School Committee: April 15, 2021

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.

0:24 sarah when you get a chance if you could set me up to record

1:28 yes sarah fox are you on is it mass public are you on the m.a public now

1:38 i’m here okay can you hear us um yeah i can hear you but i can’t see you guys at all well i mean i can see that there’s humans there but i don’t know who they are we’re using a new um a poly camera this evening so

2:46 all right i will call us to order it’s 703.

2:54 first up is our uh hearing on school choice and we have it on our agenda for 705 so we will have to wait uh the two minutes to actually officially open that so we will just sit tight for a couple of minutes

4:22 okay uh it is 705 so i will ask for a motion to enter into the public hearing on school choice for the 2021-2022 school year megan moved

4:39 second david second who who moved it sarah you cut out uh megan did and david second correct okay can you guys just for the public announce who’s with you in the room because we can’t see absolutely sarah gold is here john bucky is here uh david harris is here megan taylor is here and emily baron is here thank you all right um so i will take a roll call vote um sarah gold yes megan taylor yes sarah fox yes david harris yes and emily baron yes all right so we enter into the public hearing at 7 06 p.m

5:27 dr bucky do you want to put forward uh your recommendation uh before we ask for any public comment sure i would recommend that we not go into schools okay

5:40 i think with all the variables at play uh having an additional one for next year other advice okay all right thank you uh so does anybody have any public comment around the school choice issue all right i’m not seeing any hands go up so i will uh does anybody anybody on the school committee have anything to say no i do okay um during the uh naming process for the ground school we heard several and we

6:26 received emails too um comments about how they the community felt the next step one of the next steps to really becoming inclusive would be to adopt a policy of school choice so i i thought we might want to have a brief discussion on that and how we feel that might be beneficial you know um you know whether there’s plus and minuses or at least just you know give it some discussion because that that was something we heard from the public and it was important to them so whereas we might not you know overall choose to go with it i think that um it would be

7:12 prudent for us to at least give it some time for discussion since we already heard that the community feels that this is important um for being a truly um inclusive district and i actually i don’t know if that hand was out but i do see at least on my side a hand is up sarah can you just where did we hear this public comment um a couple i i think i know pat noonan spoke of it we saw we heard it from a few and some emails um i i don’t have all the names in front of me but i know that it was it was definitely introduced by um various people that that was the next step that they felt that we they hoped we looked

7:58 at as part of um really being inclusive of you know trying to bring more of equality of representation of different races and cultures into um marblehead schools yeah i i remember that is okay okay um i remember that as well sarah and i think um you know thank you for mentioning that because i do think um you know it it bears noting um in in the way that i thought about it coming into this meeting uh it

8:45 i think it’s it’s a difficult thing to do for next year because of all the variables that we’re still unsure about but i would you know assuming that you know next year’s is far closer to normal and then the year after that is even closer you know or hopefully completely back to normal um you know i would like us to take a look at this moving forward um i don’t think i don’t i don’t know of a time when marblehead has done this but i i think it would be worthwhile to to really look at and and decide you know if we’re not going to do it give some really really solid reasons why yeah okay through the chair um i i would just suggest that i went to a metco meeting on monday where they’re looking to

9:32 uh diversify their funding and enrollment allotments to districts and assistant superintendent anne murphy attended the session yesterday and so we do have the option of our current allotment of students for next year but petitioning netgo to increase our enrollment in that i’m not sure that school choice would get you the end result that i think i hear the discussion being about but if you would like us to explore increasing of our enrollment from metco uh that’s something that man and i would be happy to explore well i think that the idea of school choice at least from my you know being more inclusive and mecco is a fabulous program and i’m always interested in looking at ways we can increase our

10:19 enrollment but um it’s all racist it’s bringing all given an opportunity for all races and all cultures outside of what our demographic i mean our demographic in marblehead is it’s definitely slated um very clearly in one direction and i think it was more the idea of more of a [Music] a melting pot if you will i mean that’s definitely probably not the best best description but just you know bringing in other races other cultures being more uh um you know just opening up our doors a little bit more and i think that was the point of

11:05 view and again um i know i see aaron noonan’s hand up her family was one of the families that spoke to this since the hearing’s still open i mean i would encourage us to hear a little bit from the public right now yeah yeah absolutely we’re just um talking into the committee and then i’ll absolutely call on aaron um

11:25 um well i agree with increasing that co for sure um with school choice i guess i don’t know much about it for marblehead what schools does it open it up to because i know sometimes it’s just certain districts that get to come in so i i think there’s a lot more information we need i don’t think it just opens it up to anybody i think you can open it it’s districts that are enrolled in the school choice program so any pictures yep so i think it’s important to find out what those districts are who could potentially come i mean there’s i think there’s a lot of information that we need before we they go ahead i mean is there a negative decide to

12:11 someone who may come i mean i don’t know all are welcome in my opinion that’s not my decision i mean you’re saying you want it to open it up to make us more equitable but we don’t even know if you know your demographic if it would change our demographic um for instance i know a lot of area towns you know who have a more diverse population are enrolled in school choice um that list would be very helpful i think you know maybe our our committee as a whole needs to you know take some time to research this and educate ourselves a little bit more before we close before we take a vote on this if we’re not prepared to vote on this you now um and i totally respect that you need more information but if we don’t if you don’t have the information you need then

12:58 we should get that before we vote i think right and that’s what i’m saying i think we need to know exactly what the program is i think one of the things that came up during the whole school naming process was about our commitment to diversity and inclusivity and i think that’s something you know that really from a district we need to set through that strategic plan what is our goal and then think about how do we reach that goal and school choice may be a piece of that but i think we need to figure out what our district level goal and then make that plan and then execute it rather than doing a few pieces piecemeal here and there um so that would be my recommendation yeah yeah and i think that there are

13:44 still many so many um so many unknowns for next year that i think you know the recommendation of the superintendent at this point um is important right i think aside aside from the right the opportunity to maybe um do some of those things that sarah’s talking about i think there’s just with with the pandemic it just creates too many challenges and historically i can’t um i may be corrected but i can’t remember the last time marvel had spent a school choice district and principally a large part of it was enrollment because we we just did not have the capacity and so

14:29 the last time i was involved then it was on finance committee and we can get this clarified sarah but so you can’t necessarily say you want you know 10 4th graders and five fifth graders if if we have pockets of enrollment and it creates a lot of challenges related to what what enrollment is and i think if i could do so the only other point i was going to say is you know we saw this decline of 300 students in enrollment we’re projecting that certainly some of those students will come back and i think next year will give us also sarah i mean a better understanding of

15:14 of where our enrollment is and if we can support uh school choice because you know with school choice does come tuition in there’s no doubt about it and and that’s an opportunity but i think um the pandemic and then the decline in enrollment and not really being sure what our enrollment will look like next year um i i think it’s very reasonable to you know to take a pause but as a committee i would agree to look at what our goals are uh take a look at enrollment and and see how this could play out for us so my understanding is with school choice you’re not obligated to take more students than you have the capacity to

15:59 educate so if we don’t have room in our fifth grade um where we have you know we built for a certain population at brown this is an awesome opportunity to to utilize um that that portion of that that capacity of that building we’re not using um and and speak to and what better place than our than our building that we chose to um bear a name to give uh pay honor to people of a different race and culture so i just i just think that this is for me important because we when we chose this name we really i feel made an unspoken commitment to our town to follow it through through all the different levels

16:45 and if we have if we’re saying we we our enrollment in that school is going to be i don’t know the exact number but you know 80 or so students less than we have capacity for this is an awesome opportunity to to do that um so i i’m just it that’s you know i just think we have the opportunity with our enrollment as david pointed out it’s down that we have an opportunity with that and we have an opportunity to you know put some meat on the bones of you know our commitment to you know bringing in more more races and cultures and diversity and people from other areas that aren’t you know just opening

17:32 our eyes to different areas different you know broaden our horizons if you will um that’s just my voice i’d love to hear from the community on this though all right so erin um your hands up

17:49 thank you um so much for letting us weigh in after the discussion um my husband and i feel very strongly actually about this issue um and i i having looked into this basically went around the name change was that you know like this feeling of not wanting to be um a decision in name only and the if you’re not prepared to understand if you don’t understand currently what the like the the school choice is as i’m taking from at least one committee member i would suggest you maybe even defer the the vote on this because um my understanding of it is the same as sarah’s is that you’re not obligated to take anybody in you receive the tuition

18:34 and these are students that could be we could be incorporating to our community from um salem and lynn and i’m just gonna um pat has a few words he would like to say thank you thanks erin yeah so no i i think my you know my understanding is that there’s a there’s a statutory deadline that comes from desi for when districts have to opt in or opt out um so so i think that deferring this i’m not sure what exactly the deadline is i think last year was postponed but i think you’ve got some time to look into this um i think you know i know many of you participated as a guy in the black lives matter uh march last year and i just i think when i’ve been thinking about how we can actually make tangible progress on this what everyone who’s an expert in this says is you have to start looking locally and to me there’s there’s no

19:21 more local issue than than local public schools i think we know that marblehead you know is is not representative of the state and or even essex county um i think we’ve got a great opportunity to explore that and put our money where our mouth is on these issues so i hope you think about it um so lynn is not part of school choice so i just wanted to put that out there salem does it for high school so we’re not sorry can i just jump in just because that’s actually so when you’re part of school choice you are a receiving district so you opt into being a receiving district anyone can be a sending district everyone is ascending district someone from marblehead could opt in to to go to school and in salem acuity right now

20:14 all right um kristy herbert you have your hand up thank you um i am torn on this because while on one side i think it’s super important um to actually walk the walk and not just name a school and talk the talk and that’s just one school we’re talking the whole district i am concerned that we can’t sort buses or the students that we have we can’t sort covid fully no one can and that’s understandable we can’t sort the spacing in our schools currently with the code regulations that we’re trying to enact and maintain and with all of that i do have a concern that this particular year might not be the best year to then enact what should be a well-structured and strategic plan of how to welcome

20:59 students from other districts how to make sure that we have an internal culture that celebrates and welcomes those students properly um because i want to see it be a success and i’m concerned that moving too quickly um won’t give us that success and i also fully acknowledge that this is also one of those arguments of if you never make the change there is always going to be something preventing you from making the change there’s a million different reasons so um that’s just to say i’m completely torn but i think all those pieces should be part of the discussion as well i think that really sums up where my head is at um it kind of pains me to to think about not doing this um but it also it just

21:45 the the covid aspect of it that that variable that unknown is so big right now um you know things look good for next fall and hopefully they will be and maybe they won’t be um and this is something that i do think we you know i would love to see us adopt um and and i would love to see us adopted you know next time around i just am really antsy about it right now

22:20 hi hi um oh i think i have to say who i am and where i live cindy tower lowen i live at 12 trinity road

22:38 i am for school choice but um was it christy who just talked in terms of you know being torn i actually agree with her uh because there has been so much on the table within this last year um obviously covid um is the the thing that was on the table but

23:04 internally we have we have some issues just in terms of um the last few years of matco in terms of building it up in terms of the program etc and so from my personal um point of view i would suggest that we work on the metco piece and then we concentrate on the school choice piece and it doesn’t mean that you disregard school choice but if we can’t service the mecco students and i when i say service i mean support them okay as a community and as within the town of marblehead because we are such a white town okay

23:51 how are we going to be for those students that come in terms of school choice we want to integrate but we need to integrate in a in a very smart way and some of it is what we have to teach our staff um and all those um pieces within the buildings because what exists in terms of the um inherent entwined biasim bigotry and all that stuff that’s all there so why not at this point work on that while we’re working on the strategic planning

24:36 in terms of how we’re going to change the curriculum how we’re going to support these students the best way that we can um and so you know for me i would think school choice would be something down the what down um the path but certainly we’ve got enough now that we have that we can work on and i think that um dr bucky’s strategic plan is going to be something that encompasses some of the things that i’m talking about and if it doesn’t encompass it that would be my concern in terms of where we are as a district with teachers staff students

25:21 students students administration all of it

25:29 and that’s all i have to say i thank you very much thank you cindy

25:35 all right um i don’t see any more hands up um i guess my first question to the committee um is do we want to move forward with the vote tonight i’m ready to get this right it’s been moved and seconded no we haven’t just been discussing oh okay i’m prepared to vote okay so i i’ve done enough research on this that i i feel i’m ready um but i want to respect if some members don’t feel they they understand the program enough that they would want to know more about it first

26:09 are you ready um i mean if if dr bucky is suggesting that we don’t do it this year i want to respect that and i will look into it for future years yeah through the trip yes absolutely i i think that you have two competing conversations happening yeah a conversation about diversity having been in a uh school choice district i understand the program i can answer your questions if you have them obviously nantucket was not a school choice district nobody was sitting on the ferry every day to come over to go to nantucket public schools but if you uh designate the allotments it’s a blind lottery to the applicants so you may not

26:55 be answering your diversity question by enrolling in school choice you may you may get students of diverse backgrounds families of diverse backgrounds applying for school choice but um you might get somebody that wants to come to marblehead because of our football program or because of our wonderful music program that i’m getting ready to recognize in a bit and so that might not answer i would much i would feel much better about man another person during that go conversation about expanding our enrollment there where that will address the questions of diversity that are being raised right so i guess that’s where my questions applied i didn’t understand how it was going to create this diverse population that was going to come into marblehead

27:42 and so i’m going to again say we need to focus on the medical program and get that increased first okay yeah and i’m gonna just reiterate i think we need the goal and the plan and then we implement the plan i think to do it in any other order isn’t gonna get us the results that we ultimately want so is this something we should consider once we have the goal in the plan yes i think so but i don’t i think we’re kind of going at it out of order okay all right so it sounds like we’re ready to take a vote so um based on dr bucky’s recommendation um i will ask for a motion that the marblehead public schools not participate in the school of choice program for the

28:27 2021-2022 school year for the reason of lack of available classroom space so megan moved second david second

28:42 all right um i will roll call sarah gold yes megan taylor yes sarah fox uh no and the reason would be because you made it the most part of the motion is lack of classroom space when we know we have empty classrooms at the new school so that didn’t make sense to me so now uh david harris yes and emily barron yes all right so that passes four to one um and i think i need a motion to adjourn from the public hearing for school choice so megan moved one second one second second oh stated second

29:28 all right sarah gold yes megan taylor yes sarah fox yes david harris yes and emily baron yes all right that’s five to zero and we are adjourned from the public hearing at 7 30 pm okay uh that moves us along to our commendations uh mandy murphy we have you up first for accommodations for the village school welcome hi everyone thank you for having me my accommodations this evening are for the amazing students at village school from the moment i walk in not even in outside of the building each morning i have a group of students who have learned in pe class new dances

30:14 lately and so every morning they are socially distanced dancing outside they have a radio that they’ve been playing and doing just they’re happy they’re happy being in school and so just walking into happy students every day is just an awesome way to start every single day um so they’re taking what they’re learning in classes and being creative they’re then going outside to our recess and we sit as adults trying to think about what recess looks like right now and what we can and can’t do and our fourth grade students are coming up with games such as shadow tag because they can’t touch each other and um doing really creative activities outside of recess so that’s been really great to watch over the past couple of weeks as we’ve been in full days and the next um commendation for our

31:01 students is the public speaking that the students have been doing this year and we’ve been doing a lot of writing um with nan’s leadership on our lucy calkins piloting units for writing but our students have been actually doing a lot of public speaking after that i had two students sit and make an appointment with me over zoom and they read the proposals to me about things that they wanted to change such as the bathroom signs and other things around the school it was really pretty amazing and impressive for two fifth grade students to do this and then we have sixth grade students who have now started something in our culture culture at village school where they’re doing a morning joke and so they are sending in videos to me and they’ve started this so that now every single classroom in the building or outside of

31:47 the building students are starting to send videos every day taping themselves giving this joke and just starting everybody’s day on a positive note so i think just shout outs to our amazing students for all of the hard work they’re doing and all of the positive energy that they’re bringing to the classroom every single day so those are my commendations for this evening thank you thank you mandy those are great uh anybody else got one um so i would like to commend the board at the magic hat they recently gave seven thousand dollars to each school so totaling thirty five thousand dollars um and they’ve worked incredibly hard and as always we’re incredibly grateful to

32:33 them um they’ve found a way to bring in money instead of closing their door over doors over the last year um and you know they’re the they’re a huge asset to this system and their dedication um i just i wanted to note that absolutely yeah thank you john did you have one i do i want to commend the marblehead public schools music department who for the seventh consecutive year has had marblehead named best community for music education and we have tremendous music educators across the district two of them came to meet with me last week to share this news and their passion and energy in a year when a lot of music education has been

33:18 stifled because of covid and restrictions on using instruments inside or singing inside or masks and so the fact that for the seventh consecutive year marblehead is named a best community for music education i just want to commend our music teachers absolutely thank you awesome yeah well deserved on that 100 anybody else sarah sorry so i wanted to commend amanda rivers um she’s done a tremendous tremendous job at our pool testing program um in my mind it’s been a great success she’s put a lot of time into it um kind of threw it at her unsuspectedly um she grabbed that ball and ran with it and developed an a great program um from what the feedback i hear from parents is

34:05 parents is parents is she’s able to make the children feel comfortable or students i shouldn’t call all them children um make them feel comfortable and you know they credit her with that success so i just wanted to take this opportunity to commend sarah absolutely

34:25 all right um i think that moves us along to our student representative dan howell stan are you with us all right yeah i don’t think i found either um right so we will connect with dan at our next meeting all right um i’m going to move this into public comment but before public comment begins um

34:55 i i need to address an issue that has has come up um some members of our community have shared and commented on versions of a photo that i posted on my personal social media account the photo depicted me other school committee members and the superintendent sharing a toast to celebrate the completion of milestones in a difficult year some have objected to the photo saying we should not have been celebrating at all given that the financial or the final budget does require a reduction in several positions in sight i greatly regret the photo and agree that the optics are terrible i am incredibly embarrassed i sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended or felt that our behavior wasn’t insensitive or cavalier we got together after hours to enjoy

35:40 friendships after getting through a difficult process during a pandemic when tensions are unusually high and we all needed a reason to pause and acknowledge even small successes we were a small group of vaccinated adults who got together outdoors safety guidance has been incredibly important to me and i also regret that the picture suggests that we were not that we were being overly relaxed in those standards with that said i also feel the need to correct some of the misinformation that has been conveyed on social media first our gathering was not an open meeting violation school committee members and other elected officials do have the right to get together socially without posting an official meeting as long as we do not discuss or deliberate school business in

36:27 any way which we did not i’ve alerted the attorney general’s office to the concern that has been raised and i let them know that i would be addressing it tonight second some individuals were falsely identified in the photo by those who modified it individuals that were not present and um should not have been called out at all third we recognize that there are certain pain points in the improved budget particularly because declining enrollments force us to restructure and eliminate some positions it is inaccurate to state that nine teachers lost their job the school committee and the administrative team worked incredibly hard to maintain as many positions as fiscally possible and where reductions were necessary to place employees in other job openings again

37:12 again again though i am sorry for any disappointment or anger that this photo has triggered i apologize for my poor judgment and i i ask that that we can move past this and that i can get your forgiveness so with that i will open up public comments um cazzy kindle you have your hand raised i do but actually you’ve just um answered most of the the questions that i had and i feel that you have um addressed my concerns adequately so i will seed my time to someone else thank you cassie uh sandra callahan you’re next

37:58 sandra callahan 25 nagasa um i spoke to you guys i have some concerns or you know concerns i just want to share with you i was disheartened to hear today that amanda rivers was not coming back or her position was not being funded for next year i know that at the meeting i think last week there was talk where one of the nurses was going to be positions was going to be cut because of consolidation and i shared with you guys my concerns with that um i i believe sarah gold sarah fox and dr bucky you know had some concerns as well um so i was really disheartened to hear that this was uh this decision was made um in her i you know i don’t know legally what we have to do our papers you know if there’s a cutoff time but

38:44 considering we’re in the middle of a pandemic and our nurses help keep and maintain the safety of our students i think it would have been in our best interest to find other funding before we made this decision so a couple of things i want to go over and i’m sure you guys know let’s just talk about some of the things amanda rivers brings to our uh school department so she is obviously highly dedicated she’s a huge asset she volunteered on the health and safety committee during the summer time which i sat on the board with her uh she stepped up parents wanted pool testing she stepped up and she volunteered to do it a huge endeavor especially when you guys had shared that the guidance the funding what was going to happen at the desi level was very very murky she

39:30 was willing to dive in and take that on um now that we’re at three feet social distancing our school nurses are going to be spread extremely thin they are going to be responsible for more contact tracing we’re going to have more kids that are going to be considered close contacts we have our children back in school as a result these kids are going back into school we’re going to see sarah agreed last week we’re going to see obviously more kids presenting with mental health issues which unfortunately these younger kids cannot articulate to their teachers they’re feeling anxious or depressed they tend to present with common complaints of headache and belly ache these complaints will be sent to the school nurse will have more kids to triage is the stomach ache covered do i need to be worried or is this just anxiety um

40:17 who it you know if we get continued funding for our pool testing for next year what nurses are gonna run it you know we had someone that was running it um our kids you know you don’t know i’ll share what i do i’m a pediatric nurse specialist that deals with respiratory disease i’m in urgent care i see kids all the time most of my time now is spent uh counseling individuals for mental health issues and their obesity the reality is as much as moderner and pfizer are doing well we’re not going to see a vaccine for our under 16 kids they won’t all be fully vaccinated before they go to school never mind about our under 10 population we need to protect our children if we want to keep them in school we need to have nurses that can make good medical decisions about who needs to be sent

41:03 home and who is safe to stay in school so to cut a school nurse at this critical time when we’re in the middle of a pandemic i cannot wrap my head around this um we have coveted funding this is a perfect example of how we support this position right now and then you guys can reevaluate going forward i you know i’m you know proposing that this position be funded with our coveted funding for next year and then you guys reevaluate how we can still support this position and that you know in the calendar year of 22-23 um but i’m very very disheartened to see that we want our kids back to school in order for that to happen we have to have the medical personnel in these schools that can help make medical you know decisions to find out who’s safe to be there and who’s not thank you thank you sanja

41:59 good evening uh catherine martin 29 west shore drive um and thank you sandra for your comments i think a lot of people feel the same way you feel i think there was a lot of kind of outrage in the community and if i’m candid a lot of people are afraid to speak at these meetings and a lot of it is because of the way i’ve been spoken to over the last few months i’ve watched this committee closely since august when the liaison positions were assigned outside of a public meeting i watched a reopening committee operate with two school committee members and then post notes about school committee policy and when i wrote a memo asking about this and referencing the open meeting law i was you know met with

42:45 hostility and basically a public shaming i watched a budget process unfold that used coveted funding for reoccurring costs i listened to a committee member say that we have no cuts and then i felt the pain in our community of the cuts today the actions of last friday night were distasteful they were egregious they were they lacked inclusion but more importantly they were again an open meeting law violation sarah gold madam chairwoman you do not get to make that determination the attorney general does and when you call and you speak to their lawyers and you share the context that a quorum was present the superintendent was present and the hashtags that discuss the budget

43:30 they’re going to tell you that was an open meeting law violation and i think you should self-report um if you had to call your attorney and ask them if it was then you’re too close because you had to call your attorney when i brought up the idea of the reopening committee you know as a school committee candidate last year i heard about your grit your integrity your leadership and where was that friday night i’m ready to hear the goal and the plan of how you rectify your actions and i think it begins with self-reporting on the open meeting law violation thank you for your time tonight thank you katie as i mentioned um i did call the ag’s office and i did um talk with them and self-report

44:16 so can we expect the process to move forward where you will now have to have there is a process did you self-report with the form to the ag’s office no i i called them and and left a message and i am awaiting a return um but okay because the attorneys are available and anybody can file the the violation report you just actually fill it out and then you need to send it to you and to the town clerk and then there’s a process that you follow and that’s how you self-report so in previous times when i’ve talked with them about open meeting violations that have occurred um the the their the you call them and you report it and then you remedy it by putting it into an open meeting and so in the fact that i discussed the the

45:02 fact that we were together on friday night we did not talk about any school business um so there was no school business to be brought into a public meeting um and so that you know i will i will absolutely follow up on the matter um because i you know i understand the seriousness i am a follower at heart for sure and have no desire to break open meeting law and so if there’s any further remedy that’s needed i will absolutely take action on that

45:44 oh sorry sarah can you hear me sorry about that yeah thanks um thanks appreciate the time jen schaffner 20 casino road um sarah gold i want to appreciate uh tell you i appreciate the apology that you made earlier at the um beginning of public comment i’m sure that wasn’t easy and um certainly came from the heart i’ve heard from a few folks over the past several weeks and months or a number of months i guess i should say and i’ve been asked for and i’ve gladly provided my opinion on the school district policies and specifically on the budget process over the past week or really the last six days i have heard from numbers of parents in the district folks were upset and confused over this incident focusing on the behavior of some of the

46:31 school committee members at last week’s vote after last week’s vote on the budget and what i told folks is i don’t know whether this incident displayed that certain members don’t have empathy for our staff or students or whether these members simply weren’t aware that these changes were imminent and frankly i didn’t know which was worse so i do appreciate and thank you for that apology now while this incident is quite concerning the overarching issue here continues to be the underfunded budget for our school system declining enrollment notwithstanding as vice chair of the school committee two years ago i was vilified with the chair for having the audacity to advocate for an increased budget for our schools that was an attempt to ameliorate some of the educational losses we experienced over 14 years of level funded budgets that

47:17 was before a pandemic now we’re seeing the reckoning of this problem and under funding by the latest personnel changes that took place this week many people in town do not understand how the budget process works and nor should they really have to the school committee is supposed to advocate for what the schools need but this is what happens when that doesn’t take place now there may be people who feel that our schools are properly funded obviously the majority of the school committee does but judging by the number of people who have contacted me many do not and i hope that you’re willing to listen to parents who have been selflessly advocating for our students and have higher expectations for our school district thank you for your time

48:02 all right um i don’t see any more hands raised so i will move on um i plan to kind of bring this up i i didn’t realize we were doing this at this point in the agenda because i thought it would be more a new business piece but and i didn’t want to interject during public comments we don’t respond to public comment um but i i did get to a chance an opportunity to speak with an attorney at in the open meeting division at the ag’s office because i as as all you did received much concern from the public and in i i didn’t feel it was helping anybody for us to guess or make conjecture i’m a big proponent and i have been for years i’ve just

48:47 i’ve called them many times for various reasons even when i wasn’t on the board um just to go to the governing body to ask their guidance because they know it better than anybody um and they explained the problem can i ask just sarah i want you to talk sarah just one second if i could so point of order we are under public comment and i i think sarah can make comments under new business and i’d like to just recommend that we you know end public comment and then sarah can make her comments under under new business would be my recommendation or we can just continue on i mean since the topic it seems like the topic is related to some of the public comment but not all of the public comments so

49:34 it’s the will of the committee either way but i want it it’s more related to the chairman’s gold’s um statement but i’m happy to wait to the end if you’re more comfortable well we can continue i think you can continue okay yeah go ahead okay um and you know they’re always very very informative when you call they’re very clear that um they do not make any formal determinations without um a formal written um violation so so there’s no formal answers the only way the only mechanism in which they make a ruling is is through through that process the process they explained was you know someone would file it it would come before us we would we would talk about it as a committee we would at that point

50:21 they said talk about who was at the supposed um meeting that is in question um they called a meeting because if the if the assertion is it’s an open meeting violation then who was there what was said um they go through the pieces and it’s only after disclosing that and then us deliberating as a board that we make a determination and then if the individuals who filed aren’t comfortable um they can we file with the state saying our determination and what our process was and then the individuals can choose to accept that or kick it up to the state at which point they assign someone um an attorney and then that attorney interviews all parties um i believe she said separately

51:06 and ascertains the facts and then they make a ruling um i’m not here to make a ruling i’m i’m not an attorney um she gave me her you know given given the post you know that i shared they gave me their guidance on what they felt um anybody that calls i’m sure will get the same answer i got um so i i just i want i i do commend sarah for for owning um this and for for speaking to it um you know i i perhaps you know at some point in the meeting we’ll hear from the other members who will speak to it as well i think there’s great strength in showing that and speaking to that and i commend

51:53 you for that but i want to be careful that we don’t perpetuate you know some of this anger in the community by us declaring it’s not a violation when that’s for the attorney general’s office to declare um in us as primarily as a voting body prior um and again it’s for them to speak to i got the answer that they gave me um and i know i know what they told me and anybody that calls will get you know i’m assuming the same answer but i i just i multiple times this year we’ve declared things violations are not violations it’s happened to me i’ve been declared a violation things you know we we don’t declare things like one individual without without emotion a second and a vote on something we don’t declare if it’s a violation or

52:41 not um so i just want to speak to that and and also recognize that it took strength for sarah to speak and and i do commend you for that um because you know that that took that took a lot and that was that was commendable so thank you hey sarah um i do have another hand up right now um we haven’t moved forward officially um kate thompson

53:07 hey guys um i just wanted to say two things number one i am sitting here snuggled in my bed with my old watching this meeting from the comfort of my home and i just wanted to say that she and i just discussed this and i’m so proud that she was able to sit and listen to this discussion and watch um a measured conversation about a topic that’s been difficult and sarah um sarah golda i just want to say that like that your statement and your approach um balanced approach to what has become an issue for for this committee over i don’t know how long since friday um was a really powerful statement

53:53 to my child and for us to hear and to how you bring yourself forward in the face of of difficulty so i appreciate that and the second thing i wanted to say is i really don’t like this thing that we do where we aren’t able to hold two opposing thoughts in our head at the same time and i think one of those thoughts is um that there’s some people in the community that are angry about this and i think there’s another thought which is um there’s a whole bunch of people who just don’t care they don’t care about this it’s a distraction i trust our school committee member our ch our chair when she says that there is no violation can we please move on and talk about things that matter to our school

54:40 district and stop wasting time on this thanks thank you kate

54:48 okay i think that um we will thank you everyone um i appreciate that conversation um we will move forward on to our consent agenda and action items um and we have first of all the only piece in this is the juneteenth holiday discussion um so lisa dropped the calendar for next year this is this is next this is an issue for the voted calendar that we have for the 2021-2022 count school year so the state of massachusetts has moved to and we heard a little bit about this i believe it was just our past meeting um they’ve moved to declare that juneteenth is an official state holiday um and it does not impact our calendar for

55:34 our students for this current school year because we are out before the juneteenth holiday which is june 19th um but it does impact our calendar that we have voted for next year so next year our final day of school is slated to be the 17th of june and so juneteenth falls on a sunday which means that our teachers are back on the 20th which is when it would be observed however if we have a snow day then it kicks it kicks this into it would be a tuesday if we have one snow day it would be the tuesday the 21st would be our last day of school then instead of friday the 17th um so we do need to vote this um

56:22 lisa let’s see lisa um reached out to legal and we actually need to take two votes on this tonight um the first and that’s i’ll ask for the motions and then if there’s any conversation that needs to occur around them it can absolutely happen uh the first is i would like to ask for a motion to recognize juneteenth starting with june 19th 2022 um when it falls on a saturday it will be observed on the prior friday and when it falls on a sunday it will be observed on the following monday david moved david moved second emily second so sarah does that i mean we have to change we’re gonna change we have to change this year too

57:07 no because our students won’t be in the building it’s just with our teachers so it’ll be worked out with them separately because our students are done on the 15th this year okay um that makes sense yeah so so it’s not um and that won’t be a problem with the union working that out for their days right no they’ll have to figure it out john will work with joan that makes total sense and then my other question is there was a question at one point if we might need to um as we get closer to knowing the actual opening of the brown spool um if we may need to tweak that does david have any insight that we might have that we can maybe kill multiple birds with a stone are we are we solid on our opening date

57:54 as it connects to that or or do any tweaks need to be made at this point or are we not ready to talk about it that may be the other option um um i i think it’s a it’s something that is being considered sarah for sure and um you know the superintendent is aware of the september first date and there might need to be some adjustments that that get made to make sure that everything lines up properly with with that k-3 group and i think there will probably be more discussions as we go forward yes okay okay yep so but this vote right now is just if you want to observe the holiday that

58:39 well it’s not in it but we need to recognize that we need to officially observe it okay so it’s just but it’s okay so it’s ratifying that we’re going to right that’s the first motion yeah all right i thought we did that at the last meeting didn’t we recognize it as a an official holiday at the last meeting no i don’t think so i think we i don’t think we took a vote after that um after the presentation by um oh i thought we did okay never mind any other questions all right uh sarah gold yes megan taylor yes sarah fox yes yes david harris yes and emily barron yes all right so that one passes five to zero thank you

59:25 and then we then the next vote is to amend the school calendar so i will ask for an uh a motion to amend the 2021-22 school calendar to include juneteenth to include the juneteenth holiday to be observed on june 20th 2022. so moved megan moved second family second any questions on that so i think i’m being slow here it’s okay um can you just walk through the dates again because on this so all right let me see if i understand a better way so right now we’re scheduled to end on the 17th correct which is a friday is it friday correct prior to the holiday and the holiday

1:00:12 will be the 19th the hall the official holiday is the 19th so it would be observed on the 20th so we don’t have a snow day it doesn’t correct because we wouldn’t be in school but it would impact the teachers it would once again yeah move them to tuesday correct but if we had a once one or more snow days then it moves yeah i mean we have this holiday on the monday the 20th and then we continue forward to make up the um snow days okay so if we would have five snow days the last day of school would be the 27th correct and the teacher’s last day would be the 28th correct got it thank you yeah sarah you clear on all that yep i’m just trying to take minutes as we go that’s why we keep looking away sorry guys

1:00:57 sorry guys sorry guys all right any other questions all right uh sarah gold yes megan taylor yes david harris yes sarah fox yes and emily baron yes all right so that one is five to zero as well thank you everybody uh dr bucky that moves us to your superintendent’s report i will hand it over to you sure uh just some updates uh for the committee and then we’ll get into uh the presentation but uh we have two searches going on uh the first search is for our metco director and uh we brought some people uh interviewed several candidates uh nan has been definitely leading this search

1:01:43 so i’ll keep my eyes on her in case i misspeak but they brought several candidates in for zoom interviews narrowed it down to some finalists which came for in person the committee could not reach consensus so they have reopened that search they are continuing to interview candidates and i’ll have a more of an update but this is a real critical position for the district and i just want to commend man on keeping the search open and reopening the search to make sure that we get it correct um so uh the committee’s been working hard on that and then uh we have the appreciation of joseph brown school principal search um the search committee uh scoured through

1:02:28 the resumes did the zoom round of interviews uh this has been a busy week the pto posted a parent form for two finalists and that is uh principal dr sean satterfield and mr jim moltenari they did the parent form yesterday they did a faculty forum today we will be collecting input from the parents and from the teachers who participated over the course of the next week and then the search committee will get together on monday april 26th to make decisions so that is where principle search is and i think that leads us in person learning it is

1:03:17 so gratifying to be in the buildings and to see schools operating as close to normally uh as they did pre-pandemic and i commend mandy murphy she had a situation in her building today that they handled admirably they had a positive case at the middle school this week which uh matt fox and his team did a great job with um and so schools are up and running and functional and lunches are happening and so there’s something to celebrate uh every day so lots of good stuff with in-person learning and i don’t want to spoil the non-update

1:04:04 update for tomorrow there isn’t actually an update but i am sending an update so if that confuses you you’re well with me than the juneteenth holiday um

1:04:20 when we return monday every in-person student in all schools are going full days five days a week that has been a long time coming and that is something very much worthy of us celebrating so um i know that through the course of the pandemic that we have been very conscious of health and safety standards and we are very conscious of social emotional learning i had jack average reached out to me uh several weeks ago and was commending us for the number of things that happened in the district to attend social emotional learning and suggested that maybe people aren’t aware

1:05:06 of all that the schools are doing and i know that vans sent a really nice outline to sarah about things that are happening in the district and i know that um scott is going to do a presentation for us to show some pretty remarkable work in terms of analysis and how we can attend to social emotional uh issues but i just wanted to give nan 30 seconds uh to share some of the good things that are happening in the social emotional realm and then we’ll turn it over to dr solberg for his presentation great man i will apologize first i think in all of the emails that got sent out today i did not forward yours to the full committee so i will do that um later this evening or tomorrow great thanks sarah and and really that email was a follow-up to a conversation

1:05:52 that you and i had in the hallway one day it was not um for any other reason than than to just um reconnect around your inquiry so it’s perfectly fine that it’s not included um i just you know to to echo dr bucky the the teachers are just amazing so there are layer upon layers of layers of support but really the greatest support is in the um the bonds that are being built in the classrooms on a daily basis teachers high fiving or you know virtually high-fiving and just words of encouragement and um and and fun that’s happening again in schools but they’re um

1:06:39 curricular in when we look at curriculum we’ve got strong second steps programming happening in all of our elementary schools we have professional development at the beginning of the school year around responsive classrooms and that has all been broadened and deepened through throughout the year i have met um and have been lucky enough to attend the high schools um programming and and work that they’re doing both as an adult team and as student-led teams which i think scott’s going to refer to in a bit and tomorrow i have a meeting with um dr jamie slavitt at the high school and we’re going to try to put together a

1:07:26 parent forum where we can get some district experts together talking about what kids need from us as adults and how we as adults need to support each other in our struggles maybe that we’re having with our own children in the home conversations that we’re having struggling with around academics or around social emotional health and how we can help families facilitate those conversations so that will be coming hopefully in late april early may to our district we will um hopefully be able to offer two sessions one to our elementary families and one to our second day um dare secondary families as the the needs are just vastly different and yet so similar so

1:08:13 that i wanted you to know was coming as a community and just the ongoing work has just been it’s been great to to see it unfold and if anybody has any questions about what’s happening feel free to email me or call or reach out and i’m i’m happy to to go a little deeper into it

1:08:36 see what you thought you panda yeah i just wanted to um take i thought this was a good place to commend all of our staff our our teachers our custodians our paras our everyone everyone has just i mean they’re all under tremendous stress just like everybody in this pandemic is but when you see them with our students whether it’s via zoom or driving by a school or hearing from children that are in the schools um all you hear is like the teachers are showing up and all the staff again all the staff are showing up and putting smiles on their faces and making it positive for these kids and that is hugely hugely impactful

1:09:23 for giving them a sense of normalcy and we’ve had a great number of parent volunteers from my understanding to these these last couple weeks that have made it possible so it’s coming together um and i just i wanted to just put out there that i’ve heard a lot of positive feedback of what what we’re seeing from our staff um in these last few weeks great great and i just want to reiterate on that there are so many different layers um and that everything is so personalized in our district based on student need that i’ve been part of some really really worry some conversations and seeing what those resolutions for students have been

1:10:09 and i’ve been um beyond impressed by the level of care and um attention that kids are getting that are really struggling the one thing i would like us to start doing um whether it’s at the school committee level or the district level i’m not i’m not sure where that’s most appropriate and dr bucky and nan can can definitely help guide us on that but where we know we’ll still have a population of um medically fragile children um you know and i’m obviously speaking as a parent of a medically fragile child but i’m speaking as a school committee member because i deeply believe we as we all do that we educate all of our students but i’d like to see us start talking about that plan for those students in the fall i think that will help their their social emotional

1:10:56 anxiety and their that of their families greatly but also um we we want to make sure we have our ducks in a row that we have everything in place and that we’re not you know having to play catch-up in in june july and august um again i don’t know what that looks like but if there’s an opportunity um to be involved in any way i would i would welcome that um and i think it would bring relief to many people to know that we’re we’re working on it

1:11:34 in all transparency sarah fox did reach out to me and that those conversations are underway but just to underscore i walked across the hall immediately from hanging up and had the conversation with nan who had already been in contact with some local area uh assistant superintendents because everybody’s looking to be able to attend to the diverse needs in their district and to make sure that all students have a plan for safely being educated in the fall so i just want to commend dan and why we don’t have anything to present tonight i do want to reassure sarah and the community at large that that is something that is forefront in our mind as we’re planning for september and dr bucky when i called him and i think i had spoken to nia i spoke to nana as a parent but called dr bucky you

1:12:19 know as a school committee member and both of them were both like very supportive of um yes this is something we need to do um so i i just want to make sure i put that out there so i think that transitions nicely into the strength of our community and the supports uh that we have um i know the board of health is added a layer of looking at mental health concerns and social emotional concerns and i just want to be clear we’re very appreciative of an additional layer but that isn’t as a result of a deficit in schools that it was something that wasn’t being attended to or being missed at the school level and i think dr scholberg’s presentation

1:13:06 tonight will kind of drive home some of the in-depth work that we’re doing and i could spend the next 15 minutes reading his resume and his scholarly publications and his work at bu but i think the presentation will speak for itself and we are so lucky is the wrong word in marblehead by the strength of our community and the the expertise that people have in so many areas and i see that on the building committee when things come up people have areas of specialty and expertise that are really lending a great deal to that project and so when we talk about social emotional learning there are people in the community who have joined various communities whether

1:13:51 they’re teaching and learning and then created subcommittees that created task forces that created work groups and it’s just such a community of collaboration and giving and so um i will turn it over to scott with the thank you for all he has done to support social emotional learning particularly at the uh broad reopening level so scott dr solberg please take it away thank you i’ll go ahead and share my screen so scott solberg one ramsey road i always forget to do that so thank you to cindy for reminding me of that unfortunately my computer’s a little slow on zoom so it’ll help nope looks like it’s catching up um so what i’d like to do with permission and thank you john that was that is exactly what my sentiment is that there

1:14:36 are a lot of parents with amazing talent i learned that firsthand being on the cpac and just the talent that we saw on that committee and it’s just reverberates all through our town it’s amazing um and i i just want to call out i always do jamie slabit nan was was leading this large community we had educators parents we had we now have students and i’m going to ask them to come and speak in just a moment because i want them to get back to homework i’m a little nervous because i have a very stressed daughter downstairs and so as the meetings going on i know they’ve been here the whole time but i want them to talk with you about what they’ve done in taking the lead on sel it’s phenomenal um what i’m going to report on is a survey that that we worked on as a community team we had our principals we had matt

1:15:21 was on there and his staff we had myself we had jamie we had others all kind of figuring out what can we do to get a gauge of how our students are doing um in this experience and so it was done in november um but i would love chloe and tess to come off of mute to tell you what they did this spring working with gina hart bringing new people in um to get this thing going and they took the reins and and i’m just so excited so chloe and tess if you could just come off and explain what you’ve done um and where we’re at right now because we’re in the midst of another data collection yeah hi everyone thank you so much mr salberg um so as he said uh chloe and i are part of the social emotional learning group which is absolutely amazing let me just say it’s such an

1:16:07 inspiring group to be a part of just knowing that there’s so much going on behind the scenes that students don’t necessarily see with administration staff and just other students it’s been a very moving thing for me to see especially as a high school senior just to see how much people really do care about our students in our community as a whole but besides that so we are in a work group that is around data collection so we actually chloe and i just created a new survey that was based off of this last survey but we want it to be more student driven um so we decided that it would be best to sort of remake this and change the questions a bit in ways that we felt students would really feel connected to more in like casual terms

1:16:53 or terms that if we saw as students we would be more willing to answer um so we did the best we could with the questions they had which were amazing to just get some new data about being back in school and how that’s affected our students mental health so yeah i’ll pass it off to chloe so one thing we made sure to incorporate in this survey is we made it anonymous versus the last survey in november was not anonymous and i think that students felt more comfortable sharing their feelings this time and that was clearly shown because um as of today um we have 500 responses whereas back in november we only got 350. so it’s our only been around a week and we’ve already gotten a great response from students which is awesome

1:17:38 and we want to collect this data just to get an overall feeling of the well-being of our students at the high school and um we’ll then use it to incorporate more programming and resources for students who are struggling in hopes of making school just a better environment and overall positive place thank you thank you i i get choked up it is so amazing to work with these two and and what gina has been helping just creating their voice and just seeing the quality of work and i can’t wait to see what they do with the results and and what’s gonna you know what’s gonna be happening in the school gina did you want to say something say any words thanks for having me i just want to say i’m so proud of chloe and tess i’m the lucky staff member that gets to have them working with me for senior project so

1:18:24 part of that will be looking at the data and going over the the data with dr slavitt and talking about um how we want to use this data to inform programming to inform staff about where students are at and you know what we want to do moving forward so it’s been really great to be a part of this and just we’re starting to look at the data now we’re going to keep the survey open for a bit but even just starting to look at the data we’ve seen um you know making the survey anonymous actually we’re getting you know more layered and um in-depth answers from students and so we feel like that was a really great feature and um thanks so much for dr to dr silber and dr slavitt for kind of leading this and and for um allowing us to kind of jump in and i’m

1:19:10 so proud of chloe and tess i’m so glad that we included them so great stuff thank you okay so let me do a couple clarifications one is we did not do the survey in an anonymous way in fall because jamie and the student support staff wanted to monitor and if there were some concerns they wanted to be able to get to those students or create some group efforts and things so it was it was intentional um to do that and they did a phenomenal job the second thing i want to clarify up front is i help support getting the data collected but i have no connection to the students themselves i only work with what’s called a de-identified so all their any information and in this case it would have just been their id number and i don’t even know their id numbers all i work with is a very just a simple set of the data so just want to clarify

1:19:55 um those kinds of pieces also um with permission madam chair i’m going to go into the world i live in and i know that this is a whole cross-cultural exchange that may occur i want you as as the committee to ask questions to make sure i’m you’re you’re understanding what’s being presented and i’m totally fine uh with being interrupted as we go along so if you if you can take um if you will be willing to do that it will help i think i want you to understand what it is the implications we can spend weeks talking about but just the making sure you understand and i see sarah’s already um ready to go of course i just want to clarify did the students by the way very impressive for both um chloe and tess uh did they design the questions or

1:20:41 uh okay so that way so they what they did is they took the questions that we did last fall and then they remade them they are not going to look like the questions i’m showing you here they’re going to see some examples that are close but they made it in their own voice and and it really it just it just feels natural for a student to be looking at and saying yeah i can do this so so i’m really excited there’s lots of ways we can do this work and what they did was was really exceptional um so so what you’re looking at here is the items that the students completed okay it comes out of a long research area that i’ve been working in so all of these areas have been shown to be important around school success life success preparation for future um

1:21:28 and and i wanted you to see exactly what what it was that these mean and we can come back to the slide as you need just as we go to interpret um it this is an evaluation it’s not a formal assessment it’s not a research thing it’s basically a temperature gauge to say how are our students doing and so these are the six areas and what i want to show you first we have village school we have vets and we have the high school represented and i want to show you what the average was and i want to preface it as one of my parents on the cpac reminded me yesterday because the average may look good does not mean we did not have students and families struggling so i do not want this to give an impression that everything was fine it wasn’t but there were a number a large percentage who

1:22:13 were doing okay but we also have to remember that that’s that’s an average so where you have one average you have below the average and there’s a lot in that in those in that as well more importantly i’m going to show you focusing on this thing called future orientation and emotional psychological distress i’m going to use those as kind of what we want to be managing right that those are important outcomes we want our students to feel a sense of hope for their future that they’re that they’re moving forward and we also want them emotionally together and then we’re going to look at how the all of the different variables help predict that and that’s where we start to have a conversation about what might we be needing to think about as a district within our schools about different interventions all of these are malleable and that’s that’s a fancy word for saying we can change all of these the moment they walk

1:22:58 in the school building we can improve on every one of these and as superintendent bucky was saying we now have a community task force on mental health that wants to make this a community-wide conversation so i’m really excited about being in marblehead right now this is a fabulous for those of us that are really focused on these issues it’s great any questions on what you’re seeing here was rated on a four-point scale um there are some my daughter included that want a five-point scale because they want something in the middle but they did a four point so she couldn’t do that so she’s complaining at that this one as well that four point scale but so was the four-point scale so three and fours on the good side and one and twos would be on the sides you’d be wondering about okay all right so i’m going to go to the first set of results so this is now

1:23:45 looking at just the averages presenting a small amount because this can get overwhelming when we get too much the first thing you’ll notice on the left is that village had a smaller sample size so let’s not go too far in making decisions about how village was doing because it was a small sample size you know there could be lots of reasons for that that may have shifted some of the data right so it could be teachers that were really excited about sel and so really got to their students hey i need you to take this we just don’t know what what the what the issues were there and and don’t nothing about village this was we were doing this at a time when everything was in flux and systems were moving so there’s nothing this is nothing about village it’s just about the fact that it was challenging um you have a good size number at vets and a bigger size at the

1:24:32 high school which is great um and when you’re looking at these averages then remember it’s a four point scale so if we’re at three and above we’re in good shape um academic stress is the opposite right so the higher it gets the more stressed you’re feeling so it’s not positive behind we actually want it in the twos right because if it’s above if it’s in the threes it means our students are feeling a lot of stress we want the stress to be below two because if it’s above three that means they’re feeling very psychologically and emotionally challenged so so having it in the three category would be would be an issue i’m gonna just i’m gonna slow down because it’s a lot of data and i want to be able to make sure parents as well that are out there listening can can kind of absorb it as well so scott um

1:25:17 um um even though there’s more high school students percentage-wise it looks like we had a higher percentage of um participation at bets oh yeah that’s was really well represented so um that was that’s interesting to see and then um you talk about how this is an average which is you know well took but when you look at the students that were reporting on that negative scale were you seeing more extremes than you would expect to see in not not a pandemic like the ones that are having trouble are they having greater troubles so so there was certainly a small set and it was much smaller than i think we were anticipating and i take that from the conversation i had with jamie um

1:26:03 about it that they that they were looking at um matt um i don’t know if you’ve if i don’t know how familiar with with matt’s style at bets but i don’t think i can turn around without another email from matt reminding me about something um and and he and then he laughs at me when i when i didn’t get the emails like oh my gosh there was one i didn’t open so um so matt really does a heavy push for parents to make sure everyone’s aware what’s going on so i have no doubt that vets um probably had a higher response rate he he really runs a really does a great job high school’s bigger more complex it’s a bigger system so it’s harder you know to to manage through all of that but you can see what happened when tess and chloe got involved you know it’s exploded so so certainly the probably at the high school level it could have been um not you know it not being anonymous that may have um the students knew they had a

1:26:49 choice and we’re probably not ready for it um scott just a quick question this one that we’re looking at right here is that’s the the earlier version that was created by adults this was the november version yep so this is the one that that our team created um as a group yeah yes so these items are different than the items that chloe and tess were describing thank you okay so now we’re going to have some fun and i say that because it’s a little more complicated and as a researcher i love this part but now what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at distress and we’re going to ask the question which of these variables are we’ll call them variables right these different these these six different areas which of them are related to the stress and we’re focusing

1:27:35 right now at village everyone knows that academic stress will cause emotional psychological distress so it’s not a surprise that the more the higher rating they had for academic stress the more distressed they reported and so sarah this kind of gets to your point right which is we’ve got some students that are going to be in some significant areas and what this is saying is if they do not have a sense of future hope if they don’t find school as relevant and meaningful that stress is going to be really dangerous right that these other two things are helping to buffer they’re helping to manage they’re helping them hold on right if they have it because it’s decreasing that level of distress but with only stress and without these other resources these other psychological resources in

1:28:22 this case um it’s really it’s something we need to be concerned about so this is why we want to know more about students in terms of how they’re feeling let me go to the next one and then it may it may you can see what happens with future orientation so the reason i’ve selected future orientation is because i’m sure you’re the same way what covert really did was just take us out of any sense of future hope right what where’s how long is it going to last and the hopelessness going on and so future orientation is really a positive area it lets us know whether they’re setting long-term goals and where you know are they seeing life ahead as being positive in this case distress is related to that right so the more you feel not well the harder it is for you to feel a sense of hope that that’s exactly right and

1:29:08 academic motivation became a big key privilege feeling school is relevant meaningful and social connections having those connective relationships with their parents these are connected relationships with their teachers and their peers goes a long way in helping you hold on to that sense of hope and future orientation so um some affirming kinds of things in in that case let me pause the village and we’re gonna do the same thing then with vets and with the high school good okay sorry i keep seeing you move your hand i’m wondering if you’re about to go off mute okay so let’s look at vets um again stress is stress is going to lead to distress that that’s we’ve got

1:29:54 thousands tens and hundreds of thousands of research studies experimentally and otherwise saying yes that’s what happens but a future orientation having a sense of hope for the future and now feeling confidence academic self-efficacies do i feel confident as a learner when i’m in the school do i feel i’m able to learn how to learn the material that’s going on and that is now acting as an important buffer that having that sense of power that sense that i can have some control in my learning space manages and takes away some of that distress so i think that’s a that’s an interesting component and and something that we want to be focused on future orientation gets more complex so yes the stress is still there but now you’ve added in academic self-efficacy as well so the more confident they feel

1:30:40 about the academic world the more they’re ready to think about the future with a sense of hope and a sense of there’s things they can do out there and we’ve got lots of research again many many studies showing that that self-efficacy does help them lead towards thinking about their future potential and possibilities and we still have the motivation you know i come to school because it’s meaningful and relevant and i’m feeling connected to my family my peers and my teachers it’s all being important resources to support them and holding on and keeping that future orientation if there’s no questions i’ll move to the high school i think so okay so the high school now distress we’ve got it gets more complex right now we’ve got academic self-efficacy we’ve got the future orientation

1:31:25 um and social support systems managing what what the impact that that stress has on distress so this is this is another important element high school is more complex so these relational bases is important for their mental health feeling confident as a learner is important for their mental health when we get done we’ll go back and look at the averages because the high school students were reporting um a little less on the academic self-efficacy so so they’re feeling that you know there’s there’s a confidence perhaps something we want to look at around their overall confidence and then finally for future orientation so now we’ve got the self-efficacy again motivation social connections all playing an important role um in terms of that so um really submit just some important pieces on there this is i have i’m not even gonna i’ll just show you a peek and

1:32:11 i’ll get away from it quickly there is data um for those in the in the community that want to look at that or have some interest in that i did put all the data down from where i drew these conclusions but i think for this kind of conversation having it more as an op as a as a translated piece is easier to grasp i think i would love to see that i love i love looking at data points

1:32:36 it’s all there but if you want to like if you can email this no i think you have you should have it it should be in the materials that slide is included in our drop boxes you have the whole powerpoint yep yep um so just some thoughts right so now when we start to look at where we are on these averages i am a bit concerned about the high school um the distress levels seem a little elevated more than we might like right because we’re saying that there’s 2.56 is getting up there right it’s a significant amount the self-advocacy is also below a three so so they’re not they’re they’re smart they’re getting great grades they’re active but they’re not coming away feeling confident and i’m i’m not sure what that’s about we’ll see what

1:33:21 the next survey brings and if we can kind of glean out of that but i’m also excited that maybe tess and chloe can ask those questions directly i think they’re going to have some follow-up focus groups to kind of kind of add some more dimensions to what’s happening um the social support looks great we got we got they’re feeling connected on average i realize we have a lot of students that don’t i don’t mean to in any way minimize the struggle that so many families have gone through and children but on the average that seems an area of strength as our community in terms of how things are going um i get motivation would be nice if we were way above a three because i’d like them to find school relevant meaningful uh but it’s pretty close it’s not that far off so so i’ll pause so in a particular where this survey was not anonymous

1:34:07 um can you talk a little bit about if you’re if you’re aware of what the interventions were but were they identifying students that had more extreme i worry particularly about in the feeling isolated area because that’s when someone feels isolated alone that’s where i see you know the real danger because if you feel you have a community you can kind of get through these other pieces yeah um so i would i would i i can’t answer that i i know what my impression is because we spoke with them about that but if jamie is with us today i think it would be great for him to kind of share as and if he’s not it’s okay i’ll talk if he comes in that he can take over but what they what my understanding what they did is they poured over the data at each school level they broke out which students were it looked like they were having challenges

1:34:55 in which areas and it was from that that they began looking at how’s the best way for us to connect with that student right is is it needing a one-on-one touch is it needing helping with the teachers to do more sel kinds of things to to have conversations with the students in general so you saw you’ve heard about a lot of effort to help teachers they’ve had pods to help teachers really bring the sel kinds of conversations into the classroom my my son’s health teacher had them all do a wellness piece where they had to define something in the life that wasn’t working right now and they had to build a plan and then they had to test it and they had to report back and it was all about self-care so so not all of it was we have to go and go right to the

1:35:40 student a lot of it we can do right there in advisories to try to support these things from happening now i’m not saying every teacher did it i’m not saying it was done perfectly all the way through but there was a lot of multiple kinds of interventions going on because this whole community that we have in student services was on it so you had the school counselors you had the social workers you had psychologists and it was a dividing conquer type of way of going so that’s what i was hearing was going on gina do you have some ideas more on that yeah i can speak to that i don’t think jamie’s on but um so we we have a student assistance team which is a confidential meeting which which is um clinical staff guidance counselors um admin team and what um how jamie dr slavitt was able to

1:36:27 analyze the data was in clusters and and we identified high-risk students in terms of their their answers to um certain questions that identified them being at risk for isolation or not having a support and so what we did was in a confidential meeting just discussed um which students um would benefit from a check-in and a lot of times that was a clinical step that was already working with them and if not it was a guidance counselor that already had a relationship with them um just to reach out and offer support and and we got a lot of positive feedback about just being able to check in with students um around that so in in one sense not having the survey anonymous um was great for that because we were able to connect with a lot of

1:37:13 students that we know were struggling gina i want to take off thank you for reminding me so sarah the cluster that she talked about it’s a really exciting way of taking a look at all six of these and seeing if there’s some individuals that have multiple issues and now we can pull them out clinically to say here’s a profile like you said maybe they’re feeling isolated so you’ll see the isolation the stress and the distress all coming together but we’re looking at social support as being probably a key mechanism in that and so they did that analysis specifically for that reason to see what was coming up but i also know um you know in in talking with matt in terms of his feedback pouring over and and really the the qualitative information the open-ended was another level of analysis

1:37:58 to see what students were saying and again all done respectively all done privately all done in ways that they would they would figure out what’s the easiest supportive way to get to the students without anyone feeling like they’re being you know called out or anything like that so and there was it was so much smaller those particular number of students at that time was not a large number like we were feeling i think emotionally we felt like it’s huge it was not a tsunami of students that were fitting into those multiple categories so and i think you can see on the averages that it’s bearing out again there are students that are struggling there are families that are struggling i’m so glad um nan to just start focusing on the families because that’s the feedback going on too we need help i and certainly because i’m talking nicely doesn’t mean we’re not struggling in our family too

1:38:43 we’re all we’re all in this as a community so yeah i appreciate that point too because remembering that this was done in november i think is a really important piece to sort of where where we were all at you know it was before things got so ugly over the winter um and so it um i’m i’m interested to see any of those changes um from the from the new data that that comes forth and um you know it would it would it you know we we don’t have it but like i wonder what would it look like in january february as well um just you know when things were so felt so unending um yeah so scott i have a question it’s megan um first of all thanks for the

1:39:29 presentation it’s really interesting to see um the types of questions you answer and then kind of how it might be different even if it’s slightly different between the different age groups and then you know thinking about how each area really you know is interrelated so i think this is really useful i guess my question is with the new survey um that tess and chloe are helping to work on then what what actions do we take out of that because it will have to be more global right because it is an anonymous kind of rolled up survey so then kind of what’s the next step there so um so i’ll speak for the high school um i know dan is on this and and he and i will be meeting next week

1:40:14 um to go over planning and i was amazed at how any idea i had he’s already thought of and he’s asking let’s move on it so there’s a very um you’ve got a a very visionary principal who’s ready to really start figuring out ways to create the climate that needs to make this happen a lot of this is what we’re talking about is really it is community-wide it’s feeling connected to the school it’s feeling confident as a learner these are things that kind of transcend the individual approaches this is about this happens through the classroom experience it happens by having great conversations and engagement so we’ll be i think that’s where dan’s gonna be taking it and so i think we’re gonna have some really exciting um visions on that um if and i’ll pause there but i

1:41:01 hope i answer if not i can certainly so this is news sorry ben uh okay is this where things that nan talked about that that they would start to weave in to this really broad data that that where we’re not looking to pull out specific individuals anymore but kind of create um systematic pieces and then it’s called we’re creating a shared definition of what the challenges are in our school and we can’t have a major major system like a high school start navigating in a collective fashion if we’re not all having a shared definition and so the data by it being anonymous gives us the power to say here’s the challenges that are going on we can follow up with focus groups we can get more detail about some of these

1:41:48 issues but as a community we can’t really run from it anymore there’s things that they’re talking about they are stressed in the high school i don’t know parents think we can all concur they’re stressed out they’re capable but they’re stressed right and so this will help us start to get into that conversation and start rethinking how we might help manage through that so there’s a lot of very powerful things going on by collecting it in this way i think it’s really good the first way we did it was because student services said we’re really worried about individual students and we don’t know who they are so so we needed a very quick kind of like that first hands-on look to just figure out what’s going on now it’s hey this sel stuff is really huge really important we’re starting to get

1:42:34 it let’s use it to help us define what’s happening and i see eric just popped in i think he might have something he wants to add i have nothing but great things to say about you scott no i don’t want you to talk about me we’re talking about the district no i i’ve just been listening this whole time it’s incredible work i know i’ve been you know a little bit behind the scenes you all been i’ve been doing an incredible job and with our students and alongside you and jamie gina and everyone it’s really been incredible we’re looking looking to continue to expand you know through next year as well so thank you for all your efforts i don’t think we can underestimate as a community how huge it was what this district did around sel i work with districts literally hundreds and hundreds all over the country having this conversation and

1:43:21 they cannot come together like we did and put together we’re not even showing you the booklet that the team put together for families and kids around self-care it’s now going up to the health department and we’re hoping it’ll shape that this was amazing and then to have the schools do a survey like this this is hard to do it’s really not simple and it was done and so and then the follow-up and then to have another survey and to see this kind of momentum continue we’ve got to take a lot of pride that there’s a lot of leadership in our district that are making this happen there’s a lot of talented people in this district that are making it happen and whatever skills i have i’m just i just i’m in awe of what of what we have going on around us so really great stuff so if i could add um scott i just i want to

1:44:07 bring to everyone’s attention that to that this week the every grade at the high school um was offered an opportunity to join a clinical social worker lead um some talk and conversation around stressing tech techniques and practice that with the guidance of the of the social worker that was an opportunity that was offered three or four different times this week to students i also want to highlight stop and talk which is something that the students have generated our high school students have come together and they’re being trained by our staff on how to talk to their peers and when and where peers can find

1:44:53 them when they need someone to talk to and providing private confidential spaces under the guise that if they feel somebody is unsafe they know where to go and how to handle that so those are two extremely advanced things that just are happening right now in the high school and scott i can’t remember that um summer’s instagram page that she set up for the for the district do you happen to remember the instagram um there’s a there’s a it was fantastic yeah i don’t have it offhand but yeah so i’m gonna i’ll push that out i’ll tweet it tomorrow but there there is a group of students that have created an instagram um that greets students and staff ever

1:45:42 daily with positive affirmations and ways to look at positive look at things in a positive way which is just another thing that i always enjoy as an adult looking at so i’m going to send that along look maybe gina knows it’s yeah it’s positivity underscore mhs and it actually has our survey we have summer to share the survey out on that um site so that might be helpful and why we’ve got so much response as well but yeah positivity underscore mhs just to clarify this new survey that’s designed by the students is that going just to the high school or is that going to village vets in the high school thank you it’s a fantastic question um um matt may be on it he can he can certainly um speak for himself but i think they’re

1:46:27 looking for timing um and tess and chloe will be part of a team to talk with him to look through it he may change some of the items it’s his it’s his school so this is like a a consulting kind of thing to give ideas um he may i don’t we haven’t had a chance to talk i just know that trying to get to break with oh there you are matt i didn’t want to speak for i was trying to give you some time to come in and and talk yeah jamie and i exchanged a couple emails a couple few weeks ago we just you know we’ve been tight with time the reason we had such a good response from the initial survey is that we did it coupled with an advisory so when we were doing remote advisors at the beginning of the year our advisors did a big lead up into it and then [Music] really just let the kids do it right then and there so they just the advisor turned the camera off and

1:47:13 the students turned the camera off game the link and jumped into it our advisories lately have been full of teaching schedules teaching them how to eat lunches teach them how to do all sorts of other things so we’re sort of catching up here you know we’ve been looking at this to be honest since the beginning of march probably and it just seems like one thing after another we’re still sort of prepping our students for changes and and sort of settling in that way so we are just looking for a good time um luckily we have the mcas coming up so that’s not going to impact our schedule at all or anything like that um but no we’re we’re definitely looking for time because we we do want to close the year sort of taking a look at where we started and where we ended the year and then springboarding into next year

1:47:58 so that way we can see some and the object of the idea of an anonymous survey versus what we did which was identified through only student ids and only you know school personnel saw those um i’m on the fence with because i still think it’s pretty valuable for us especially at our school level too [Music] especially going into summer to assist parents um making that transition out of school with if we have concerns of the student um so that’s some of the pieces that we’ll go into and that’s i just looking forward to one more schedule change and then we can settle in and do some of these things to finish up the year matt thank you i think what i’m really excited about is you guys got to see how matt works on this this is exactly how he approached the survey he’s wanting to make sure every every child in his

1:48:44 school is able to be taken care of and all this way and he did a lot of editing and a lot spent a lot of time on this mat i think given how busy you were during that time thank you so much and it’s you can just tell he’s ready to figure out what’s going to be best for for his students so it’s just i’ll fantastic to make this my last question scott so oh come on sarah i love questions i’m sorry um so did your committee um look at you know those lower levels like really you really can’t do a survey with them um and as we as we heard from one professional i think during public comment a lot of times those kids can’t even articulate you know what’s i have a belly give a headache i you know i mean these type of things as we see this potentially on the rise um are we looking at you know obviously we have

1:49:30 the second step program but i know at different schools at different times they’ve um you know there was a grant written for mindfulness by one of the teachers that they did some of that and then we used to have some outside sources come in i know gene skona came in at one point and i got to see what she did with my kids but i see them even now you know a couple years later try to utilize those strategies they might not even realize they’re doing it but they’re kind of so embedded so i didn’t know if we looked at you know harnessing some of those um community efforts to kind of increase this particularly with that younger population where that’s been so successful doing some of those mindfulness um teachings where the kids quite honestly a lot of times see it as a you know a game or something but they don’t realize

1:50:16 really the impact they’re getting at but at least i think sarah honestly um you know we didn’t do a survey at the elementary we probably could have gone and done something but the elementary principles and the schools really got the grunt of this i mean the stress the pressure was constant right there was no way they had bandwidth to try to figure out how we can move push this in that being said we have phenomenal counselors and phenomenal support staff that are doing a lot of these things um and i think and i’m feeling very encouraged that they’ve been they’ve been addressing a lot of these issues yes absolutely when we start talking about a strategic plan i’m hoping scl is going to be on that list and we’re going to have building level you know grade level kinds of ideas about what we want and second step is fine in elementary

1:51:02 but as we get to middle it doesn’t have the same panache and and really sel at the elementary is really helping them make a great classroom right how do kids move and use these skills in middle school it’s the foundation for mental health it’s it’s really them engaging in positive interactions because then they get something positive and they feel better as a human being and then by the time we get to that middle and high school those same skills are the workforce readiness skills this is what they need in the world period and certainly employers are looking for so we have a lot to lean into around sel but i think i think there’s a lot going on in elementary that we’re not aware of and i trust that they’re doing a huge amount but i think when when you guys start describing your strategic plan i’m hopeful that we’ll have a more

1:51:48 articulated vision at least of what we can be thinking about at the different levels and i knew you were going to have another question and we’re going to be doing this all night so we got to be careful no no you really need to just coming up with this thank you sarah can i just i want to add just another bit of information as i alluded to we’re meeting um with dr slavic tomorrow and dr oxford and i one of the things on the agenda spoiler alert if jamie’s on today right now we’re going to talk to him about how do we bring some of those practices that he’s been able to bring at the upper secondary level to the elementary level this year before the end of the year so how can we start building some of those networks for the younger students yeah and are we surveying our staff because

1:52:33 you know you hear how important it is but they’re really like front line workers and they’re all experiencing trauma through all of this but you know yeah yeah you have no idea how awesome that was so at the beginning of the year they did a whole kind of pd for the teachers and it was a home run oh i’ve heard really positive stuff but are we serving them throughout the year to make sure they’re yeah they created so i think where nan’s going is they also created pods and so so staff would our counselors and psychologists would follow up with teams of teachers and keep the conversation going this is a model that post cobid we need we need to keep remembering that our staff are working so hard and get so stressed

1:53:18 stressed stressed they need they need a place where they can just talk and they can get ideas about how to connect differently with their kids so we what nan’s describing that’s going on with jamie we need to go district-wide and so i think that’s the whole point is we really did come up with something this year that’s quite remarkable and partially because we’ve got great great student services staff i mean they just are amazing and so now that now they’re able to really use their skills in a way that’s helping our whole district um so fantastic and then of course our next question will be and how can they get those parents we want time too so buddy right yeah scott thank you so much um and when when tess and chloe get their information back um can we have you guys come again and report out from

1:54:04 what where we’re at currently yeah they would love it i speak for gina too i think it’ll be fantastic for them to leave this conversation be great yeah i just wanted to add on to that um we would love that and also i think this was mentioned but both of us are doing our senior project together with with ms hart and a lot of it is going to be centered around this data and we haven’t decided exactly what we’re going to do with it specifically since it is anonymous but i think the biggest thing that we’re going for is spreading awareness that so many of our students do struggle with mental health stuff especially during this pandemic and i think that our goal is to break the stigma and show students that we have resources so more students will be pushed to go towards those resources so and i also love the idea of bringing it to elementary and younger students i

1:54:50 actually work with kids and something that i started implementing every day is asking them how their day was and hearing about their feelings because i totally agree with you sarah i do think that a lot of this stuff is going over their head and they’re struggling silently because we can’t really tell so yeah awesome awesome thank you so much amazing work amazing work guys um so scott this was awesome thank you so much and gina and man and jamie and everyone else who’s worked on it but i also just want to say how awesome it is to have such engaged students like this is a this is amazing yeah this this type of thing is exactly why i personally i’m sure everyone else gets involved in school right so awesome job guys i cannot wait to see the survey results um that you put

1:55:36 together um and see what that data looks like and how and if it’s different and then what we plan to do with it so yeah i mean yeah i’m amazed um i mean this for the students this was these are things that i was doing in like senior year in college and graduate school so this is like i’m blown away so it’s pretty amazing yeah awesome awesome thanks tess thank you if you’re still on yeah thank you everybody um thank you scott and uh yeah we would you know our it’s we’ve still got time left but our meetings are are dwindling at points so we can kind of see the end of the year so um you know hopefully we can we can work and and make sure that you’re you’re back with us before the end of the year thank you all right i think that one more piece

1:56:22 john sure um there’s nothing that boosts social emotional uh spirits like hearing about end of year activities and mr bauer in two and a half minutes is going to tell you about graduation planning and prom and all the exciting stuff that i know is on everyone’s radar and i will give a spoiler alert we continue to wait for guidance from desi on what is allowed because what is allowed changes but hats off to dan bauer on staying up with all this and fighting to get all of these honored traditions and end of year activities uh available to our parents and uh students so dan thank you very much and uh i’ll try to be under two and a half minutes i’ll do the best i can

1:57:09 anyway i appreciate you pointing that out dr bucky and the fact i know everybody’s dying for information about the senior uh the senior events and we’re committed to doing the best that we can so we’re doing everything we we can to make sure work with the senior class officers senior advisors class advisors administration ms page and also we we’ve also been able to work with the board of health just to as the guidance comes through to ensure that what we’re doing is meets what we need to be doing so i know it’s tough because everybody’s waiting for information and there will be a meeting after april break with the senior class to provide more details but it is evolving the goal post to move so i’ll just speak just about graduation and we did receive guidance from desi

1:57:55 recently uh and within that guidance and it’s important to know that they they’ve also taken the guidance from the department of labor standards in consultation with department of public health so it’s it’s pretty comprehensive you did mention earlier that they didn’t ask for the principal’s you know input to this but at the end of the day we’re very proud that we’ll be able to offer the outdoor graduation on june 4th at 6 00 pm that will take place on piper field we do have rain dates with that because our old plan was if we’d have a rain date we’d go inside but we won’t go inside we want to maximize the ability to attend the ceremony so the rain dates will be saturday two or sunday at two if necessary um basically the guidance is very simple so number one in terms of capacity limits

1:58:42 uh and operations they’re really um as it is a school event they are saying that we do not have to adhere to a capacity limit however the recommendation is that uh up to six uh family members attend with each graduate which is excellent the piece that’s important to note is that the space can cannot can accommodate the spacing that’s required for that so obviously we’ll have the graduates spaced at six feet but we’ll also have to create pods for family members uh we can put them together uh with six foot spacing uh and the big piece that i think will be much different is that we do have to in advance put out a uh sort of ticketing operation because we have to account for people that come to the ceremony and that has to be family members so we’ll

1:59:28 have some sort of sign up mechanism and then a ticket upon arrival then a check-in but the rest of the ceremony itself you will follow our tradition and it has been student-centered and will continue that way in terms of you know we have fewer adults on the stage it’s it’s the students we can make speeches we can have music uh but we still have to make sure that we do it safely and follow the guidelines so more information will be coming in on that and certainly as we work with the board of health just reviewing these guidelines uh we’re just very pleased that we’re able to offer this and i know that’s a real boost for our seniors and um and i know it’ll be a boost for our community so with that being said um lots of planning is taking place and we’re again just just very pleased that

2:00:14 we’re going to be able to have an outdoor ceremony that the community will be proud of we will also in addition stream the ceremony to help with those who cannot attend and i think that’s real critical throughout the pandemic you learn different things and one piece is the streaming of our athletics has been outstanding we’ll utilize that same technology to ensure people that are not able to attend can enjoy this ceremony from the comfort of their home um so that really is it in a nutshell i think i did well on my two minutes and 35 seconds that’s great dan thank you excellent news as well yeah we’ll have more information in terms of the other senior events as we’ve been working we’re close to finalizing a few but we’re committed to having a wonderful senior week uh that we’ll all love and enjoy

2:01:03 so that was that was excellent dan and i i was remiss i was so excited to get to end of year planning i did not probably acknowledge scott and thank him and acknowledge the work that he did because i really think it speaks for itself the depth of what we are doing here to attend to the needs of our students and including student voice in that so tess and chloe and gina and dr slavitz you know it’s an impressive presentation you can see the excitement or hear the excitement about the work that’s being done end of year planning i don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but i don’t think the irony should be lost on people that there are gathering size limits unless you’re a school and it’s graduation and then you can have 1200

2:01:49 people gathered and so the coordination that dan and his team will have to undertake uh i appreciate him sharing the ticketing coming from a high school that had to do ticketing because we did an indoor graduation that presents unique challenges but it’s exciting that we can have a graduation for our seniors and they can have up to six family members attend uh and to get to celebrate that milestone and so other things like powder puff i know dan is working on and prom a prom that there’s no dancing i don’t know how any of that works but i just want to acknowledge dan and the work that he’s doing um it’s awesome news about graduation and dan thanks also for you know thinking through the live streaming piece because i think that would be a addition to it so

2:02:36 um you know good luck with all the logistics that are going to go around this but you know i’m thankful that you’re you know that you’re moving forward the way you are when you said in prime when you sit in prom with no dancing scenes from footloose jumped into my mind which none of the kids will get the reference to i appreciated sarah because i um thank you dan so it is great news so we appreciate it and whenever you want to come back and update us on on anything further you are more than welcome thank you very much thank you thank you thanks dan all right uh michelle that leads us to a coveted i’m i’m sorry the superintendent yes he uses time for the business

2:03:23 department michelle um would you like to take it away with the code funding update sure um this meeting we do not have the typical expenditure covered reporting because we did we covered that two weeks ago and we’ll cover that in our next monthly update um i just wanted to give you a brief update with all of the rumors surrounding this new funding coming about um so we did learn enough some information about the easter three grant that will be coming along and this is actually part of the american rescue plan act so i believe this is actually just a portion of that four to six million dollar number that the town has been um tossing about and i don’t i do not believe any additional information has come to the town on that funding yet

2:04:09 but um the department of education has provided us with some estimated income on that easter three grant and that is in the amount of 796 000 um that was released just this week the um documents and applications are not yet set they expect those to come out sometime in may hopefully um i did not get a real real good reassurance when um desi spoke about those this week because they are stating that the federal government is holding some of their funds until they determine how they’re going to use the rest of their allocation so there’s a little bit of a of a hold up between the the state and

2:04:54 federal government on that but we should expect the 796 000 for this grant and part of this grant is going to require that 20 of it be spent on addressing learning loss so we are going to have to set that 20 aside which is you know roughly 200 000 which is great and it will go directly to students needs and um we’ll know more about that but it definitely will be an fy 22 grant um due to the timing and we’re just still waiting to hear back on the sur2 grant or easter two grant um any day now and we should get that approval any second now i was in touch with our department of ed rep yesterday so we should get that any time now um

2:05:39 when do we have to use that funding buy that one is 2023 i believe that’s the three sr3 no sr3 i believe it’s 2024. fy24 or like a because i know they sometimes label them differently i don’t know if it’s june 24 or december 24 but i know it’s the year 2024. okay all right so we certainly have a little bit of time to figure that out um and that’s about all i have on the covid funding front at this point um just working with the town to to try to figure out what portion of their 1.8 million they have remaining but um i do not expect any additional funds to be coming to the school department specifically from that funding um we’re

2:06:24 just spending down our pots and and basically we need to spin down what came in first because the first in is the first to expire so we have to spend them in in the order that they are being awarded to us so this third grant will be the last thing we are spending we’ve spent two though almost completely or um or um encumbered it if you will almost yeah i have i have set aside basically everything into at this point um we really haven’t started spending at all but yes we haven’t actually started paying the bills but we’ve started spending and current costs yes um so yeah so that that’s about it on the coveted funding front if there are any questions about that uh questions no i mean i think that’s good news obviously um and then yeah i’m you

2:07:11 know anxiously awaiting the approval for the sr2 so great great thank you michelle um i’ll actually have you stand because our next the schedule of bills and i know you wanted to clarify uh one point there yes so in this week’s um packet of the schedule of bills there’s multiple schedules but i did want to just point out that um one of the schedules does contain three prior year invoices um while the invoices are old they are athletic invoices and they are actually being charged to the athletic revolving fund which did have enough um adequate funding at year end and rolled over into the current year so we are legally able to cover those um so i didn’t want to um you know just have this slide under the radar i wanted

2:07:57 to make sure that they were out and about um because that has been a touchy subject with us in the past so we are good on that front and then i did want to also just mention that recently we received a restitution payment from a former metco director that was court ordered um because that payment actually came in larger than the court order we have to issue a small refund in the amount of 259 dollars back to the former metco director so if anyone you know saw that on the on as as a payable they might question why we are paying the former medco director that had to make a restitution payment to us so i wanted to make sure that that’s out there as well so um we did receive that restitution payment in the form of a bank check so it was definitely a good check and has cleared our account and we are

2:08:45 just returning that 259 all right wonderful thank you michelle you’re welcome thank you yeah through the chair i i just want to recognize again michelle and her understanding of school finance with municipal finance and the level of transparency that she brings to this work that schedule bills could have gone forward but she flagged three things for the committee to make sure that that’s out for the public to digest and so i will if i may through the chair speak to today was a procedural guideline in the collective bargaining agreement where we needed to notify

2:09:32 staff of movement something that the district has not been good at meeting and so in my weekly meeting with mea joan said if people are moving they would like to know prior to spring break and if you could not ask for an extension of that deadline i think we’ve been very open that the budget is ever evolving and so a notification today doesn’t necessarily mean that will be the end result so i would just caution us not to get too anxious about what’s happening with the school budget because we’re being very open and transparent about it we’re informing

2:10:18 staff according to the collective bargaining agreement of giving them the opportunity that things might change and so i met with principals yesterday and said please help people to understand that yeah getting a letter from the central office is very disconcerting but that that letter today may not be the end result and so i gave a great example that the budget that we approved has matt’s reading teacher in it that he has been asking for for a decade and so i feel very good that he got that we already have an internal grade level teacher that has expressed interest in that if that internal grade level teacher gets that that would open a

2:11:04 grade level position for one of the reductions that was in the budget for that person to come back so although a letter was received today i think we should recognize that that is a procedural safeguard in the collective bargaining agreement where we’re working with the teachers union to abide by that but that there’s still a lot of work ahead of us to do that’s a good explanation yeah point to me too um so thank you for the next time um and uh of course we all love michelle new absolutely thank you very much i’ll step down off the sidelines and recognize michelle yet again all right um can i get a motion to approve the identified schedule of bills totaling

2:11:51 and seventy 585 dollars and fifteen cents so if megan moved emily second i think those are probably the only questions just wanna make sure nobody’s got any others all right uh sarah gold yes megan taylor yes sarah fox yes david harris yes and emily baron yes great this is five to zero thank you everybody thank you michelle thank you all right so that moves us on to school community communications and such uh so i have on here our school committee goals um i don’t you know i don’t i didn’t see this as us kind of officially going over this i just wanted to really point them

2:12:38 out because um we’re sort of teeing up this piece with the strategic plan john’s entry plan and then the superintendent evaluation so i will bring these back a little bit closer to the end of the year but i wanted to kind of put them back on our radar um as i as i’ve been starting to kind of try to dig in on how to present the superintendent evaluation some of the things i’m learning about is how our our goals fit within that evaluation i think from what i’m understanding we did our goals a little bit differently this year but if everybody remembers we did them kind of closer to mid-year than than we are where we should have sort of had them done probably more towards the beginning of the year and that they would really be in conjunction with the strategic plan our one of our our main goals is creating a strategic plan with the

2:13:25 superintendent um so you know this year as with with many things is a little bit different than it’ll look hopefully going forward um but i just wanted to bring them back um sort of into our view again because it’s been a while since we’ve looked at them and just sort of keep them on our radar um again as we as we push towards all of these really large goals at the end of our year um that’s really all i i wanted to tea up with this so um yeah i mean i think it’s good for us to look at these again and just think about how we’re tracking um because it is april we’ve got less than two months yeah yeah um so i think that’s good and just you know we’re moving forward obviously i think you know

2:14:10 you know you know these ones this was our pilot year if you will with goals um so at least we got them done you know that was kind of a long time coming so you know i do think when we or when the school committee meets again in the summer to do your workshop we should really be kind of doing this in conjunction so yeah um you know lesson i think this was a good starting point i guess but yeah there’s definitely an opportunity you know we’ve hit kind of quite a few of these things with the budget goal that we had i know the facilities is i think that’s going to start to really come in and um and and take shape um and then obviously as i mentioned the strategic plan um that we’re going to tee up right after uh it will break so all right thank you everybody um subcommittee and

2:14:57 liaison updates um i think policy we are going to skip a month um just some schedules um so we will be back in may beginning of may anybody else budget i think we’ve well we had the fincom yes meeting on is that only monday yes it’s not a long week it’s like um

2:15:26 it was monday and um uh dr bucky um you know once again made the presentation that was um an abridged version that came before the ful the full committee and um prior to the monday meeting again uh recognizing uh michelle um and megan there was an entire packet that went to the finance committee um before the weekend and before they met as three of the members have participated in the process and so um i think it was pretty much um out there and the information was was known well in advance and there’d been lots of discussion and just just a review of the the process once again

2:16:11 that we went through to uh to get us where we’re at and and i think as uh you know dr bucky said not that our budget is fluid but you know the finances are fluid with some of these grants that are coming in and how they might be able to be spent to support you know learning in the district and things related related to covid so um more to come on that but it was i think overall so we’re all set with that and there is the warrant hearing i don’t have the date but um and he’s next this coming week isn’t it i think i think it might be on tuesday and so we do have

2:16:57 the uh warrants related to equipment and facilities and that’s that’s just simply another um process where the finance committee will review that and there’s you know we had prior to prioritize pardon me the items that we were looking for on facilities with the funds that were available and the vehicles and equipment so um we’ll hear more than that after um that’s presented and we might need to decide megan if um it’s not necessarily an article that’s sponsored by us but um i’m available so i’ll see maybe if i can just tune in on that in case there’s any questions thanks um i think it’s probably important to note too it passed right the the yes

2:17:42 um was unanimous right yes so the budget all right um facilities i think you guys have a heads up maybe yes so we have a meeting tomorrow um i’m back and forth and whether you know how much to kind of present now because when you hear the number that came out of the report it’s a little shocking so i i worry that if we present that although it’s up on the website so it’s been up for two or three days i think people started looking at it so it’s out there um i just don’t want people i don’t want to shock anybody but um you’re that’s the that’s the use of this facilities committee so you guys will have it and then you will bring it back yeah so um

2:18:27 it’s we’re holding our meeting tomorrow at 10 30. um we’ll be presenting uh michelle will be presenting um a summary of what the what the numbers came back at and then we’ll be discussing it and and you know planning our next steps but um lots of good information anybody that wants to review those reports uh emily got them up on the website i think two days ago so people have ample time to review that in case they have questions or concerns they want to address tomorrow all right thanks sarah am i missing any liaison updates just through the chair yeah um spoiler alert since we keep talking about strategic plan i will be stunned if facilities is not part of the strategic plan so not to take away sarah’s thunder and the subcommittee

2:19:14 meeting tomorrow but i would be prepared that facilities will be a chunk of the strategic plan i think we heard a few heads up on the strategic plan tonight big strategic plan i’d love to get in there ambitious yes i like that um i have a cpac update um lots of good stuff going on with the cpac as usual um dr solberg presented as part of the conference series that they have had ongoing this year um on april 6th about developing future readiness skills so i believe on their website you can access the slides if you weren’t able to attend that presentation but the feedback i’ve heard from it is that it was really well received we know that scott does a great presentation but also that it was very

2:20:01 useful for her parents as well i’ll just i i listened into most of it it was it was fantastic um i would highly encourage anybody um to listen to it especially parents who have kids that maybe aren’t kind of on that quintessential um you know what we what we kind of quintessentially think of as the marblehead track um and and really you know just highlighting how many amazing opportunities there are there are some um abilities to access some uh surveys and everything to sort of help and and um really just really cool media things um yeah it was it was a phenomenal uh presentation yeah thanks for adding that detail sarah

2:20:46 um there’s also two events coming out so first of all um on may 12th the cpac is going to host a panel discussion um and it will include eric oxford as well as the team chairs and they will discuss the vision for the coming year um and that will be followed up by parent q a so this one i’m gonna make a request of this committee is that we all try to listen in to that um to that presentation and i mean listen really listen to what the presentation is and also listen to what the parents are asking and their feedback um i’m hoping that we’ll have eric come directly to the school committee as well but we can kind of use this as a as a learning example to hear kind of what’s coming like i said the

2:21:33 parent feedback which i think is an important um perspective as well so that is on may 12th i’ll get to the exact time and all the details but you can just kind of put that on your calendar i would appreciate it and then you know my favorite event it’s coming up unsung heroes this is the feel-good event of the year you know how i love it um so the cpac was not able to host this last year obviously because of code and this year it will be a virtual event but um it’s important to acknowledge all the hard work that has gone on this year um so this is really an opportunity to recognize the people who make a difference in your special education world people who might not always get um

2:22:20 you know that type of recognition it can be anyone in the community obviously teachers of course and staff but if there’s other community members who’ve made a difference um you know that that’s always welcome as well so really anyone that’s shown exemplary work made a significant contribution um and or impact beyond their kind of accepted responsibilities the nomination forms are open i think they opened april 7th and they’ll go through may 7th so a couple more weeks to get your nominations in um every now and each nomination should highlight one person so include you know the nomination form is up on their website it kind of lays out you know the type of information to include um and then there’ll be some type of celebration

2:23:07 um coming up towards the end of the year so my favorite event um please get your nominations into the community and you know there’ll be more information coming on that event in the future as well great thanks anything else yeah i just have a few little ones um megan told me to forward this to the committee and i’m just going to tell you about it right now instead of an email um and it’s kind of late notice but tomorrow uh metco headquarters is offering a virtual family night at the theater they’re calling it um it’s a broom full of asha it’s at 6 45 you can reserve tickets it’s free to anyone in our community um

2:23:52 and you just have to reserve your ticket and they’ll tell you how to um log on and i guess it says it’s funny it’s about a mother and son and their different views on their culture um and so it’s one of their events that we are able to participate in because we are a metro district um the other thing is i just want to um kind of feed up with what john said about nan and her um leading the charge of finding a new medco director for us because it being a part of this hiring committee you can see the passion and how important it is to find the right person and it’s really it’s great to see all

2:24:39 these people in our community coming all the faculty administration who are a part of finding this person and it’s um it’s great it shows how important this program is to everyone here and what we can do with that um great yeah thank you and emily i think we all have that um movie thing in our our inbox it was part of millie’s update for the week oh okay i wasn’t sure if everybody got it so perfect wonderful all right and building project update so um we had a building tour today that had really good attendance members of the building committee uh members of the board of selectmen

2:25:25 we also had a um representative from the finance committee that was there and um school committee was represented you know megan came inside of course emily’s on on the building committee and and so they were going to sort of give a little bit of their view of the tour today i thought just briefly and some color but do you want to go first um sure so it’s really amazing to see the actual building and we were all kind of saying this on the tour like we’ve been looking at it on paper for so many years and we were walking through it um and like the paint color is up in the classrooms and it’s like

2:26:11 beautiful blues greens orange yellows it sounds like a lot but the way that it’s spaced out and the subtleness of just having the one accent wall that you can like look down and see all i mean it’s like amazing it’s really awesome and eileen who’s the music teacher at coffin team and got to see her music room that she’s been dreaming of i think for 19 years like we said earlier she had tears in her eyes on how amazing the space was and it’s so huge and it’s just really it’s i don’t know it’s so great to be able to have this happen and offer this to our community because you know we talk

2:26:56 about how the community spaces and how they can like shut off the academic part so at night everyone can use it and like multiple things happening at once because it’s not like every detail that was done was like thought about everything that could possibly happen in this space and it’s just like it’s amazing and that’s this was just so exciting

2:27:21 um i will agree the building is amazing um it’s beautiful on the outside i mean the i’m sure there’s a more technical term but the wood paneling kind of in between cycles

2:27:35 you know the windows where um where the school name is going to be i mean it’s just beautiful outside and then inside emily’s right every little detail has been thought of thoroughly and it’s it’s amazing and um some of the things i really liked was that bridge that we’ve seen in some of the pictures but the way that you can kind of look up and or you know both up to see the the light and then down to see what kind of what’s happening in the school um the portholes in the media center where you know kids can kind of cozy up and read a book i mean i would love a spot like that you know and then there’s so much light coming from all angles in the building the top um you know the windows because there’s that bridge it

2:28:22 opens up you know light to get down to the bottom floor um i think some of the details just with the soundproofing in both the music rooms and the stage area you know they really thought about the uh like even in the ceiling in the cafeteria they got these ty it looks like tiny little pinholes so that it can absorb the sound so that it’s not echoey um so really just the attention to detail i think was something that stuck out to me um and the spot where the mural is gonna be i mean it’s huge it’s gonna be an amazing addition to to that building really it’s both the outside and and the inside and it’s in that kind of community center or community area so that you know you can see it from the outside and if you’re in there

2:29:10 for events you you can see it um and then while it still is you know big pile of dirt but the outside space up there is gonna be amazing it really is just gonna be amazing so david thank you for organizing that it’s really exciting to see it start to come to fruition and i think tripp was saying how in the next you know four to six weeks we’re going to see you know another major transformation because the landscaping will start to kind of go in and you know start to finish up the skylight will go in the main corridor yeah so there’s some big things coming up too so i mean i think even as you drive by you’ll start to see some changes there so really well done guys i mean i think this building committee has done an amazing an amazing job all your hard work is

2:29:56 it’s it’s paying off thanks tonight and i would just want to echo it was it was i mean that’s that’s why we’re doing this you know it’s about the students and it’s about the teachers and the educational design and seeing eileen go into the room it was just like i heard this enormous loud screaming of excitement it’s like oh what’s happening and she you know saw her rum and and um you know just to see that space and um well sean couldn’t be there today because he was at a teacher’s forum uh but but donna was there and i you know and i want to recognize donna too i mean as she said you know it’s been five long years and she’s been there when there were the pre-educational design groups of thinking about what this was gonna look like and

2:30:44 and the extended learning spaces and and there was donna just like she’s like wow this is this is real this is the it’s just going to be an amazing school and she’s retiring but um you know i want to thank donna for the time that she’s put in to to contribute to the fixtures and equipment you know most recently and then all the work that she’s you know all those meetings at glover donna was just um you know talking about you know how it’s finally coming to fruition so very gratifying and we’ll we’ll be hosting more and hope you know hope people will be able to attend and as we go forward i sure hope i’ll be able to yeah i’m sorry it’s really really exciting and we have three less schools that will

2:31:29 be on sarah’s report tomorrow as a result of this so it could be a lot worse if we didn’t have this um 55 billion dollar project to take some take some older schools offline alert they’re our cheapest ones on the report i was shocked all right um that leads us to closing business any new business

2:31:56 all right um any additional public comment all right i don’t see anyone um we we had no correspondence so that leads us to adjournment uh thank you everyone i will close us at 9 32.