##VIDEO ID:sk7ZBvCYnoo## good evening and welcome to this meeting of the Boston school committee I'm chairperson Jerry Robinson we'll begin with the Pledge of Allegiance I alce to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liy and justice for all we currently do not have a quorum our official meeting will begin once the Quorum is established I will acknowledge the presence of the Quorum before proceeding can we do the announcement about okay all right I want to welcome everyone who is joining us tonight in person on Boston City TV and on Zoom I'm going to ask everyone here in the chamber to please turn off the volume on your laptops or other devices so it does not interfere with the audio for tonight's meeting thank you for your cooperation tonight's meeting documents are posted on the committee's web page bostonpublicschools.org school committee under the December 18th meeting link for those joining us in person you can access the meeting documents by scanning the QR code that's posted by The Doors the meeting documents have been translated into all of the major BP s languages any translations that are not ready prior to the start of the meeting will be posted as soon as they are finalized the meeting will be rebroadcast on Boston City TV and posted on the school committee's web page and on YouTube the recording will be available in all of the BPS languages the committee is pleased to offer live simultaneous interpretation virtually in Spanish Haitian Creole ceran cantones Mandarin Vietnamese and American Sign Language the zoom interpretation feature has been activated Zoom participants should click the globe icon at the bottom of your screen to select your language preference and I'd like to remind everyone to speak at a slower Pace to assist our interpreters I now invite my fellow members and superintendent Skipper to join me on the floor for the presentation of a citation to Louisa Sparrow recipient to the 2025 massachus Massachusetts teacher of the year Mrs Farrow or as students affectionately call her Miss s is a special education teacher for fifth and sixth graders at the Perry School in South Boston I had the pleasure of joining the ceremony where Miss s was honored by both the governor and the mayor I was deeply moved by the introduction by her students and the many students hearing her on in the crowd this s is deeply committed to inclusion and literacy actively contributing to the school's inclusion planning team and founding an inclusive cooking PL the master teacher teacher of the year program is the highest honor for educators in the fa Rec izing those who demonstrate exceptional dedication and make a lasting positive impact on their students and Community we are incredibly proud that Miss Sparrow has been selected as the recipient of the state's top leader educator award next year she will be a reaon to the Department of Elementary and secondary education des and serve as a representative for teachers all over Massachusetts just like the student we will be caring you congratulations for the C reads the Boston school committee conr teacher all recipient of the 2025 Massachusetts teacher of the year as an educator of the Year miss Farrell exemplifies the hard work commitment to professionalism of educated buiness to continually go above and beyond be it further know that the school committee and superintendent of schools extend their deepest appreciation to miss miss faroh for her unwavering dedication to BPS students and families and wish her continued set in all future endeavors December 18 and I I just like to say that it was uh when we got to be able to see got to be able to see Miss s with her class um and all of the students that the Perry she said to them just remember I love you and I I want the best for you and you could feel from the students how much they care about you and they felt that care and I think you know your you make us proud today not just at the Perry but in DPS and all in Massachusetts and so um Lisa will be now representing us as she goes out and she spreads her best practice and the best is spr practice throughout Massachusetts so congratulations it's really really in honor to to have you as an educator here in DPS thank you so much I'm really honored to be here today and very proud to be Public Schools teacher um this is my fifth district that I've taught in um my fourth state um country that I've taught in um and I've really found the home that I'm very proud to teach in here and I really appreciate all of your support superintendent Skipper actually um I don't know if you remember this but you came to visit my classroom on one of my very first weeks back from maternity leave after having my second child and um it I initially felt very anxious about the visit just saying oh no I'm just back but you really like you were just so warm and friendly in the visit and I thought it was very comforted that you were there and really excited to work in Boston so I'm very proud to be there thank you so much and I'm just so proud to work in L so many wonderful Educators in the district e busy busy oh yes sor before we move on I'd also like to take a moment to congratulate Vice chair Mr Michael O'Neal on his reappointment to the Boston school committee Mr O'Neal has been an unwavering leader his dedication vast experience and insightful contributions have been greatly benefited our students we are fortunate to have him continue in his role and I look forward to our continued collaboration for the success of our students in schools we're now going to move on to public comment thank you chair the public comment period is an opportunity for parents caregivers students and other concerned parties to make brief presentations to the school committee on pertinent School issues questions on specific School matters are not answered this time but are referred to the superintendent for a later response questions on specific policy matters are not answered this time but may be the subject or later discussion by the committee the meeting will feature two public comment periods with the first comment period limited to one hour priority will be given to those testifying in person time permitting the committee will then open it up for virtual testimony after one hour anyone who hasn't testified will have the opportunity to do so at the end of the meeting we have 16 speakers this evening each person will have three minutes to speak and I will remind you when you have 30 seconds remaining if your remarks are longer than three minutes please email your comments for distribution to the committee the time that an interpreter uses for English interpretation will not be deducted from a speaker alloted time speakers may not reassign their time to others please direct your comments to the chair and refrain from addressing individual school committee members or District staff please note the comments of any public speaker do not represent the Boston Public Schools or the Boston school committee please state your name affiliation and what neighborhood you are from before you begin we will begin this evening with our inperson speakers d ra Manning John mud Willow Yang and Cynthia Lee Dedra Manning good evening members of the school committee and superintendent my name is jerra Manning I am a resident of Dorchester a single parent and sole Financial supporter of two school age children who are also public school students I've spoken to you many times before and I feel that not much progress has been made I'm encouraged to see that the exam school policy is on the agenda today however I fear that there won't be any meaningful change to the policy that doesn't continue to exclude students who live in different areas of the city including West Roxbury parts of Dorchester um and students who go to the Elliott school which is one of Boston Public Schools own school I understand that the policy might include tiers being compressed my concern with that is even if you reduce the number of tiers if you still have the higher tiers competing against many more applicants particularly those who do not receive bonus points those students are targeted for exclusion I would like the school committee to understand that Boston Public Schools is meant to serve all members of the community that includes people who live in West rockbury Dorchester Charlestown um all corners of the city every single child who lives in the city should have a similar chance for admission so by continuing to sort of go with a tier policy that has applicant admittance rates in below 50% where others have close to 90 or 100% that's just not acceptable and I struggle to understand the disconnect between members of the public not being adequately served I understand that the system in the past um put students at a severe disadvantage you've really just created another group of students to be excluded I also want to touch briefly on testimony that I gave about 6 weeks ago where there was incorrect information um related to the so-called bonus Point list so I was correct that information was incorrectly posted in November but I want to point out to the school committee members that that information was available from desie in February so February to November is plenty of time to look at the data and calculate the the correct amounts and you simply just can't be dropping this in November and not have it be accurate and I will say that despite the fact that the one that I mentioned was corrected there were other mistakes that were subsequently corrected but that was not advertised and the list wasn't even indicated that it was subsequently updated it's just not right thank you thank you time next speaker is John mud good evening my name is John mud I'm a resident of Cambridge and a longtime education advocate in Boston excuse me for those of us who have been monitoring the diversity hiring issue for many years the report you received at the last meeting was disappointing and discouraging 2024 was a bad year for Teacher diversity the overall percentage of educators of color declined BPS still does not meet the 50-year-old GED standard of 25% black Educators BBS hired only 38 black teachers in 2024 that is half the number hired two years ago last year BPS also saw the largest exit of black teachers and the largest net loss of black teachers for all the years reported 52 more black teachers left the system than were hired into the district this year the same is true for Latinos where 15 more Educators exited than were hired this reality was nowhere highlighted in the report yet we are told in the hiring report that the percentage of teachers of color is stable as though that might be reassuring there was no sense of deep concern about the lack of progress on this issue no sense of urgency or accountability the report does celebrate one positive achievement of this year's hiring which is the report that over 50 % of educator hires have some self-reported language fluency it is sadly ironic however that these same teachers will be assigned into classes where they are told they cannot use native language in instruction and over 90% of the students are failing stop implementing inclusion for multilingual students develop bilingual programs where teachers can use their language skills in instruction publicizing new bilingual programs for the few score of students diverts attention from the reality that thousands are being dumped into English immersion classes the lessons I learned from the report and the recommendations I would make are the gity standard are woefully out of dat update them two add reports on teacher language diversity to the existing reports on race and ethnicity three report the gaps in race and language numbers for each School four require the district to develop a long-term teacher diversity plan with goals timetables and outcomes that can be measured and provide the basis for accountability five bring successful pipeline programs to scale and six most important convene a real working group task force to develop new strategies that can significantly increase the number and percentages of black Latino Asian and language Pacific proficient teachers including a collaboration with local colleges and universities what is happening now is not working thank you next speaker is Willow Yang good evening my name is Willow Yan and I'm a resident of the Mission Hill I'm currently working with the office of multilingual and Multicultural education department at Boston Public Schools I'm here asking the school committee to advocate for me and other intern International colleagues ability to continue work with BPS after May 2025 all of us came from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and are passionate about contributing our Knowledge and Skills to better the education system here in Boston our current work authorization under F1 student Visa is set to expire in the summer of 2025 however all of us have a master's degree from Harvard that qualifies for o opt step extension allowing us to work without work sponsorship for two more years if our employer in this case the City of Austin is enrolled in the eify program with the federal government we believe that enrolling in E verify is an important step in ensuring that BPS retains a culturally and linguistically diverse representation of it work according to the BPS strategic vision for 2020 to 2025 BPS students come from 139 countries and almost one in two students speak a different language at home at multiple points throughout the Strategic report BPS commits itself to quote hire and retain a Workforce that reflects the racial ethnic and linguistic diversity of the students and families it serves end quote in addition the report also indicate that it will quote address the structural barriers that Impact Staff and educators of color for us this is a structural barrier the retention of international staff will ensure that students or teachers are supported continuously and consistently as Educators from International backgrounds we're proud that we can bring in perspective that reflects the students and families of our BPS Community retaining current staff will mean that resources can be aimed at existing programming rather than cost of hiring and additional training however we're faced with bureaucratic rat taping when it comes to advocating for ourselves PPS Ohr said this is a responsibility of the city of Boston when we approach the city of Boston their response clearly acknowledge their understanding and awareness of the E verifi program and the benefits for a few years however they cannot give us an answer because implemented it across the implement it across would be difficult given be Boston is a decentralized department I want to highlight that this is not the first time this conversation has been raised in BPS their leaders who came before us spoke up and their voices were not heard today we're asking the school committee to Advocate to be a part of our advocacy pushing the city of Boston to prioritize enrollment in the E verifi process before February 2025 next speaker is Cynthia Lee dear school committee my name is Cynthia leay and I currently work with the Department of Behavioral Health Services here at Boston Public Schools I'm here asking the school committee to advocate for me and other um colleagues that come from International backgrounds to continue work with BPS after May of 2025 um Through the Ever verify program my time at BPS has been marked by a diverse community that strives to provide safe supportive and culturally relevant educational experiences for all students and families and I am fortunate to be able to serve BPS in the Department of Behavioral Health Services our district is at the Forefront of school-based Mental Health services in school psychology and we are recognized internationally for the work that we do as a project manager for the Department I manage a $5 million competitive Workforce Development um program and Grant this grant seeks to recruit train and retain highquality BPS school-based mental health practitioners that reflect the racial cultural and linguistic diversity of our community all of which contribute to the Strategic priorities of Boston Public Schools during my first 3 months in this department I'm also proud to share that I was able to secure $100,000 of funding to expand our Mental Health Resources and services which will contribute to the high quality care that our students deserve retaining current staff will mean that resources can be ex aimed at existing programming rather than the additional costs that go into hiring and training in many of our departments the description of losing staff have already been felt due to our our um not being enrolled in ever verify we are not the first to raise this concern at Boston Public Schools I hope that you can feel the sense of urgency that I'm trying to convey that losses are felt throughout the entire BPS Community whether it be in our departments facing unnecessary shortages and more importantly students who will not be able to fully benefit from the services and programs that BPS offers if we work together to begin the process for E verify now we can prevent losses in BPS and will pave the way for more highquality professionals practitioners and Educators to serve in Boston Public Schools our next speakers are M Moro wandel tropman Kyla Briggs Barbara Fields Willie bodrick myo and wandel tropen will need Mr Bernan good evening everyone for the better flow of communication she would rather read the entire document and I will provide a side translation into English as soon as she's done Academy l the com compas thank you very much now the ation is being provided into English side translation good evening members of the school committee my name is Marine Moro I live in Dorchester and work as a power professional at the Maria um Academy throughout my experience in an inclusive classroom I have witnessed the significant challenges we face when attempting to adapt the curriculum to meet the diverse needs of our students every child has a unique ability and strength and strength and our responsib ility as Educators is to ensure that all receive the support necessary to thrive in an inclusive classroom students face a variety of challenges from difficulties in language development mod skills memory attention to so emotional aspects some multilingual students require specialized instruction to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers which further increases the complexity of the task as par professionals our work is critical to ensure that each student receives the necessary support in these areas helping to adapt materials provide personalized attention and facilitate social integration this often requires extra effort as we must manage complexity the complexity of emotional situations and adjust accordingly to teaching strategies to the specific needs of every child is were one of the biggest concerns arises the low salaries of our professionals despite the multiple responsibilities we take on from assisting in the classroom to adapting to the emotional and educational needs of students our salaries do not reflect the level of commitment and work that this job requires this low salary not only affects our motivation but also geop paradises the quality of support we can offer our dear students to achieve a positive and lastic lasting impact in their lives it is crucial that the importance of our work is recognized through Fair compensation as we always say together we are stronger thank you very much thank you next speaker is Fel tropman likewise Mr M will read the entire document I will provide it translation as soon as use that into English English school Mor ad V for thank you very much site translation is provided into English right now good afternoon my name is Juan Dell I live in Roxbury and recently I graduated from the English High School additionally I am representing soad Latina which is a nonprofit organization Youth Development organization where I'm currently staff member and alumni of their program today I'm here to communicate several demands about tech education in schools and how we as young people can take better advantage of it an interesting statistic here the Surgeon General warning a year ago the Surgeon General of the United States Mr VC Murphy is Ed a new warning about social media and youth mental health while social media may offer some benefits it can also be detrimental to the mental health and well-being of Children and adolescents with as many as 95% of 13 to 17 year olds reporting using social media platform and more than onethird reporting using social media almost constantly here's the demand funding for digital citizenship classes and artificial intelligent classes plus BPF when according when appropriate BPS Personnel our demand as as unorganization is that the funding from the 2025 school year be spent primarily on adding capacity to the school system in regards to that big problem by implementing professional development workshops where teachers are taught about how to use technology and artificial intelligence also we are requesting that BPS provides workshops or classes on responsible digital citizenship and responsible phone use in all schools my personal story W's personal experience with phone policy at the English High School personally I was when I was a student the implementation of the Yonder Poes program was very stressful at first but later I realized that having conversations instead of being on my phone could be very productive this also help other young people to develop their future and my last demand finally soci Latina is requesting that BPS creates a committee that includes students parents Guardians and outside organizations that work with you youth to advice regarding the policy of using mobile devices in public schools it is important that BPS implements artificial intelligence Readiness for all classes and class that teach how critical it is to be a digital consumer finally we need to do an audit to find out that BPS schools are C what what are what are currently doing the BPS schools to prepare the students with this necessary ability and competence it is necessary to take immediate action so that these benefits will be helping the youth and the young people to have a better life and those lives are not lost thank you very much for your attention to his special request and have a good night everyone thank you very much thank you next speaker is Kayla Briggs Kayla Briggs Barbara just G to give you the statement good evening school committee members and superintendent last sound I can see my name is Barbara fields and I'm representing the black Educators Alliance of Massachusetts I speak to you this evening with a sense of urgency and deep concern regarding a troubling and largely Overlook crisis with within Boston Public Schools the alarming decline in the hiring and retention of black Educators this issue if left un addressed will undermine any progress made in diversifying our educated Workforce with far-reaching implications for our students the recent presentations to the school committee such as the equity garity Educators report which highlighted Recruitment and Retention trends for educators of color have inadvertently masked the severity of the problem the report combining hiring and retention data for both black teachers and counselors leading to an unclear picture of the situation in doing so it obscured the specific challenges faced by black Educators in BPS making it difficult to grasp the full scope of the crisis and formulate appropriate interventions guidance councils are not considered teachers in the gity court report it C currently reports black teachers and guidance counselors in the report at 22.6% down from the 23.1% in 20 2023 we asked the school committee to request the number and percentages of black teachers separate from guidance councils in an updated report so that the actual percentage of black teachers employed in the BPS is known and I bet after receiving that report the last meeting none of you can tell me exactly how many black teachers there are in BPS you can tell me how many black teachers and guidance counsels in BPS the data presented in the report also shows that the retention of black administrat has Dr dropped sharply from 91.7% in 2021 to 75.6% in 2023 this decline coincides with the period of leadership turnover and reports of disproportionate administrative leaves 30 seconds affecting black leaders of color in BPS this allegation of discriminatory targeting has not been adequately addressed to date by BPS the retention of black teachers fell from 83.3 in 21 to 81.2% in 23 there are several key questions that remain unanswered and must be addressed to fully understand the causes of black educator attrition and we're going to give you a memo so sake your time I want time is up okay I will skip all of those but the other thing that I would like you to pay attention to is I'm going is the uh changes that are reported in that and those are changes that I thought we were already doing so I'm really surprised that there there is changes for next year thank you thank you for the extra time appreciate it next speaker is willly Brodrick good evening uh superintendent Skipper to uh chair Robinson and vice chair O'Neal and to the entire Boston of the school school committee my name is Reverend Willie bodrick II and I serve as president of the Boston Network for black student achievement and as an organization we are committed and dedicated to advancing equity for all students but especially black students families and Educators and we believe in addressing systemic issues with an urgency Clarity and compassion tonight I want to bring to your attention a pressing matter within the BPS uh the alarming decline of hiring and retention of black Educators uh this issue goes beyond Personnel it is a structural challenge that we have been facing and that directly impacts the quality of education and the equity within the all of our schools without immediate action we risk erasing any modom of progress that was made by the recruitment cultivation diversity office during 2020 to 2022 as has already been stated earlier by being the gity order reports presented uh the Boston school committee attempted to shed light on uh the the G the gity Educators report and the diversity that is present here in the school committee in our school system but it failed to provide enough transparency to tackle this issue um by combining the teachers and guidance counselors it really does blur the critical distin as well as mask many of the challenges that are faced by many of our black Educators it is important to note that under garity that the guidance counselors are class are not classified as teachers and thus highlighting that we as a city have still yet to achieve that garity standard despite the many Advocates bringing this to our attention we think that is important that we address this issue and make sure that we move forward with this issue corrected uh much of the current data has already been stated and you know it very well as we have seen uh even with uh the combining of our guidance counselors and our Educators we have seen this drop uh from both uh 2022 and 2023 uh and without separating these categories we need to see true numbers that really reflect what's happening and we're asking that the school committee does a report and at least ask for an updated disaggregated data report that will make this clear so that we can address this matter with urgency uh we uh we also know about the black administrator retention that drops sharply from 91% to 75% and even the teacher retention that decreased from 88.3% to 20 in 2021 to 81.2% and so we want to make sure that we are doing the work uh to acknowledge this uh and to even break even BPS would have to hire at least 52 more black Educators which has been a daunting task in many ways and so we want to continue to ask these questions uh what percentage of black Educators hold leadership positions of the 118 School leaders uh what black educators are how what black educators are leaving the district and why are these black Educators leading at the rate that they're leaving uh particularly in relation to their white counterparts and What proportion of black teachers exits are from classroom teaching as versus the guidance counselor I will report a memo as well so that you have all this information there's more to be reported but we want to make sure that we put this issue at the highest of your priority because we do believe we can tackle this issue together thank you very much we will now transition to the zoom testimonies our next speaker are Ian Chan Mike kishman Haven Jones Nicole O'Neal Michelle Kane and Emily Chapman Ian Chan Chan please turn on your camera and unmute yourself hello my name is Ian Chan I live in Brighton massachusett and I go to the Jose Quincy Elementary School I'd like to share some thoughts about the zoom busat which plays a critical role in helping our drivers navigate their routes while the route has its merits I've noticed that it can sometimes lead drivers down less efficient paths and that's a concern we should address recently I experienced this firsthand during a bus ride our driver Faithfully followed the app's directions but unfortunately we ended up on a slower route causing us to arrive home at a frost string 10 minutes late at 5:34 p.m. this delay is not just a minor inconvenience it can affect our entire evening as a result we ended up we are constantly getting home late and it seems that the driver is Solly dependent on the GPS what if the Zoom app allow allowed more input from the students it serves incorporating feedback and insights from us could lead to smarter faster routes and a much smoother experience while some thoughtful enhancements I truly believe the Zoom app could transform the journey for both the drivers and the students State transport thank you for considering this important issue I am excited about the potential for improvement it is essential to us students because we can help develop better routes for the drivers then what the machines can do thank you thank you very much our next speaker is Mike I think an internship in transportation is in order we should ask all the kids Mike hman Mike kishman arest beaser uh that was disturbing report about the lack of equity and racism and hiring and retention now for my testimony this could happen here thank you BTU members for your advoc advocacy for improvements in our school system harmful policies are often chosen because they are cheaper than providing additional funds for successful policies the BPS chooses inclusion done cheaply and poorly instead of inclusion Done Right the department also chooses other policies done cheaply and poorly negotiations with the btu and their are common good proposal proposals are providing the system with many opportunities to improve teaching and learning embracing these opportunities should happen here recently three Suburban communities to our North went out on strike for over 10 days these unions stood up for their members and advocated for improvements in teaching and learning conditions the media always reminded the public that these actions to withhold their labor were illegal and judges levied heavy fines I applaud the three unions for courageously defying an unjust law and the strong support that all of them receive from their communities this could happen here teaching conditions in our schools are substantially inferior to our neighboring striking communities thus the btu has a far greater responsibility to fight for our children the ineffective management of the BPS is harmful to many of our children this is permissible and legal withholding your labor in order to pressure the system to be more effective Humane and pro- children would be obedience to a higher authority when I was a teacher in Chelsea we went out on strike twice it was the right thing to do for ourselves and a gift of a positive and Powerful teaching moment for our children and Community superintendent Skipper and BC members I urge you to do the right thing and embrace this opportunity to be just to our Educators and improve teaching and learning conditions if not I urge the community to support the btu and for the union to shut this system down this should happen here thank you thank you Mr hman next speaker is Haven Jones good evening my name is Haven Jones and I am a Jamaica plane resident and a school social worker at Boston Latin Academy I'm here to speak about the BTU's contract demands for fair wages for par professionals throughout my time as a social worker in BPS I've been fortunate to collaborate with a number of skilled and caring par professionals to support students with disabilities on my IEP counseling case load these colleagues of mine often have the most intimate knowledge of the students and their needs out of all the Educators within our buildings because they are with the students they serve virtually every minute of the day think about that for a moment other than a brief break for lunch our par professionals are with our students who have the highest needs from the moment they step off of the school bus in the morning to the time they board the bus to go home at dismissal the PA professionals are there to help break down academic content when lessons are moving too fast to assist students in regaining control when they are emotionally or behaviorally disregulated to help students with mobility and sensory challenges navigate around our many non-ada compliant buildings and so much more in short par professionals make school possible for so many of our students who otherwise would not be able to get through the day on their own yet many par Professionals in BPS make less than 30% of the area median income for the city of Boston which qualifies them as extremely low income this is in a word insulting our par professionals deserve to be paid a wage that fairly compensates them for the dedication that they show to some of our most high need students day in and day out they deserve to be able to afford in the city of Boston without having to take on additional jobs to make ends meet meet in short they def deserve better part of my ethical responsibility as a social worker is to uplift the marginalized BPS has finan Al marginalized our par Professionals for far too long we need a contract that recognizes and values our par Professionals for the contributions they make to our schools members of the Boston school committee I urge you to meet the BTU's demand for fair wages prepare PA professionals thank you thank you very much next speaker is Nicole O'Neal hi good evening my name is Nicole O'Neal and I am the proud parent of two students at the lynon Pilot School in West rockbury last week a current family attempted to transfer their third grade twins into the Lyon such that all of the kids would be able to attend the same school however they were turned away by central office who stated there was no space for them and they had to choose to enroll at a separate School however this information was not true the current third grade cohort contained 50 students and could e easily accommodate 10 more yet the district placed a block on enrollment back in September this is just one of many families who have been turned away this fall from enrolling into our school our community has spent several hours at school preview days this fall trying to recruit new families to the Lyon and BPS without knowledge of this detrimental decision made by central office I stand here as a Public School advocate and ask why would the district expressly prohibit one of its highquality schools with seemingly no cause or justification from growing in numbers at a time when enrollment is so desperately needed across the district how will Turning Away interested families help to improve the reputation and Financial Health of BPS the decision to close individual classrooms across BPS is not a sufficient long-term fix but rather a Band-Aid placed over a bullet hole we need the district to work with schools to create a plan with a more proactive approach to attract more families to the district not make irrational decisions that drive families away to the suburbs we ask or or private schools I should say we ask that the enrollment hold placed on our school be removed such that our enrollment numbers accurately reflect the interests in our school and in our community additionally we ask that our current third grade cohort remain three classes next year to support inclusion and differentiation of instruction and we ask the school committee and superintendent to review the process of blocking enrollment at schools and classrooms without just call to ensure that it is not inadvertently prohibiting the growth and success of the Boston Public Schools thank you thank you our next speaker is Michelle Kaine good evening my name is Michelle Kan and I'm a biology teacher at the Margaret imun Academy in Jamaica plank brushing your teeth cooking eggs writing a letter these are all skills and abilities that I would Hazard to guess you have all mastered more or less anyways if asked to demonstrate knowledge of any of these skills I would bet you would Ace that test you would likely be able to speak knowledgeably about how to carry out each one and what key ideas are important to consider when doing so if a job required competency in these tasks you'd surely be hired and you'd be confident you could do the job well barring any end foren circumstances now if I asked you to cook scrambled eggs brush your teeth and write a letter all within the same five minutes that might pose a bit of a problem of course you can do each of these things on their own of course you know what each should look like when done well but to do them all at the same time is a different thing altogether maybe you just bite on the toothbrush write a letter with one hand on the counter while attempting to stir the eggs maybe it all gets done your breath is probably not the freshest your letter not so thoughtful and with less than Stellar penmanship and the eggs are edible sure but not really what you wanted knowing how and what it looks like when these things are done well and being confident in your abilities to accomplish them were not enough you needed more time you needed more hands you needed some help if someone came to evaluate your teeth brushing egg scrambling and letter writing you'd probably be concerned you might feel worried or frustrated this isn't a fair test after all you might be thinking but of course I can brush my teeth of course I can write a letter of course I can make better eggs than this but what could you have done differently in that situ ation you were given a ludicrous test that assumed competency for each individual task was sufficient for doing them all simultaneously of course I'm not actually speaking of dry scrambled eggs and poorly brushed teeth I'm speaking of children needing an education I'm speaking of teachers put in impossible positions I'm speaking of District leadership looking at my colleagues and I in the face telling us that we should be able to brush our teeth cook scrambled eggs and write letters all at the same time because we have proven that we have knowledge of these things separately I'm sure I don't need to blor my point but for the sake of clarity I will speak for a moment without metaphor demanding and expecting Educators to teach the tremendously diverse student body of Boston under multiple licenses instead of having multiple adults each with those qualifications is a perversion of the spirit of inclusion classrooms I find it profoundly troubling that District leadership maintains it's a reasonable ask that one adult address the needs of an immensely complex student population simply because that person has knowledge of what needs to be done teaching is not a purely intellectual exercise it's an emotional and physically demanding role as well students deserve and need classrooms with enough to learn effectively that means counting the Educators in the room not tallying up licenses asking teachers to serve a group of students that necessitates more than one license is like asking me to brush my teeth cook eggs and write letters all at the same time and expecting those things to be done at an exceptional level I urge you to put yourself in the shoes of those you oversee please bring reason logic understanding curiosity and good faith into these discussions and please make decisions that are worthy of the students of Boston thank you for your thank you very much our last speaker is Emily Chapman good evening my name is Emily Chapman and I am the proud let's make sure we can can you guys hear me okay yes we can hear you okay perfect I'm sorry I thought my phone muted myself again good evening my name is Emily Chapman and I am the proud parent of two students at the Lyon Pilot School in West Roxbury last week we were informed that the district is planning to reduce ours would in the dismissal of one teacher however the third court has 48 students and the second grade cor cohort has 58 students these numbers are in direct conflict with the current BTU contract which states there can only be 23 students Max per classroom therefore the district would need to see an enrollment of 46 or less in each cohort to support such a decision further the effects of moving from a three strand to a two- strand school will have major implications on the ability of teachers to differentiate instruction and provide the best the most effective inclusion practices last year our teachers provided substantial evidence to the governance board on how they differentiate instruction across the three teachers in each grade to Pro to provide inclusion and assistance for students working below at and above grade level resulting in gains in test scores and learning retention with fewer teachers and subsequently fewer resources how will differentiated instruction look for students next year if these cohorts are reduc produced from three classes to two how will inclusion work with fewer teachers and more students per classroom what if our cohort's current enrollment does not go down to 46 students as is required to reduce a classroom and our schools have already let go of two of one amazing teacher teachers who already know the students and families and who have spent hours and years perfecting their craft alongside their colleagues what happens then the decision to close individual highquality classrooms across PS and at the Lyon is not a sufficient long-term fix but rather a knee-jerk reaction to a budgetary deficit the much larger issue is that BPS needs to create a long-term facilities plan to account for significantly under enrolled schools in large buildings that have high operating costs in Staffing heating electricity water Etc we ask that the enrollment holds place on our school be removed such that our enrollment numbers ACC Ely reflect the interest of the Lyon we ask that our current third grade class remain three classes next year in fourth grade to support inclusion and differentiation we ask the school committee and superintendent to consider how reducing classrooms will affect the overall learning opportunities for our students how it will affect the resources for our staff in the coming years and how BPS plans to communicate large changes like this in the future thank you thank you it chair that concludes public testimony thank you than you we now have a quorum and the official meeting can begin we will begin with the approval of minutes I will now entertain a motion to approve the minutes of the December 4th 2024 school committee is there a motion some thank you is there a second second is there any discussion or objection to the motion is there any objection to approving the motion by unanimous consent hearing none the minutes are approved we'll now move on to the superintendent's report I present to you our superintendent Mary Skipper thank you chair thank you to everyone that is in the chamber this evening and on Virtual um so it's great to be here for the last school committee of uh 2024 I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the recent reappointment of Vice chair Michael O'Neal to the school committee by our mayor um Mr O'Neal is certainly a respected leader who has served the students and families of Boston as a member of the school committee for 16 years um I've Had The Good Fortune of knowing Vice chair O'Neal for many years beyond that as a school leader an educator here in BPS and I always appreciate his thoughtful and insightful comments his knowledge his deep knowledge of the schools uh you've been in so many of them visited so many of them uh and is just his deep love for the the students and the staff um I I am extremely happy um to welcome you back in the reappointment uh you know you have always been a steadfast advocate for our schools and our students and I'm really looking forward to the work ahead uh in the years so congratulations so um in terms of our Showcase of schools and registration uh we're gearing up for school registration time for the 25 26 school year uh we recently held our annual BPS Showcase of schools here at the bowling building last Saturday on December 14th the Showcase provided families and students the opportunity to visit all of their school options in one event where they could meet their school leaders they could ask questions they could meet staff who were on hand uh and really find out um what makes each School unique we had uh record more than 420 families attend this year showcase and we had 105 of the BPS schools represented along with many other additional community resource tables families received a list of their homebased schools and they were able to visit those School tables and get answers to their specific questions uh as usual I was just really impressed with the effort that each school made to make families feel welcome while highlighting what's special about their particular Learning Community uh I want to acknowledge the work of well welcome Services um particularly senior director Sonia Gomez Ben R and her team uh our school leaders all of the volunteers who made the event a success Dr devaris um you know our BPS School schools are currently holding information sessions until January where prospective families can tour the school facilities they can see student work they can meet School leaders and staff and they can get a chance to ask questions about various programs so um you know schools try to offer a combination of virtual and inperson as a way to ensure that they um meet the needs of All Families families and students can also go to www. Boston schools. slgr starts to learn more about each school and access the school choice list which has been updated with the most recent school quality framework tiers priority registration begins on Monday January 6th for students entering k0 K1 K2 and grade 6 s and n and for additional dates and times for those sessions important BPS registration information and deadlines please visit www. bostonu schools .org enroll last week the Massachusetts schools building authority board of directors or what we call msba voted to move the district's application for the Ruth Batson Academy forward in the next step of the core program to support a major renovation of the school's facilities the invitation from msba into the eligibility period means that over the next year the district will work with Ruth Batson Academy leadership ship and the msba to lay the groundwork for a large Capital project supported by state funding delivering on a longstanding commitment to the Ruth Batson Community I want to share my gratitude to the Ruth Batson teachers and families leader who've all ad advocated for this project for many years and I also know chair Robinson and vice chair O'Neal have as well making visits to the school itself you've you know really continually pushed us to honor our commitment and I'm very very happy for the Ruth Batson Community this morning I joined the curly K8 School in Jamaica plane for the unified Champion School celebration and banner unveiling uh you might remember that earlier in the school year the curly K8 and the matah Hunt Elementary School received National Banner recognition from the Special Olympics North America for meeting national standards of excellence in the areas of inclusion advocacy and respect during school year 23 to 24 both School communities were honored for creating a social climate where everyone feels included and respected they represent two of 19 schools named in Massachusetts and they are among 202 recognized Nationwide for this status through unified soccer and basketball teams unified Arts programming and a unified Student Government the entire curly School community demonst demonstrates the power of inclusivity by creating spaces where students of all abilities can come together Thrive and support one another and maybe most importantly have fun we were joined uh by City councelor Ben Weber City of Boston disability commissioner Kristen mcos Special Olympics Massachusetts vice president Patty dhy and a special guest was a special Olympian athlete lumine monol uh lumine the the high one of the highlights of the day was was that um lumine has won three gold medals lumine is also a graduate of cash and uh when she held up the three gold Med the sorry two gold medals and a silver medal the kids eyes all got really big um because she was sharing that she's a runner and she said I'm like flash and so she just she really the kids were just so enthralled with her uh it was a very sweet moment but it Al was just the power of what's possible um and finally I just want to give a special thanks to leader Katie graa her whole team for putting on the event um there were lots of just balloons music celebration uh we had a third grader who actually performed in the um the orgon and uh it was just wonderful to see the students coming together and really rallying around each other so congratulations uh both to the curly and to the matah hunt BPS held its football All-Star Game earlier this month at English High School where team Randolph Abraham who's the athletic director at Brighton High prevailed over team rul Brown who's the head coach of tech Boston Academy with a game final score of 12 to6 you might also remember that Coach Brown last fall was named the New England Patriots coach of the week so congratulations to both teams and in particular to uh to Bright and high in in prevailing schools and students around the district are celebrating the season with special events and performances a highlight of the 83rd annual Boston Common Christmas tree lighting on December 5th was a beautiful uplifting performance by members of the Boston Arts Academy Blended Roots Ensemble and on Friday December 13th last Friday the BPS central office was treated as it we are each year to fested performances by more than 600 talented students from 6 dance and music ensembles I want to acknowledge the work of BPS executive director for the Arts Tony beatric who continues to shine a light on the incredible talent in the district and celebrate the creative Spirit of all of our students truly fills our halls with just Joy last week the Sha Elementary School in Dorchester hosted a successful coat drive for their incredible students in partnership with the we love you Foundation sha Taylor students receive coats gloves hats and scarves as we prepare for the colder temperatures and we'll actually be sending a notice home to all parents so that when we come back from the break everybody remembers we're back into the winter season and so we want to make sure students have what they need congratulations to the Bradley Elementary School for being named a 2024 National Esa distinguished School in the category of exceptional student achievement earlier this month by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and secondary education or desie each year Desi nominates just two schools across the Commonwealth for this National recognition I'm so proud of the entire Bradley Elementary School team for this well-deserved honor School leader CLA Carney attributes the Bradley success to their commitment to implementing High pack high impact instructional strategies a culture of Staff collaboration aimed at enhancing student learning outcomes and a welcoming environment that values parental input and ensures clear consistent communication between schools and families I also want to share that Maya Smith who's the associate head of school at Fenway High School has been named the 2025 assistant principal of the Year by the Massachusetts school administrators Association Miss Smith has 21 years of experience in education and a variety of leadership roles and she's served in her current role for the past three years she's committed to impr improving educational outcomes for all students by ensuring they receive rigorous daily instruction and by breaking down barriers for the most marginalized communities congratulations to Miss Smith as we end 2024 I'd like to note that Miss Smith Miss Farrow the Bradley and the curlyy schools join and the matah hunt joined an impressive list of BPS Educators and staff were recognized this year for their outstanding contributions to District success that list also includes 2024 BPS school counselor of the year so Haley Santos from the curly K8 School the entire team at the mat hunt who are the investor school on the Move Prize winner and the odonnal elementary school Community which was recognized by Governor Mora Healey and desie for successfully reducing chronic absenteeism these Awards and recognitions are a reflection of the talent commitment and dedication that make up up our BPS I want to thank our teachers administrators and staff for their hard work every day and we really look forward to a banner year in 2025 before I close my report would like to pause to Mark a very special occasion cheer Robinson's 10th anniversary as a member of the Boston school committee chair Robinson was appointed to the school committee on November 19th 2014 serving as chair for the past three years an expert in early education early childhood education chair Robinson brings Decades of experience to this role as an educator and as a longtime vice president of Early Childhood initiatives at the Boston Children's Museum chair Robinson was instrumental in helping to guide the district out of the covid-19 pandemic and through a period of enormous change in our city by providing steady leadership in always centering the needs of the district's students and that's what she does every day this body this district and this city are better because of your leadership chair congratulations on making this Milestone and we have um I know the chair Vice chair O'Neal is going to say a few words and we have a little presentation drum roll Lina that was a total surprise she didn't got so Madam chair on behalf of uh your fellow members uh we want to congratulate you on the 10th year anniversary or as I like to say a good start um what what the superintendent did not mention is you're also a graduate of the district something you have never forgotten and you and I have always shared that being graduate of the district as well and um as as the superintendent said you a longtime vice president of the Children's Museum a very passionate Advocate and then several years ago you retired and thought you were going to enjoy retirement and now you're working harder than you probably did when you were at the Children's Museum and and I know you work very hard at the Children's Museum because what a lot of the members of the public don't realize is what you see up here is just a small part of the role of being chair of the school committee in particular as well as being a member overall but the chair is very frequently out visiting schools uh she has sat in every I believe every single uh BTU negotiating session or or most of them I should say um an frequently updates the members on the progress there she has joined many other negotiating sessions as well she uh meets with Community folks all the time she meets with members one-on-one usually weekly um I join her in meetings with the chair and other folks on a very regular basis so this is a very small part of what is an extraordinarily full-time commitment for our for our chair um on behalf of all of us and she works very hard to bring us together to hear viewpoints to make sure it is incorporated into policy recommendations um and to always push the district forward and as an incredibly Fierce Advocate most particularly for the students that we are serving every single day um she brings that commitment to every single Le conversation and I know our fellow members and our one-on-one meetings with her and the superintendent can certainly attest her there are times when we're in small meetings and chair Robinson pounds the table because she wants to make sure that our students are heard and represented and so um having served in the role myself I often tell the chair that there is nobody happier in the city of Boston that Jerry Robinson is the chair of the school committee than I am and so uh you do an extraordinary job leading us and we thank you for your commitment and your passion to all of us to the staff to the district to the parents to the community Advocates and most of all to the students that we serve thank you chair Robinson thank you oh a picture up front yes picture just come down here yeah right herey whichever everyone come close yeah that's a little bit better yeah just come closer y right smile Don't Close Your Eyes and thank you it's great it's too much right she well thank you superintendent I will now open it up questions and discussion from the committee um I'd like to remind my colleagues about our agreed upon Norm we each have five minutes one to two questions please make sure your questions are on topic related to to the items in the superintendent report other items other topics not related to the superintendent's report can be raised during your business later in the meeting I'd also like to remind VPS staff to be brief in your responses and please speak at a slower Pace to assist our interpreters thank you a question no main questions maybe just a reminder for folks as to when they will expect to hear things around like school choice and things that coming up in the new semester right so we have um we have all of this going on right now um having just done the Showcase the information is all on our website uh and it really starts that January 6 when we come back that's the priority one thank you madam chair so just a couple quick points superintendent thank you for sharing that the msba voted to ro move the Ruth bats and Academy I believe what what step was it that they uh right so the so the next step would be uh for them for us to put forward um a design yeah this was the feas move to feasibility right so my suggestion would be it would helpful maybe we put it on our website under facilities or something to kind of explain to people what the various steps are of the msba process and what the time frame is for each we certainly know it very well by a number of buildings that have built recently such as Josiah quinsey AR academic set deborn that all part of msba and it would be helpful for people's expectations I know we're working on it as well for I think sha till was a step ahead now Ruth Batson is emptying so it's it's about a four five step process um and I think it'd be helpful to have people understand both what the process is and what the time frame expected time frame is usually in each um I'm thrilled and I know the chair is as well about rof bats and we have been pushing for that commitment to be h on for a while so I'm glad it is um second that Arts holiday celebration the chair and I were at and it was really special it was so great to see our particularly our well Elementary and our high school students variety of Arts represented everything from music to interpretive dance um a variety of culturals represented and cultural celebrations and it was great to see the interaction between the schools but in the chair and I was speaking to a number of the students and we complimented them on one jazz version of a song and they told us that there were in fact 10 different genres represented it was gospel and it was this and it was that and they were teaching us and to see the power of the Arts education now in our schools and the investment that this committee has pushed coming through so we're now seeing it particularly in our early grades so congratulations to Tony beis and and the rest of the team that have worked on it because it was very very powerful and I just have to say superintendent that and the chair knows this last Friday night I attended a incredible event and it was the faculty and staff of the Carter school getting a chance to tour the new Carter school that is under construction for the first time they get to see where their classrooms are going to be and where their Arts rooms and where their therapy rooms were and it was incredibly moving to be there um there were a lot of Tears um happy tears one teacher in particular as we all climbed to the second floor excitedly told each of his colleagues every time they step through the door this is your first time stepping on the second floor of the cter school because the existing building didn't have one and one person who said I was going to retire and now I can't because I want to teach our students in this new environment so I have here to share with my colleagues draing they all received of what the building is going to look like when it will be done the end of this year and it's just another example of new you know we hear so much that we need to be doing buildings but between the Dearborn Boston Arts Academy Josiah quiny upper and now this one uh sh Taylor Ruth Batson we have a lot underway right now and particularly this is for our most vulnerable students and it is um it was it was a very special evening and I thank uh principal Carter uh excuse me Marco Connell for his of the Carter School of Marco cona for the work that he and his team are doing and this is going to be a game changer for our most vulnerable and most disabled students thank you madam chair that actually reminds me I think something that um I'm wondering what we're doing as far as at least in the past year and even moving forward we're going to be having um School mergers I mean this is something that we're anticipating um but because you had mentioned the shaw Taylor it sort of brought up what are we doing um to stay with this community to actually continue monitoring how these communities have emerged and actually how they're thriving now or if they are thriving at all I think that would also be something for other school communities to look at to see like what the process is and how we're continuing to stay with these families and with these communities um after the merger has happened no it's a great Point um Dr alkins and I think that when we um are doing our present ations in January we can also share you know how we're partnering schools and school leaders uh as they go through the variety of whether it's a merger a closure um or gr grade reconfiguration but I think those that have gone through it first have so much to teach both us and the other communities it's a great point just want to say I was so pleased coming on Saturday morning for the showcase it was great there was so much enthusiasm um and it was really provided me with an opportunity to talk directly to a number of school leaders and I did talk to folks from the two schools that are emerging sha Taylor and the um suar school to hear about how they're going and I think um they need to hear from us because one of the requests was that you know there there are still meetings that are going on it would be great for members of the school committee to go out and show their support um we know things are going to be difficult they need some reassurances from us about that um you know things will not be forgotten the the things that they're concerned about are real and that we want to hear them in real time and not have people waiting on those things and worrying about them so um in the New Year we will be probably getting some invitations I've explained to people they need to invite us to things so many things are going on half the time we don't know every single thing but if there's something that's going on out of school we would welcome getting those invitations hopefully in the New Year we will be hearing um right I will now entertain a motion to receive the superintendent's report is there a motion some thank you is there a second second is there any discussion or objection to the motion is there any objection to approving the motion by unanimous consent hearing none the superintendence report is approved our first action item this evening is the grants for approval totaling 4,138 421 now I'd like to turn it over to the superintendent for any final comments wonderful so tonight's grants P grants package includes four grants totaling 4.13 million the largest of these is a three-year continuing project provide Grant totaling more than 2.23 million to improve access to mental health staff across the district project provide is a partnership between BPS UMass Boston and Buu to increase the number of diverse highly qualified mental health staff that work in the BPS while also improving the technical and supervisory skills of the current mental health Workforce we also seek your approval of the new more EV trucks grant for nearly 1.6 million which will serve students districtwide in school year 2025 this grant is a rebate for the purchase of 19 electri school buses it will pay for additional buses Andor the continuation of the BPS bus fleet this grant will help BPS and the city further our Fleet electrification goals tonight you are also asked to approve two additional grants an acceleration academies Grant totaling $240,000 which will serve a total of 600 students in school year 2025 and a grant for 100,000 supporting students social emotional learning and behavioral and mental health to help 5,000 students students uh I see that CFO Bloom is squarely seed at the table so if there's any questions we're happy to entertain them right as we have no questions I'll now entertain a motion to approve the grants as presented is there a motion so thank you is there a second second is there any discussion is there any discussion or objection to the motion no is there any objection to approving the motion by unanimous consent hearing none the grants are approved our next action item are the United Steel Workers Local 8751 letters of agreement and fiscal year 25 supplemental appro appropriation request you'll recall that at our last meeting executive director of Transportation Dan Rosengard presented these items for the committee's consideration at this time I'd like to invite the superintendent to offer final comments thank you chair so tonight we are asking the school committee to take action on three items regarding the bus driver's Union in their role as the current School Bus vendor for the Boston Public Schools transdev employs school bus drivers who are members of the United Steel Workers local 8751 Union under the contract between BPS and transdev transdev is reimbursed for all unionized Personnel wages INF Fringe benefit costs as approved by the city and payroll taxes as we explained at the last meeting on December 4th transdev and the school bus drivers Union recently reached an agreement on a successor collective bargaining agreement for a 4-year contract through FY 28 this agreement was ratified on November 15th we are asking the school committee to request an fy2 supplemental appropriation from the Boston City Council in the amount of 6.6 million to support the cost of the contract in addition we are asking members to approve two side letters of agreement between BPS the city of Boston and the school bus drivers Union United Steel Workers Local 8751 these letters are continuations of letters that are currently in effect the school committee members have been updated on the recent agreement and its Financial impact the side letters of agreement and the actions requested of the school committee this is outlined in a memo that was shared with you prior to our last meeting the memo was also posted publicly on the school committee's website www. bostonu schoolsschool committee BPS executive director of Transportation Dan Rosengard is here tonight to answer any final questions you may have I'm gonna ask one quick question Mr loard since we have you here um we've seen stud Improvement in the transportation now this year it we started slow as we have in Prior years um you had cautioned us at the beginning that to anticipate that particularly because of the Zoom app being implemented now it's fully implemented we actually had a student testify about it tonight I think a potential future student intern in your department I hope think so um but I'm interested in in your assessment of how we're doing now and number one and two how you feel getting this contract resolved is going to continue to move forward for improvements for us y I appreciate that question so we have continued to make uh steady improvements in our on performance since that you know really significant decline that we saw at the start of the school year uh for November the most recent month that we have full data for we had 92% ontime performance in the morning which was uh more than a full percentage Point ahead of where we were for the same month last year uh afternoon we haven't seen as you know the same gains but we have made steady Improvement each month uh we were at 81% for the morning in November um and then also in November we had the driver rebid which went into effect where we saw a you know a much smaller initial decline in OTP compared to what we've seen in past years and I think a lot of that is driven by you know the GPS navigation tablets that you know make things easier for the drivers particularly when they're doing something new for the first time uh so we you know we are seeing that steady Improvement and I think the other thing that that really for me you know is um you know meaningful is kind of this time last year it very much felt like we had hit a plateau and there wasn't much room for growth you know from this time of year through the end of the spring right now it feels like between the work that we're doing with the ridership you know with the data we're getting from ridership tracking through Zoom as well as just the you know continued weekly feedback loop on you know on the normal routing side there's a lot of kind of unta potential and room for continued Improvement throughout the year in a way that we haven't had in the past um so I think that you know that's where we're focusing our efforts right now and and this CBA you know helps in a number of ways one is just in providing that um you know stability over the next few years so that we have that you know that labor stability also the you know the increased wages which make sure that our drivers are continuing to get a competitive wage rate you know compared to other districts so that we can stay fully staffed and um you know not just be able to hire drivers but really be able to retain them and you know provide them with a you know a good living and a good career um so that and then I think you know that that work as directed piece that we we talked a little bit about last meeting that's introduced in this contract really provides us some some new opportunities that we haven't had in the past particularly to improve how we provide Athletics transport ation and some of these other supplemental Transportation which is huge that we're getting this and we have not had that before correct so exactly the feedback we've been receiving collectively over the past year about concerns On Athletics and field trips you're going to have the ability to address that more closely with this contract that's exactly right yep thank you sir thank you thank you Madame chair thank you um good me I have heard through different families that there had been improvements in terms of Transportation which is something very good however however I do have a question for you so we have to take in consider in consideration that the direct users are are the students themselves the families the [Music] students so my question to you is had there been any surveys for the families to evaluate what their opinion is or regarding the performance of Transportation itself how do they feel has there been any surveys regarding this with the families directly regarding Transportation thank you thank you for that question member P Garcia um it is it is something that we want to do that is actually something as well that the Council of great City Schools recommended in their review which uh was September 2022 so you know we are constantly talking with families through our transportation hotline you know uh families who come in talking with schools going out to schools so so we're constantly interacting with families and trying to you know understand and aggregate the trends that we're seeing in terms of their feedback but we also want and intend to do you know very specifically some sort of uh you know feedback survey you know for families on their experience and where we can continue to improve so that is in the road map well I do believe uh being a little bit proactive it would have been interesting if we did the service before the approval of the contract no I I appreciate that feedback I'm sorry that we didn't do that thank you um I know you just mentioned the Council of great City Schools um report and um I think I know I've spoken to Brandon who unfortunately is not with us tonight but one of our concerns or one of the things that we would hope is that we would be able to get come back at this point in time and have a review of what are the actual recommendations we're taking because I understand how complicated all of this is and incrementally the steps and you all are doing you know a Yan's job of trying to make this all work but I think it would be helpful to us particularly as we get ready to go into budget season to understand you know where are we making progress you know what's happening with the budget particularly as we're coming into a budget year that may have some more stressful things that we need to look at within it but it would be helpful just to understand you know what are the actual recommendations that um the council recommended and which are those things that were actually actively moving forward on y absolutely yeah I will say that um this this is this is a good point Sharon uh transportation department special education I mean literally all the Departments that we did reports on um we have a Tracker like very extensive to show particularly in the high impact recommendations they had what we've been able to implement so that's relatively easy for us to be able to provide thank you perfectly T thank you perfectly timed Harry all right thank you all so we will now take three votes two on the letters of agreement A&B and another on the supplemental appropriation there's no further discussion I'll now entertain a motion to approve the United still Workers Local 8751 letter of agreement a as presented is there a motion so mov thank you is there a second second is there any discussion or objection to the motion Miss provix will you please call the rooll Dr alkins yes M Hernandez mosa Miss poano Garcia yes Mr TR Mr O'Neil yes Miss Robinson yes the motion is approved thank you I'll now entertain a motion to approve the United Ste Workers Local 8751 letters of agreement b as presented is there a motion so move thank you is there a second second thank you is there any discussion objecting to the mo motion Miss PX will you please call the role Dr alkins yes M Hernandez Miss Lima Barbosa Miss poano garciaa yes Mr Mr O'Neil yes M Robinson yes and the motion is approved thank you I'll now entertain a motion to approve the fiscal year 25 supplemental appropriation request in the amount of 2,637 486 to support the collective bargaining agreement between trans Dev and United Steel Workers local 8751 is presented is there a motion so move thank you is there a second second is there any discussion or objection to the motion Miss PR will you please call the role Dr alkins yes Miss K Hernandez Miss Lima Barbosa Miss poano Garcia yes Mr Tran Mr O'Neal yes Robinson yes the motion is approved thank you thank you thank you thank you a second presentation will be an exam schools admission sorry one David David panic I thought I have the agenda right sorry about that tonight we have two presentations our first presentation this evening is a finance update let's aim to keep the presentation within 20 minutes before I turn it over to Chief Financial Officer Mr David Bloom I'll invite the superintendent to give opening remarks uh thank you chair so tonight BPS the chief Finance officer David Bloom will present the district's annual fiscal update uh it includes an update on the fy2 24 budget progress related to fy2 Investments and the first public preview of the FY 26 budget and our financial projections for the coming fiscal year the update will include where we have made key Investments to advance our priorities including but not limited to the implementation of inclusive education districtwide bilingual programs Hub schools expansion Equitable literacy and high quality instructional materials long-term facilities plan family engagement and support and recruitment cultivation and diversity the team will dive into some of our findings over the past year in share where we saw lower than expected costs the presentation will include a summary of The District's pandemic Relief Fund over the last three fiscal years where we stand as we close out Esser and explain how we have used those f funds to offset increasing costs as our enrollment continues to level off following a downward Trend we will continue to focus on prioritizing stabilizing School budgets and investing in our highest need students especially students with disabilities multilingual Learners and multilingual Learners with disabilities in early February we'll return to the school committee for the preliminary FY 26 budget presentation which will be followed by a series of school committee public hearings before the budget is voted on and sent to the city council in addition to Chief Bloom oh it's only Chief Bloom um I think Deputy Chief Financial Officer Blair Dawkins is available and other members of our leadership team are obviously here to support so with that turn it over to you David thank you superintendent and um Dr Alin prer question from earlier I'm going to just take a moment to shout out the family and Community advancement team and welcome Services team I am going through uh the school assignment process for the first time as a prospective K1 parent uh and I was not expecting the full range of emotions that would come with that especially going to my first school preview day um and I've appreciated all the work that the team has put into making that easier for a prospective parent like me such as having the Google for interest form which I had to fill out a couple times I have a lot of schools on my list um so I can get regular email updates and I'm getting communication from schools all the time I've been very nervous about making sure I make all my different preview days so it's been a very exciting if nerve-wracking process so shout out to the team doing all that work behind the scenes um I'm here today to present to you a a three-year Financial update this is actually uh getting us very close to a period of time where we transition from operating in three fiscal years at a time to a period of time where we're only operating in two which will be a great relief to some members of my team uh this report will go through um school year 24 3 24 2425 and a preview of 25 26 but uh before I dive into the details just want to acknowledge that all of our work in finance is trying to ground ourselves in both the BPS opportunity achievement Gap policy and our new inclusive education plan one of the things I hope you see as I move through tonight's presentation is that of you're going to see a lot of similar themes to when I was here with uh the team last year and talking about the major initiatives we're working on in the district and this is because our major initiatives are the same right we are still working to roll out these big important changes that are needed for the students of Boston so the highlights fiscal year 24 was another year in our tra long tradition I think about 35 years now of finishing the fiscal year on budget with less than the remaining salary of a PA professional as the target uh Vice chair O'Neal I'm sure will make a comment about how I didn't quite hit my record from last year of $965 but I still think we were within the margin of error um current in the current fiscal year we are still feeling very confident that we're going to finish the year on track um and close out Esser spending every single uh Cent though I did just get an update from desie that suggests we might have a 43 Cent problem but we're working on the accounting for that we do want to give a couple of updates on our fy2 investments as well and then finally a preview as a superintendent mentioned of what we've said to schools last week as they got their budgets for school year 26 and then last week's PD with school leaders so uh this is sort of this year's update of this slide poies 34 years not 35 um BPS finished the year with a net surplus of 26,000 $299 these dollars do get returned to the general fund um for use by the city um we every year work to ensure that we end the year um using all the tools in our toolbox that less than the salary of a pair of professionals um and this year was no different there were some slight differences in the uh sort of overage and and savings areas inside the FY 24 budget we did see higher than expected costs in temporary employees transportation and Food Services Transportation was mostly related to transportation out of the district and then we did identify operational savings from salary and health insurance by vacancies and I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation um and some Savings in utilities costs that weren't quite as high as projected as we now move into fy2 we are confident that we will continue to end this year on budget um We are continuing to see some higher than expected cost in Food Services we think this is mostly related to some slight delays uh in the construction at our Central Kitchen that will allow for more efficient and effective delivery of of meals uh to families and so or to students I should say so we are hopeful that these um cost increases will get better over time um we actually have some really great news overspending I think it's possibly the first time I've said that um in that we are over our part-time employees we are overspending our projections and this is mostly due to uh Dan and his team doing an amazing job hiring bus monitors um we did not anticipate being quite so full in those positions this year which is a great problem to have and then finally part of a sort of Citywide Trend our health insurance costs have come in a little bit higher than we anticipated um and as you'll see sort of in the attached memo that I shared with you um this is a pretty significant multi-million dollar area of cost increase something we are managing and we have resources at our disposal to cover it for one year we're working closely with our partners in the city to ensure that we get this more accurate for 26 and this isn't a problem again we are seeing some savings from a higher vacancy rate than historical this is the same thing I've said to you now for basically three years however we are seeing some improvements in that vacancy rate heading back towards pre-pandemic levels which is an exciting development and I mentioned just before that we're seeing some um increases in health insurance one of the ways we're paying that is we're we are seeing some savings if you will from the end of Esser we have purchase orders and contracts things that we had planned to do with Esser that come in a little bit under budget for a variety of reasons maybe something couldn't be delivered on time maybe the price estimate ended up coming in lower when you sweep that across a $270 million grant that ends up being a couple million of sort of leftover money at the end right and we anticipated this coming we talked a little bit about this with you last year is how we were going to use this money to help offset cost for school year 25 and that's now what we're doing so with that in mind we are very confident that we will finish fy2 um budget um I discussed a couple of times before our vacancy rates um just as a note right because of the size of our district every 1% of change in our field rate for positions is about $10 million in salary Savings in salary spending excuse so as you can see our fielded rate before the pandemic was around getting to around 98% um we had a real dip in the pandemic years through a combination of a lot of increased positions with Esser as well as just sort of some challenges and hiring that I think we're pretty consistent Nationwide um going into 2025 especially if you look at the actual FTE you'll see a really significant increase in filled positions um we still do have a higher than 2019 vacancy rate um you know we're sort of down 3.6% in terms of filled positions however that is uh 1 and a qu% improvement from last year and so we confident that will continue to improve so if that's the nuts and bolts of where we are for fy2 I want to step back a little bit and talk about our goals for the fy2 budget this is the exact slide we laid out with you last uh spring as we went through the budget approval process we talked about these three major initiatives we're working on to help um close opportunity gaps for our uh students especially students with disabilities um and multilingual Learners and we said this was going to be a fiveyear shift so I'm here to give you an update on what we're doing this year and next year um in our academics office we've hired over $15 million worth of Staff right almost entirely teachers in this first year um to work in schools and help support this team-based approach to inclusive practices that we're working on as a district we've also hired inclusive education coaches had stiens for our inclusion planning teams to build their school-based inclusion plans and really expanded our mtss work across the district we've also been planning for new bilingual multilingual programs and I believe it was as of last week that all nine programs were officially approved by desie which is very exciting and you'll see then the financial impact of that in our FY 26 proposal Equitable literacy was also a key part of our fy2 budget um with a focus on high quality instructional materials support resources and direct support to students with reading interventionists finally I'll just mention in the academics area that we're very excited that we now are up to 20 Hub schools um all with full-time coordinators and one Citywide coordinator who's helping to sort of manage the work across the district uh in operations team um we've heard a lot obviously about the work we're doing in our Capital planning and operations opening new buildings we were uh talking about the Carter earlier it's a very exciting development but also the horse man is in their new space at the Edwards and really filling in that facility um you heard a little bit from Transportation earlier about zoom and from our students as well as well as the electric buses um and sort of the work we're doing along that finally I should mention the work of our family and Community advancement team and the progress they've made on investments I actually thought maybe we' had a typo when I first saw this number but there were 25,000 individual touch points with families um this includes calls emails walk-ins and support staff provides support in seven languages that was really a pretty remarkable number when I saw it and over 7,000 students participated in summer programming this past summer with over 80% attendance so what does all this mean as we come into FY 26 well I'm I'm very excited to say that our major priorities haven't changed right we're still focused on these same investments in uh multilingual Learners in students with disabilities and inclusive education so I want to talk a little bit about what is this same and what's a little bit different in fy2 we stopped using weighted student funding to adjust School budgets as we went through with you last winter we made adjustments to budgets starting from the school's existing funding level increased or decreased based on the number of classrooms or capacity changes and then prioritized new Investments and instructional resources for FY 26 as we're trying to stabilize right and build on that work our priorities remain very similar right we are continuing to make classroom and capacity adjustments using the same methodology we're expanding investments in inclusive practices and investing in bilingual education through the establishment of uh newcomer dual language programs and full adjustment for any ESL services that are required superintendent mentioned enrollment stabilization this is one of the important things that we are looking at as we go through this process so I believe this is the first time in my this is now my 10th budget cycle with BPS that we've been in a place where we're able to talk about a multi-year stable enrollment technically we were up this year it's 80 you know 86 kids but it is technically an increase so I appreciate that and I think um you know I think the interesting thing about this is the underlying data about Boston is still true we are still seeing fewer births to resident families in Boston and we are still seeing the impact of that in our enrollment patterns however that has been paired with a real and Lasting increase in multilingual Learners through our um Services we're providing to Immigrant migrant youth um and as we look across our district we do see that the needs of our students have changed right we are serving more multilingual youth more students with disabilities than we have before and more importantly more multilingual Learners with disabilities as well refresh okay hey look at that um my my other slide magically appeared um apologize this slide is a little bit busy because the lines overlap but I'll walk you quickly through it uh what we want to do is break out three categories of students as we talk about the level of need we're seeing in The District in blue is students who are multilingual Learners without disabilities so only multilingual Learners they don't also have disabilities in Orange is students with disabilities who are not multilingual Learners and then in Gray is the intersection of those two multilingual learners with disabilities overall when you look at this you can see that historically we were somewhere in between 7500 and 88500 multilingual Learners without disabilities as a district for the last two years we've been over 10,000 right this is a real and significant change for the district you can also see that the proportion of our students who uh with disabilities who are also multilingual Learners has increased right so while the total number of students with disabilities is relatively similar to where we were and historically the numberb multilingual Learners with disabilities has increased and we know for school year 25 this was a major uh area of investment for the district so I'm gonna steal the superintendent line as we get to the headline of uh FY 26 because I like it um we've had two years of really historic budgets in BPS two years ago we reached this Landmark deal with the Boston Teachers Union that allowed us to revamp inclusive practices and do the roll out we're doing now in collaboration with our teachers that required a really historic budget investment from the city to make it happen uh in the year one then last year we were planning for the first year of the actual roll out of inclusion and we were coming off of Esser and we went back to the city and we said We Want To Make History again and have year two of a historic commitment from the city and the city came through for us again this year we're back to a more traditional funding level but the thing I clarifi for principles and school leaders right a traditional doesn't mean bad right we're not this isn't a budget of cuts this still allows us to fund major uh cost increases so for example the health insurance increase I talked about earlier we have full funding for that in our budget increase that you know we've talked about with the city and we are also in addition to those maintenance costs being able to invest in really significant ways and Key Programs around inclusive education bilingual programs continuing to grow our work around mtss and academic support and continuing High School pathway expansion finally it would be important to mention that the long-term facilities plan still has impacts on on our FY 26 budget there are changes that the committee approved last year that are going into place in this year's budget and we are working very closely with each impacted School Community to ensure that transition happens in the best way possible one of the ways we could have this traditional budget more traditional level and still invest in the significant way we're investing is by identifying efficiencies and the superintendent was very clear when we launched our process with uh department heads in September she was very clear schools had to do the hard work last year when we left Esser right and they had to make reductions to their Esser program and make really tough tradeoffs and we all heard about that on this body right through the process that was very difficult this year while we're still making adjustments related to classroom changes opening and closing and there's still some things happening through the long-term facilities plan that we're voted on last year the real uh work of finding efficiencies we wanted to put on central office and central office budgets more broadly right so both those real central office expenses that you might see in the bowling building my salary for one um but also those Central budgeted School services or School Services budgeted centrally things that you really would see out in schools like custodians right and all these sort of central run programs all of our summer school is budgeted centrally um we're really trying to identify efficiencies in those programs the superintendent was very clear we don't want to reduce services but we want to take a really close look at what we did an example of this might be looking at an area of service in the district where we run four or five different programs all of whom are H seeing outcomes for kids but maybe one of whom is 10 times more expensive there are real circumstances like that and while we think that program is providing value we may have to make a tradeoff to say okay that centrally run program might phase out so we can invest in more costeffective options that are still providing outcomes for kids as I mentioned before there are still going to be some areas of increase that fit on the quote unquote central office budget but these are things that are purely School Services budgeted centrally so the three main areas of increase are health insurance as a central office cost but not really central office just the central budget utilities same and then out of District special education tuition and transportation costs these are just the those are the normal sort of inflationary costs of you know program growth program expense growth from year to year the last thing I'll say is not on this list but there are some cost increases in our facilities Department as well for the increased inflationary costs of Maintenance contracts and those sorts of things but all of those dollars are things that will be seen directly in schools excuse me finally I wanted to close talking a little bit about the timeline uh our budget is a year round process and I think one of the things we are working to improve in collaboration with you is how we engage the school committee in that process year round really showing how the school committee's feedback you give us in meetings in October November and April and June even if they're not directly in the budget process are key to informing the budget that's before you tonight so while this meeting technically is the launch of the budget season officially because schools got their budgets last week we had PD really you know and I'm not just saying this because I'm the CFO the whole year is budget season in a way right and we're taking your feedback on what we need to do in the budget as we go through the whole process and so um I really appreciate sort of all of your feedback on that and I can say say that your colleagues in the community and in schools are also giving that feedback year round and with that I'd like to open it up for any questions from the committee thank you um thank you Madame chair thank you for the presentation uh my question is in the page number nine I think in the progress academ progress 10 number 10 yes thank you so I could read um my question comes from page number 10 and I could read the 98% of schools have mtss coordinators who create structures for mtss and monitor Services aligned to student needs yes so do you have any data that could show us um what what has been the progress of this um group of coordinators um how many students that they have served um I don't have that data with me now but I think we can certainly get you yeah think um I think Leslie Ryan Miller can as well I think there's been um several things with mtss one was establishing a system because it didn't exist before and then secondly it was creating the coordinator position as a way to ensure that it was institutionalized in the school and that the teams would be regularly meeting to talk about the tiered supports for students brought forward um so part of that progress is in the team formation how often the teams are meeting and then the number of students that get uh put before the team during those meetings but uh Leslie I don't know if you want to add to that sure no that's ex exactly the role that they play one other thing I would just add that's critically important is that they're responsible for the documentation of services that students need so outside of students who receive IEPs so when we have general education students that might require additional services like potentially support from a reading interventionist um or other tiered services that are in a school um the mtss coordinator supports grade level teams or content teams with documenting in Panorama what those tiered supports are and interventions that a student needs we reflect on those centrally to make sure that the school has the interventions and support that are needed so we can look in Panorama and see okay we have this number of students that might require service from uh reading interventionists um and if it doesn't seem like there's enough capacity we can think districtwide about uh how we mitigate that need and we provide the services that are needed for students yeah another example would be uh chronic absenteeism and so the mtss team uh in Panorama is responsible for ensuring that an attendance plan is created for a student that is showing chronic absenteeism either they've already reached it or they're approaching it and that can include Outreach to the home a home visit a contract an attendance contract with the student there's a variety of things so they're really supporting in those in that tiered way the academic and social emotional needs of the students [Music] So within the responsibilities of these coordinators do the parents received a letter when one of these students need an IEP so parents are involved in the process of getting an IEP so there's certainly documentation that goes home if either sometimes a family could request um services but if there's believed to be um a need then there is a process that of course families go through that I'm sure um Christine travison could speak uh could speak better to than I certainly can yes um and thank you Christine um and yes my question arises because um I have heard certain parents or parents that have come up to me and have told me I have not received a letter yet and I have seen that my child is not reading at the level that he's supposed to be reading and and I have not received a letter so I want to know if this is within this um team that needs to do this so thank you for having me the mtss process is a process to support students and give them the extra supports they may need if a student is getting for example reading intervention for 6 to eight weeks and they're showing growth um typically the team should be notifying a parent that um the student is receiving those supports right they're general education supports but that they're receiving them and making progress if they're concerned based upon the data they collect through that process that the students not making progress they could refer that for a special education evaluation sometimes you also say we thought the problem was this sometimes we think when you think of reading and learning how to read you think it's decoding the words but sometimes it's comprehension so we might do six more weeks looking at comprehension then you know to address that if the mtss team is concerned that this may be a result of a disability it does get moved forward to the Special Education team which is the coast at the school and then of course the parent would be notified um if they're suspecting a disability and doing an evaluation my recommendation would be any parent that has concerns about their Trials of reading or anything they should absolutely reach out to their school that's the first place to go and they could you know let them know what your concerns are talk to the people that are there to say is he getting any additional supports is this something I should be concerned about as parents were often worried about about things and teachers may not be as concerned as we are so I think that's the first step I would recommend yeah I I also think it's an interesting question because I think part of why that 98% is so critical should be 100 but the 98% is critical is because without a strong mtss structure and a coordinator ensuring it as a district we were skipping a really important step of documenting what we're trying and making sure the school has supports to try and we were unfortunately I think overidentifying students for special education and skipping a really important step now that mtss is there we can put supports in place many of which work stabilize the student and then actually help the student to grow so that they don't get identified for Special Education Service when that's not actually what they need so I can't emphasize enough Sarah J's work Leslie's work this this whole structure of mtss we've worked on now for two and a half years and it's a continuation of like progress we have to keep training ensuring schools have it ensuring those meetings are happening all that documentation gets put forward to their department so lastly how many people um are on this team it's just one coordinator so it's one coordinator per school and they work with various uh grade level teams or content teams at a school because that could be a lot for just one person in a big school no yes because we have this coordinator um that is in a big school with a lot of students that have special needs I believe that we should start thinking about hiring help for these coordinators because this could be overwhelming sure so it certainly is a big job um and one of the things that's really important is just the centralized support for those mtss coordinators so they get together with Sarah Jay who's the executive director of mtss every month and they talk about not only professional learning so that they can really um put the role in place with Fidelity but they do also talk about problems of practice case loads Etc so we're at least able to have a touch point with schools to know uh if there is a struggle that we need to address yeah I think there's also there's other structures that support there's a student support team in every school and that will have on it um a combination of counselors nurse uh administrator uh Educators special Educators could be the coast it could be and that team um is there to really move the student forward what mtss does is it makes sure the structures are happening the teams are meeting and that communication is really flowing uh but when it comes to the student level like for a special education student they have a special they have an IEP team they have a coast in the building they have an ad for special education so there's lots of layers of support for a special education student um so it's really we were missing some key structures that we had to make sure the teaming in schools and mtss is one of those they're going to reach out if for instance they see a gap in service uh or or they see a gap of need they might reach out to Leslie around curriculum uh they might reach out to um Leslie around reading intervention for general education they might reach out to uh Casal and Christine if they see a lot of special education students bubbling up and they see a need but they're really working on a structure to bring people together to communicate student support team has like a really deep role with the student and that's equally important thank you thank you I just have one question and it's related um actually to one of your um appendix slides um looking [Music] at what we know is the particularly the trend of new newly enrolled students in in our district and you note that exclusively that those numbers are coming from multilingual Learners um like in the district so this is actually and my presentation is slide 28 yes um so what's what's interesting about this particular slide to me is one wondering what particular percentage of the 978 and then 700 from previous years um is due to multilingual Learners and then do you have any just forethought on what that means for projections that might be going towards teacher pipeline as program hiring um things like that um yeah I mean you really hit the nail on on the head with that I think um you know so you're sort of seeing we had you know about 10 years ago we had the first sort of end of a big wave of this in in school year 15 16 right and we really saw then those um in you know sort of the new multil leers coming through the district really drop off um during the pandemic and so when we started to see that increase again in school year 2122 um and sort of going forward I think the superintendent and uh Dr Chen and the um Joel and the team have done a lot of work to build up new uh multilingual learner programs um so uh we have these nine new programs are opening now but there's also the expansion of bada to bada East um and who are serving a lot of the students who come in uh through the year I think what we see is you know the distribution of the 978 or the 710 or the 691 on this slide it's not even it's not every school getting six or seven kids a lot of the need is concentrated in certain schools and I think you'll see a lot of overlap between those schools and the schools getting new programs as we move into this so um one example I think you know the would be relevant is you know for a long time the English historically has been a school that gets a lot of new students when we see these influxes of students for a lot of really good reasons it's location right its services it provides and so the English is now going to have a newcomer program that was formally approved in one of these new models from Desi that's what one of the programs that's being built out for next year and so I think you know we've really ramped up the district's capacity to do this work right I and I would add to that I think our newcomer programs have we have also increased those uh and at the high school level where we've seen a lot of unaccompanied minors coming in um we've also I think SLI is another great example where we've had to open programming and ensure the social emotional support is in that programming um that's been a fast growing program it's all in response to us looking at the profile of the students coming in and what they need and so that gets then reflected I think for us special education in ESL um certified staff is really critical so much so that we're looking within ohc right now to talk about you know early hiring of those positions knowing that we're always going to have a position for somebody that has those certifications uh and I think for multilingual Learners with disabilities uh that's where somebody that may have an ESL CT and is delivering ESL but also has a special education CT and has experience with special education can see what is language-based uh development and what is special education and so it it's we're really trying to hire in and create pipelines uh this is why our par pipelines are also critical because that is our largest group of multilingual um staff so I think um these are great questions and and I think relative to the budget you would see in the FTE as you did the last two years are heavy heavy hiring is all uh students with disabilties so basically special education and and uh ESL do we expect this distribution to be lasting and like throughout like I don't I mean say but I think you know this chart um if you look at the where the drop off happened at on this chart there was a moment in time that's very similar to a moment in time we're going through right now now at the federal level I think the thing we don't know is what the impact of that will be going forward and you know I I can steal your line or I can let you say it superintendent but we don't know whether Boston's going to you know become the safe haven and we might see an even bigger influx uh from students who are now you know sort of more all over the country or if we might see a drop off like this one so for now these are the students we have these are the students we are going to serve and so we're going to build the programming for them and if we do see a drop off we'll sort of think about how to manage that going forward but the great privilege we have in Boston is we can afford to build the programs even in that uncertainty to make sure the students are getting the services they need and so you know I'm I'm very happy to be in a position that we're able to say even with the uncertainty we're building the programs for the students that's right we're a district that welcomes all and serves all and so we very much hope that we continue to see uh the vibrancy of so many of our immigrant and migrant families and students thank you madam chair thank you um Chief Bloom for this presentation so I cannot let it Let It Go without repeating 3 fourth year consecutive year of a balanced budget there are not a lot of school districts in this state or in this country that can say that so congratulations to that and I can't help but think of our former Chief Financial Officer and interim superintendent John MCD who started that Trend he did and clearly has uh it has been continued um this past year steers ship at well though I can think of a full school full School leaders that few School leaders that would be disappointed that 26,000 was left I I knew the feedback was coming Vice I I have to sit here and take it it's fair I much more importantly um it is important that it's a balanced budget and that's important to the taxpayers this city so for such an a huge budget that in fact that it is balance shows great fiscal stewardship and I thank you for that um I remember when weighted student funding was put in and one of the key findings of it was we discovered a lot of inequities in our system of schools that quite frankly were underfunded and other schools that were overfunded the old theory of the squeaky wheel gets the grease right or political favoritism that type of thing my big concern about moving away from weighted student funding is that inequities can reappear help me out with the philosophy of how we ensure inequities do not reappear intentionally or unintentionally for sure as we move away from that formula what is replacing it to make sure there are checks and balances so that we are um Equitable in how we address the inequities in our system I think um I really appreciate that question it's been uh one of the biggest conversations inside finances as we think about and frankly with our steering committee that worked on this project and others has and how do we Define equity and how do we ensure that we're meeting and sort of redefine Equity from what it was in the way the student funding world but I think one of our biggest takeaways from weighted student funding and a thing that will not change and is not changed and you will see it in your budget documents you get this year is um the number one rule is transparency right we have to show everything about how we made the what decisions were made how they were made and every dollar that every school got where it came from um so that means any special deal that happens anything that doesn't follow a specific rule a pre-ordained thing will be out there and will be listed right and so I think you know there were examples of this during weighted student funding and we would have them on our sort of allocation tracker you would receive and we would discuss them now we think we are doing a pretty good job of avoiding them being the sort of special deals that are bad and instead being sort of special deals that actually are appropriate for a specific situation or circumstance where the rules or the math might not perfectly describe the situation so an example of a rules-based special deal that we had implemented in the wayed student funding era and our continuing is um when you get a new ABA sub separate classroom we typically assign one New Strand coordinator for every four classroom right but what we said is essentially we're going to update that rule taking away from way of student funding and instead say even if you're only starting one classroom we're going to give you a halftime position and then even if you only have three you'll get a full-time position because what we found was when you had just a small fraction of a position it sort of didn't work and so even though the rule would say if you have one you only get a quarter of a person's time we sort of made this special deal but I think the thing that makes these special deals that happen Equitable is they're not actually the special part of them is that they're different from the existing formula but they actually are consistently applied to any school in the same circumstance so we do a comprehensive review if we're going to make any deviation from policy right we're going to have a review of every school that might meet that need that level of service and then we'll adjust it I think the other thing that's really driving our shift away from weighted student funding is this um changing definition of equity and I think the thing that Wade student funding did really well is dollar per pupil Equity right it was researched multiple times we were in National studies all the evidence was it is Equitable when you review pure dollar per pupil and yet we would all sit up here together we would be out in schools and we would hear the real challenges that schools would be going through and they would say I hear you that our dollar per pupil might be right but you know come see what we're experiencing and one of the big sort of takeaways from that as we sort of tried to dig in and figure out what was going wrong is the thing that weighted student funding really struggled with was twofold first was as class sizes decreased dollar per pupil increases were limited just to the teacher classroom ratio and meant schools had less money for all of those around the classroom things that they needed even if their dollar per pupil was high right and so we had schools with much higher dollar per pupil that felt poor relative to some other schools that felt quote unquote rich but had a much lower dollar per pupil the other thing was you know um I was this is sort of the example I use more in the community when we're talking about it is if you're school with 300 kids and your enrollment goes down five your school is effectively exactly the same nothing's actually really different about the way your school's going to operate with five fewer kids but in a weighted student funding world that could be a $50,000 budget cut for your school and that might not seem like a lot relative to what I'm sure is a multi-million dollar school budget but the amount of wiggle room in the school budget is very limited and so that $50,000 cut was really big for schools and then maybe the next year it would swing back and they would get the $50,000 back but then they'd already cut the thing and now they have to put it back and it was creating all of this uncertainty so I think a lot of the fundament I'm sorry for the long answer it's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the last couple of years um I think we are trying to keep some of the core principles of way of student funding transparency school-based decision making right obviously right but also learn the lessons of what worked and what didn't and the other thing that I really appreciate about the direction we've gotten from the superintendent on it and every year in budget season we have to sort of calibrate on this is we're not going to move very fast right to implement a new system and do sort of um one of the challenges way student funding implementation was you know a bunch of schools got told you're overfunded now you're gonna have to make a whole bunch of cuts and a bunch of schools got told you're underfunded here's a bunch of new money those second group of schools were very happy right but the first group of schools obviously not so much and I think one of the things you'll see in this year's budget process as we go through it is the the change for this year is the schools that might be re We Believe were potentially relatively underfunded they're getting a sort of disproportionate share of the new money it's not actually disproportionate though it's appropriate and schools that have been historically we think we believe slightly overfunded for a variety of reasons are not getting as much new money but they're also not cut and we think that'll help us bring the system into balance into this new sort of reimagine school funding world and I have gotten feedback from multiple people that we need a better name so I there'll be a separate conversation about workshopping that so let me carry that thought process just a little bit further because from a general fund View Point yes a base BPS budget you can say they're not they're not filling Cuts or that type of thing but laid over that is the Essa funding that is going away yes so when you talk to school leaders we have some school leaders who said hey I knew that was going to be going away I I didn't use it to hire people I use it for other things and quite frankly usually are more experienced School leaders right and they're in great shape but I anticipate we will have folks both School communities and and School uh School leaders and school communities who will feel well my budget is being cut because they're looking at the general fund budget they had plus the Essa funding and now the Essa funding's going away which has been telegraphed for several years but from a total amount available for a school it's going to feel like it's less I think we did so in in this year's budget most schools do not have any Sr funding in fy2 so they actually mostly did that work through last year's budget season so um actually we're you know we're pretty confident that the vast majority of our schools are seeing a net increase I think there are some schools and we will inevitably sort of hear from them and work with them on on issues who are seeing real um reductions due to classroom changes right and enrollment declines and I think you know even if we're not doing a weighted student funding pure system anymore we are still making adjustments for enrollment and those adjustments are always difficult and I don't want to take them away from the experience of a school Community but I think what we're really trying to be laser focused on is ensuring continuity in the student experience and that all of those services that wrap around the student experience the librarian the school counselor the social worker right the Partnerships that we're able to maintain those programs and build more of them in our high State schools yeah I mean I think that there's certainly very very good argument that the SR dollars funded districts like ours at what they should be funded right um I would be the first one to say that um I think what we did over the last two years two previous budgets that's true was to very strategically work with school leaders and communities around what to take off of Esser and get on to the hard dollars and those were the historic budgets that David referenced and so what you really didn't hear in our case that you heard nationally and you heard Even in our state was big layoffs and um you know just schools decimated because we did it very strategically and because the city was able to give us funding to actually build in and insulate some of those very things so we're we're pretty much through the Esser piece and now moving forward the most important thing is that I think it's a couple things I think one is um that there's a stability in the budget that folks can count on um and so when we say sort of a traditional budget it's much more in line with the types of budget increases that we would expect um or be able to count on in future years I think the second is the efficiency pieces and US constantly being as efficient as possible as a system and in schools to make sure that the resources that we're investing are translating to the outcome that students want and then I think to David's point it's constantly seeking from an equity lens how to make sure that schools are you have getting the resources that they need in an equitable fashion so I mean that is the work I think of the finance and the budget team uh you'll meet you know um David's building his team out and I know he do he wants to do some introductions but that is going to be the work of that group um going forward great thanks and just Mr Bloom since you said this was a multi-year budget right three years it's as so what correct me if I'm wrong it it had to be committed by September and spent by December or committed previously and spent by September yeah let's we can go there so thank you um yes so it's it's uh obligated is the word that the federal government likes to use um obligated or spent by September 30th of this of correct yeah so um we have obligated all of the money um we then have until uh two weeks from today more or less to spend okay almost all of it there is something called uh late liquidation which we have been approved for um the federal government allows you if as long as you've obligated the project to apply for an basically 18-month extension of the spending deadline for specific Esser programs for us these are mostly facilities projects there's a couple other things in there we are trying to spend it all by this summer so we're well in advance of the deadline but if you can look in your appendex there's about 3.5 million of approved extensions and those have all been fully approved already so we are on track to spend every penny well except for maybe 43 cents depending upon what happens between me and desie of uh the $276 million and separately we'll have a look back on was that's spend worthwhile and achieve the goals that you know we wanted with which was to help with the academic loss due to covid ex improve facilities you know yes we're working toing pandemic Etc that's right thank you thank you Mr B I was originally going to ask uh a question which Mr O'Neal already asked pertaining around like how the removal of weighted fund fing was going to affect like how schools funding and how we're going to ensure that it's Equitable yes my other question would be how in determining like the Investments that that are made to like schools how are how are students in the community like contributing to like what investments should be made what voice do they get within it besides like looking at like statistics of schools and looking at the populations like how do they get a direct Voice Within it um I really appreciate that question there's a few ways so um last year we had a working group of parents students community members come together to help us evaluate way did student funding and what a reimagined school funding system could look like those recommendations are heavily influencing the way we're moving forward now I think we also have um a number of sort of community feedback events that happen over the course of the process the main way though that we're get we get community feedback through our budget is through our School site Council or governing board process so each of our schools should be working with their School site Council or governing board which includes student voice at the high school level and they should be providing uh an update on the budget proposals for the plan budget the School site Council has reviews the entire budget actually takes a vote on the discretionary budget as a committee and I encourage if there are any school councils watching or governing boards um they're encouraged to write a letter to attach to there's a form they have to fill out to say they were involved in the process and those letters provide us with feedback on how the process went any um things that feedback they have on the budget itself and also you know they can inform the work we're doing we're not able to necessarily take all the feedback in one year but we can definitely sort of take the lessons we learned through each budget season and apply them to the next the last thing I would just say um one of the things we lost during the pandemic that I would love to restart and this is a sort of plug but we can figure about later is we used to have some School site count um some BAC budget events where we would meet with BAC and we would talk about the budget talk about different priorities and get feedback from BAC members and anyone else they invited so I would love to sort of restart that process and we can have conversations offline about how to get that started restarted again uh is there like how often is like the School site Council like advertised to like students or people in the community so that they can know about it cuz this is like the first time I've hear of it and I want to know like if students get the opportunity to hear it and maybe get involved like yes I yeah so I think I think on the on uh School site Council and the governing boards a lot of times leaders will reach out to their Student Government so if there's a student government in place sometimes it's the president that serves on it or the vice president on it or sometimes they'll just ask for like a member elect that wants to but generally I think leaders will try to recruit from folks that are kids that are already doing and active within whatever structure they have um I also think BAC I think to um CFO Bloom's point I think BAC would be great to sit down and have some conversation we had a wonderful town hall with youth um probably about 3 weeks ago that you at actually and um I think you know we heard uh I think from students some things that are very consistent with what students will say about um social emotional mental health supports facilities and uh food uh certainly and then I think we you know we heard a couple of other things but I think you know it's as many forms as we can to kind of get that input but at the local school level it's just really important um that student representation whether it's coming through student government or whether it's through the school Psy council rep uh that that schools are getting that feedback School leaders are getting that feedback all right thank you I would look forward to like any involvement with Visa it's great thank you very much for this update and um all the work that you're doing as we move forward one question I have um for you is are we going to get that book yes let me give you an update on the much discussed budget book um we are on track back I think the our current timing update as we've been sort of looking at what other districts do with their budget books is I think our goal is going to be to get it to you in the runup to school vacation week in February so we won't have it necessarily for the first hearing but I hope we have it well in advance of the 35 hearing and the reason for that mostly is we're literally building the budgets with schools until January 7th like the last possible moment we need to prep the documents for you uh it like goes right from those tables straight to translations and out um to all of you um so we need a couple weeks basically from the 27th to put everything in and publish it I may be being a little bit optimistic about how that publishing process works it's not my area of expertise but I'm hopeful that in that sort of three-week period in between when we're basically done crafting the budget and school vacation week we can get that uh uh booked to you right yeah my other question is I think it's even complicated for me to try to figure out how I want to say it I'm many conversations we've we hear we keep hearing about you know as we are moving towards full inclusion how complicated that is at the school level we looking we're looking at how our um student B's needs have changed yes over the years the point that our general ed students are almost the minority of students that we have yet we are asking teachers to do any number of things and we are hearing the push back around what they want to refer to as inclusion Done Right Etc um how can we take a step back particularly as we are looking at moving away from you know weighted student formula to look at what we have learned thus far in the um New inclusion work and are we budgeting what we need do we really have the resources um both in terms of dollars but also in terms of skill set yeah um and needs of the children that we are seeing both linguistically as well as special needs and then and how do we Rectify that um budget alone won't do it no the sort of the bigger issue of achievement Gap issues you know all of the issues we keep talking about that are coming to a full head as we are shifting how we structured the district I will say so we're I think you know three three months and two weeks into the actual roll out I think it's it's so funny for me to think about that because I think we've been talking about it for two years right but we're actually only three months in I think some of the big things we've seen in terms of the finance part of things that I can speak to is we're really shifting what we look at when we determine um student need away from this very like boxes and classrooms lens to really specific student groupings and instructional minutes and and the needs of of kids and I think um this year at professional development just last week um it was the quote unquote budget professional development but it was BAS basically a 5050 split between uh finance and then academics on the other side talking to school leaders about the way they can document the needs for their groupings and one of the things I said to the school leaders in that meeting was we think this works for for most schools in the new way we're doing this and the way we're rolling out the investment and the guidance from those departments for most schools in most circumstances what that means of course right is it's not going to work for everyone because it's impossible to roll one formula out that's going to work perfectly for everyone but the real Advantage we have in the Lessons Learned is that we've been able to collaborate with the academics team and build out a really strong process I think for reviewing student need and identifying the areas where things don't work and I think the other thing I just want to acknowledge from sort of my perspective on this from a find lens is um we do still have because we're three months in and we're only doing grades k0 K1 k27 and N this year if you're a teacher in a k to six um and you teach in grades one through six which is a majority of teachers in K to 6 you haven't necessarily felt a huge amount of change in what your classroom experience looks like and so I could see how it could be frustrating to feel like the budget my school's budget hasn't really done anything new for me yet and the thing I just say is it's coming right it's a multi-year investment we're really doing the work and I think you know are there some individual areas where we're struggling either with resources hiring or training in some of the schools are doing the roll out I'm I'm sure we are but actually by and large when we look at just those rollout grades and the schools were doing implementation we sort of we see things working mostly as as design and so we're just sort of hopeful that will continue continue to grow yeah I think the other um other pieces I would add to that is I think that the team has the academics team has worked in um the office of specialized services and om they've worked uh to create for the first time sort of like a real guidance around um what types of classes ratios supports uh and then with that is sort of a tool set that school leaders and use one of the things that's most valuable like when you think of the schedule as a school leader the schedule is generally about 80 to 85% of your budget because that's your people and so we spent a lot of time talking to leaders about how they can more effectively use grouping so that students can get an experience of inclusion or partial inclusion with the resources that they have but doing it in a way that's not overwhelming the other thing I will say is that with any adoption like and let's just say Innovation with any adoption the adoption curve is slow at the beginning and then it starts to go up and then it kind of levels uh we are definitely seeing that with inclusion right when we look at the number of students who through the IEP team are being recommended to be included so I think uh we're we're trying to Pace the field in a way that that allows for mindset change adult you know uh capacity building and at the same time allow for things that we might not have expected that we need to either add resource in or we need to address in a different way so it's all it's all coming together I think PD for us is a big piece in the capacity building for our staff is you know over the next several years uh to me a big priority well I would love to also just take a quick moment to thank the team who does 98% of the work that I get to sit up here and talk to you about um our uh budget director Serena Lorac is now in her second budget season and acting basically like I did in my fourth uh uh Chris Williams our uh assistant budget director is a longtime member of the budget team and bring a lot of his legacy history and experience to that then of course the team members uh Christina Mary Salam Trey Ty and G are working tirelessly to do all the things and then I want to introduce you to the person who's keeping everything running as well uh this is our new Deputy Chief Financial Officer Blair Dawkins she's new to newly returned to finance but not at all new to the district or BPS and you'll be seeing a lot more from her if you've noticed any improvements in your um Grand documentations over the last few months she's been working really hard on that as one of many projects and so I just wanted to make sure to introduce you to Blair as we get started in the process and you'll be seeing a lot more of her thank you thank youc thank you welcome it's a great team yes thank you and we look forward to seeing more of you in the next couple of months so thanks thank you okay so second presentation will be an exam schools admission policy recommendation I'll invite chief of data information and systems Improvement miss Monica Hogan to come forward with the presentation while she gets settled I'd like to invite the superintendent to offer opening remarks we want to aim to keep the presentation under 20 minutes and a reminder to our presenters to speak slowly to assist our interpreters and I'll now turn it over to the superintendent wonderful thank you chair uh so we' like to share some data related to the exam school admissions policy changes this evening and bring forward bring forward a policy recommendation for your consideration as we prepare for our fifth year of implementation of the revised process we want to balance responding to feedback while making data informed adjustments tonight we're proposing a slight update to the policy that will help us achieve that goal while staying true to the intent and spirit of the policy shortly you'll hear from Monica who is our chief of data information and systems Improvement um Monica has been through almost every re iteration um with this but she's going to provide some recent data on exam school admissions and share the recommendations going forward we're asking for your vote when the school committee resumes uh at the January meeting next month in January of 2024 the school committee approved a change to the policy that took effect during the emmission cycle for the 2425 school year at the time the school committee voted to revise the number of additional points that students receive who attend a school where more than 40% of the students are economically disadvantaged that number was changed from 10 additional points across all tiers to a number of points determined by the tier that the student lives in and that range from two to 10 points that policy change was intended to address the fact that some students needed a composite score higher than 100 points to get into the exam School of their choice which obviously was impossible for students who do not receive additional points during the last application cycle there were 11 7th grade applicants who had a perfect score and all of those students received an invitation to their first choice tonight we're recommending an additional minor change to the admissions policy we're asking to consolidate from eight to four tiers if approved it would mean that students in each tier would be considered for a higher percentage of invitations an increase from 12.5% to 25% per tier this change simplifies the policy it mitigates changes due to minor variability in the American Community survey data and it lessens the disparities in Access between students in geographically similar areas we recognize that there are areas for additional analysis based on feedback we've heard from the community as well as from school committee members numers as we enter into the fifth year of implementation of the policy as the policy suggests we're committed to reviewing all available data around areas of concern that have been raised and as you'll see in the presentation that Monica will show shortly we'll look at these areas more closely this spring address the questions that come from them and then look holistically at the data set in return with future policy recommendations for implementation to impact the following school year so at this point I'll turn it over to Chief Hogan thank you superintendent and good evening school committee members um we're going to look at some data tonight and before we do that wanted to just remind um remind you of what the admissions policies have been for the past five years because they have been slightly different each of the last five years um so the school year 2021 was the last school year that utilized the isce and GPA um and did a straight city-wide ranking of um highest performing students school year 2122 was the policy that was an one-year interim policy that utilized a 20% city-wide round um in an 80% um round where invitations were distributed by ZIP code there was no test in that school year school year 2223 was the first year of the policy that was passed in 2021 on the first year of implementation used socioeconomic tiers and additional points but only grades and then in school year 2324 we introduced a test again um so this was a policy that used socioeconomic tiers the additional points um and then grades and a test score for students and then in 2425 the last school year of admissions that have been fully complete um um used the socioeconomic tiers um as well as additional points but as the superintendent just mentioned um this was where we had the the small policy change last year where the number of points you received was um dependent on the tier you lived in so this slide looks at the number of applicants for seventh grade um by socioeconomic tier uh since 22 23 the total number of grade seven applicants has slightly ticked up um and the proportion of BPS applicants has remained steady we've seen modest growth in the number of applicants in tiers 2 through six um but a larger decline in the number of applicants in tier seven and eight where the invitation rate is lower the next slide looks at the invitation Trends by student group um so we're looking at students identified as economically disadvantaged students identified as multilingual Learners and students um with disabilities and so over the past four years we have seen an increase for each of these groups um but what you can see in the graph on the right is that the dotted lines represent the percentage um of those groups overall for the district and so while we have seen an increase um the groups are not at the same level as they are districtwide the policy change has also resulted in a shift of the geographic distribution of invitations for seventh grade um the maps on these slides are a visual representation of the percentage of invitations received by ZIP code um comparing school year 2021 to school year 2425 um and so we can see that the distribution of invitations in school year 2425 is more closely aligned to the distribution of school aged children in Boston and finally this slide shows the invitation rate by socioeconomic tier or the percentage of applicants in each tier that received an invitation in the last two admission cycles and those are the last two admission cycles that did use a test as a reminder um so you can see almost all students in TI 1 through four received an invitation while approximately half of students in TI seven and eight received an invitation um before I go into the policy recommendation under consideration um we wanted to share some additional information on the impact of last year's policy change as a reminder last year this body voted to change the number of additional points that students received based on the school attended in the previous year based on the tier they live in that meant calculating the point differential by tier between students receiving points and students not receiving points and using that number as the number of additional points Point students would receive rather than the original 10 points in the policy this was intended to ensure that students with composite scores of 100 prior to receiving additional points were still able to receive an invitation to their first choice First Choice school if they did not receive additional points I and what we saw in the 2425 application cycle was that there were 11 applicants with a perfect score of 100 and all of these students received an invitation to their first choice School the policy recommendation before you tonight is to consolidate the number of tiers from 8 to four under the current policy each tier receives an equal allocation of invitations or 12.5% as there are eight tiers currently um by consolidating the number of tiers from 8 to four students will now be considered for 25% of invitations rather than 12.5% this change simplifies the policy and also responds to some of the feedback we have been hearing frequently that families across the street from each other may live in different tears even though they are in geographically similar areas this change will lessen the number of places in the city where these disparities occur to understand the impact of this recommendation we conducted two simulations using the school year 2324 and school year 2425 applicant pool tools um the table on the right shows how the tiers were combined in the culation from 8 to 4 so tiers 1 and two became Tier 1 tiers three and four became tier two tiers five and six became tier three and tiers seven and eight became tier four um and then this slide shows two visual representations of the tier map the map on the left using eight tiers um and the map on the right using four tiers in the map on the right you can see that there are still areas where a tier 1 census tract May border a tier four census tract however with fewer tiers there's less differentiation between Geographic areas you can see the colors sort of smooth out more um in the in the map on the right um because there are less tier options to [Music] consider so looking forward um we are asking for the school committee to vote on this polic recommendation at a school committee meeting in January um to go into effect for the current admission cycle um and additionally we will undertake um additional and deeper analysis this spring to better understand the multi-year impact of the 2021 policy and consider potential future changes um the last slide outlines some of the potential areas for additional analysis that we have heard come up through Community feedback and comments from school committee members um we will be working over the spring to better understand the answers to these questions to inform future policy recommendations and these questions include some questions around the calculation and sizing of socioeconomic tiers um whether or not the policy can consider individual socioeconomic status um the impact on top performing students ensuring access for students with disabilities and multilingual Learners and better understanding what the student experience is once they enroll enroll at an exam school and with that chair I will pass it back to you for [Music] questions just um just just a couple and I this is more data that I'm looking forward to seeing so um we talked about this a little bit so next year is the first graduating cohort under the most recent um exam school policy so the first students who were admitted under the 2021 policy the students who were admitted in 2223 using tiers and grades only right those students are now in ninth grade those stud so that's been um Yeahs yeah it is oh no so I I mean I I think also um this aligns with my my other question just around just wanting um to see um the invitation um Trend data um Broken Out by like race and ethnicity if possible um I I just would be very curious to see like that shift and everything like that I mean there's obviously some intersections with socioeconomic status but like to see it yep you can provide that [Music] yeah so um thank you for this work I know it is this has been a um quite a process as the chair always says we spent a lot of time talking about exam school policy which take up you know um time talking about the rest of our students as well it's also a matter of importance to our families I was um struck by a couple things in your presentation the first was the look at the change that we made last year where we substituted real data for what had been a hypothetical so we had a hypothetical of 10 points right it was an assumption of what the difference was between tier one and non-tier one schools and Title One a title one excuse me right thank you title and tiers right so Title One poverty deemed by the US government to be poverty level schools um and so we adjusted we substituted real data for a hypothetical and because we were concerned about people uh applicants who had received a 100 and were overtaken by someone who would receive 10 points and they weren't and were not getting um admission and that was both in the data we had seen as well as um in a doal that we had heard from a number of families so this is interesting for me to see that this past year after we implemented that I think the number you had and there was 11 students received perfect score or better and all of them received invitations to their first choice yes so that's interesting I also note though that you put in here that there was a decline in applicants from tier 7 to eight to 7 and eight and it was a fairly substantial 46% 62% uh no decline in the number of applicants in that tier it had the percent in here thought it was 62 46 I think that was the amount that 15 to 16% oh yeah right I think that was the amount that were accepted or received invitation right you're right but the percentage oh no so where am I seeing that percentage invited there it is yeah on page three so the number of applicants in tier 78 has declined by about 15 to 16% suspicion in my head is folks from previous years saying my children shouldn't apply because they're not going to get in because they need the 100 plus the 10 points that type of thing so it'll be interesting folks to understand that the change we made last year actually did result in everyone who had at least a perfect score got in so um it will be interesting to see as if that data continues for previous years um because one of the things you address on here is about our top performing students can the policy Ure the top performing students of City receive an invitation School their choice so be interested to see if that plays out I do appreciate the change from 8 to four because there is such confusion among parents about what ti they are in we hear consistently about um trying to understand how the tear are made up what the factors are what the Census Data is you have an exhaustive memo in here um from Miss Clarkson about how it is determined but it's pretty thick reading right and so simplifying to me makes a difference and this to me is simplifying Chicago a substantially bigger city than us who has wrestled with the same issue has four tiers yes so for us to go to four tiers to me makes sense it's responding to parents and it's simplifying how to understand what tier you're in um the last point I'll make is I think quite frankly the most important part of this presentation um and and Dr alins asked for one way to see the simulation i' also like to see it what the results you know did it you you have in here in the appendix did it change invites and non- invites it be interesting to see did it change that by Tears I think you have the aggregate data in there yep but the last piece is this slide of potential areas for additional analysis because to me these four points you raise are the points we hear from people across the city that have raised this consistently um um our colleague Mr cardet Hernandez has consistently raised about individual socioeconomic status versus Byer and so I appreciate that that's in here because I know that was important to him and he he couldn't be with us tonight but also this question what are the impacts of size and tiers based on number of applicants in a tier versus the number of schoolage children I know that's something the original task force wrestled with and recommended One Way um they had also wrestled with the issue of do we do a certain amount of applicants Citywide and then the rest by tier that had been wrestled with by the task force is done commonly in other cities that look at this so I think each of these four questions I appreciate superintendent that these have been laid on the table for discussion we're starting to get towards we said we' look at every five years we don't want to be looking this at every single year um we yeah we're clearly seeing in the data we're getting a wider range of students from across our district we're getting more applicants from students who would traditionally maybe not have thought applying to our exam schools and those are all positives I think this proposal on the table simplifies also recognizes some outstanding questions that we need to analyze further and dig deeper on and so um thank you for the presentation and I look forward to conversation about it further conversation about it um so I I think also going forward there's kind of three pieces for me when I think of a policy there's the policy itself which we was created there's the implementation guide for that policy which needed to be created uh for a policy that had not existed in this way and then there's um what are the supports of for the students who are part of that policy and so I think for us going forward as we now kind of go into year five I do want to make sure that we're addressing kind of all three of those things I think uh the exam schools have done a good job um coming up with programming that they believe helps to support all students uh as they go to the exam schools but I'd like to uh better codify that and actually make sure that's there and that means looking at how are the students doing that are there and I think Dr alkins you poke at this a lot right which is appropriate like how it's getting in is one thing but then what do we need to be doing to support success for students once they're in there so I think going forward with our team I want to make sure that all three of those things are happening with this particular policy but all policies as we Implement them whether it's inclusion or you know whatever policies we're implementing no um by Sher O'Neil your question makes me think of have we actually done any surveying within the tiers to figure out perhaps what's behind the the decline because even as you um mentioned the stat I was like the reason why I think my my head went to slide six was because if you look at the actual numbers the applicants in tier eight are the same so it's really just tier seven that we're talking about right so it's one tier that perhaps is receiving that particular message right so I'd be interested to see if we have done any suring or any convers or had any conversations with families as to why because it's particularly um yeah like definitely like over 60 you know a reduction in 60 applicants right so it's very interesting 262 yeah yeah 272 to 270 it's the same my my question is more about the 355 kids that did not get an invitation and what did they choose to do how many of them chose to enroll in other schools and also be interested in what percentage of those students were you know Kon BPS students versus students coming in back into the district from other areas as well yes so this past application cycle um of the applicants who were not invited to any exam school um 54% of them were enrolled in a BPS School in October um so about half um that was up right yes that was higher than the year before which was 43% um about 150 kids that that's right went elsewhere that went elsewhere and I think about them as 150 High achieving kids who BPS Now does not have an opportunity to have this part of their do we know though of those 150 whether they were in the BPS to start or whether they were taking the exam and sat outside of the BPS and then just remained outside of the BPS I don't have that in front of me but I I don't mean to ask you questions we'll follow up we'll follow up on that because I think I think it really is it is the question of uh our students that in the BPS that don't get a seat staying in the BPS leaving the BPS students from not in the BPS that don't get an exam School seat are they choosing to remain outside of the BPS or come into the BPS so I think if we can look at that that would be helpful but I do remind us all that they may be quote unquote outside BPS but they are city of Boston residents yes right 100% right yeah 100% yeah and I think I mean something else that we're not discussing tonight but I think is equally it's important is that and we've heard it in the past from parents that BPS does not do a good job of advertising what all of its high schools have to offer AB that I mean you know and some people who've not gotten into an exam school and of chosen another school have been pleasantly surprised at the academic rigor and the opport opportunities that other high schools offer so you know we we need to do a better job of making sure all of our schools are well represented as well as parents are getting the information early enough about what schools offer and how to access them because they often feel they get a lot of information about applying for exam schools which means we do our own Sal with the services that's the only that's right messages they're getting that there are not other you know quality opportunities that's right and to that recommendation chair I think we had a strong presence of the high schools at the Showcase and a lot of parents for high school grades both sixth grade transitioning to seventh and then n9th grade uh the other is a lot of our high schools are doing open houses on their own to be able to sort of in within their regions promote um so I think you know this is something I know with Communications and the new web site um this is something that we'll be particularly kind of um honing in on is how are we marketing is the wrong word presenting the best of our schools thank you for this continuous work that you've been doing and um we look forward to taking action on this when we come back together in Janu okay all righty okay so we will now return to um public comment no okay well thank you all um that concludes our business for this evening is oops before I said that is there any new business okay thank you then that concludes our business for the evening um the school committee will hold virtual meetings on Zoom from January through March starting at 5:00 pm committee's annual organization meeting will take place on Wednesday January 6 at 5:00 pm and our next regular meeting will take place on Wednesday January 15th at 5:00 pm again those meetings will be held virtually the complete 2025 meeting schedule will be posted on the committee's web page after it's formally approved at our organizational meeting and with that I have a motion to the meeting is there a motion so thank you is there a second second is there any discussion or objection to the motion is there any objection to approving the motion by unanimous hearing none this meeting is adjourned thank you all and have a wonderful holiday and see you in the new year happy