School Committee: February 28, 2024

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.

0:50 it all button doesn’t work so I’m going to each individual person so if you have

0:59 all um all right so welcome everybody I’m going to call us to order at 5:00 pm um thank you all for coming I know this is a really long night and top of a long day I’m gonna hand this over to Josh mcginness in one quick second um before we get going joshu mcginness and I had talked about it might be helpful for everybody as they present if you know you have for the committee members that you have a common question you want everyone to speak to to have let them know up front so as they’re talking they can kind of work that in rather than you know doing it during the question and answer period later on if there’s a common them not individual questions so does anybody have any

1:43 specifically um I do if well you’re going through and you’re talking about your reductions you can just know if how many of those are vacant positions because that carries with it um how we you know our heads how we’re allocating for um unemployment that goes with that and it’s also you know something that was always by the public are making decisions for I don’t I’m not asking for individual information just um all right got again thank you very much welcome we’re pleased to be here I have a phenomenal leadership team around me um to talk with our school members this evening and to share the preliminary which is very preliminary

2:29 your feedback and your will of what you’d like us continue to do but before we start with these slides I’d like to um thank a few people because it’s truly been a team effort and I want um the school committee members and the Greater Community to know that um you have the most caring and collaborative team of Administrators around this table and when things are difficult that’s when you really get to know that we are in a difficult Financial time right now in the schools um and I first off I wanted to say to the assistant super endent CA who has worked most closely with me along with your Assistant Director of Finance and operations Emma and setting the financial stage and on also being po Partners through this

3:14 process is very iterative and I really appreciated that thank you both for your Insight and the experience that you um and then also around the table we have our fine principles over there so um and our directors are on this side of the table as well and we have spent many hours and many days um and the most important part of it is was the most thoughtful process uh each time we would walk away a little bit down and then we would come back and come up with new ideas and think outside the box so I really appreciate um how constructive principles have been um in making this first preliminary reduced Services budget which was really hard and I’m not going to say that it wasn’t painful um because it was and it sort of still is

3:59 but before we begin presenting the information I’d like to share three points that will contextualize these 87 slides that we’re going to work through so two things can be true at the same time although they appear opposing and the first one is that while I agre agree believe that everyone in this room and listening believe that Educators teaching supporting encouraging and inspiring students build a closely connected Community within a school that results in increased student achievement an overall well-being of our students I think we would all agree with that and I would actually add to that that the quality of our children’s education in Marblehead head depends on how much we value Marblehead depends on how much we value our teachers and at the same time what

4:46 we have learned a lot this year is that we must be fiscally responsible um to create that connected School Community within the budget we are served with from the town and that’s what we did with these slides the school committee and Marblehead Public School leaders recognize head Public School leaders recognize that at this time in history the taxpayers of Marblehead do not have an appetite for an override um having twice failed in as many years but there is an opportunity to explore going forward how we will deal with those Revenue CH challenges but for this budget year FY 25 I respect what was asked of us and tonight we will present our preliminary budget reflecting significant Cuts so faced with the budget deficit of

5:31 nearly 2.3 million um chips away at those connection or those connected School communities that I mentioned um that surround our children in our adolesence as we continue to annually reduce positions and resources within each school and across the district as we looked at this $2.3 Million number we asked ourselves how do we preserve this connected School Community responsible for student achievement and well-being and the preliminary budget that we’re about to share with you will show you that that the second thing there’s a fact well-known fact and we’re addressing it this evening um data illustrates declining enrollment over the last decade in Marblehead um and actually across the greater Commonwealth we can go through the whole pandemic but

6:17 I’m going to put that aside for the moment however there’s not a onetoone correlation between losing X number of students and reducing X number of Staff members and since the pandemic has subsided which I’m going to pick fy22 budget SE season so that was 2122 so okay our district enrollment has increased by 16 students so from 2601 to 2619 or also the post pandemic reality is that students mental and emotional health has faltered X number of Staff members and school counselors have increased Staffing to support them so we have hired social workers and adjustment C celor who have been phenomenal in

7:03 supporting students more than we have needed to do in the past and while Staffing did not decrease at the same rate as our enrollment we are proud to say that we strive every day to meet the increasing needs of our students in the realm of mental health yet it is important to consider these overall enrollment decreases and we did examine closely enrollment as compared to Staffing in each School the district has adopted sorry this um a tiered decisionmaking methodology that we used at every meeting that we had and it was very iterative and we used it to make reductions to the general fund in a most thoughtful manner this methodology is predicated on the district’s practice of efficiency with budgeting reallocating

7:49 where necessary which might have meant from one Elementary School to another or from a Village School to the Middle School um and to figure out what is needed for a high quality education for our students in the deployment of these resources and third we’re joined this evening with our new interim director of student services Patty Bell welcome um and she officially started on Monday so it’s day three for here here already she along with Special Education team chairs and some other special Educators have begun looking closely at the special ed delivery grids to assist principles in determining Staffing levels and needs we will share what we are terming the Staffing accountability brief as requested did by our school committee to the committee at our next meeting Once

8:34 We Gather this data um and finally we are gonna move to our slides so are you perfect okay are we all set yeah would you please let her um show her screen present want to present from her screen she wants no mean for these One display again yes just ask to present one moment

9:08 please please um need a co-host or allow to rec just allow

9:25 yeah you need to allow me to share my screen I’m

10:03 and then hit slideshow right don’t blame you thank you all right thank you take off here um this just with for school committee members so that when you were looking for a part of the many slides that you could locate where they are and we put it into three groupings as you can see here the final of the three our um District directors and our principes will be presenting their specific budgets the first two are more around districtwide um everything that we do and all the decisions that we make are based on our plan for Success which includes the mission and vision and our core values in the district I’m not going to read this it’s something you were all familiar with over time but I

10:49 want you to know that we reflected back on it when you first started this process um the overarching goal and um this was from last year from the school committee and again into this year and that was for transparency reasons to make sure that the information that we were sharing um was as uh useful to all of our stakeholders whether sitting at home or up here on school committee to make sure they understand what are the instructional needs of our students and what it costs um to educate a student of course tonight we’re going to present level Services of what it would cost and then we’re also going to present reduced Services based on the number we were given um initially also for the budget directives the um principles and directors needed to identify essential services so what is essential and what

11:36 is better to have not nice to have but I would say better to have to Target instruction for individual students um we Justified everything um based on projected enrollments curricular needs and the data sets that we were using uh we’re in the midst of creating the Staffing accountability brief some of which you will see on the slides today more of which you’ll see next next week on the 7th um to give a more in-depth review of staff in by school and then um in order to sustain appropriate Staffing level levels um we were looking at what is the S students academic social emotional and behavioral needs and we talked about that at length um We examined revenue streams other than the operating budget the Town Administrator um told all of the department heads at

12:22 our meeting very early on make sure that we look at grant opportunities and make sure we look at all of our user fees so that was an area of focus and finally um the budget development must continue in uh collaboration with our town officials the fincom the select board and um the budget subcommittee meeting the framework that we used was our our job in every school and across the district is to meet the needs of all of our students right and how that has been uh done in the last few years here in Marblehead head very well and continuing to Marblehead very well and continuing to do is in in the framework of a multi-tiered system of supports and originally we started with academic supports and what does that look like at tier one for all students tier two for some students at some times and then

13:09 tier three in a much more individualized way what we’ve moved to is looking at the social emotional and behavioral needs for student in those same tiers so in order to do that to continue that research-based way of constructing schools um the most important priorities underneath that is using the plan for Success um looking at the Strate IC objectives um in making sure that the existing programs support all of our students um most importantly is students have to feel they belong um we have to nurture their social emotional wellness and their social emotional learning how to self-regulate how to collaborate how to work with others um and in inclusive environment so that’s a focus area that has been across the district for a few years which is great um we use data for

13:55 all of the decision making so each time a principal was thinking out something they would impairs or by grade levels or School levels um they would meet to talk about the data look at the data from one school compared to the other um we want to make sure that we have consistent and aligned curriculum K to 12 and uh one that gets spoken of a lot and um when um assistant superintendent Ferrera um shows her slides for teaching and learning is culturally responsive teaching and practices and what that basically means is making sure that everything that we teach how we uh give access to the educ is appropriate for every student in front of us if 83% of our students are white in Marblehead Head and there’s 177% white in Marblehead and there’s 177% that are not it’s making sure that

14:42 representation from our e learn for our e Learners Etc is all there and then challenging students with rigorous instruction most importantly in safe and welcoming school buildings so that’s where capital building needs are come into play um as as well as emotional safety and finally our legal mandates for special education are always a top priority uh the primary resources that we use to do this as principles um was the plan for Success the school Improvement plans which are based on that in a cohesive way we looked at FY 24 which principles are working through with their school teams right now and there needs to be continuity because you don’t want every year to have a whole new set of goals that are not related to one another so we as we were planning

15:28 the fy2 budget we were seeing where’s that continuity going to go they’re going to work with their um School advisory councils on making that happen the data we examine is listed there uh it’s wonderful that you guys have Universal Assessment program I ready um but sat AP I know at the high school we’re starting with a new course next year to increase AP opportunities so we kind of looked at all of that the great surveys that Gina and the other principal uh the other counselors at the high school um are studying right now and we’re going to share I think at June at the school committee meeting so all of that kind of of stuff was what we were examining and then finally they looked at what’s happening this year in FY 24 how are they spending the money what aren’t they spending it on what are they find they needed more of um the drivers are always student enrollment

16:13 and student need is primary but of course with Staffing um as we’ll talk about in a couple of slides um we have to look at contractual obligations and then steps and cost of living increases um operations and maintenance are always a driver our contracts our facilities and our utilities that increased tremendously um over the last couple of years our special education services are always a driver for our budget um we have a slot couple of slides on our out of District tuition and Transportation around that um fluctuations that we have uh on our grants or our user fees our entitlement grants change from year to year we can’t rely on them they’re supplemental um so that’s just another area and then finally this year our reduced appropriation from the town became a big feature of what was driving this budget

16:59 this budget this budget to talk a little bit about enrollment the next two slides are from NES DEQ and as you can see in the column there um starting with the 23 24 year with 267 as the number of students um and it’s showing a very slight increase over time the um up to it says let’s see I can read it from here 2028 is at 2708 so it’s slight but it’s still you know 80 80 students um over time it’s not a decrease which is good um the reason this slide is included in there is it’s based on um birth rates and uh children already born in the district Etc I prefer the next slide and the next slide is historical and projected

17:45 enrollments this one shows the ever so slight increase um by the arrows there but it is a positive trajectory um showing at the elementary and middle school the reason I like this one is it separates where is the growth um so that’s good right the elementary and Middle School is larger than the high school so that will improve over time um this is concrete uh as of October 1st that’s the the date that we use annually so we have a point of comparison that is is alike and um it’s showing from each School us there the enrollment and then this is a document that we’re using ongoing um from when we started the budget process until through the summer and uh right now it’s a snapshot in time but what it shows you is three things

18:30 um on the left side is fy4 actual numbers of students in classrooms in um at the elementary C six then it has the number of classrooms on the second chart down and then it has the class size so you can see there for example if we look at the First Column if we look at Brown School and we look at first grade it says there’s 99 first graders this year and it says there’s uh five classrooms and the average size of the classroom in first grade is 19.8 students I don’t know who the point8 is but um so anyway so it’s the reason that this is very helpful is um for this year we’re projecting uh as you see FY 25

19:16 what it will be next year as we plan classes but what happens in the spring is there’s uh students that leave the district and then there’s students that come in at the lower grade level sometimes students are at kindergartens that are not um Marblehead Public Schools so those numbers tend to fluctuate more this gives us a um an ongoing charting of where we’re at and we may decide some of the numbers like uh let’s see this’s a 22.5 and second grad at clubber um you know that’s a big number we’re just keeping an eye on those things because if for some reason we had 10 second graders come in and it didn’t fit to schools we may have to add a teacher right now we’re looking good these are good numbers the school committee uh at the very bottom I put the school committee policy for average size class Is AO o imately it says

20:02 around 25 students that might be something you want to work on um defining in future um at Future times because it should be a smaller number K to three than it is older so in a lot of districts the one I was at it was 18 to 20 day one 20 to 22 next two and so just a thought but um anyway so we’re using this as an elementary team going forward just to make sure we have appropriate teachers uh English Lear Learners we have 108 English Learners in our district and it’s uh showing the breakdown there and then our demographics and again this is as of October 3rd um and it shows relatively compared to the state um low um English Learners um low

20:48 low income compared to the state uh those are kind of the most notable parts of that all right so this brings us to um what we uh pay our teachers right now to do the good work that they’re doing so this shows Unit A for all of our teachers um the percent increase as the staff move through the steps that we talked about earlier through the collective bargaining agreement and so if you look at this I I uh indicated in the bottom row there you can see that um the largest percentage increases in the 11th year the most experienced veteran teachers and the reason why this is an important number to look at right here which averages about eight I would just say is because the next slide is going to show us um this is where our

21:34 teachers in the district land in these steps so in the middle column master’s degree um you can see that’s where predominantly our teachers are right by far um and then you’ll see also um in Step 11 is also where predominantly our teachers are so that’s important information for the school committee to know as we go into collective bargaining and as we think about our budgets going forward as well and that’s just a a copy of our budget calendar and and how we got to where we are and do you have questions before we move on to the next session that we can answer would you like me to continue I just want to take you’ve already given us more information than we’ve ever had

22:20 and I’m so grateful thank you this has been Wonder this part of the presentation already you’ve set the bar high so keep do te this was very very thank you okay so this next section I showed you this is column in the middle column the table of contents right this is really important and I have cies if anybody wants this so you know you say okay go cut 10 2.3 million and we all first cry and then we get to the stage we’re like okay we really have to do this and we care about those teachers and um par professionals and tutors that work with our students every day to make those connected communities that I talked about at the very beginning of this right so it’s different than other businesses sometimes um because we’re growing students right so we use this

23:06 methodology so that we could have something concrete a framework from which to work so as you can see on here

23:17 um here we go um we used a tier decision making process for this similar to what we do for mtss with academics and behavior for students we did the same thing here and we have four tiers the bottom tier 4 d says instructional staff so that’s a teacher standing in front of all of the students in the classroom so we started far away from that right because I we all know we that that is the most important role for students achievement so we looked at professional development and transportation we looked at extracurricular programs which includes ath Athletics uh the third tier is a lot of um teaching and learning so all the materials uh our technology we ended up cutting back there uh we might have had to uh change the High School courses and not offer all of the electives that we did stuff like that

24:04 you go one two three and then you go to four so how we use this budget process was of these several meetings that I described before at the very first meeting we look through it all we send the principales off and we say we we took first um assistant superintendent cesta took our budget and then she said what is a fixed cost so the cola the utilities you know did all the fixed cost and then we saw okay what else do we have left to cut 1.6 million whatever it is okay so then we took the enrollment of the schools so high school being the largest they had the highest percentage to cut now that was just a starting point for the first meeting which pretty devastating to principles because you’re like I to cut what but we started there just as a place to start then we come back to our next meeting

24:49 and we highlighted in color like yellow the red green blue um so that we could see where did we start to cut and when we saw you know if we saw a lot of green we’d be like okay well we didn’t go through one two three let’s go back to that let’s make sure we’ve cut our professional development let’s make sure Etc so what happened through that process many different meetings is it didn’t end up with because there’s a thousand students or 90061 at high school they had to cut x amount that changed we didn’t even look at that number after it was a place to start with it um but then we realized oh there’s more need at another school because in the over the last three years they haven’t been able to hire a b or c and the Beautiful process of this was the principles going this hurts but I see your school the class size in your school is going to go

25:35 up here while mine stays here and my kids are older you know things like that and and that doesn’t always happen in districts so I just want to tell you again connected Community close-knit great experienced at um administrators working on this so this is the process and if you care to you can click on the link at another time and and see more in depth of the tear that’s what we used um I’m going to turn it over to the lovely Miss chista um to talk through level Services budget and a few few numbers absolutely so our first directive from the town was to create a level Services budget um this slide just gives you a little bit about the definition of a level Services budget our first step was to roll forward all of our salary costs basically it takes

26:20 our salary costs moves them forward into this year it adds a cola it adds any step increases if the employees are eligible for that as well as linkage changes and Lane changes are when um a staff member or a unit a member rather moves from one column on our paay schedule to the next column based on educational credits that they earn um so an aggregate amount has been budgeted for the salary increases in terms of contract negotiations as we are entering into a contract negotiation year for all of our units at this time so that has been built into the budget um not sure if that’s going to be adequate but certainly we have a number to start in there this time our non-salary expenses may be level funded um with the level Services

27:06 budget request but sometimes they are increased based on need we certainly didn’t add any services but the cost of doing business has increased so you might see some increases um such as for example our legal costs increase ourly increase and ourly a need has increased so that is an increase in our budget um certainly we are not seeking additional legal councel but our needs are just going um so basically that is our level services but I do want to mention that for both our salaries and expenses and increase may also need needed to be to deliver the same Services um based on our level of needs and this goes for expenses as well as our student needs so if we have a specific student that has additional needs um we have to address those we

27:52 can’t just ignore it and say sorry we don’t have the dollars so therefore they’re included in our level Services as well so the level Services request when we took a stab at this um it came in at 47,4 23,8 51 which is an increase of roughly 2.5 million or 5.77% so I want to reiterate this was our level services this did not include any new requests or any new needs we had some major drivers um broken down into our wages of just $927,000 our out of District tuition cost in the operating budget alone is 448,000 our out of District transportation costs

28:38 transportation costs transportation costs 409,000 our utility costs those are increases these are increases correct absolutely good good to point that our utility increase is 487 th000 however 400,000 of that is coming from the town as a transfer it was already budgeted on the town side we’re just simply transferring it to the school department and taking it away from the top so it’s really not an increase but I did want to mention it because it does look a little skewed when you look at our utility budgets um our it Hardware equipment cost is increasing 420,000 in the level service budget this is actually the start of our replacement plan for all the devices and network equipment that we put into place with all the co funding that came in in 2020 um and the rest is really just various increases of

29:24 293,000 which represents um costs such as our legal costs and whatnot so um that kind of captures all those there with our total increase of just

29:36 over our out of District tuition certainly is a item that we discuss quite often um our total increase for FY 25 is projected to be 687 th000 or 18.5% over the current level um it is only an operational increase to our operating budget of 448,000 because our circuit breaker funding also increased so it offsets the increase that’s actually getting our operating budget OSD which is the operational services division is responsible for setting the tuition prices for more than 200 of the outof placement schools um so usually we use their price increase that is recommended they came out with it

30:21 it’s 4.69% for FY 25 if you recall this was the percentage that was increasing um 14% last year so it’s certainly been a significant number it’s not as high as it was last year but still 4.69% increase on a cost where we’re looking at a budget um of less than 2% budget increase of less than 2% hurts us in FY 24 current year we have 42 students in outof District placements next year we are anticipating 46 students in out of District placements that does include we’ll get into the Mitty gritty later on but that does include four Place holders in addition to all of our students that are on our radar last year at this time we actually plugged in six placeholders we used most of those so we now

31:11 anticipating um do just want to mention we have budget offsets we have circuit breaker of 1.4 million that is our Revenue coming in this year for last year’s circuit breaker claims um if anyone wants to know how the circuit breaker calculation works you refer to the presentation that was given last evening which is posted on the school committee website under the budget documents um and then we also have special education tuition in revenues with an offset of roughly

31:41 $90,000 this chart details um a history from fy19 of what our outof district tuition costs have done the Blue Line represents the amounts budgeted and the Orange Line represents the actual or projected for this year um you can see certainly they they go hand in hand for the most part but we’re going in the wrong direction so it means that it’s just more Reliance on our budget to meet our the needs of our students actual always more than projected yes even with yes and that’s why it is important that we have that circuit breaker fund we have the special deed Reserve fund and we have reserves of All Sorts do you me go back one second I just want to look at the years that went down it’s interesting the year yeah

32:27 year yeah year yeah to the end yeah but it’s still it’s just now backup it also changes our enrollments change our needs change our placements change so the next chart is a very similar chart it just um details our out of District transportation CS as well the Blue Line represents our budget and our Orange Line represents our actual I do want to mention since Co and since the bus driver shortage has just skyrocketed the transportation costs have been out of control um it is not due to needing more Transportation necessarily it is just the cost of procuring that transportation for these individual

33:13 students until we find solution to the bus driver shortage I’m not sure that that’s going to change that

33:21 should so this pie chart gives you a budget allocation um based on a level Services request and this is by budget area or school so our high school we have dollar figures and percentages for each of them our high school represents 22% of the pie chart High School athletics is 1% veteran school is 15% Village School is 15% lover school is 8% Brown School is 11% Central Administration which includes a lot of districtwide costs such as legal um employee benefits not including health insurance but other employee benefits work is comp um unemployment that is at 8% teaching and learning is 2% student

34:09 services is 10% information technology is 2% and is

34:19 10% so our next chart breaks this same level Services budget down by cost function um salary and wages represent 80% overall of our entire budget so when we’re looking at Cuts unfortunately if we’re looking at substantial cuts it means we’re going to impact our employees supplies represent 4% of our budget contracted Services is 5% of our budget utilities is 4% other costs which include our out of District costs as well

34:53 7% this chart here just um summarizes our fy2 budget levels so we had a level services budget where I have focused everything so far we then have a reduced Services budget where we were asked to come in um to meet the towns available revenues that they’re allocating to us they have stated that they the town has stated that they have available revenues roughly 1.5 million they have allocated 50% of that to the school department so taking our current budget suggesting yes um the FY 24 adopted budget of 4.8 million adding the 755,000 allocated in revenues we come out to a reduced Services budget of 45 mil 592 667 or

35:42 1.68% over our FY 24 budget um I do want to mention that um the state allow does the state allows tax levy growth of 2.5% each year so that’s important here but I also do want to mention that that 1.68% doeses not include health Insurance costs so the additional capacity between the 1.68 and the 2.5% the town is allowed to increase the tax levy covers additional costs that are on the town side such as health

36:15 isues so this budget just summarizes um a little bit of what I’ve talked about that the 45 million 592 667 which is our reduced Services budget has an increase of 755 or the 1.68% um I do want to mentioned that that figure does not include the two transfers which we’ll talk about in a little while that the town is is transferring from their side to our side so our bottom line does not look like it’s only increasing 1.68% it looks a little higher but really that’s a budget transfer and it’s not a new

36:48 allocation so the next slide is total budget by function um this is a great slide that will show you the major cost categories of our FY 24 budget as well as our fy22 actual FY 23 actual current year budget that I mentioned our fy2 level Services budget as well as our fy2 reduced Services budget and this will give the dollar change and the percent change for each of those those proposed budgets so our fy2 level Services comes down to that increase of 5.77% we refer to the column all the way to the right is the reduced Services it has the percentage increase of the 1.68% the change there is a

37:36 decrease in percentage of 3.86 so that is talking about you know Apples to Apples when we’re comparing our cart budget to our proposed budgets the two lines underneath are the transfers from the town one for utility reserves in the amount of 400,000 and the second is Medicare payroll tax for all the employees covered on our side of payroll um the town is always allocated this always covered it they just felt it was better off reported on our side so that it’s also a transfer but it’s not an increase to overall

38:08 televion so budget offsets we talked about this a little bit last evening as well if any of you saw that um we were we rely on revolving funds and revolving funds are a fund established separately to account for specific revenues and ear mark on for that specific purpose um we have a variety of evolving funds it is a sound financial practice to carry one year of Revenue in these funds if we’re going to be using them as a budget offset if we were to use them before we have them in the account really you’re taking a gamble on those revenues coming in if not you’re creating budget deficit so it a sound financial practice to make sure we have one year Revenue in those funds most of

38:55 them we do um one of the bigger ones is circuit breaker that we had been talking about for the past four years we finally have reached that one-year goal and that certainly will help us with the next year’s budget because we’re able to offset that cost by1 million in a reduce Services budget I do want to mention one of the items we’re discussing is user fees which is this is the fees for our athletic and activities and in the reduced Services budget you will see that um we are anticipating changing the Sens structure or changing the fee structure which will change the way we pay sens currently in the budget we are allocating the operating budget to

39:42 cover 50% of those stiens and the other 50% is covered by user fees so in our proposed reduced Services budget we will move those stiens 100% to the user revolving fund which will then mean that we are not able to obviously collect a half million dollar to use our before we actually need to spend up because we will be increasing it for next year as what spend next year so we won’t be at the recommended Reserve level that particular we can certainly get into that a little bit later lastly we have a summary of our federal state and private grants um most of the grants at the top the title grants and our early childhood our

40:27 special education I daa Grant are all federal grants those are recurring annual grants that have specific purposes all of these grants are to be used to supplement and not supplant our our operating costs so basically anything that is in our operating budget at this time we cannot take out and move to a grant because that is in violation of the Federal Regulations so we do have a couple actually three state grants at this time we have the metco the metco ATT and the Innovations Pathways rants those are three state rants those also have specific purposes um the Innovations pathway Grant this is the first year of that grant that was 75,000 this year but you will see notice in that red circle

41:15 here um fy22 are grants total 1.4 million FY 23 1.5 million and FY 24 is 1.5 million about,000 last year the bottom section of this slide details the additional onetime grants we received an fy22 which were all Co specific there were Co and Esser funds for um that particular time period into pandemic any questions a lot of I have a couple questions on that so first of all the um reduced service or level service budget that you projected um for next year if I were to look at all y 25 objectiv that include

42:01 either produ service or level Services plus the grants plus the roling funds all add up to what our budget correct no the the grants are not included as offsets to the operating no but in other words if I’m looking holistically you know what we’re going to be spending next year our expenses versus what our oh absolutely if you’re looking at the true cost true cost of running the district yes and that’s actually captured in our our very lengthy end of year report um each year we do an accounting to the Department of Education and um I remember discussing with Sarah because the school committe chair signs a report you know what it truly C cost to operate our district and certainly that $44 million that is allocated to us is just a small piece of what

42:46 we yes the um 22 entitlement allocations these various I were one time Co related grants these the current balances are these there are no more balances no there is roughly about 250,000 left so which we need to spend by September okay is that anywhere in here it on no it’s already in our our accounts essentially and we’re in discussions innal discussions about how best is okay thank

43:15 you that will probably be a question we should bring up Tech later on but I may be over simplifying it but if we’re adding 300,000 of TCH we have two something left um Esser can we just allocate to that and use some of that money for sale but we can talk about thatat we can that will create a structural deficit for next year ongo but yes no I understand that this was the argument we had I had last year when I said you know we have some of the Surplus because of the people you know the the pre payments and I understand in theory that you cannot keep people on a onetime sa

44:03 panks I also I’m done I’m just I’m done with groundhog today so um at this point if we can save staff to put in front of kids for one more year then I want to save staff we and that’s just mean we’ll talk about it as a as a group but we will get into it little bit later on we may need to use those some of the sponsor issues as well well thank you very thorough this is great Michelle this is great great all right in just a moment we’re gonna to our schools and departments the place to go but as we look at reducing um positions this year it is important just to keep in mind it’s year two of some big reductions so

44:50 um you know we have a list at the very end that says asks and the asks are the librarium that you know a lot those are the above asks that we aren’t able to achieve right now but I just think it’s important to um reflect this as we move forward um so Central admin um as you can see there the changes we put in red in all of these slides in red circles the first one um the director of Food Services we are not eliminating Our Food Services director at all what we are doing is moving how we um structure paining for him to the revolving account um so that’s why it is removed from the central office so it’s from Food Services involved the direct assistant director

45:35 of student services we are removing that position but as I described earlier a lot of it is reallocating uh what needs to be done so down the road you’re going to see some um specific School changes that we’re recommending um we have right now six um special ed administrators uh and what we are uh planning to do is make one school every school base so every school has their own um special ed administrator team chair what have you and then the sixth one be um in charge of our prek across the two elementary schools and are out of District placement so that’s the structure that we’re um we’ve set

46:22 our schools going forward and it’s it’s been confusing this year um having people a lot of people different schools so I mean you can own someone and they would own then pay three um that would be good and Patty’s work from the 13 on figuring well that’s that’s where that position is going the admin assistant is just down tiny bit um three and that’s you know there’s a there’s a02 here a0 five there there’s whatever and so we just moved it around a little bit and the central regar was a tiny 0.25 that was 10 hours a week and it’s actually under one of our admin assistants right now um so instead of place that we could cut and then that’s

47:08 it and then um assistant superintendent forer your turn to talk about the office of teaching and learning thank you Dr mcginness good evening um I’m here to share a little bit about the office of teaching learning um as Dr mcginness and and assistant superintendent CA shared we are a small 2% of the budget I like to say small but mighty there’s a lot of work that happen to the office of teaching and learning so I’d like to share a little bit with you about our goals and our objectives um and how that affects our teaching and learning throughout the entire District um so our overarching goal the one that drives all of our work is to fully align our teaching and learning 3K to 12 um with the framework of multi-tiered systems of support to ensure that we have aligned teaching and learning and that is meeting the needs of all of our students um with so they can meet and exceed

47:53 their academic and social emotional earning expectations so what that means for us is it really means supporting all Learners as Dr Mna said that framework of the MTS mtss gives our schools and our districts a focus on how we can move our students um how we can help our students U move through each grade needing and exceeding their their academic and social emotional um expectations our school Improvement plans really proud of how we have aligned them to the work that we’re doing at the district level um and to continue to effectively support all of our Learners um so when we talk about mtss it’s uh we often refer to te of of supports um tier one that’s our all

48:38 students all students having high quality aligned curriculum um we are integrating positive behavior um intervention supports responsive classroom um and as Dr mcna said culture response of teaching and learning and professional development to support with that um about 10% is at that two to three tier two to three and that’s those interventions um that is needed um for our students um to support their academic social emotional Behavior Support so I’m going to take this goal here and go into some of the objectives can I add one thing to um please um the um under tier one collaborative problem solving the associate program um we have started as you well know that um student services steering committee um it’s

49:26 group of mostly special educat ERS and administrators and teachers and we meet weekly and um the team we together um led by two teachers on there um have written a grant for um $75,000 to desie uh last week and it was um for some training on collaborative problem solving which is Dr Stewart Adon at Harvard and MGH and it’s a a program the reason it’s under tier one it’s both I also added it to tier two and three there CPS is um it is his research which is well regarded and uh is decreases um the need for restraints by 80% and he actually works with children that are in

50:11 programs that are um specialized schools and you know with more of a challenge and so some of our special Educators have had different trainings on this but we’re we’re making it more of a a whole District um learning session so this spring we hope we get this um find out in two weeks and we would start the associate program and I we put the link there that you could look at if you wanted it just tells a little about the be beauty of this is it it’s integrated with our ntss program that we’re already doing so this is not oneoff this is this is connected to what we’re already doing but it gives us a lot more um uh training that I think is uh very valuable so that’s what that great than so um so to um that point breaking down our from our goal to the

50:59 objective on the next slide that we um so our objectives um they do some are um working through um internal capacity but some do have budget implications so um that’s why I wanted to go through um several of these with you tonight so um as you can see curriculum instruction that’s what drives our work um we are working daily to expand and refine our instruction to ensure that the curriculum that’s being taught is Equitable and consistent Al line horizontally vertically throughout the district they um we are working with our financial uh resources um as assistant superintendent cesta mentioned we do have some title grants that help supplement and not supplant some of the work that we are doing um we are examining work with our culture responsive experts and that’s a goal that we’re continuously working on as

51:45 outlin in our plan for Success um and in the end continuing to reflect upon and evaluate our practices to ensure that our students have that access to high quality educational opportunities um so our next set of objectives so that’s curriculum instruction and then professional development um really proud of the work that we’ve done this year and the um how we’ve reflected on past practice and continue to improve upon that to support our educator development um and we are also um doing a lot more professional development with ensuring to ensure aligned um curriculum so my last time you saw me here presenting was with the wit and wisdom uh literacy curriculum and the I ready data to support that um so you can see that’s like a little example of the professional development that we’re doing to ensure that a successful implementation of

52:32 implementation of implementation of that um I’m also really proud that we are able to um continue to fund a universal screener U that’s I ready and that’s giving us academic data on our students that helps us um as Educators reflect on how our students are doing and what they need to continuously show Improvement um and grow so we are also through our professional learning communities um which I spoke a little bit about that’s where our teacher are using that time to analyze data and thoughtfully plan those next levels Beyond what’s already happening at the tier one with all students what’s going to be C up the tiers two and three to support all of our

53:12 leaders so while our staffing is going to remain consistent in a reduced Services uh budget uh we did look at uh reducing based off that tier decision-making methodology reducing significantly the professional development contract Sur services in the curriculum purchases um we are going to we feel really strongly that our coaches are critical to the work that’s happening um so we’re going to maintain that into the next year and using them to support with a reduced of outside funding for um or funding for professional development um so we are going to use our grant funds um to support and supplement not supplant um and we will continue to um use some of

53:58 our title grants to um support the funding of another additional instruction coach as well that is not that’s outside of the operating budget thank you on to miss Bel special education so on special education obviously is designed to support all the wide variety of children and all different subjects all different environments in the school and that tiered intervention model that has been adopted here in most places in the dist in the Commonwealth have to do with bolstering skill levels and tools that every level of instruction can accommodate so we are hoping that the skills of a speech and language pathologist for example might be best

54:46 used in a larger tier one setting instead of exclusively in onetoone instruction especially at the youngest grades we want to have the widest base of tier one one instruction bolstered so that the most kids get the most expertise in the district and as we go through the tear those needs that are not met in that wide base of increased skill in teaching we will be able to hone down and probably reduce numbers of kids that need extra help for smaller group instructure and of course tier three for the children that have the most difficulty adopting new learning in in whatever environment we’ve been able to supply and then we search for the

55:32 optimum environment that we can provide for those students so I think all the skills that special Educators have can be best utilized in multiple settings and not just exclusively in a handful um as they often are um so we are looking at already the student needs as been defined by evaluations and teacher reports on student students and looking at how best to use our staff effectively to meet needs in a variety of settings so um case loads and efficient delivery services is top on my list as I look at the last four months of your school year to see if there are any model changes

56:19 that might provide better efficiency and effective use of teacher time and that does does very well with the third and that would be to um make sure we provide the professional development opportunities that will increase the base of skills at all those tubes so um we have expertise all over and U the buildings have fabulous on skill basis that we may be able to U utilize and share among each other and not necessarily spend dollars on outside Consultants although the literacy program has demanded some training we definitely need to share that knowledge because um teachers often get assigned teacher leader roles but having the

57:05 opportunity to share what they’ve learned with others is really important um so we don’t want silos of expertise we want to share our expertise um and um the the one I jumped right over was assessing the U impact of the budget reductions and I think that um our other three FY will help fully uh in the future and I don’t think that this is going to be a one-year process I think this will be a multi-year process but I think you can find Avenues to um reduce the budget load that special occasion takes that it’s going to take a lot of examining the other three aspects

57:52 of what we can change given uh the current Staffing and there is the Staffing so um as you’ve already heard the administrative assistant to my office has been reduced recently to a 0.5 and it is going to be increased to a one point FTE based on the fact that you also don’t have an assistant director to this office anymore um that’s going to give some of those responsibilities that haven’t been able to match up with Team chairs and other buildings um the safety they need to get accomplished we do a lot of accounting to the state there’s a lot of indicators that um we demand headcounts and outcomes that have to be

58:37 filed each year um along with General purchase order processing in that department and Communications with families there’s a lot of uh interpersonal work that has to be managed in that office um one person probably can’t do it so um the only other reduction that I took a look at case loads and saw that there was an unfilled behavior analyst position and I don’t want people to confuse that with oh we’re not going to take care of behaviors anymore but that is a specialized person that analyzes in a very clinical way the tier three kids that need behavioral um supports so um

59:23 based on the current case load and it really is a tier three intervention um skill set that we’re looking at um it seemed to make sense to reduce that for next year to

59:38 two thank you and Greg you’ve got big games to go to so I I’m glad you’re still here yeah no we’re okay I got about an hour so um for athletics uh we’d like to continue to provide the most meaningful experience we can for our student athletes uh Middle School through high school um we continue to have some of the highest parti ation in the area we’re actually up at about 69% of our student athlet of our students at the high school participate in one two or three seasons of sports um which is incredible um you continue to focus on the skill development um attitudes teamwork things that are really important and goals that we have for for our students in high school um I’d like to continue to try to find some ways to develop our coaches that’s um not always high on the list but it’s something that I think is important whether they

1:00:24 utilize one another in a lot of are experienced coaches um that played at the high level coach for a long time um or on different clinics or different uh professional developments for them to to increase uh their knowledge of their Sport and that will have a positive impact on our student athletes and then also continue to develop our student athletes as As Leaders as well we have a number of different um program that we use through the MIAA or through our vague itself um and then we also have some some Captain development things that we do at at the next so I’m hoping to continue with that and that would be you know three goals I have um in terms of our student participation is like I mentioned we

1:01:11 have huge huge numbers um 1233 individual athletes that’s not obviously the the amount of individual kids that we had but if you play one two or three you count one two or three times just it’s it’s incredible the amount of s that we have it school it’s makes my job enjoyable and a lot a lot of fun so we have 64 teams and um 90 paid coaches that we have so it’s yeah it’s great great stuff um terms of Staffing just myself and Mr tarmy in the office so not a whole lot that we can do in terms of changing that whether it be reduced or level

1:01:48 services so for our our current user fee structure I mentioned this a little bit earlier this is our current structure right now so we had actually amended that at the beginning of the school year our current athletic team Performing Arts unlimited usage for one particular student would be $495 our high school clubs would be $140 flag football $66 um and Inter Scholastic Sports at the middle school $220 and Inter mural Sports $140 with a family cap of $800 so this is our current fee structure that we are charging right now but this is what we are looking to revise for the help of school year with a reduced structure A reduced

1:02:35 budget So currently as I mentioned 50% of our stiens are paid by user fees the other 50% of that is within the operating budgets if we were able to support a level service budget we would keep the 50% funding in the operating budget with the reduced service budget we are proposing that 100% of the stipend costs be moved to the participants so basically user fees would support it um other athletic costs such as Transportation pool rentals ice rentals all that still would be within our op budget um we are working very closely with the athletic office to trying to come up with some proposals to bring the school committee and we’re to to at your next meeting

1:03:22 on is it reasonable though if we’re thinking 495 covers 50% and we’re looking to cover 100 that we’re looking at roughly 990 it’s not that easy okay um we are looking at various structures to tier them based on the actual cost of sport because obviously certain Sports don’t cost as much to run where football costs a lot to oh so you would pay depend yes and possibly buy each season as well and doing comparisons to other districts within do other districts do it that way yeah most other districts do we’ll bring all that information comparisons would be key yes absolutely

1:04:08 and you have to build in um some version scholarships or exactly that’s student we are you know we’re looking at the family cap what the family cap level will do to us what um our free and reduced lunch program which is our financial aid program that is offered for these fees so we need to take those in if it was a 100% everyone pays it would be really easy analysis it’s not that easy um in the free and reduced lunch program people really aren’t applying for that anymore know that all we encourage it because it actually still helps us so the more free and reduced applications we received that are found eligible and are approved um impacts our Chapter 70 which helps the town in terms of state aid so we do encourage it and that’s how we offer our

1:04:54 financial aid for our full day kindergarten program as well as our okay and you’ll bring us information on the will there still be a family Max cap that bring option option okay right thank you I do have to run any questions yeah and you know what before you leave I was help but think this last night because we had so much conversation about it yesterday but by way of examples if you think of in the last week going forward through this week of the amount of students that are in state tournaments or winning state titles um in this district and that number that you showed up here too 79% we don’t we’re not just to be clear

1:05:43 we are not cutting Athletics um but in these difficult physical physical times we have to go outside tier one tier two and tier three and so us moving to the participant just the stiens not the larger number number which you’re keeping in the Opera budget allows us to do that and how we kind of thought about it in our head is when we’re looking at the town’s money we’re thinking well senior citizens or others that are on a fixed income maybe um you know in terms of weighing like what they should pay for or not their children might not be participating in sports and all that it’s kind of like where we went with it it’s a it’s a hard thing to say we do know it could decrease some student in so we are going to monitor it I mean you’re going to monitor it next year um

1:06:28 but just to make sure that you might need to be tweaked in some shape or form too because we want our kids involved we see how important it is and how successful they are and um when when you guys bring us that information I’d like to hear from you know not right now but from Greg how much if at all you think it will affect your participation yes talking about other outside help perhaps from other types of more um Universal fundraising and we’ve had so many you know generous people in town I to say that but that’s the reality towards not having this affect our students and and if you think we need to go beyond our scholarship to to set up something I don’t want any student to

1:07:15 not be able to play who wants to thank you good luck do anybody have any questions um we skipped over question I think we did questions for we had for Patty for special education I know we didn’t do anything we didn’t I had a quick question on um we don’t have to to go back to the slide but your little girl there is literacy and math Specialists so those are staff that are not student basing is that correct like they are Co they’re coaches or they yeah a lot of student interaction absolutely so they do a lot of um wi oh yeah sorry I was they do a lot of uh works with work with the teachers and they will co- te and they model lessons especially with our new wi wisdom that’s been happening a lot I

1:08:02 guess I’m trying to understand how you so because I was thinking okay so they’re not tutors they’re not um how do you decide what’s in your bucket versus what’s in the building so they’re not building based I guess that’s how they do they are they’re actually so in total we have four again one is through a title Grant so they are in the building um and they are k through eight um so they are working with the leader very closely we have an immense amount of work that’s happening um so I can continue to elaborate on that later but it’s it’s everyday working with the leaders teachers students student facing is a lot during our intervention the wind time wind blocks um and just Rel so I guess I’m just trying to understand why they’re not in building St that’s all because they’re not in just one so we

1:08:49 just so their District so the coaches work in all three okay so that’s a decision to like never see in the district office don’t think that three of them share room here when here coming and going throughout the day as the teachers really value this support really Val try to understand where they they one thing I want to pause and point wow that New York just came out pause and point out is how Julia just said we actually have four but one’s in a title grain You Don’t See that fourth one show up in our what we hear in the community sometimes is yes but they have these grants and they’re double dipping because they’re charging this to the

1:09:35 general fund in that 44 and if they’re getting the grant money no she’s got four people we’re only seeing three show up in our line it them because one’s getting charged to a title Grant so we’re there’s no double dipping we’re not seeing the staff show up here and then get paid for here we only saw the three because that’s what’s getting charged to the the town allocation their benefits are oh they are the benefits are too so so this is pro positive there’s no double dipping this is a prime example of how those grants are covering that employee so you’re not seeing here and I do want to just mention that we do not have many staff charge to Grants are

1:10:20 revolving funds because the grants and revolving funds do have to pick up that benefit cost so we that as well so they’re they’re only a handful it’s not a large so in regards to uh special education student services um so one thing is we are eventually going to have this review done we talk about that so that would be helpful but I don’t know where that fits in versus Val you kind of coming in you said you going to be looking at you know some of our programs that’s work that we started but

1:10:58 ient for a hot minute but I am interested to hear more of your research once you get to that point yeah it’s it’s um an opportunity for me I’ve been in similar size districts and bigger ones and um it’s nice to be able to learn from my past and have a different set of eyes on how things are going to every district is unique um but there are some best practices that we can maybe one question where you talked about really reducing the DC ba that’s something we’ve heard a lot about so I’m really G when we look at that staff accountability study or whatever we’re calling it I around a little bit I’m really going to want to see the service

1:11:43 hours that we own in iups for a bcba what we own in contracts for the bcbas that we have and that they matage because makes sense I from what I’m hearing have a hard time reducing BCPS further so I’m going to reserve that until I see that grid but that’s where I am right now hard well and at that point we can explain exactly what a bcba does because they are different than the one that necessarily would spend most of the day with a child monitoring their behavior redirecting them and charting everything that’s is not necessarily the BCB okay so um we will define those roles for you and we’ll look at Serv yeah and then also we’ll want to see how much time we’re allocating that

1:12:30 individual to do testing evaluations as well right and just to be clear too I’m so happy that pie Bell is here with us and bringing our expertise we really appreciate it um but before she came we had already looked at our staffing at the schools um and came to that determination also she’s great because she’s validating all of this before we came to this point today so want to make sure that’ll be great to resonate to the community as well yes and now Stephen technology thank you uh technology goals for next year we started our planning on this pretty much my first year when I started here um looking at the GL school project the devices that were in that building

1:13:17 that need to be replaced um planning for the ground school and the devices that will be need to replace here in the future as well as all the other devices that we use across the district um devices purchased through Co funds devices uh gotten through uh grants that we purchased from um as we moved over the last three and a half years that have been here um first up in the recycle uh replacement cycle as I came to the school committee last year presented is uh the staff laptops purchased in 2019 um we’re looking at 39 90 staff laptops to replace um we had asked for more Chromebooks but I have reduced that as part of the reduced Services uh down to about

1:14:04 to about to about 150 fin question when you the 390 staff you sell them back somewhere or cplus so the the hope is to have a refresh cycle where we’re going to take those hopefully move those down to um Tas and other staff who aren’t using a full laptop at this point using an old fir book or something else that we can reuse that device and then have that be part of our replacement cycle as we go for um so our our smart panels so we’ve offered smart panel training last year at all the school districts we’ve offered it at the high school for the staff here again this year um it’s been a lot of great um feedback from all of our staff saying

1:14:50 they really enjoyed it they thought it was a great PD um so we’re looking to continue that as we Mo forward as we’ve invested in all this technology in all of our classrooms we want to keep that um momentum going forward and looking to continue with the training uh for a sta uh cyber security awareness so we started our own program about a year and a half ago last year we applied for the state cyber security Grant we approved for that um we’ve reapplied for that Grant we were approved again for this year so starting next month uh tomorrow we’re going to be starting with the new program uh which is called No before um

1:15:36 State’s part of this grant so we um all of our staff will receive emails they’ll do online trainings and also be a part of uh fishing campaigns where um they might receive an email and it hopefully helps them to determine that maybe that email isn’t a true email that they should be trying to open and find so uh Glover school security cameras so we’ve added many cameras into the building uh internally but the external cameras have been a concern going back to even when Mr oo was there and so we we our original budget was we’re looking to upgrade cameras on the external lever um there’s a new state grant that just came out a couple weeks

1:16:21 ago I’m going to be applying for that and removing that uh that’s part of PR Services just have a couple of quick questions so is it like the refresh cycle is it four years try to do a quarter each year so we’re we’re at a fouryear mark four to fiveyear Mark um really depending on the device and how they’re being used I would think the maintenance how how long is the maintenance for those yeah so that all of them come with like a three so after year three a lot of them start to to have issues people drop things kids break things left and right so there is a a high need for us to be able to replace those devices so that teachers can keep teaching in their classrooms so kids can keep learning in

1:17:10 their classrooms um and part of all of our testing whether it’s for I ready or mcast is all online now um even our uh PSATs were online this year so all these new tests that we do we need to have devices for gets to use there is a certain level at which the devices have to be at in order to be used for mcast and older devices are now being discontinued from being able to be used for like mcast Tes so and I know we’re trying to save money but is the price differential still pretty significant between a laptop and a Chromebook yeah so I thought a lot of folks are doing away with Chromebooks because they just didn’t have a functionality and the price differential really that is true

1:17:56 and for our students for their needs Chromebooks are a great tool um for our staff where they do need more tools um the laptop is better sued for them just one more question around cyber security so obviously training and no before y are good things and hopefully people if they you know don’t do the appropriate thing with a to notice a effici we would follow up with additional training perhaps yeah it’s all part of that program what are there any other you I’m more concerned about I’m sure there’s tens of thousands of taxs per day on these networks yeah so is there anything around so we we’ve invested heavily in software from uh the front end to the back end so we have software that just

1:18:43 in the last three years that we’ve upgraded everything on our Network I in our in our town about three and a half years ago we were still working on uh old fiber that was was put in probably 20 years before we would have uh schools that their internet would go down so we’ve replaced the fiber between all of our buildings then we replaced all the switching in our closets we replaced our firewalls so that we had something that was large enough to handle um like online uh classes and so we’ve really invested in all that technology and um and I can share with you I know you were probably here for the school committee last year about you watch me but well this our replacement cycle

1:19:30 is covering the student devices going forward and then also all that other technology that’s keeping us secure and safe um while we’re educating want but security is what keep s people just so we we we’ve invested heavily in that and getting ourselves on a regular replacement schedule not just for the devices but for all of those things that are keeping us safe is important thank you anybody else have questions for Stephen oh wait oh I a question last um so thank you for having another Grant you’ve been great about bringing grants just almost every year I just want to ask a grant you brought to us a few years ago I think a state Grant um where you had to spend a minimum we

1:20:17 had never been eligible for it before because you had to spend a minimum yourselves and you weren’t even spending minimum to get the match is that a one and done is that something we are still doing or can we go back and so some of that was like uh for some of the security grants that we’ve done and and we we’ve made the most out of those okay that is one of the things for like the L school that you know we’re looking at so okay all right and thank you for continuing to do the um technology wise just as those um trainers are there for our staff to help them with their um teaching our staff members for the technology department are also districtwide staff they are in every

1:21:04 school every day um I myself was uh able to be here for the whole month of January in the brown school I really enjoyed that um our staff are student facing because anytime a student device is down our staff are there fixing it same with the the uh staff devices if they’re down the staff can’t teach the kids so you know it’s a lot of uh on the moment if a staff member needs something our staff are heading rate to their classroom to help them write that you know take um important things to kind of look at our district owned devices so we have 1493 iPads currently uh Chromebooks we have 26 12 laptops

1:21:49 12 laptops 12 laptops 520 and desktops 4 and 85 so that’s just over 5,000 devices in our district that we own that we’re servicing um and really where that those numbers are coming from is three and a half years ago when I got here we weren’t a one to one and that was one of the things the school committee had said to me when I first started here was we want to get to a one1 um the new school project here at the BR school was great that helpful we got to purchase all the devices out of that project um devices that we’ve been able to invest in using ARA funding have helped us to get the other schools to where they are

1:22:35 so we’re one to one k to2 uh using iPads three through six using Chromebooks there’s also a little overlap for the third grade where they actually have access to both Chromebooks and um they share an iPad card that way they can still continue with programs maybe that they were using K2 and that transition into third grade where that’s their first year taking the mcast which is on a Chromebook so they need to have that year to learn about the Chromebook and be preparing for that test at the end um uh grades seven through eight so we’re more of a uh one device for every two students so we have shared carts between each of the the different grade

1:23:23 levels and between the teams uh they share those carts as needed the uh specials like the health department might have their own carts that they do just use all the time um we also have uh other floating carts that get shared throughout that building during the day uh 9 through 12 uh there’s little um Chromebooks that are in every classroom that are kind of like daily loaners so if a kid didn’t bring their device in they need to borrow a device we have to devices in every classroom for them to borrow those really are like some of the oldest devices currently and are part of the uh refresh needs that we need going forward as well as other cards and things throughout the

1:24:09 district and as well as mcast devices for the high school to take their mcast um as well um there’s a little Aster there for the high school is also a byot so those 5,000 devices that were supporting are not including the 900 kids bringing in all those devices out the high school so they’re bringing in their own laptop their own phone all those things we’re giving them that access on our Network to uh use those devices and learn with them while they’re in our buildings so if they’re having issues our staff don’t shun them we usually try and help them as much as we can um and give them suggestions if there’s nothing that we can do to help

1:24:57 them so we’re we’re also supporting not just those 5,000 devices but all those other devices that students are bringing in as part of Bood um and then just a little note side note is on our on our Network which I don’t think we could have done this three and a half years ago but just in the last 30 days we had about 12,7 six devices that were connected on our Network individual devices so it’s not like my device connects twice or three times it’s that’s how many devices we had connected at all of our buildings um throughout the 30 days so there’s a lot of equipment that you know connect on excuse me and um you know having all

1:25:44 the systems in place that we have now protect us and as well as provide uh capable services so I I like Apple but but usually you pay a premium for an Apple device so are there applications and software that will only run on iPads for our students and that’s why we continue to purchase them and part of that again is the um the learning that happens K through two and that’s why it’s really concentrated on there we have the iPad carts also um at the high school for like graphic arts that they use them we have some in in the Vets so and some at Village as well so there are some specialized programs that they need to use on an iPad that they don’t make

1:26:31 for a Chromebook and that really aren’t um for kids when they’re that young to to be able to kind of give them a Chromebook ask them to log in um we use things like clever which allows them to take a take the iPad use a barcode to log themselves in instead of having a kid that they AR trying and type in the longest URL um that we have Mar scho a but sometimes not so depending on on the the grade level and the needs uh that’s that’s how we’ve broken up the devices and a lot of other districts it’s the

1:27:13 same thank you so much I just want to let everybody know after we go we go through the next one is facility yes and then I’ll give us a brief recess Todd wel thank you yeah so with the uh facilities you know our we’re trying to streamline streamline maintenance uh it’s taken five years since I’ve been here I’m now comfortable in putting in place our maintenance plan I’ve had it shelle knows I’ve had this for quite a while but until this time it it wasn’t worth we were playing ketchup we’re at the point where we’re still playing a little bit of ketchup we can get right into an actual program stick with it that will keep our buildings as

1:28:02 best as possible long as possible uh you know this this way we also you know like it says minimize our equipment downtime some things uh it are just out of our we can’t do anything about it because it’s still you can’t get a hold of these things you have to wait for it so uh yeah our our Safety and Security is always will always be number one for every student staff member uh we we continuously look at any upgrades Steve always helps with this of course uh to keep every Everybody safe once they go into that building they should feel safe and they should never have to worry about anything that’s our biggest goal

1:28:49 right there for that and we always try to you know maintain uh specific types of cleanliness we’ve been short-handed uh I do floow people around here and there when we can as needed uh because you know certain schools need a little more attention than others every single day not every school needs that same amount of attention every day it all depends on what is going on at each building an example High School seven days a week there’s something going on but you come to Brown there’s little ones they tend to make a different kind of mess but you know it just you need to there’s different levels of loneliness to you

1:29:35 monitor um you know we always we always try to encourage all of our employees you know uh custodians and maintenance people you know to to clean up properly we offer training to them uh through the town so we can get that for free free training is always is a good thing but it it also helps in some of them help in dropping our insurance costs to the to so we always focus on that we always s um make sure that the staff knows they’re appreciated you know uh last week vacation week we got a bunch of pizza they thought it was the best thing in

1:30:20 the world and I’m I’m happy to do it uh you know and it was just a small thank you they work hard they’re here all sorts of different hours especially in the winter they never know they could be leaving at 10:30 at night and I’m calling them at 1: in the morning to come back because we have a storm coming so they get tired and and they you know a little bit of a break they really did appreciate that um so when we when we put all of this together and we I try to I haven’t been able to wait I try to meet with say the custodians regularly and just to go over everything to see if they need something uh how everything is going it’s been a bit

1:31:06 hextic as of late but we’ll get back into that so uh for our custodial and uh what we have right now is

1:31:22 3626 um we are going to be uh we will not have a 7D drive next year we will not have a 70 vehicle we’ve requested it 70 vehicle is uh it is a school bu in the grandest sense because you could transport from two school and two home and it has to be equipped and certified and registered that way uh the one we have we’ve been putting quite a bit of money into it to keep it going and we utilize that one for the small streets of course downtown and we’ve noticed that a lot more kiddos are are attending

1:32:08 school from downtown for the past few years so that we will not have that position nor will we have a vehicle so we will do and I always work with police fire everybody to make sure if we have to implement a new stop that we physically go look at it and deem it that it’s a safe area to stop a bus so children will have to be walking a little longer won’t be able to fit down these small small streets anymore uh we were going to um sh and I of course got a little you know creative uh we did not they’re

1:32:53 going to bring in two more custodians but by doing that I would have to release a couple of people So the plan is we’re going to take a couple of our maintenance people they will now be maintenance custodians they will be on kind of an off schedule for their hours so they can come in they can still do the maintenance but then they will help so that way we can cover everything and this and I’m proud to say none of them are going to that position you we need everyone we can get and they’ve a lot of them been here a long time it’s a lot of

1:33:41 knowledge so and uh so in here also you know we’re showing the amount of custodians um there’s uh it’s it’s a common Education data standards there’s spefic specific levels of cleanliness which I touched on a little bit level one would be absolutely spotless every single day in an 8 hour period okay so you get a certain amount of square foot per custodian per eight hour shift so with the G you know elementary schools Brown and uh Clover you strive for level two because and again there’s little ones there it’s a different type of mess so you have to make sure with that you always go by the amount of square

1:34:26 points they give you a range we go right in the middle of that so that being said at Brown and at Glover were fully staffed uh village where almost fully staff the larger schools we strive for level three which is more square foot per and it depends on how the building is used that’s how you judge do you know that one you can go up to 25,000 Square ft in a 8 hour period but you have to judge on what’s going on at the time or the day or the week whatever it may be so we we strive for those two level two and level three level one would be

1:35:14 great but that would add a lot more staff and then uh you know you also go this is the amount of rooms that uh all the custodians are cleaning every single day in an 8 hour period so with the crews that we have they put in quite an effort these are bed buildings this does not include hallways this is just a room that they utilize so you add all the hallways in and stairways you have to add even more to

1:35:47 that a question for what about coffee is there Elric sitting water there is only electricity of coffin I’m sorry could he there’s only electricity of coffin and it maintains the fire panel so that if something were to happen it would sound the alarm uh there is no water there that was cut off at the street so was the gas so there’s nothing in the over sprinkler sprinkler system is empty there um we had a pipe that last year remember when we had that SU for deep freeze um we had a pipe that let go and when I showed up there um I spoke with

1:36:34 the fire chief and he said listen you have the fire panel you have the alarm you don’t need the spray so I I whatever he tells me you know he’s that’s his word Insurance wise the insurance company’s okay with that sh answer that we had the town has a special policy on bacon buildings oh yes we we I will also add we do a building check every single day of the week seven days a week just to make sure and then some of the inspectors will go in just take a look you know see if everything’s okay or not or whatever uh fire chief might I go in you know um

1:37:19 Stephen and I installed all the cameras that are around the outside of that building so that we can monitor which is is great great investment in that and it wasn’t that expensive of a system I believe we put it in we saved a lot of money doing it ourselves of course right so we keep an eye on it every single day uh if we need to remove snow we maintain it in that

1:37:48 sense um one thing I just wanted to point out through um the presentation on the Staffing is um by taking on these reductions in addition to the halftime bus driver we will be reducing the two custodians that Todd spoke about the recommended level by the common Education data standards for our square footage is actually 27 so by cutting down these additional custodians we will actually be at 203 so we’re not even where we should be and part of that is uh if uh people remembered last year was we had some empty positions and instead of cutting it was don’t fill so we saved money

1:38:34 that I just want to know you know think something we’ve we’ve heard forever from the community is you know outside of your buildings XYZ look like this we don’t even have enough people to meet you were four below the recommendation in custodian Ians in these people even by country the idea that we’re going to get grounds done in this type of fisal climate is just not even on teable so just people the community in the town us to have a an expectation of what we fund is is what we’re going

1:39:17 to so onto um yes thank you summary of our Capital Improvement record um typically we have 10-year Capital Improvement plan that we had formed back in 2021 we try to follow that as much as possible um a few things actually popped up that were unanticipated this past year so they have actually become priorities this particular um round of requests so at veteran school we have a structural issue for the d-wing we provided a temporary repair if you recall an area of that building was actually closed for a week or so um due to this structural issue we did you know like I said we we implemented that temporary repair but we do need to address the so roughly that is about $100,000 the second large popup issue

1:40:04 that came about this year is the heating system at the Glover as you call from a few weeks ago um there are six classrooms that did not have any heat and it was really cold at that time we provided temporary heating um which wasn’t the best but we we have brought in a temporary repair for that as well to the $240,000 but to correct that issue um we’re estimating it to be 218,000 so in order to have that proper Heat next year we need to it does seem a little so about 10 years old it is I can I can address that where we had everything tested um for the the LG units that are the ones that we’re talking about over at the Glover the

1:40:51 units themselves are obsolete even though it’s only this age We cannot put just one unit in they they the new units will not work with theal units number two these units that were put in initially are are undersized not big enough for the size that they were supposed to be piping all the free you know where the freon runs through is wrong it’s on the wrong slope it goes runs back into the units where it goes into compressor and tri being in oil it’s destroying these compressors so part of the repair that we did is to get these back running they did a little some adjustment on these pipes added a

1:41:38 new compressor there a bridge diodes all for the air no heat oh was he they do the same these units do both um and obviously very hesitant about putting that that kind of money into a temporary so so unfortunately that’s another um repair that we need to take on um the third item on this list is a fire panel update at the Village School we have found that this is reaching its end of life um there’s in Jeopardy of failing and if you know if that does fail we need to put in a fire watch so certainly we do not want that to happen um we are able to update not replace the panel for tune about $30,000 which is good news because we thought that price Ty was going to be a lot

1:42:26 higher and lastly the the fourth priority that we have rated as a number one is the paging system at the high school um this also controls the bells and clocks and this is another system that is completely reaching its end of life Parts not available to repair it and if it goes It goes so we’re not going to have anying system so um that’s to the tune of $ 52,700 those four items total just over 400,000 it’s $4,700 I am not confident that we will get that full Capital appropriation from the town any sense from that um I have spoken to them I don’t have a sense of exactly what they are going to be able

1:43:12 to provide us with but I do know they’re having a difficulty finding free cash to do you think to give us any I do believe they will give us something so and this is why earlier in the presentation I said we have that roughly $250,000 left in Esser I think we should apply it here I also think that some of our building rental revolving funds that we have built up we should use here in addition we can also use some of our foreign tuition student funds here so while I think it’s going to be a really tough year in terms of capital funding we do have some mechanisms to be able to address these needs does have turf field on there we do have turf yes so we made a request

1:43:58 for the turf field this was the amount that was not able to be fundraised so far okay um so that was the differential to bring that project to 100% of fund we’re only looking to really fund the red circle correct so not fun yeah so so that was a priority too at this point the priority ones are really the essential systems that we need to repair this year to move forward anybody this I have another question about yeah is that the same vend that installed originally in the building so now will it the computers talk to the Eventing system that was always the problem that would be full replacement of that system so we have that same type of system

1:44:45 here Mary this one works pretty good from what I I have learned in the years I I’ve been here almost day one people were going up under the roof shutting it off turning it back down which if you have to do that temporarily that’s fine but it damages equipment if you keep doing it um and again I wasn’t there when leer was built but Brian you know better than I uh some of the issues um this would be a full replacement of those LG units that are above our roof and done properly so that they’re size proper piping is done prop and that they’re up to dat so they can still get parts for

1:45:31 these older which sounds silly they’re only like 10 years old these older units uh but you can’t get

1:45:50 okay we worked really really hard on the um strategic plan we all Todd you I jack em Baron was part of that um to have truly the only strategic plan that actually exists in the district that has timelines with budget TR for Capital we have yet been able to operationalize every we know exactly what we need 20 years out we invest $50,000 in the study to get it done right in very detailed way we have yet to be able to operationalize because of a lack of funding any of this the these improvements so you know Jeffy George

1:46:37 and our committee says it all the time and our facilities committee pay now or pay later and I know I’m preaching to the choir but this is again another million and a half of defer maintenance last year was I think a million and a half to 2 million up deferred maintenance the year before that was 2 million of deferred Mains and our buildings we hear from everybody we want to keep up our buildings it’s pay now or pay more later at at what point do we have another mechanism to start actually covering these Capital Improvements because the town they got this document when we produced it three years ago and it was and they know I mean not like they can’t

1:47:23 forecast out they know what we need every single year to maintain our investments these are Town owned Investments and we run them into the ground not we run them into the ground Our Town lets us run them into the ground because we’re not maintaining them and I just I’m completely at a loss what to do we’re going to get pretty much the same speech on the educational front a little bit after you guys go but and you have to we have to invest in maintaining this stuff I I really just don’t know what to do with this because none of this stuff’s going to go away to fix it next year it’s gonna be more a lot a lot of these items are rolled forward from last year’s request that were not funded um ma four floors I’ve seen in here for three years

1:48:11 yes I’ve seen them for three years know they’ve needed it but it’s been articula clear help plan right exactly your your gymnasium floors so I mean our total year is over 1.7 million you’re right and I’m focusing on the first four because they’re essential to open our schools in September so I heard I don’t know you would know more I’ve heard chat are at different meetings I sit through at the Town level of I think I heard it at the select board meetings or maybe at the state of the town that there’s this idea of taking the 1.4 million that’s left in the the that was um through the boote for this school and the town was saying I thought they said that they were going to reallocate that to cover some Capital needs through town meeting I know that’s a mechanism of town meeting you can do it through a

1:48:59 vote how how about the town allocated that for the schools to maintain their properties are they going to share has there been any talk of if they do that sharing that with us I have not heard of anything on that and that is actually the funds approved this school building is a dead authorization so it would need to be items that could be borrowed it would have go to town meeting I have not heard anything about they talked about reallocating that money which I know can be done but I just want to make sure if they’re going to take that 1.4 million in the townside and do something with it that some of this stuff some of it doesn’t fall by for Deb exclusion some of it does so I just want to make sure we’re getting a seat at the table for for that you talking about the sweet

1:49:46 they were talking about yeah I I recall the state of the town that um the Town Administrator that caser indicated about $300,000 was the kind of the total so I don’t know if it included C because it was probably like old seaall I think there were old articles that were actually appropriate it could have been Al make sure there’s more allocations somewhere that are coming from dead exclusions which are cap cap that we’re getting part of that’s my however that maybe we should just make some inqueries yes in fact we can probably do that at the sub okay and just say because um and they may restrictions on what they could do well probably not it depends it’s a town and there’s still

1:50:33 arpa I I know there was an arpa meeting this week and selectman are actually voting some of the recommended items to any of them are yes one of them is can you hear about it the first time we got money yeah um I think it’s the new person is table behind um yeah thank you and so there was came down to 65,000 and there was one on there for 63,000 for professional development for wh ler which they were very generous in giving 400,000 to start the program in year one implementation but we had to cut funds here so I explained that to them and explain how cohesive it would be if we could continue with year two of implementation with this professional development trainers and they did it so

1:51:20 we got the last 63,000 so there I’m really happy to hear that well I don’t know that we do they

1:51:28 voted no I’m really happy about that thank you I was too right place right time um yes all right and there’s no grants that would cover any of this no okay there is a security grant that Steve is using for the GL okay so we we Tred to utilize some of that yes exactly we tried to utilize some of that Grant last year um in both our departments but it was very specific had to be for the cameras yeah they they only Pro cameras yeah so we put a lot of things into that we tried you gotta try all right so I’m gonna I’m gonna pause us for recess at

1:52:17 6:51 um I’m gonna give everybody 10 minutes we see it’s can we mute

2:06:21 great thank you very much um principal Maxfield we start off talking about gr school all of our schools absolutely so uh thank you uh yeah I you’re probably gonna have to shut me off because I do love to talk about our school so was that the first back up just one more okay we’re good did you want to do goals let’s do goals first yeah usually we do but um that’s fine um so yes lots of goals um we talk about multi-tiered systems of support all the time we say we throw around mtss we throw around PLC throw around all these letters but truly it means meeting the needs of all of our students this is that’s the vehicle that we use in order to do that it’s the system that we apply to do that but it

2:07:07 is is a imparative that we make sure that we have an opportunity to um to meet the needs of all of our students that they be academic or social M so um strengthening that system is is top one on on the list um certainly Fidelity to the implementation of our new Wht and wisdom program our coaches are invaluable to to helping us do that you asked about our coaches a little bit earlier um could not do that without them they are in coaching in classrooms working with student modeling lessons um uh recently um one of our goals this year was to have teachers go in and um actually observe other teachers uh observe a teacher then come back actually have a fishful conversation

2:07:53 with their colleagues watching about their interaction what they notice what they learn from one another doing that so um having that implementation program go forward is is going to be critical for us um again looking at those tier one supports uh in the classroom as was mentioned before hopefully that Grant comes through we’ll even strengthen that further for um looking at the next one collaborative problem solving just as it was U mentioned and and that’s yes in tier one but also two and three um and then our Dei inclusion across that uh across the school this year so we have Dei goals dist rewi but we also have a Dei team that Lees once a month and

2:08:40 their focus been on the VAP um and making sure that the that all teachers all staff it was a little surprising how some you know new new staff newer staff or even some of the old ones hadn’t looked at the beap in in some time so having a refresher and understanding um and reminding ourselves of all the accommodations of all the things that we can do to provide access for all students um can you just let us know what Decap is we don’t all speak here your curriculum comination thing okay okay which is it’s Universal set of accommod set of accommodations that we universally apply to all students that we believe that suceed so and it varies per grade level

2:09:25 um some examples you might see at Ground School be um kind of a smaller setting um giving tiered instruction preferential seating smaller group pieces uh smaller group instruction extra time extra time yeah but we we sometimes and it’s lengthy um and so we sometimes forget you know exactly some problem solving trying to figure out what more can they do is for this student to make sure that they’re accessing fully it’s actually a written list of our best practices thank you you prob wrot I did okay okay CH uh so but it’s good to review that

2:10:11 and so you can care about that uh so uh who we are um that’s how many students we have um actual under FY 24 and then uh the projected so projecting kindergarten and prek is really uh a difficult task um I looked at the trend certainly looked at the birth rates um the difficulty there is that it is um by grade level so it will say like all grade three which means both schools are both so to ages so it’s a little tricky um you don’t really know which district they live in um and the typically our kindergarten numbers have been increasing um each year over the past four or five years so we want to make sure that we accommodate so I did

2:10:59 bump those numbers up a little bit um and knowing what we have um in kindergarten this year we also have always have a handful of students who go to private kindergartens who um either come in as first graders or they come in as kindergarten so you can’t come to our kindergarten and ask to repeat kindergarten um but you can go to a private kindergarten and then register as a kindergarten so we we kind of have to build in a few extra spots for for that to allow for that um and then just for the past five years there it talks about our kindergarten enrollment um and then there’s our mcast that we continue to grow excited

2:11:46 grow excited grow excited about um can question these numbers and maybe a question for you collaboratively with Julia and Teresa we use as we know we have a few programs in town I think deorah school and the children’s Workshop maybe is one of them that provide a pre in kindergarten environment so we have we do have those kids that go through that and then start in our public school system in first grade and we see you know anywhere from 10 to 15 come in cheering there used to be a practice when Glover was always to biger classes that if any kids coming in new first grade didn’t matter where you were districted you came to Brown to bolster you know those lower numbers there sure I don’t know that we have that process anymore um and if we do I would hope it

2:12:33 would be that they go to Glover that’s what it is it is so we started doing that this year when we were CT out our kindergarten classes were at 20 21 and there were at 15 um where it gets a little bit trickier is when they are um they have a sibling so they have a kindergarten or third grader and our third grades you know could be lower than than Glover so it’s a tricky kind of decision to make but right now we are making that decision that they’re going to because the class sizes are smaller without redistricting and that has been on the table we did talk about that a number of times but until we do if we decide to do that it will look a little bit different um right now we’re just having them go to the other school let me clarify if you decide to do that

2:13:25 yes yeah exactly but it would be something for the 26 year yes abely we had planned to do that for this year but we I think with uh given the situation that we were in and there was no um leadership that was continuous throughout the year became more difficult much more challenging to do um we had talked about um hiring an outside agency to do it there were lots of lots of conversations around that is like y do anything like that not sure sure okay um so this is our current Staffing

2:14:10 who we have um I was asked just to to highlight who our how many inclusion teachers we had and uh about what that case load was so those are their uh specific case fls but I also um those are identified students with a with the learning disability however they do provide services for additional students which one are you refering uh the one on the side just the inclusion teachers I just wanted to call that out just to are they inclusive of the 20 classroom teachers they’re not are they what did you say inclusive of the 20 classroom teachers no those are we have

2:14:47 five no they’re part special teachers part they’re part of the special teachers I I think that was an ask just how many inclusion teachers it’s part of our um staff accountability brief okay you need instead of reports special education teachers yes yes and then uh yes and that is what our current numbers are and that what we will project for next year

2:15:25 that is okaye full so I will say when you see the Glover numbers they’re much uh they’re lower so we may decide to make those decisions we may decide to have a cap I don’t know how we do that but it’s only K that’s lower at um your school otherwise they’re we could move a teacher we it’s a space issue as well I heard that they looking at the can we go we we have not had that conversation we did use it law is do that be a problem you talking about the multi-purpose

2:16:11 real um with regard to reduced Services the reduce service would be um a half a halftime secretary so you would have one point instead of the two um our El numbers are um will be lower next year we have a group a larger group going over to Village so one of our um staff members would be going there um and then uh we have some tutor positions um that we would be reducing some of that is a or par professional I should say um some of that is uh just by hours so uh decreasing the hours that they work so they would have to what would the student in fact that what would we lose out would that be win

2:16:59 time so when you look at that goal and my number one goal of providing those you know supports for students uh it would absolutely impact the number of students that we could provide additional interventions or additional instruction for not um Master instruction that would be one of the questions that we’ve had this goes back to Brian’s well Brian’s request and our request is there has to be some spreadsheet or some tracking that tracks what we are trally obligated to support um in IBS and what’s put down yeah maybe if you can explain a little bit what she’s referring to are not special ed student needs there when you have the tiered instruction we like to

2:17:46 have small targeted groups based on the data so we need people to run those small targeted groups in different ways and people different tutors help out all tutors and they currently work from 8:30 to 1 on most days and by cutting those hours I would definitely be cutting small group um interventions and instruction um but I wouldn’t have to cut a whole person if I cut their hours back um so so when it comes to special education uh contractual I of ations that must fall under service providers right and also pars or no parently must be it’s tutors it’s tutors and it is a

2:18:32 special education so there’s special education par professional down at the bottom so there are 11 okay so that those are separate correct yes correct okay got it yep let me use

2:18:56 so is so is there I know thank you because I know you guys have all done a tremendous amount of work to get to that without a special education director we now have someone on board is I would assume as we’re reviewing what we own contractually and then contractually to students and then what we own contractually that staff is able to provide and we match those up these may change or have you already in your building pulled up what you own and matched it to for next year you have already as best as we can okay it it’s PK and Kinder are you know they’re just unknown well you do know what you have

2:19:42 for IDs don’t know change you don’t have the incoming you we don’t have PK and honestly um you know 3K was a a you know a source of we need a lot of resources in prepay this year many more than we needed last year so we’re on a yeah you just you just don’t know um what that is Tri and the transition from EI i’ I’ve said this for years because I you know with EI for a long time that that transition from EI at three the school system you don’t always know what’s coming your way and you may have a kid that requires wrap around support by multiple people and you find you can find out and notied and then the day they turn three you own in fact that’s

2:20:28 happened I think three times year so absolutely it does occur you just can’t predict it for last year

2:20:38 not but yes this would cover the hours that we those service providers the OTP and speech and language they were separate contracts that were developed and implemented by these director of people Services they were not part of a unit contract are they no they’re not part of the unit a but they’re still employees with yeah no no I understand that but the contracts are inally kept for each one of those I mean that’s when I was principal that’s what they told me my contract is with so you negotiate these contracts so those three people that listed are actually could be 0 five there and then 05 that clover oh they could travel to many different buildings but they just recognized here

2:21:25 is three so it doesn’t say it’s 05 of an ot5 PT 25 you know what I’m saying it’s misleading how well here that you have three we do have three um fulltime one OT 1 PT and one speech and language is something like that yes we have well we have a speech and language then we have a little more than a speeching language who works you know part-time here sometimes at the high school then we have one but it all averages out to three so but they do work in more right it was always hard for us to where they they would just be they’re related services and they’re not part of um Cafe worker I understood cafeteria workers were under the revolving fund they are they should be on the CH yeah

2:22:12 it should be so it should be 2.93 less less on both sides yes I think we used like last year

2:22:22 chart we’ll chart we’ll fix set y thank you and principal Richards thank you and uh you’re married for going firsty one more I have one more question for you sorry how many of are any of those positions vac that

2:22:59 oh let’s go to your goals first so um as you can see uh have part of our goal is uh wit and wisdom which Mary mentioned um and I just want to um emphasize the importance of that principles do a learning block each one of our schools to see what and I I would say I’m extremely impressed on the consistency between each ability uh so this is very exciting wisdom to see it in action and asking those questions so when looking for consistency with the elementary schools I’m really pleased and uh excited about the program and for it to continue and to visit each one of the schools to see how

2:23:45 they’re very different as well um that’s one of our goals as well and and also our tier one U PBIS support for Behavior interventions um as well that will be a goal for ours and also for year one examination of professional learning and research based collaborative problem solving which our superintendent mentioned and you can see that our main focus is on a tier one social emotion support for students uh so they can be

2:24:17 successful our next one is our demographic slide uh the Dem you can see um prek and K which Barry did a good job of explaining how fluid that is um so I won’t go into that uh but what you can see and what you what stands out on the demographic side on the left is if you took our first take a look at our first grade um the reduction from the fy2 to 21 students and also you can see the increase from second third um over on the right hand side you can see the MC that are listed um and the Delta I just want to add a little bit of data real

2:25:03 quick to that um our from 20 um 22 to 2023 we had an increase of nine points in ela and nine points in that in addition to what you’re seeing there so I just want to make sure that trend is communicated on just now not that One Snap shop so this be very

2:25:24 proud our current Staffing up here um you can see what our staffing is and again like every slide we out onclusion teachers on the left hand side and the average of students um and also the tier two um I think Mary had it in hers but the tier two supports that they provide in addition to what they’re currently doing and I’ll talk a little bit about that way our next slide is an overview of our class size and if you take a look um it looks like that the first remains same but in fact that reflects the um decrease and the reduction

2:26:11 that next slide so that we can actually um keep a balance from all my reads as far as students and um projections are pretty clear and our last slide up here is probably uh the own couple slides but the most important is the story um going from what we currently have to our fy2 you can see that our classroom teacher is reduced by one um our par professional tutors reduced by one also a school counselors be reduce by one special education is reduced and the um special education par

2:26:57 uh reduce that Glover and we’re talking about actually taking that therapeutic to Brown um but as they move to Brown it is a loss to this one because it’s more than the position all of these are more than in position um when we get to spreadsheets we see numbers but we don’t see stories and this a story behind each one of these people whether it’s a transfer or whether it’s reduction these folks offer beyond their job descriptions QBs training um academic andal support all of them teacher support all of them lean in and I will I’m very proud of this school that everyone is that quality of leaning in needed um pushing in lessons

2:27:45 for PBIS by our counselors be reduced and our family support our councilors do a lot of Leaning out to our families to help support them to get kids to school and to make sure they have the right resources that would be a reduction that’s not reflected by a number so I want to just make sure made that point as we look at the one can you go back to the

2:28:12 class class case I explain is it the first grade first grade kindergarten uh kindergarten um those are the numbers that we have but again that’s the toughest one to predict because it’s so fluid um is to put that number in they’re gonna go to blover any new spring that’s why that chart I showed you at the beginning is ongoing so at 15 class how many before um for teachers for classrooms class

2:28:58 sh um when you go back and you look at the the special education teachers and their exclusion Cas loads at notice between your school and Mary School Mary um Ground School is 29.4% higher case loow for inclusion teacher year have we looked at or can we look at or are we thinking of it looking at what the outcomes are working with a case load that’s almost 30 pretty much 30% higher are you getting the same outcomes are you getting um you know different outcomes because that’s that’s significant um it may may show us you know which one of those is the number we want to strive for my guess is always lower

2:29:45 numbers um it is part partially but 30% of pry large it’s a significant number um also when you talk about the therapeutic potentially moving a therapeutic program um that’s a larger Global conversation I think especially when we we talk about um I think there just needs to be a larger conversation saying you know it would be a no I’m saying it just needs to be transparent the community because when we asked for funding for this school the one of the major stories we told the community was that you will be in your home school district you won’t be assigned to a school dependent on

2:30:32 your need if you were friends next door or going to lover you won’t have to go to Brown because you have a specialized need that only can be handled here it’s very Isola and that was a big very big piece of um the push for the new schools and how that would provide Equity if we’re going to make that shift it’s not for me to say yes or no there has to be a tremendous amount of Education around why we’ve done that and it personally it would need to be based on we know that that provides better outcomes not that it’s better financially because how

2:31:17 would I I don’t know it’s not my what that oh because it’s cheaper to put everybody in one place and in well it’s more economical that’s for sure it’s more economical when they split it like that language based never came to Clover so the inclusion teachers are doing language based work which is heavy it’s heavy on their Cas or there needs to be a lot of Education around not it’s not for me to say yes or no it’s but there because we put one thing out to the community we just have to be

2:31:48 very well one piece that I can share is students graduating from per consideration how many kids would we have as far so that’s one

2:32:02 piece piece um I just want to this is a good chart to look at when you talk about incoming students when we say they would really love so if they have a sibling in third grade they might be able to take one but if they have a sibling in first grade you can see that that makes one of those classes 23 as opposed to so it it does get tricky well you wouldn’t the sing would already probably be in school no I’m saying when they move in marhe which happens that’s what we’ve been doing everybody who’s moved here we’ve had them go to I to I would you could also have sibling in an older grade the incoming K needs to be in a different in a

2:32:51 K needs to be in a different or we just for numbers we want to just hate to separate try not to separate but I do recommend this year with enrollment like monitoring those numbers sooner I mean obviously we had to implement that split end of August early September this year I think we should you know as soon as you start approaching but keep some spots open in and’ll do kindergarten registration at the end of March so that will be the first time last year I think I got about 60% of people signing up then and then I get another 10% in April I don’t know who those people could well generally

2:33:37 old get them signing up earlier or not necessarily it’s not just first incoming kindergarten Sarah you pointed out difference between two Elementary School 1 to 11 one to 10 one to eight is a very generous and nice system to have for inclusion I mean for yeah for inclusion special it’s I think the average is 18 to 20 much so so 11 I’m like that’s so some of those kids could have you know extensive just as Brian mentioned language based if some of those inclusion teachers are picking up

2:34:23 language based students who have you know a lot of SEC then they’re doing a lot of hour and each of those kids is different so somebody may need a lot more hours of somebody’s time than enough they go in and out of classrooms based on your needs yeah you have to be careful just measuring the case load number yeah because one of those cases could be equal to two or three others just it’s not a good Contin scale it’ll be great to see those hours next week what we because it really comes down to hours can I interrupt we move to Village I just want Dan’s time atber can still be measured in

2:35:11 weeks I just want to recognize the efforts he’s put in thank him

2:35:26 know your sta you know so that’s really great and that it has been a pleasure to get to sta you know uh we’re talking about Bud it gets a little because I have got to stuff um I’m really proud to be part

2:35:43 of and that’s an example of the collaboration I’m telling that have been through through this whole process thank you principal Murphy 39

2:36:02 no number off the as list so it is very possible that that is

2:36:18 possible in a while but I know it’s all my rooms are full I don’t have

2:36:25 that all right um a lot of these goals are similar to what you’ve heard from our elementary um principles here so um obviously mtss is a big goal for all of us and our um wit wisdom implementation and I just again want to give a shout out to the coaches taking on a new curriculum and we’re looking at wh wism but I also have to we math for year so so I think it’s important that we note the hard work that they do to help our teachers because it is hard work for teachers taking on the new curriculum making sure that they’re meeting the needs of the students so those are large goals for us and um it’s a collaborative process that’s really making that difference um We are continuing to work

2:37:12 on our PBIS um and our tiered supports foral and academics and we have a team of teachers that has been really working um on bringing that to our Forefront as a goal for Village School we started Community meetings this year really looking at building our Village um Community which has been it’s been a really nice process to see having students um get shout outs for being kiao kids or sharing what they’re learning about Black History Month and so we’ve just had a lot of meaningful conversations and even academic learning than a community so that’s that’s a huge goal for us so school like we can’t but we do grade level um we actually got the whole

2:37:58 school in once this year and it was tight but um our we do it by grade level and that’s been really nice because of grade level as you see here you know we have all the fourth graders in there and there’s a 187 suits in the room all celebrating together which is really impressive so um so our um actuals are pretty similar we have about a six different uh six student difference um fourth grades always our one that we have to look at more closely because they’re incoming from Brown and Glover and then we always have that um fluctuation of students going to Charter or other schools but historically I always look at that data to look at who how many students have moved into District over the summertime too and it

2:38:46 usually balances pretty even um so I feel pretty confident about those numbers um that we have there um when you are looking at our mcast scores um and looking at our exceeding and meeting expectations in all three grade bubbles um our this was our best year mcast and when I talk about class size and enrollment and all of that in a little bit I just I think it speaks volumes to our smaller class size um that that has it impacted our improv task force you know not that’s not the hill I’m Williams di on but I’m just letting us know that that has definitely been something that we’ve taken into consideration as we look at doing those small group interventions um for

2:39:33 students so um here is our current Staffing um and we have seven inclusion teachers with an average case load of 10 um obviously like we said before 10 is a really nice case load to have um we we focused a while back on having teachers and um collapsing some positions so that we were able to do more of a co- teing model so that’s why you will see that case load of 10 and seven versus having um a significant amount of tutors rep parents between classrooms I also want to note that um the story that the case loads tell the numbers versus the students sitting in front of you is very different and so we all know you know there might be a student coming in with language based needs and needing some support as well or a student coming in

2:40:20 with inclusion needs um but really needing a lot of the targeted interventions and um support from staff so I think that that story about the students sitting in front of us now versus five six years ago is very so right um next our class size overview so this year we have an average class size um fourth grade 21 fifth grade 21 and sixth grade 18 and this is for home rooms it’s not for teams obviously our fifth and sixth grade work teams um and so our next year’s projected class size is not that much different um when we get to the production um staff that you’ll see coming up so about 21 and

2:41:06 23 what’s the I miss to students um is 537 next year will be

2:41:15 5 so here we have our um Village um Staffing for this year and then our reduced Services next year um I also want to note that when you’re looking at our um reduced Services um for Staffing um one of the other pieces that will be cut is a supply line of about $70,000 I think that’s just important to note that as Teresa was talking about that tiered system of looking at budgets we did look at student facing so to cut 70,000 out of things um that might be able we have a teacher versus we worked our magic and we found it somehow it’s not easy and we’re not going with what we’re being asked to reduce our AGS so if I can have a teacher in front of students versus

2:42:01 $70,000 in supplies I’m G to put a teacher students so that’s the piece where we really had to dive in and look at what is it that we need and what is it that we’re able to um cut out of this um and you know you’re getting gu so when you’re looking at our classroom teachers it goes from 28 to 26 um that obviously impacts two classroom um teachers other teachers goes from two uh from three to two our par professional and tutor wine um goes from uh 3.73 to 1.10 um that affects our office stff as well because we have a fa professional um half time position in the office and

2:42:47 our special education teachers are reduced by uh one special education teacher does that someone’s coming

2:42:56 over no we talk about

2:43:05 numbers you’re going to two so you going to three

2:43:16 um okay um okay it’s gone okay um the the story that’s not up here with these numbers is that um when you’re looking at par professional and tutor we have done an amazing job this year looking at our wi blocks and looking at our um mtss and what every student needs and offering those interventions and diving into the data when you see tutors gone from here that means that we don’t have those general education people to support in those wom blocks in um and that is a big um and I I know it sounds silly but it’s a big hurt um when we’re looking at a reduced Services

2:44:02 versus classroom teachers and we’re talking about reducing two classroom teachers and we’re looking in our enrollment and saying we can do that um I also want to note that if we weren’t looking at reducing Services we might be looking at adding a health teacher on here um which we really use we might be looking at adding other teachers to be doing interventions with our students so those are the pieces where that story is not up here yes our class size can hand this but there are other needs that we have that we’re not going to be able to meet because we’re just looking at enrollment right here and while enrollment tells a very different story than needs of our students and the interventions in front of us are really um the the piece that’s going to

2:44:56 May the um couple questions I have give the example of for example you asking for a health teacher who’s teaching Health right now um obviously the the fourth to sixth grade level is a big change in humans and who’s teaching that right now you don’t have a health teacher so no one licensed in health is teaching and I think these are the things teing no teer never we have

2:45:38 never I was not a teacher at that time but this is this is the point we we do but is that in the best interest of pursu students and the fys teachers are not licensed or the ones we have they are but they’re um their fette and they have a curriculum full time together um I you know it’s lost and we lost a PE teacher last year teacher the position so um you know when you’re looking at like scheduling needs like you um they have five sections at the Glover and brown and they’re sending their students off to five sections of Alli Arts teachers right so we have eight sections and we’re sending them off or

2:46:24 10 sections this year and we’re sending them off to seven teachers so even like having an extra health teacher would help with the schedule pces so that everybody has so there’s there’s other you know if you want me to get into you know all the little details these are all the other pieces of the story that were that is affecting maybe you pH uh 26 27 sometimes 28 they depending on the grade level that’s going they can be there’s double teams going or a team and then a half so one of the teams has to with yeah um you know just some things I I’ve

2:47:10 heard throughout the year in the community you know as we shift your numbers things like that to be Community thoughts and concerns that really speak to what you’re saying are you know a lot of parents seem concerned not every kid has Library every cor um you don’t have enough staff to cover every special so your child might not have lot well if you’re a bet you’re guaranteed I guess it’s a warm up for that so what are you doing you’re having different Ally

2:47:46 exra they might music one semester and then not have it the next semester and then have it third semester

2:47:59 complicated complicated don’t and you know we talk about the Wind Block for a couple years we heard a lot of not not embracing feedback from the community about when this year I’ve heard a shift in that narrative and what I’ve heard is people from parents at least have I’ve been in hearing positive things for instance you know the Wind Block if your child is an advanced learner at Village you know they might do a um program a newspaper program things like that um for that’s open I think to a certain grade level but it’s grow it’s growing it’s not every great level so where that is but again those are pieces

2:48:44 where it would be great to grow those at the great level yeah so these are these are opportunities that will those opportunities still be able to be available as we reduce our

2:49:14 questions all right principal Fox all right Mr are the goals there we go so three of the four goals are continuation or you’ve seen in our school plan um so I won’t really go to

2:49:29 dep um the second goal though is um I I will come back to prioritizing historic class sizes that’ll be part of the discussion have when we get the redu services so the decisions I made there so going into that um the other goals that are listed there um comprehensive system tier supports you’ve heard that you’ve seen uh we we’ve done some great jobs over the years uh expanding our tier 2 especially now really conting on tier one uh Dei we have an outstanding Dei uh committee the commitment Dei involv in that and then just today even uh at our PFS meeting time we’re working on our student engagement social emotional learning uh through taking a look at how we’re going to redesign reimagine some of our advisory time so

2:50:16 that’s those our goals next year um to breathe a little life uh again I I’ll sort of I’m not going to lie I I like to tell this the true story The vs we’re very good school um I I I’m again I’m not going to lie uh we you know when you talk we take a look at mcast scores uh you talk about student growth you talk about meeting exceeding percentile um we’re number one or number two on the NorthShore for all four of those categories holistically so for our student growth for ELA we’re Number One initial so for our our meeting exceeding for math we are number one initial period and that’s that’s an outstanding comparison talking this goes up into anal too these are some good

2:51:02 schools um and then you can dive a little deeper in there our eighth grade their student growth was fourth in the state our eighth graders last year have um a disability that’s a subgroup their Ela growth was number two in state so it’s not just the fact that we’re moving our general body of students we’re moving everybody now is there still a gap in there yes working on them but we’re still moving them forward literally better than anybody else except one of those so I like to sort of come back to that again because we are doing a lot and we’re still success

2:51:49 ceeding even after year years and years of cuts and reductions okay we’re working hard there is going to be a it’s not maybe this year but if we’re facing this next year I’ll be talking about will we have a middle school structure I’ve been in a district where we lost the Middle School Str and they fought for years to get back and one we lost the Middle School structure and went to a junior high teachers teaching vertically more common planning time no more common time to sit down and coordinate students across teams and things like that we be lots of teams we’re a year maybe away from losing concept of Middle School in this District so that’s a that’s something I

2:52:35 take seriously so that was some of the decisions when we get to reding know reduction of forces I’m doing everything I can to keep our teachers in front of our students to keep our structure

2:52:49 successful and that affects not only all students all residents St yes um projections you know I project project sort of a pretty flat growth um we we’ve seen a massive Resurgence of seventh graders returning since Co um last year 24 the two years part of that we had 27 to seventh grade 42 across the whole school so we we we’ve been Gathering recouping students at a quite a rate so we’re predicting a pretty flat growth overall as far as our size going um one couple slides here so how do you do that projection you have no idea no I go all the way back to third

2:53:35 grade so I go back to third grade when you had numbers that weren’t divided by the charter that’s that’s our number one and I track that grade every single year so I knew that this grade in the seventh grade had the possibility of being a larger grade and they did they came back because some kids come back larade right and so you know I can’t predict 24 but I figured we’d pick up at least 18 17 somewhere there and have a good size class Pi Go 24 25 26 now with new students that came in after start the year that’s like a whole class it is and we did we we had to do some creative scheduling this year we um in August we created we sh Ed stud you know teachers out of the eighth grade by a class we have two teachers that are now teaching

2:54:21 cross team across team social studies across team math class helped us reduce class sizes especially in one very difficult period if you remember from the 30 Cuts we lost that Latin position and and that was a there was a programmatic decision in that because the town’s not selecting Latin but the problem was is there’s a structural problem losing that entire position I need five places on both teams to put SCS because I don’t have at least a halftime language teacher in two periods four I only have four and so unless I did those those rescheduling of those two teachers in August we would have had two periods of

2:55:06 27s across the board math English social studies and and PE 32 so we did some creative scheduling to again that goal of historic class size is 21 that’s been our 15E average is 2 so our staffing I broke mine out a little different on the slide I’ll talk about inclusion in a couple slides so I wanted to show you the the three special ed the three programs that we had and these you know the descriptions of the programs were on there taken directly from a student services website and I want to just sort of tie in that of those 10 teachers we have six are within our substantially supp programs so we have three right now language based teachers once one therapeutic in two a classs and those are needed those are

2:55:52 student needs driving the numbers and those those are fluid in a small District like this uh you know last year I had one ABA teacher and then you know we have to go home moving and things like that so this is a fluid process especially small scho yes the other four our inclusion and I’ll get to those and I’ll talk about their their case loads okay so the next one so class side is at the secondary level here for for M Melle a little bit different a little bit hard to calculate but we’ll sort of there the average class sides if you’re really you know sort of drawing your attention so you can see Spanish with a loss of that that whole position that was Latin our Spanish classes are now actually that’s we’ve had a you know like I said I had a couple new students come in this year we’re at an average of

2:56:39 25 with a couple seventh grade once being 26 on Spanish so our Spanish is working very diligently uh the next page sort of delves into a little bit more I like to bring up this is the Kathy leonardson Page because this is when when she was on a school committee we used to go into average mode medium range we used to go into this we’ve done this for years and years the one that you can sort of see the mode for those of you that might not have taken or remember your about seventh grade math uh mode is the most frequent number in the data set so if you take a look at our English classes the most frequent occurring number is 23 the most frequent current number of science is 24 our science classes because all of those students that met have been in the program they all come

2:57:24 back in for science with support we don’t have substantial separate science classes um so they come back in for science so our science classes really reflect how large you would be if you didn’t have substantial program and then the last bottom right corner all denote a third of our classes are 23 or large so that’s hidden in those average so if you think about that you know 65% of those lie in that large seventh grade so um on the next slide this sort of digs into our special education our tier two classes a little bit more um so our top two there math lit academic support these are our tier two supports of our students we have three sections of each of those uh lit

2:58:11 lab that’s what we call our elll classes um so our elll classes we have five of those that are you know good number of students this year curriculum support um these are again our guaranteed classes uh based upon student IEPs we have 29 sections of support uh 17 are inclusion 12 are through the ABA lb and therapeutic strands that I mentioned before um sub separate classes again I just sort of rolled out these are the number of sub separate classes we must have to meet the needs of our students and if we remember subar classes I don’t talk about numbers those are legally cap 10 so that’s where we’re at those 8 is that what we sometimes refer I know we don’t use names any but therapeutic no therapeutic is why am IAP uh because therapeutic is not is not an okay how do I explain therapeutic is not an academic

2:58:57 placement therapeutic is a social emotional therapeutic support placement our students within that program might be reflected in a sub seeper or they might not we’ve had honestly one year we had a therapeutic student was number one on our French national exam so Therapeutics support does not refer to academic needs ABA and lb does refer to academic needs okay uh and then finally at the very very bottom I’m sorry uh our four inclusion teachers have an average case load of our school of 18 students so we have two per grade so we’re a little larger and they also co- te two classes they also co- teach English and math so that they have only

2:59:44 uh three classes of curriculum support to meet with those

2:59:50 need so reducing services to meet the needs uh uh we started first just like um Mandy did we made a decision to cut $42,000 in instructional supplies and professional development so that’s not reflected on this we will will also on the bandwagon of user fee reimagination from call it uh as another savings um and then we’re looking at reducing one administrator and and one teacher currently my assistant principal Joan Miller uh I convinced this to ground for one more year before her retirement she’s definitely retiring at the end of this year uh got the most we good out of her um so for that position as Sarah asked it’s a 100% cut so by

3:00:37 being a 100% cut with no impact on unemployment or anything else it saves two teaching positions so I go back to that first goal I have keep our class sizes without that being the first cut I make I’m cutting two more teachers which brings class sizes in the eth grade next year for at

3:00:59 least for three of three of the periods to be 27s and then the one teacher that I’ll be cutting is the teacher that I thought for for 10 years which is our teer the first 10 years here I put it in as request every single year three years I got it um and what we’ll have to do is uh you know I sat down talked with Ashley Leman our our special chair and we’re going to have to reimagine and go back to using tutors we outstanding reading tutors and again counting on them to deliver the services they deliver prior to the teacher imagination working

3:01:43 that when you let go the librarian last year have you seen any impact in current year yes uh at at Midway Point um I should have come with the numbers I told I told Teresa the numbers um we we still have the library open after school three days a week um our library checkout and and I I’m sort of winging it right here if I remember right about halfway through the year um we reduced uh our number of books uh that were checked out by about 1,00 we checked out less than 400 books the first semester our students um where we typically were at 2200 4,000 5,000 so

3:02:28 that’s the first impact so I don’t know if that means our students are reading less or they’re getting the books elsewhere the second impact is um The Way teachers can use that room uh in our library um we talk about research which is something that really sort of starts the Middle School serious research about getting out there finding it teachers don’t have time to come in and prep the library pull the books pull the topics pull the subjects put them on top of the carts and come in to do Egyptian research with you know Mr scha and it’s like laid out for you and he can talk you through it but the resources are easily findable we we don’t have that so teachers you have to commit more time to

3:03:14 research losing class time to that or change the change their approach to how to teach that and then finally you know our librarian was also actively involved in making sure our students understood and were taught how to site papers correctly she she actually did grading some of our research papers c-ring with our teachers she worked with our teched teacher so there was so much more that we got from that position that’s the

3:03:49 I’m going to make an exception to my own rule without not talking about personal experiences you just talked about research one thing I’ve noticed a change in is the kids use a format now where you enter in you put in the names and things like that and it spits it out instead of teaching a child how to sign a paper and I do worry as they move on if they’ll know how to sign a paper yeah that’s not a dig at any human teaching that’s also the the believe it or not it’s also one of the things where we take a look at is what is AI going to do for our students move forward and that’s literally going to assist our students as they move forward because all right you might talk about it as maybe that’s

3:04:35 the skilled they not fully learning as as a middle school student or fully learning as a high school student now but to be honest when you’re now at a junior or senior college level that’s what you’re going to do you’re going to plug and chug your things in the AI it’s going to spit it out in the right format and you don’t have to waste any I don’t say waste any time but that’s going to be off the table for our our student unbelievably we all learned our AMA you know our all our different formats and MLA formats we did all this yeah it was the worst now our our students in the future aren’t going to have to do that it’s not even the future it’s now College my son is a sophomore College the only thing he guarantees me AI for is why resources just plug in your stuff

3:05:20 and go just not worry about if the book if it’s a film if it’s a this because I was worried as these kids move through are they going to be able to not only site but read a citation and find a source from it you know that side will always be a skill that’ll be taught you know throughout college and high school a little bit in the Middle School not of time but a little bit in the midd school the creating of the sighting format that’s pretty much going to be off the table for our students moving forward our kids moving forward I I have a 20y old and it’s off interestingly my mom’s an English professor she still teaches

3:06:11 sure and last but not least for schools Dr

3:06:18 Carlson okay so um some of the overarching goals for next year for the high school is um and I use this word preserve because this is something that I’m really concerned about is to preserve our tiered academic interventions that we currently have in place our po teaching our RTI models really those have been very successful with our students and I firmly believe it’s something we need to preserve to keep our students looking um and that’s also going to go into some of these Cuts I’ll talk about that a little further um continue to foster a sense of inclusion and longing to um Continue to update our curriculum and our alignment of our courses at MHS and also to continue our work climate with the veterans mle school and to

3:07:04 ensure all of our students have access to high quality educational opportunities um so here’s a little of our projections for next year and M a nice job I just St up from the eth grade um and um projected out where we’re going to be I think we’ll be maybe two kids so it’s gonna be pretty pretty even in grades 11 and 12 we do tend to take on some International students that shelle talked about before and so that’s why that’s bumped up slightly in there um I looked at how many we’ve taken over the last few years and figured it in there and then our mcast data again you really really pleased with how we did um

3:07:49 on mcast and we’re pretty much at prepandemic levels when we are at this point and um really concerned um about some of these cuts and keeping keeping that trajectory going um our current Staffing um is here it’s at 132.5 as you can see I did the same as Matt and put the program descriptions for the special ed um positions in there and those are taking right from the website so it’s consistent um and it has the the number of teachers that we have at the high school in these different programs and then in addition to this we also have um it seven inclusion teachers as well and

3:08:34 their average case load is about 12 teachers so seven on top2 nope it’s figured in under the special ed teacher and it’s the and again we’ve got Cafe workers

3:08:54 in um here is our class siiz overview um and I broke it down by Department here so you’ll see the average we are similar um with Matt where um most of our sub separate classes um would be in English math and there’s some social studies but in science there really isn’t sub separate so that’s why you see those numers up a little bit and in um social studies it’s only a semester that is um and then this breaks it down even further um so you can see where we are with the different world languages we do still have Latin at the high school um and the number of teachers that we also have in each subject area there is um sorry it’s something I do want to point out though English Math

3:09:41 and Science we do offer RTI classes in those subjects which are smaller group classes so I did back those numbers out because it was really skewing those average class

3:09:52 sizes um and here’s our special ed in tier 2 classes that we currently run so we have six RTI classes that’s a tier two intervention in math English and Science and they are specific to those subject areas we have 30 curriculum supports we’re currently running um literacy lab was our elll classes um and then our sub separate numbers are are down there for the number of courses that we’re running and the Strand that they’re

3:10:23 running and then here is what we’re looking at for reduced services and I do want to also point out like Mandy and Matt um like everybody here it’s not just positions there is other Cuts in um supplies textbooks professional development um and then we got to this this area here um so we’ll be reducing the number of secretaries we have um and redistributing um their workloads amongst the remaining positions that are there um the par professional and tutor we’re reducing that that is a nonfed non- special ed par professional um SL tutor position

3:11:11 um and we have moved that position into a special ed this year year so it’s it’s um it’s not being utilized this this year was at the beginning of the year it recently um school counselors something to point out it looks very high and it is we have 10 right now um but that is not just guidance counselors that is guidance counselors it is our mental health um counselors as well that includes our school psychologists and our social workers so we’re we’re looking at reducing um one of the one of those um and then special ed teacher um we’re going to go from 16 down to 14.6 so we’re going to make a full time a part-time and then cut one

3:11:56 position and um our special ed power professional and tutor go from 15 down to

3:12:04 12.4 and I believe it’s two that are under

3:12:14 s any questions for high school I just tell to one everybody here I want to ask at the beginning two topics that were actually this we um had to do with um Dei so you guys all can speak in detail but it appears even the high school you didn’t have a separate bullet point but it’s still um part of your building culture yes to include the diversity acusation um focus um and I guess curriculum that’s um the other thing that came up um also I wanted to ask about was black history um someone I think maybe you might have touched on it but were there activities or were there focuses okay good because I think we probably might

3:12:59 want to get some information um out to the Cross around I think they might have been a disconnect on communication absolutely will thank you Michelle you know we all H hit on and any I’m sorry anybody else specific questions from Mich um everyone’s talked on every week all these are obviously impactful will these affect your C Force offerings your differentiated learning um any of that potentially you know how we we talk about how we’ve been basing out sorry CP to um to to move toward towards a better

3:13:47 implementation ands model did do these numbers affect that and if so Happ um no this number preserves these numbers right here preserves our RTI and it preserves our go teaching and because we’re at the average 12 for inclusion you know those numbers will go up and something I should have mentioned before is it’s not just an inclusion teacher that just has 12 kids those teachers are also in the classroom cool teaching at least two and or a small group and any of the other um special ed like the adaa or the therapeutic they’re doing the same thing they’re either co- teing or they’re running small groups or they do both in addition to their

3:14:32 supports they’re working really really hard these kids and I mean they’re getting great results as you can

3:14:43 see sort of in summary this slide has a lot on it but it’s we tried to summarize what the principles I’ve just shared with you into one slide so some of the efficiencies Andor reductions include the consolidation of the therapeutic program to Brown School two students this time the reductions and Staffing are 36 positions but as everyone pointed out some are 2 or five or the total ftes is 28 um the list is just copied from the the list of that was on principal slides uh transfer partial funding for athletics and extracurriculars to participants we

3:15:28 talked about elimination of teacher leaders at the elementary level significant decrease in professional development funding across the schools and at the district level and a huge decrease in instructional Supply especially Village saved a teacher and took out more one more thing is that the very beginning when we did what we normally do when we’re creating budgets we said what would you need in your school to improve to have continuous Improvement this list here shows what the principles had um requested originally so restoration of the librarian that we’ve talked about the Middle School seven

3:16:14 tutor positions across the elementary school to support mtss two permanent Subs to provide coverage which is a real problem actually for attendance across the district um Staffing to implement the bridge for resilient youth at the U Middle School Staffing in equipment to for ground scrw that you talked about earlier um curriculum leader and data intervention coaching positions at the high school and then other smaller requests is that in order priority we didn’t prioritize yet because if you tell us you give money we’ll prioritize these are above and beyond but we would still this and what we just put out here to cut would

3:17:01 be and this final slide is just um next steps March is a busy month as you can see down there um principles are already today shared everything at their faculty meetings which is listed there so day early two days early um and then they’ll go to their school advisory councils also more of this and then we have school committee meetings coming up um where we will share the staff income ability brief um based on enrollment student need IEPs um we also present the athletic fees um options two options that we’re working on right now and then um you guys have right now which you may change the school committee has the superintendent recommended budget who will a vote it says for 21st of March

3:17:47 but you may choose to change that remember so and then of course finance committee meeting and then the town meeting May in that have a budge yeah right now it’s scheduled for March 21st oh that’s budget budget so I’m gonna open to the committee I don’t know if there’s a way any pictures get a note The Village tomorrow they’re wearing black red yellow and green right I know it’s hard because some people don’t want their children in pictures I just I didn’t know if there’s some way we do that I think that would be

3:18:32 nice I’d like to make a comment that if you look at our M task force pretty good all the great that means the elementary teachers from 1 to third are doing their work getting competency in literacy and math despite year after year of constant requests to cut our budgets our teachers are working your hes off trying to get their kids ready for the next level and I think we ought to commend the schools for that but I think I agree with Matt we’re at a Tipping Point at some point in time with the concept request to reduce our budgets cut our programs teachers going to bail and we’re not going to be able to keep this kind of momentum up I can see it I can feel it I hear it so I think we to be very cognizant that they are working very

3:19:17 very hard that me the high proficiency level we have they can’t keep going year after year if they keep getting ass to cut the budget don’t get the materials and lose teachers at the same time I think at some point in time we really have to figure out how to get around this because I think it’s going to be real impact within the next couple of years well I want to thank Dr mcness and Michelle and all of the everyone on the uh Team here for um probably the most thorough well-presented uh beautiful Graphics um but clearly um I mean I’ve set through a number of these um both on the committee and off the committee and this is without a doubt the most um robust detail oriented um presentation that I’ve seen we are

3:20:02 still looking for the staff accountability which we’ll get and the special education um just to understand the numbers around that which I think will just be sort of an overlay um on what you all Ed tonight um it’s not easy right we’re in a we’re in we are in a tough spot but I think we are at a point where we are able trly to present to the town you know what what the reality is about what it cost to educate our students in Marblehead today um and the needs that they have so I thank you all for a really really great job coming together in in really really situation and I would I would second that I just have two I think very minor points um so when we talk about

3:20:48 encast awesome par but I’m just wondering like when we’re using you know how we’re doing relative to others we’re using the state which makes sense would it make also make sense to have another column around I believe desie has comparable schools um so we have those and we presented actually you presented those I can share it’s just I just think I think it would just be helpful yeah um in this presentation the other thing is because sometimes we you know when you look at some of this information you don’t really understand you know like the cafe workers are funded elsewhere and we talked about taking them out I’d rather keep that in and just say fund it elsewhere just so you’re seeing the whole picture um so just a recommendation as I’m you know but yeah this was amazing the presentation but

3:21:35 just two small suggestions so one thing that I question I had asked earlier actually un um so one of the things we’re talking about are actual missions in in people um and there are savings around that as well as budgeting levels in regards to um health insurance so I think that’s something that we probably want to reach out to the townside just to understand because when we have these positions that we’re creating you know having to cut back on also creating um savings on insurance side I that’s something we to discuss because we ought to be reefing you it’s our staff we ought to

3:22:21 be reing those savings as well to go to reinvest into our budget so I think we just need to follow up on you know some of the

3:22:34 numbers do we also have it would be great to see how many these are part time versus [Music]

3:22:42 fulls fulls but I did want to mention that currently out of the 36 positions 4.2 of them vacants and three of them are vacancies so it’s a small

3:23:02 portion portion anybody

3:23:10 um what what number are we carrying for our unemployment to

3:23:39 CS I mean I can look up the number it’s more to the point that we are are carrying a number therefore we’re literally laying off staff to pay for the staff we’ve already had to lay off I believe we’re increasing it by $400,000 so we are laying off 35% right 35%

3:24:03 so would be carrying over till next year but we already no this is and because all these right okay I guess I um so I

3:24:19 just so you almost have to lay off an additional half of person to pay off for the person who just lay it off

3:24:30 so I just thank you for doing this again you know Groundhog’s Day year after year I I have to say you know the first time I really sat through the first brutal round of this I was in the audience and watching and that was in 2019 and the only people on the school committee that year were Jen and Meredith that bought to keep your staff and then the next year I sat through it as a Committee Member and again it wasn’t it wasn’t unanimous again I think there was you know two people at that point fighting to keep back and the next year it was one and then it was two I don’t we are the rubber has met

3:25:16 the road the rubber met the road way back when like it’s in our rearview mirror nothing that leaves ever comes back you know we were I still cannot fathom that last year we we went to a system where we have an entire school does not have a librarian and we’re not even in a position to bring that back yet and I know I’m preaching to the Cho but part of this is the public is watching too and I or I hope hope to God they are at some point and the rubber has met the road we cannot we you know to quote Jason Silva from four years ago folks four years ago Jason Silva said in these meetings we are no longer cutting that we are now

3:26:03 cutting flesh and Bone well here we are folks we’ve cut it again and we sit in these meetings where we decide are we going to amputate a leg or an arm

3:26:18 and I just I’m we have I’m just we have to at some point fund what we value in this town and it’s really hard that last night in a presentation we heard the town is cutting as identified a million cuts and we’re being asked to ID and we just identified 2.5 million so as a town you need to decide what we value because I do think we’re working here I think that our this committee is working to fund what we need to fund but you know it’s the last year we laid off 33 people and the town added twoe positions so at some point this town

3:27:06 needs to fund where their values and I just I know I’m preaching the fire the people around this but enough is enough so thank you all for living through this again I hope to not do

3:27:28 this so there’s nothing else I will journ us at age 27