest takeaways that i had um was that piece around um open meeting law violation and because we’ve had this come up i you know we’re all very careful of it and very aware of it and it does i think everything with social media is very great to

2:29:32 great to great to how i’m understanding it there’s very little case law on it um and so it just it sort of is i don’t know a breeding ground for um missteps i think so you know how do we but how do we move forward with it because the takeaway certainly was not um even though i’ve deleted most of my social media accounts from my from my own personal sites um the takeaway was not that we can’t that we shouldn’t be doing this the takeaway was these exist they are ways in which people communicate and so how do we effectively manage them um without then misstepping whether it’s personally misstepping or as a group misstepping in

2:30:17 an open meeting law violation um so i think one of the pieces what so there was a little bit of talk about facebook pages for the school committee um and i think the woman who presented i i appreciated her because she was very clearly all in on on social media um and then and you know multiple times described herself as a very active uh participant in her town’s social media pages so she sort of advised against a facebook page for the school committee um and really saying that and we i think we’ve talked about this a little bit in the past that basically if you do that you either have to give the control of the facebook page to the chair who’s the spokesperson or every

2:31:04 piece that goes on that facebook page um has to be voted on in an open meeting and so that just sounds like personally it sounds like way too much to manage for me um and and then very cumbersome on the other end of that however she’s she very then kind of went on and spoke all about all of the town pages that are in every town in the commonwealth and she her suggestion was that in order to avoid open meeting law violations that you know one of the suggestions was that possibly you talk to the administrators on those pages and take yourself off of being able to be tagged because once multiple people start to be tagged then you’re really getting into a murky

2:31:50 situation but then her additional um her additional thought was designate a school committee member as the spokesperson on these facebook pages so that one person is providing feedback so that there is an actual voice out there for the school committee and so we’re not being accused of of not commenting or ignoring or hiding out from from them um but that but that then we’re avoiding any open meeting law risks as well to the best of our our ability um and so that if we appointed one person as a spokesperson they would be speaking on behalf of the committee and sort of as the committee um but i thought that that was a really interesting

2:32:36 idea um and kind of you know whether or not people are are open to that idea and i know you know again i’m not the biggest fan of social media right now but i know sarah fox you spend a lot of time on it and so one of the thoughts was kind of maybe you would want to take that on as one of your responsibilities um of kind of speaking for the school committee on the town pages for facebook

2:33:03 i actually don’t know if i i don’t know if it’s appropriate that we have a spokesperson um i think i mean i can see positives and negatives that when people have asked a simple question when’s the next meeting what’s the agenda for the next meeting things like that that i think is benign but i think otherwise it’s very i actually don’t know that we should have an official response from one person um i i think we our power as we all know lists or lies in the will of the committee correct so um i don’t know that we should have an official response i think that um

2:33:49 if it is the answers of when’s your next meeting what like just the factual things that’s i mean facts are facts that’s fine for anybody to answer it’s not a fact is not a deliberation only an opinion is a deliberation so if you’re just stating a fact then that that actually that doesn’t violate anything right information sharing is not at any time a violation of open meeting law um i i don’t think anybody should in an official capacity be sharing that um you know i i have and i i’ve always been clear to use the phrasing i as a parent um and all of us have that opportunity to do that and i think obviously that can’t be taken away from

2:34:34 any of us but i don’t know that anybody should be stating anything in an official capacity that is not just a fact and we’re protected under open meeting laws by that so i i don’t know that we should have that well i guess one you know i would push back on that a little bit because i do think you know this is kind of a credit to you sarah is that i do think you have played that role um on some of those pages and i think we’ve talked about it in our meetings previously um in that the the communities appreciated the fact that you are active on that page and can answer those questions quickly that you know it’s not just what’s the agenda because that’s pretty easy to find but you know um i think you have played that role and i do think that it is

2:35:20 it is it is easier for us all to manage if we have a central way to manage it and that was a lot of the feedback that we got um especially from the presenter who was very active she said you know it’s actually easier for us all to manage if we know that someone’s on it um so i think that’s where the suggestion’s coming from

2:35:45 and i can appreciate that i just worry that is

2:35:55 i just worry it is a slippery slope by identifying someone as i mean any one of us at any given time can answer those questions and and we are we are provided those protections i i just think that by identifying one person in some ways it alienates it takes away the rest of people connecting with the public and the ability to connect with the public and i think it is so important that we all have that ability to connect with the public answer questions um it went in if we choose and i don’t think it’s appropriate for anybody to kind of have that taken away from them and if if you identify me it takes it away from you and emily whoever else that ability to do so or and vice versa if i wasn’t the person that take that ability away from me so i think that you know

2:36:40 you know you know the community wants to talk to all of us and should be able to talk to us all of us and we all should be able to connect with them and as long as we’re sharing facts in the official capacity and not opinions there’s no violation whatsoever i would suggest quite honestly that maybe everybody listens to that to that course and brings up some of these things because this is actual feedback from other people who have done it and done it well in other districts so i appreciate your point sarah but i think it would be useful if everybody got up to speed and had the ability to kind of have that back and forth with other people who are doing it and learn from them too

2:37:27 and the presenter did say that they were they were going to put this one back on the list of presentations as well so um you know maybe i’ll try to keep a look out for it um emily i know you’re often on that site if you see it come up um just you know if anybody sees it come up just toss an email out to the committee so that so that we know about it um i know i actually got the the one that we attended i got it in an email i think i passed it along but i think it was a little bit later um before them before the actual webinar so if if we get anything like that in email too um i’ll just make sure that i forward it to everybody

2:38:06 all right um megan that leads us on to further communication with the school committee website update you’re muted yeah it’s almost past my bedtime so i’m not i’m not gonna rush through it um but feel free to ask questions so first let me share my screen so just a little aside i used to work in software right so i did demos all the time and i was always skeptical of doing live demos in front of large audiences but i’m gonna do it a decade later for you guys so let’s see if i can even find it so you only have 79 people watching you right now okay well that that’s better smaller numbers okay can you guys see that

2:38:53 yes yes okay so um this is our home page there is a picture of each one of our schools here um how do i scroll down here hold on there with me how do i do this okay so it on this home page it’ll talk about our meetings um how they’re the first and third thursday so everyone knows exactly when they can find us what time where they’re going to be posted to so they’ll obviously still continue to be posted to the marblehead town calendar um as required with a direct link and now also to the school committee calendar and this link will take it to the calendar page which we’ll look at in a minute

2:39:44 also that we will have our materials minutes and zoom recordings posted as available in our calendar again with a direct link

2:39:53 and then you can catch it all live screen live streaming from our home page as well so basically a one-stop shop for our school community meetings our agendas our minutes of the materials and then to actually view that meeting in in progress

2:40:16 obviously it’s slow here for me so it oops it will pop up to obviously current date what we have here are basically icons for um for the different meetings just so it’s an easy visual so school committee meetings budget policy will add in the facilities um once those get up and up and scheduled um but just a little bit easier viewing wise um what we talked about here or what we’ve done here is just our open meetings you know the public meetings so if there are you know individual meetings that might be happening um those aren’t out here right now these are our public meetings um what you can see if you hover over it is

2:41:02 the agenda and the zoom link and then you can obviously just click those or if you were to click directly into the icon it brings you to um to that information as well i’m going to go back a couple months just so you can see

2:41:18 on if we look at august 10th we have the agenda and then also a link to the video recording and if there are any materials um out here you’d have the link to those individual materials too so um we can talk about that in a minute about how that how that happens um any questions on the calendar okay under about this is kind of where all the information exists so under committee members these are your pictures and bios that you submitted the one thing i will point out that we did here um was we did add the term expiry dates for everybody so that you know if you’re coming to view the page you know when

2:42:04 those terms are up and also a direct link if you want to email that committee member individually we tried this on the contact page and it just looked a bit messy and we figured this way you have that ability but it just made it a little bit easier easier to manage within the site also under about we have our strategic plan right now this is just cut and pasted from the existing strategic plan um i would hope that as we start getting into planning that john maybe we can in a phase two figure out how we can put some timelines around what that process will look like and some updates so i think that’s a phase two piece but for phase one this is our existing strategic plan

2:42:53 also we have our policy manual so this will be um a direct link to the actual policy library so every individual policy there’s a manual inter introduction which um you know i know i looked at this when i first became a school committee member so it might be a good refresher for some of you but it really just goes through you know the layout what’s included in a policy um the library structure etc so these are just direct links for now um you know there’s some ability through masc to work with them on hosting and if we want to do that in the future again that could be a phase two but this is just for now a direct link to our policy pieces

2:43:39 our operating protocols are new and improved operating protocols are out here um this one is a bit long um as you know we’ve had like three pages of for our operating protocols i would love to have a link to our signed copy um i think that would be a good thing to have out here we just don’t have all the signatures yet but i think in that absence then we’ve just got it um we’ve got every single protocol out here one thing we could look at is if we could not maybe add some drop downs for for each header um that one was going to take a little bit more work than i wanted to do you know just so we could get it up and running for um for next monday

2:44:24 monday monday we also have a page specific for our subcommittees

2:44:34 this is why you don’t do demos live um so this walks through each subcommittee a little blurb about what each committee does we have listed here so if we look at facilities who um which school committee members are on those committees and then we go down into also our advisories and our liaisons as well so these will link back to so if we look at budget there are some links in here embedded so for the budget we can link that to our operating budget presentation that we did back in june

2:45:19 our resources page links out to um these are all the organizations or groups that you guys gave feedback to make sure that we include um so again i think this is probably something that will develop over time but this is our starting point so making sure that we’re linking back to all the pcos and ptos um deci we have in here metco the marblehead cpac the boosters but again this weekend continue to grow out as as time goes on

2:45:54 faqs faqs this is another one um where we just put out some common questions and some answers i think um kate was very helpful in developing these they will come up eventually um but this is just like what’s you know where’s the responsibility between the school committee and the superintendent and describing how that works um if i have an issue at the school what’s that chain of command process look like how do i um participate in a school committee meeting how is the school committee you know how do we kind of run our meetings and why would you potentially have a closed door meeting so again these are just kind of

2:46:40 like questions that we get on a very regular basis and where we can point back to link for additional information we’ve done so so for example the open meeting law is a good example of that and again this is one that i think as we start to get feedback on this website we can continue to add add to this page as well and then our contact page which is just the contact form if anyone wants to send us an email you can obviously fill in the form you can do a direct link click to open up just the email box this will go directly to our school committee at marbleheadschools.org list so we tested this out

2:47:26 this out this out i think everyone got that test so we know that it works um so that’s the full school committee and john as well and i think you know when it pops up in our email it’s pretty easily identified that it’s come from from our website

2:47:45 i think i’ve hit on all the major points comments questions oh one other thing i want to add sorry um because this is probably the most important thing of the website is that i did not do this so kate thompson um has helped us out of the goodness of her heart she helped us get this up and running she’s been amazing you know an amazing resource to us and um you know has done it completely on her you know on her own time and i appreciate her tremendously our target date is to go live on monday so hopefully you know we only have to make a few tweaks to get it up and running and at that point we will fully transition it to the school committee and we will you know anything that needs

2:48:31 to be modified or maintained or managed from that point on is you know kind of on our backs um but kate has been amazing and i just can’t thank her enough for all the help she’s given us putting this together

2:48:47 great wow thank you yeah this looks great um maybe do we want to you want to leave it up maybe stop sharing the screen just so then i can see everybody again uh yeah stop sharing okay i think so okay all right um i really like just like kind of a visual piece i really like the um fonts that you guys picked um that they just look i like that it sort of mirrors the m a little bit um so it’s just it’s it’s very visually pleasing easy on the eyes exactly i appreciate that and lots of great information yeah

2:49:30 it looks great it looks really good um i have a couple questions will we be uploading like our packets so that all those documents are there that we discuss in our meetings um because i think that’s one thing people have asked for a lot and i think that the way you have it laid out it would be really really easy to do that um so that was one question and then can i answer that one before you jump on so the answer to that is yes um that is absolutely the intent i think you know one thing that we did last year because you’re right it’s hard to follow along if you can’t actually see the document and what we did last year was we projected that up in the meeting and then you could see that on mhtv or if you were sitting in the audience you could follow along so it’s much more difficult in this virtual world so absolutely the

2:50:16 intent is to have all those materials up there i’m not going to commit to an actual day and time yet because i think we have to you know get it work through it a bit but i think you know i can commit to having him up there prior to the meeting um at this point so that you know you can access it and you can certainly follow along um i’m not gonna commit to like 24 hours in advance yet but i think we can work to that but absolutely have them up prior to the start of our meeting yeah but and i would i think there’s sort of a fine line there about certainly there are things that we want to get out there in advance for people to be able to see and uh dr bucky has done that on numerous occasions as it’s related to um

2:51:03 our reentry plan but as with most public meetings the the documents don’t become public documents until the committees themselves have discussed them in public and a lot of those documents for those reasons need to be discussed in public explained somebody needs to present them provide proper context and so on and so forth so i i mean i don’t know sarah i’m not thinking that we want to put our schedule of bills like we get the schedule of bills in a dropbox i don’t know necessarily that we want to put our schedule of bills out there um before a public meeting it’s certainly public information but

2:51:48 um after a vote and after after discussion i think if um or in the case of uh you know a principal or somebody making a presentation related to a specific project or program that’s going on we could certainly make those make that information available just like we do for the building committee um once it’s been presented um you know emily and cindy make sure it’s available for people to see just a thought well i think like um i think what meg and i were talking about like for instance when there’s these presentations last year when they were up on the board it was super helpful because a lot of times when you’re sitting in the audience and people are referencing these documents it’s really hard when it’s out of context and you can’t see what they’re referencing um it was let

2:52:34 honestly the schedule bills was like the least of my thoughts on what to get up there but a lot of times these presentations um some that like for instance if we’re gonna get a presentation on the updated budget or whatever we used to project out on the screen so people could follow along and i think it’s helpful for people to have those you know that stuff ahead of time um particularly if it’s something we’re going to be voting on where you know the the public wants to kind of follow our our discussion um and it’s i think helpful for them to have that ahead of time yeah and i think um i can definitely reach out to dorothy presser to see if there’s any kind of best practice around what sort of should be up beforehand and then

2:53:20 what maybe is best to go up afterwards um and so i’ve wrote myself a note on that um but i think you know it sounds it sounds reasonable to have at least some of it up yeah um which leads me to a very important question who’s putting all this stuff up so that is a great question sarah um actually you know i’ve been talking to lisa about this website for a while now too and so i think her and i initially are gonna have to work through it um and then we’ll figure it out but i abs you know we’re gonna have to put a process around it right now it’s challenging for lisa in our district website because it’s time

2:54:07 consuming and clunky so i don’t want to add another task to her but i’d like to also get to a point where we’re taking that piece of away you know that headache away from her so i think that’s going to be a transition um i think in terms of actually making changes to the website that um luckily we have a very experienced website manager on our committee um since emily did you know worked on the one for the building committee she can absolutely help us in terms of updating the website in terms of you know overall content

2:54:46 perfect and then the only the only change i really saw as you’re going through and it was laid out very well um is in that closed door meeting headline heading i just foresee us getting a lot of emails about that if we can just change that phrasing to executive session because i think they’re they’re that might keep people’s idea that we are having closed door meetings and we absolutely are not um and i think below the heading you explained it very well but it just that people often get will see this heading and then flip out so if we just can just change that then we won’t have people out there thinking we’re having closed door meetings yeah i can put executive session in the heading that’s fine just a question on that um since i made you take it down now i’ve got a question

2:55:32 um is there a link to the reasons that we would go to executive session in there so you know this we talked a lot about because we’ve got the link to the open meeting law so and we originally did have a link to just the executive session piece of that open meeting log that does go through those 10 or so reasons and then through our conversation we’re like well is that redundant because we’ve already linked to the open meeting law and it’s you know easily found in there so you know either way i don’t it doesn’t matter to me we can absolutely add it if if you want to um i’ll take a look at the open meeting law and just if it’s in there then most likely not i mean it’s easy enough to link to something so um yeah either way yeah emily i know you’ve been trying to get a

2:56:20 word in okay um just this has to do with um putting up documents before the meeting like if there’s a presentation the building committee we just share the presentation during the meeting right so the person leading the meeting shares a screen and goes through all the documents they’re up throughout the whole meeting and then it just switches between um who’s talking so that might be something we can think about instead of having to put the documents out there just make sure if there’s something we talk about that needs people need to see that we just put it up on our zoom call listen and then that kind of so i’ll just put a little point of information out there i would like us i would so

2:57:06 i’m going to work with mhtv over the next couple of weeks to move us into the committee being in person sarah fox i know that you’re going to be fully remote um and so that’s one of the things that mhtv and i are going to work on is how do we keep sarah fully remote but audible um and then how do we splice in and connect for a public comment um because it i i can’t control an in-person piece and a zoom piece and then participate in the meeting so i’m a little hesitant to sort of rely solely on zoom for that type of thing as we’re moving forward and trying to kind of

2:57:53 juggle all of these things so that we’re not sort of committing to things that we’re trying to also then kind of present in other ways so like we would also and one of the other pieces that i need to talk with mhtv about is then that we would need to still be live streaming on to youtube so that everyone has access to this meeting not just comcast and verizon uh people who can um get on mhtv so we’re going to work that all out hopefully we can get it figured out but i just i’m has i just want to put the brakes on a little bit as far as our reliance on zoom as we move to sort of get a little bit more in person i take it back but if we do it in person wouldn’t we have it on a screen like up yeah we

2:58:40 could yep yep that’s i’ll talk to mhtv about that as well about how all of that can come together okay

2:58:50 yeah it looks great it’s exciting yeah it is exciting um actually it came around it came up it came you know to fruition quickly so again hats off to kate for that yeah thanks for all of her selfless volunteering yeah yeah absolutely um the i guess the only so we’re um you know if there’s other minor tweaks we want to make that’s fine i i think i’ve only got one the potential executive session link and change to the wording there that’s fine um i think in terms of next steps get it up and running on the fifth um fully transfer the ownership over to to us um if we can add in the subcommittee

2:59:37 dates i would love to do that and this is just a plug for getting regularly scheduled subcommittee meetings um i know we’ve you know there’s pros and cons to that and i and i completely understand that but i just think it makes it a lot easier for us you know in terms of making sure that we’re updating each other on a regular basis and also for the community to know okay just like our meetings are the first and third thursday the budget meeting is every x whatever and so to be a good example um we have set our budget subcommittee meetings up for the second thursday of the month um so those are out there on the calendar but if we could add in

3:00:22 policy and facilities as um you know as a matter of immediate next steps that would be great the building committee i i should i want to add those too i don’t have the schedule so uh you know david when you have those meeting dates um let me know we can we can add those in um but i think if we just kind of start with our high priority you know absolutely that would be great yeah and um emily and i are probably tweaking the policy meeting regular date now that hybrid is going to be put into motion because lucky for us we’re both on the same in-person days so

3:01:00 that works out and then um a little bit further on you know not quite so immediate is sarah fox as you mentioned kind of determining what that process is going to be for making sure that we get the materials and all that stuff out there um and also responding to emails you know right now we have we don’t know what the volume will be so i don’t think it’s prudent to put a process in place until we have a better feel for the usage um but i think that’s one area where we might need to add a little bit of structure to and then the great thing about this website is there’s actual um analytical tools that we can utilize to see exactly you know how many people are using the website what are they you know how are they using it what links are they or what tabs are they going to most often which i think will be helpful for

3:01:47 us as we think about how do we want to continue to evolve the website and we may want to think about after a certain period of time you know surveying some users just to get some feedback from them so we make sure that we’re making it as useful of tool as possible megan will we all get a chance to proofread um like the copy on this before it goes live because i i glanced at some of it as you went through but i wasn’t obviously able to read it all and then also with those analyticals will we all have access to that or no i believe so um so to your first question yes i can share the um the link in the password that’s no problem i have been through it multiple times um kate’s been through it um and just

3:02:32 because emily’s gonna be helping me you know helping to own it after this um i had her read through it too so we have kind of gone through a number of times but absolutely have have a read through um you know we don’t want any typos going up for sure um and if there’s you know minor tweaks then then absolutely we can do that um and then my understanding and i have to double check this because i can’t actually remember what level of um of the website we ended up purchasing um i don’t remember if there’s a limit on number of basically owners um so i have to double check on that i don’t think so but i’m not 100 positive on that

3:03:18 but i’m sure we could even if there is a limit to kind of owners on it it doesn’t mean that we can’t then provide that information right okay i bet you can create reports yeah right all right great awesome it’s exciting stuff go live on monday go live date yeah all right um so that leads us on to the subcommittee updates um megan i think you made your little feel with uh you guys are getting a budget meeting together is it going to be next week next thursday 8 30 a.m um this is going to be our first official budget subcommittee meeting or

3:04:04 meeting or meeting or at all not just official we have invited town representatives too um you know so that we can go through the closeout of fiscal year 20 um especially with you know the surplus was kind of an estimated number last time we all met so going through um that piece um looking at our coveted expenses you know the information that michelle’s given us as a committee and then thinking about what the planning is gonna look like for the coming year so i just figured you know we you know talking to john and david that it made sense to just get everyone on the same page early on um so yeah 8 30 next thursday great will those be zoom meetings megan the first one is going to be zoom yes um

3:04:51 yes um yes um if we can do them in person going forward well you know we’ll figure that one out i think the budget you know is a um you know we know there’s interest in that so we have to figure out how we make it accessible um so to be determined okay yeah i think you had noted that before that you were hoping to make those virtually available because that is probably the one that people try to go to the most maybe that could even be if you guys decided you wanted to move them in person that they could even be a streaming piece with that too once we sort of figure all of that out so that it’s i don’t know it’s gonna be all over youtube exactly uh yeah we’ll have to figure that out

3:05:37 we’ll talk about it in our meeting and then emily and john and i met for the policy subcommittee um just about two weeks ago we were going to meet again tomorrow but we punted it to next week um we were looking over a couple of policies related to quarries and um background checks that that have kind of surfaced lisa had asked us to take a look at them so we’re doing a little bit deeper dive into that and then um i forgot my notebook downstairs so i can’t remember what we did choose a section of policies to start to review um do we choose i

3:06:20 yes okay so we’re gonna start with the i policies um and and just kind of chip away at those which i believe if i’m remembering the the two that we are that we were looking at last time will also happen to be um i policies so

3:06:37 it fit perfectly emily any uh any additional things to add

3:06:45 no i think that was everything i’m just looking quickly too through my notes great um all right sarah um so as far as facilities go emily had reached out earlier this week to talk about getting a a meeting online and i let her know that um i want to read make sure i reach out to michelle cresta and todd bloodgood as well as the members we have members of staff and volunteers that are kind of subject matter experts um that are part of that committee and we’re very fortunate to have that um so i want to make sure i reach out to everybody and just kind of get is find out if there is a commonality in schedule and also one of the other pieces to note is one of the subcommittees of the reopening was

3:07:31 facilities and um every i think everybody that’s on the facilities committee is also on that committee with the exception of emily so i want to touch base with michelle and todd and see if they foresee more of those meetings and perhaps having just emily join us on those for the time being um i don’t i don’t want to add work to michelle and todd who are kind of already out flat as as many of our people are as all of our people are um so i just want to just i just want to have a conversation with them and ask them what their bandwidth is if they foresee and kind of close out of that reopening facilities committee and a transition to our full district committee i just i just want to have that touch point with them um and i don’t see why we couldn’t

3:08:17 just kind of transition it from one name to the other and make those public meetings but i just want to um i just want to give them the courtesy of that conversation before we book our first meeting so sarah who else is on the facilities subcommittee um michelle todd i don’t i don’t have the list right in front of me it was it was a medium-sized group um john maretti is gone he was he was such a great uh addition to that um jeff st george is on that he’s um a huge huge asset to that um committee um there was a couple other people on it i have to just i just have to reach out and see um in my list and and see who they were because there were some people that you know

3:09:03 know know there was a sustainable um representative that we had invited to that because so much of the facilities has the sustainability piece that they had asked kind of first seeded that um so i just want to make sure that everyone is is available and kind of just do um um a survey if you will to find out when if there’s a common date like you guys found that thursday mornings work i just want to figure that out so i just you know i’ll talk to you offline it’s probably not prudent for this meeting that’s fine okay good sounds like a plan david bring us home with the building project update hope you’re muted

3:09:52 i can share my screen right here yep everybody see that so yes there it is uh in its glory that was um [Music] tuesday afternoon i believe and um or maybe wednesday i the days uh get blurred but it was tuesday afternoon i’m pretty sure and as people can see the parking lot uh binder is down on the left um the school is coming together second floor and i’m excited to say that we’re going to have a walkabout next tuesday for the entire building committee as well as um you know sarah and megan are invited and i also invited uh nan to

3:10:38 come and and see what she can be looking forward to working with uh next year once the school opens so um hope people can attend it’ll be at 3 30 on on tuesday and gilbane and left field and rda will be there to answer any questions that people might have and we can see the progress that’s been made since the topping off ceremony and it’s it’s really exciting to to see uh the progress that’s been made and the other key piece that i would like to mention we had our building committee meeting last week and we’re at a real critical juncture in the project where we’re at we have actually submitted the 100 construction design documents to the msba

3:11:24 but at the 90 we did a um we reviewed the budget for the school and there were um various estimates that get done by both um left field and as well as uh gilbane and the project is on budget and in fact the project is is under budget by about 125 000 and it was noted during our meeting last week that this project has also not spent any of our owner’s contingency funding which is about 1.7 million dollars so we’re in a really good place um the brick is due to arrive

3:12:11 in the next couple of weeks so that they can start doing the uh envelope of the building and so that’s real exciting and coming up shortly will be um the the land the final landscape buyout that um you know katie martin and some of the other

3:12:31 members will be working on and as well then we’ll get into the final um you know fixtures on the interior but it’s moving forward really well and look forward to next tuesday and hope people can attend

3:12:50 bring your hard hats no open-toed shoes and your mask and we’ll be all set fantastic thank you all right um stop your share i will perfect thanks you didn’t like the photo i do i do love the photo i just like i like to see everybody all right um so that brings us into closing business um i do have a little bit of new business so i realized uh the other day that our next meeting scheduled for october 15th um we the the third grade village open house is scheduled for that evening at seven o’clock as well and that encompasses four of the five of us and then david also happens to have a

3:13:36 conflict that night so i think we probably need to pick a different meeting day for our meet our second meeting in october um any preferences david what does the building committee schedule look like are you guys definitely meeting on the second and fourth no we’re we’re down to uh one day so october would be the 22nd for us okay would be the one building committee meeting all right um so that leaves us we do have the added benefit of having five thursdays in the month um so that helps us a little bit

3:14:21 so that so we’re gonna end up meeting two weeks in a row regardless um

3:14:29 so do we want to meet next week or do we want to meet on the 29th i would i would push more for the 29th um that would be my thought on that john is shaking his head yes

3:14:54 all right all right so the 29th 7 o’clock um i will keep everybody posted as to what mhtv and i have are able to work out um that’ll obviously give them an additional amount of time to to work to sort of help us figure everything out um so we will just kind of wait and see as far as how the meeting is brought to everyone for next time but it will certainly be have a it will certainly have a live public comment um and there will be and it will be live streamed to multiple places um if it is not a full zoom meeting all right sounds good

3:15:41 all right i’m really sorry to do this since the bells at abbott hall rang 10 about 15 minutes ago and we do want to uh end this meeting but there were several comments about the the special town meeting and i think worth clarifying that if we’re not meeting before town meeting that’s taking place on the 17th it’s i guess you could say it’s a special town meeting but it is the articles of town meeting that were not considered in may when um or or june that were just limited to the

3:16:26 budget so the remaining articles as an example parking on streets leaf blowers pleasant street you name it are the articles of the warrant that were presented to the town and needed to be submitted by a closing date sometime in january that would have been part of the normal town meeting so this is not a special town meeting in the sense of the word where new articles are being presented on the warrant so i think that’s just a point of clarification it’s articles that need to be voted on just in the course of business so

3:17:12 for the school committee we have no articles on this budget or this warrant except for um article 35 which is the supplemental appropriation for the schools and i i think it’s been misconstrued that potentially this meeting was called to um you know fund extra monies and i know it’s late but um article 35 to see if the town will vote to raise an appropriate or transfer from available funds money to supplement the school department operating budget for fy21 contingent upon a proposition two and a half override um

3:17:59 i think this ship has sailed since you know these need to be placed on the warrant in advance as a placeholder because in january we don’t know what the situation is but we did pass a budget at town meeting [Music] that did not require necessarily an override so i don’t know about the technicalities of this but i just wanted to try and throw out a little bit of clarification there about people’s expectations appreciate that clarification that’s the placeholder for an override right david correct it is that kind of always get served i mean at least in my experience has been put on to the the warrant as the placeholder just the kind of a just in case situation

3:18:46 situation situation right so as far as this committee goes and as far as um what we’re budgeted for for fy21 i think it’s just for the record uh clarifying whether um the recommendation it says sponsored by the school committee so whether you know the recommendation would be indefinite postponement that uh at town meeting as it goes for for no consideration we won’t be asking to fund this article or putting a dollar figure to article 35 on october 17th correct correct

3:19:31 it’s worth it’s worth clarifying so that clarification we’ll have to see i mean we can talk further with jason about that but whether whether it needs to be and we when we do have time prior to october 17th but maybe we can just check in with jason to see if if this committee needs to vote indefinite postponement so that when it gets to the floor of town meeting that is the recommendation of the school committee or not but i think that’s sort of the the procedure you know you put it on so for instance if the library article is not going to be asked for the recommendation by the moderator would be indefinite postponement of the library article because

3:20:17 because because some committee has voted that so maybe we can just um before the 17th we have plenty of time or at least we have a couple of weeks get some clarification on jason if there’s any further action that’s required by the committee if i recall correctly david it’s it’s fincom that makes that recommendation for indefinite postponement it’s not us um um that’s what hap that’s what’s happened in years past is that they stand up and they recommend it and then we vote on that and not we as a as a school committee but we as a town vote on that that’s been my experience is that fincon makes the recommendation for that

3:21:05 yeah it it so i mean you’re right in the sense that there would have been the so when we had the budget warrant hearing which i think was um somewhat or the articles uh you know when we the fincom would normally have the hearing on the warrant and i think that was impacted and at that time it would be you know rtm you know recommendation at town meeting or indefinite postponement or to fund it so you’re right sarah there are some things there but i don’t remember exactly what happened with the warrant hearing

3:21:53 and if there actually was a motion for indefinite postponement at the warrant hearing or that’s how it would proceed so it’s a good point and we can just follow up on that maybe you guys can get some clarification on that at the budget meeting too yeah okay yeah that’s a good point okay if i recall correctly they did recommend it for indefinite postponement at the warren here yeah because we had no intention at that point in time yeah if that if that happens sarah then we’re good because that those warrant hearing things would would be the recommendation that would come to the floor town meeting for sure so yep good point okay um and then i had um new business since the agenda came out

3:22:39 but not new business since we started three hours ago um that i just want to request a formal date be set for the an open forum that that was requested through all the public comment um if we can just so we can we can i think it’s it’s a really good show of saying we heard you we’re moving on this and we’re we’re going to have an open discussion absolutely and i think that i glossed over that in the slide but starting the week of october 19th we’re going to host uh building level forums that i will attend all of them i think one forum for people that have maybe first graders to have to sit through ap discussions at the high

3:23:26 school or to hear middle school concerns i think it would be a better use of people’s time and focused questions for us that week of the 19th once we have been in the remote hybrid and then the full remote for a couple weeks for people to be able to provide their feedback so that was on that slide um that i put out and i’ll work with building principles at our leadership team meeting on monday to designate uh dates and times for those and is it possible and i and i i apologize because i don’t recall that the exactness of that slide to have one the building levels but to have one for for remote because i think that absolutely yes we’re kind of living a different life here no no that makes

3:24:11 great sense and yes we’ll schedule a full remote um for nan and i to host

3:24:18 maybe it would make some sense to you to just um mention that in your weekly update yes i’ll probably include that slide right in the weekly update great thanks john all right john was there any correspondence that she wanted to present this evening um i just this might seem bizarre but i just want to make sure the committee understands why we are not back in full in-person instruction five days a week full days that seems to be a lingering question out there it was part of the reopening plan that we submitted to the state that with the six foot distancing that we were doing the hybrid approach but i just want to make sure that the committee fully understands that and to answer any questions about

3:25:04 why we’re not back in full person five day a week instruction

3:25:09 i fully understand that um that it’s based off of the six feet and that if at some point it’s it’s science is able to back the three feet piece that we will work to get our kids back in as soon as humanly possible yeah and i think we talked about it last meeting too um it came up so i think you know it’s been the same the same story so yeah i think it i think that actually that there was a really good explanation for that um and i know although some people aren’t happy with the facts of that explanation it’s that they’re facts nonetheless yeah and i think you know when you when you look at the at the private schools who are back

3:25:55 in person it’s because their numbers are capable of supporting the six feet distancing um and so there’s a there’s there’s a that that they’re saying i think um you know i would certainly love it if we could abide by the three feet and feel incredibly safe because i would love for my kids to be back in full days all day um every day but it just is not in our best interest in anybody’s best interest right now and i think that you know you introduced the idea of the private i think it’s really important to reinforce for people that um we are not a private institution absolutely there is absolutely no way to compare the two or or to ask that the same

3:26:40 they’re just different their options you have the option of a public education and you have an option of a private education and those are options we all choose yep absolutely thank you thank you all right thank you that will lead us to adjourn at 10 28 right under the wire right there there do you know what time we i i always forget to put down the call to order time yep uh 705. thank you very much

3:27:13 good night everyone hi to everyone thank you bye guys bye