##VIDEO ID:https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/925261?autostart=false&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false## <v Speaker 1>I get started.</v> Good evening everyone. Sorry for the lateness. Happy new year to everyone. This is our first school committee meeting of 2025, the school committee meeting of January 6th, 2025. I'll start with roll call Ms. Laers. Here. Mr. Brand? Present Ms. Collins? Here. Ms. McDonna? Yes. Ms. Corset here. And I'm here And I'd like to make a motion to enter to executive session specifically to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation of if an open meeting may have the, a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigation leading position on the public body and the chair. So declares. And I do. Second. <v Speaker 2>Second.</v> <v Speaker 1>Ms. Collins. Seconded.</v> I'll we'll do a roll call. Vote. Mr. Fathers. Yes. Mr. Brand? Yes. Ms. Collins? Yes. Ms. McDonough? Yes. Ms. Gors? Yes. And my yes as well. So we'll now I the second session and be back around six 30 here. So we're gonna restart the meeting. Good evening everyone. And again, happy New Year. Happy 2025. This is the January 6th, 2025 school com school committee meeting. We'll we did roll call right before the executive session, so I now want to ask everyone to please stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence. <v Speaker 3>I the pledge</v> <v Speaker 2>Pledge of allegiance to the flag</v> of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. <v Speaker 1>Thank you for taking that moment of silence to honor those</v> who have sacrifice for our country. We have several announcements. Ms. Babo, do you wanna go first with the MMEA? Sure. <v Speaker 4>Our Natick High School had 56 students auditioned</v> for the Eastern District, MMEA festival at Milton High School. We are pleased to announce that the following students have been accepted from Natick High School to perform in the festival, which will take place at Milton High School on January 10th and 11th. For chorus, Carolyn Hogan Soprano, James Potter for tenor. And Sammy Renie for Alto for orchestra. Rachel Atkin for bassoon. Ellie Stevens for bassoon. And Lily yur for oboe for concert band. Eric Broberg for trombone. Lucy Chen, chin for trumpet. James Grant for French horn. Justin Lay for clarinet. Taylor Lynn for obo. Ben Sua, tip Fong for French horn and David. So for clarinet, some of these students also have received an Allstate recommendation, are invited to audition on January 25th for the MMEA Allstate Festival. We're proud of the students who are accepted and we are no less proud of every student who chose to audition. Whether they made it or not. Walking into a room and playing alone for someone you don't know whose job it is to judge your performance is incredibly stressful and our students made the choice to try to be the best. I think it also merits mentioning that at a different high school on a Saturday morning, the behavior of our students was top notch. And Mr. Morrell, Ms. Spielman and I could not have been more proud. Natick has the best kids anywhere. This was from Mr. Chisholm who is our director of K 12 music. So congratulations to all. <v Speaker 1>And then we have an announcement from Dr. Sp. Yeah,</v> <v Speaker 5>Just wanted to inform everyone watching that we,</v> last time we met was December 16th and at that time it was a joint meeting with the school committee and the select board. And we had offered up and we're gonna post it in a minute, a QR code where people could put in questions related to a potential override. We had about 10, I didn't count them for this meeting, but roughly 10 questions come in and it's gonna, I just wanted to explain the process that I'll be using here, which is to, when the administration and I write the answers to those questions, we're actually gonna post them on the school website and they will be combined into the town's website as answers. So I have a memo, it will be posted to the website. This is kind of the practice we'll do every week as these questions roll in. This was the first round from December 30th and my understanding is those will be published to the town website Thursday or Friday of this week. But we'll put my memo up. I think Cory will do it tomorrow. So if anyone has any questions on that. But the memo does go to the school committee as a formal means of informing the school committee of what we're sharing town wide. Really always in the spirit of transparency and building credibility. So I'm happy to take any questions if there are any, <v Speaker 1>If they're not, none, I have a follow-up announcement.</v> We do not have the override, the proposed override or the budget on today's agenda. However, our plan is to put that on this agenda item between starting next meeting between then until the March 25th election. Assuming that the select board votes to put the override in the on the ballot. The purpose of having that on the agenda is so that you all the school committee members, if you have any of your own questions, if you have any questions from any constituents that you talk to, you can ask them so that there's constantly a way for people to ask for you all to ask questions of the demonstration. As per our regular norms, we just ask that you submit those questions in advance. So usually by Thursday we have that form so the administration has time to look at the questions, process them, and then provide that response. So that's for the school committee members for the public. I want to emphasize what Dr. Bash said. The web, the town does have a website is dedicated to any questions and any information about the proposed override. And in just a second we'll put up, can I show that the slide with a QR code? I encourage anyone who has any questions, any questions at all about the proposed override for either the town or the school to submit your questions. That way on the backend, any questions that you submit that are related to the school side will go to Dr. SP and the rest of the team and she'll follow the steps you just outlined before. Obviously if it's a question for the town side, they'll respond as well. You're also always, always, always override or override. Welcome to email the school committee at school committee@natickps.org with any questions if you know, so there's no wrong doors. If you want to ask it on an email to us to any one member, the members will have opportunity to ask that during our our future meetings or you can ask it to the website. Just buying a little bit of time so you can see we now have this slide on this on zoom. So there's a QR code and then there is the website. Obviously either one, the link or the QR code will take you to the website. This is where the information will always be posted. This is where you can ask questions. We wanna make sure that if there is an override vote that people go to the ballot with all the information they need. And we're here to provide that in a as transparent as way as possible. So that's our override update. I, the last update I have is we are, the school committee is offering a session as part of the 1 0 1 series that the town is putting to out toge putting out. If you haven't heard of NAIC 1 0 1, this is an initiative from the town to allow the public to learn as much as possible about town government. There's already been four different sessions. Can't tell you which ones they've been but which ones they were. But you can go on the website and find, find out. We are offering our very own school committee, Natick 1 0 1 session January 23rd at 7:00 PM here in the school committee room. You can come in person. It will also be televised through Pegasus on the YouTube channel. More information will be out through our social media channels, through the town media channels, through our website, et cetera. Or the NPS Engage. So if you wanna know exactly how you can participate, please stay tuned to other additional information. And just to explain NA 1 0 1, it's not a regular meeting, it's not business meeting. We're just gonna be presenting information about the basics of natick, oh sorry, the school committee. So na literally school committee 1 0 1. What is our purview? If you wanna join a school committee, how do you run for school committee if, if you wanna engage with school committee in any way, how do you participate in meetings? What is public speak, all those basic things. And obviously there will also be time for q and a. So if you wanna learn if you've ever wanted had any questions about school committee, come to that session again. January 23rd at 7:00 PM We are, we're not gonna address any substantive questions, it's just for us to talk about school committee and all the school committee members are welcome to attend. We encourage you all to attend and what we're hoping to do is at the very beginning to give each person a couple minutes to introduce yourself and how you got to school committee so that the, the public knows what motivates crazy people to spend Monday evenings doing government stuff. Ms. Collins, <v Speaker 6>I knew there was something else on the 23rd,</v> which is gonna complicate Sue's life if it's here at seven o'clock. Since you booked negotiations until seven at Kennedy. Well I'm just, <v Speaker 1>That's still six 30 so we'll have to drive over from</v> <v Speaker 6>Kennedy, right?</v> I just wanna make sure that, <v Speaker 1>Yeah, no I didn't notice it's, it ends at six 30</v> and then school committee. No. Oh that's <v Speaker 6>So just,</v> <v Speaker 1>Oh good catch. Yeah, good catch. Well</v> <v Speaker 6>It's only because I'm already busy from three 30</v> to five 30 and now I'm guess I'm not going to Kennedy to come back here. I'm just staying here. <v Speaker 1>Just bring your sleeping bag and just sleep over. Kidding.</v> Any other questions? Any questions about any of the announcements or any other announcements for that matter? Okay, so let's move on now to, sorry public speak. Public speak is scheduled for a period of 15 minutes. Each speaker will be permitted a maximum of three minutes during which time they can speak about topics within the scope of responsibly the school committee. All remarks will be addressed to the school committee chair. Public speak is not a time for debate or response to comment by the school committee. Did anyone, no one sign up. Anyone here in person or online would like to participate in public speak? Anyone see anyone online or in person? So we'll move to the teacher, student and medical representative updates and we'll start with you Mr. Wood. <v Speaker 7>Thank you Mr. Chair. I have nothing to say at this time.</v> <v Speaker 1>Okay, thanks. The student representatives are not able</v> to attend today, but Anthony did share with me some remarks which I'll read again, this is from Anthony Lu are one of our student reps midterms and of semester cumulative tests are coming up on the week of January 20th to the 24th for all high school grades ninth and 12th. All days in that week will be half days. Good luck to all students with midterms. That's for me. Career pathway fair on Wednesday, January 15th from five to 7:00 PM is a career pathway fair. The meco headquarters at 11 Roxbury Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It is open to all Nick High School students. The fair students and families will learn about possible pathway options for post high school success excluding four year degrees. And then lastly, MLK day celebration. So glad he is reminding us of that. Natick will be hosting its 20th annual Martin Luther King Junior Community celebration at the night at at Natick High School on January 20th. It is on January 20th and refreshement start at 9:00 AM and the program begins at 10. So that's MLK, the annual MLK Community celebration NI High School, January 20th, refreshment start nine and program starts at 10. Is Ms. Scott online? She's not. So our med group president isn't here tonight. So with that we'll move ask a question. Yeah, sure. <v Speaker 8>So I have a question about the midterms at the high school</v> and every midterm day is a half day but that's not on the calendar. Is that what he said? That every midterm day was a half day. <v Speaker 1>All days in that week will be half days.</v> Is that January 20th through January 24th. The students who are here in the room are nodding as well. Okay. <v Speaker 8>Alright. Is there a reason</v> that we don't put that in the calendar? <v Speaker 4>I don't know the answer to that,</v> but they've never been put on the calendar. Okay. <v Speaker 5>I, I will say that is pretty traditional in other</v> districts as well in my experience. <v Speaker 1>I would like to, I'll take a motion</v> to approve the consent agenda. <v Speaker 5>So moved.</v> <v Speaker 1>All those in favor? Anyone abstain?</v> Anyone against? The motion is approved. The consent agenda is approved and now we're ready for the superintendent's report. And do you wanna introduce our guests? <v Speaker 5>Yeah, of course. That's,</v> I think this is the earliest we've gotten to the superintendent report. So this is, I hope this bodes well for tonight. I'm gonna start with the third item on the agenda, which is Serve Natick. I always like to try to put students first. So welcome. We have three young men from our high school, Kabir, Cameron and Finn, who are, they've met with me before and I know that some of us have met them. They are, they are very innovative and have, are gonna take some time today to introduce us to the organization that they started that I think you're gonna find really interesting. And so I'd invite you up and you can do your own introductions and we have a slide deck for them. But welcome and we are really excited to hear about your endeavors. <v Speaker 9>Thank you.</v> Thank you, thank you. <v Speaker 5>Maybe as each of you can</v> introduce yourselves as you start. Thanks. <v Speaker 10>Thank you. My name is Kabi Anand.</v> On my right is Finn and on my left is Cameron. We are all Natick high school juniors and we created Serve Natick. It is a non-profit that is made to inspire community service in and around the town as well as connect local volunteers with different organizations that need said volunteers. We created Serve Natick in our freshman year from the Jay and Ricky Ball Impact award ceremony that was presented as a competition to all Natick High School students in this competition. There were about 12 different projects that were entered in our freshman year. We ended up becoming the first runner ups we and in in the year between that time and and the same competition our sophomore year, we took the advice that we were given from the panel of judges. We put all the advice into our project, went back our sophomore year and then ended up winning an a thousand dollars grant, which we are putting to some projects that we have planned for 2025. <v Speaker 11>All</v> <v Speaker 10>Right, next slide please.</v> Real quick, a little overview of our presentation. We have a slide about our general, our general mission followed by the problem that we noticed and the solution that we've created. We would like to touch on an event that we are planning for late March, early April of 2025. And then a quick recognition to our sponsors. Next slide please. <v Speaker 11>All right, so what are we trying to do with Serve Natick?</v> So our ideal mission of what we're trying to achieve with Serve Natick is to ultimately benefit the community by fostering philanthropy in Natick, not only Natick but surrounding Madras area. We connect basically the, our Cons, constituents, the residents of Natick with events organized by community service organizations. And we hope to create an easy to use website that everyone can use. Next slide please. <v Speaker 10>So the problem that we found is that there's really,</v> for the students, there's a lack of knowledge on how they can get like community service. And as we have a community service requirement, lots of people like have stressed about finding like how they can do this and how they can get their hours in. And another issue we found is that there's a lack of connection between many organizations as they can't get the volunteers that they need for projects that they'd like to work on. And so what we've done for the solution is that we've kind of, we made Serve Natick, which is a joining between the students and really anyone who'd like to serve the community and these organizations that need volunteers and we've connected them together as Serve Netec. Next slide please. <v Speaker 11>Okay. So to give you guys an idea of</v> what we're trying to look for in the future and our past statistics here are some like data that you can look on. So in 2023 we had 593 visits and 445 unique visitors and we have steadily like gained visits and unique visitors throughout last year and the end of 2022 we got almost a thousand visits and 740 unique visitors. And for 2025 we're hoping to get 1,215 and just expand all of our stats in terms of this next slide please. Thank you. <v Speaker 10>So now we would like to touch on the event</v> that we are planning for 2025. We are presenting the Natick Impact Collaborative presented by Serve Natick. Next slide please. The Natick Impact Collaborative is gonna be similar to a TEDx style event, which with a series of speakers followed by a Q and a with the panel. We are forming this event based on a goal that we've come up with, which is the ICE goal, which is to inspire community engagement. Ideally we are igniting passion in the entirety of the town to get more involved in the community they live in as well as building, building lifelong bonds and empowering action to make a big bigger impact in our town. Next slide please. With that being said, what we are looking for in terms of speakers, we already have a couple that are tentatively committed, but in the rest of the panel we are looking for a diverse group of speakers that can discuss things like hidden issues in the community as well as local success stories and building communities in the various towns that they live in. These speakers are generally gonna be prominent, prominent community members in their respective towns or communities. They for the most part will have served some form of some form of community service capacity as well as had a great deal of positive change in their community. So they can be very strong speakers when it comes to inspiring our Metro West community members. With this being said, we are looking for sponsors for this event so if anyone has any suggested sponsors we would appreciate it. Thank you. Next slide please. And to quickly touch on the sponsors we do currently have, our website sponsor is Cameron's painting, which has been sponsoring our website and all our online presence since we've started. And our product sponsor Precision Graphics in Natick, they're right next to Roche Brothers. They've been creating all the brand merchandise like we're wearing today. Thank you. Next slide please. And lastly, we had a endorsement from Jay Porter Paddock who, who most of you should know. He's the director of communications with the town. He's also been one of our biggest supporters since the beginning. He's been working with us right since March of our freshman year to really start to get this thing off the ground and he's kind of been hand to hand with us since, so we wanted to give him a little thank you. Thank you, <v Speaker 1>That was amazing.</v> First of all, I'm sure that Jay and Ricky Ball will be very excited to know that they inspired you all to do this 'cause I know how important community engagement has has been produced to be for for them. And I remember one of the, being one of the judges the first year I remember learning all about your project and and how exciting it was. And it's just amazing to see it grow into what it is today. Even with, in fact several people you'll see on the committee and administration side have your stickers on their laptops. Anyway, just great amazing work that you're doing. So I'm super appreciative of that. All your efforts that I'll take. Any questions from the committee or comments? Ms. Collins, <v Speaker 6>You were looking at me, but first</v> gentlemen, I, I thank you. I knew that first night that I met you at the J first Jay and Ricky Ball event that you had a lot to offer and I was so glad to see that you persisted with it and congratulations on winning it last this past year. It's Whether people realize it or not, this is an important topic in our town, whether it be at the student level, which is this is what address is addressing or our adult populations. I'm involved in a group that is trying to help people who recently retired make these same kinds of connections so they may reach out to you to get some pointers because it's really important to help people figure out how they fit into their community. And this is so important for more than just the hours and I think you guys realize that and have exemplified that. So thank you very much. <v Speaker 3>Thank you. Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 6>Is this targeted</v> <v Speaker 12>Just at students or the goals to be for anyone in the</v> <v Speaker 10>Community?</v> The initial goal frankly was just for the high school students, but we realized that aside from just students, there are a lot of general town members that would like to give back, but they don't know how. So very quickly we did expand to the entirety of the town and frankly we've had a larger margin of people over the 18 opposed to high school students, which we actually do really enjoy to see. <v Speaker 1>Any other questions or comments?</v> Well, I already told you how appreciative I am of your efforts. A couple of thoughts. The NAIC education you, you asked for funders, I don't know if you've reached out to the NAIC Education Foundation, but they provide grants to all kinds of initiatives here in Natick. Some might be a place to start. And then I also recently heard of the philanthropy connection and you can just Google it. They're also a group based in the Metro West area and they provide grants to small projects, so in the community. So that's another group to explore. And yeah, thank you so much for coming and good luck <v Speaker 10>And sorry I forgot to mention it.</v> If anyone does have any feedback, we are always open to feedback and we always appreciate it. So if anyone has any feedback, I believe you guys all have your email or you can reach us through our website. Thank you. <v Speaker 5>Thank you so much. Thank you all. I feel like you need</v> to teach a mod module now in like supply and demand. 'cause the stats showed you increased demand over the last few years and maybe in entrepreneurship. So we might, we might come find you. Thank you. Excellent. Great way to start the superintendent report like a couple days after the end of vacation. The next piece we're gonna go through is really exciting. It's an English language learner overview that are several of our folks from our English language learner team are going to present to us. So come on up and introduce yourself. One of the, it's very timely because all of our multilingual students right now are actually starting to take access testing. It's kind of run in January and February, so it's nice timing to kind of highlight these students and our programs. And Erin, I'll have you introduce the team. I'm <v Speaker 13>Happy to, all right, here go.</v> Yeah, one over here. Michelle, we can squeeze down. All right. Hi everyone. Thank you for having us. I'm Erin Miller, I'm the Director of Student Services and Equity and I am pleased to introduce my colleagues here who, you know, they really are the boots on the ground folks of, of running our English language learner program here in Natick. So I'm happy to introduce Caitlin O'Neill, who is our K to eight coordinator. Jamie Muey is our middle, newly appointed middle school department head. So this is a new position this year. Jamie has traditionally been a teacher with us, but she, we realized that we needed some leadership at the middle school level in particular. So Jamie now is our, our new department head for the EL department at the middle middle schools. Michelle Boyle is here who is a teacher at the high school. She's an English teacher as well as an English language learner teacher at the high school. Lauren Adams is not here. She is our high school department head, but she was not able to be here. But Michelle is representing the high school tonight. So I am going to let them kick off our presentation and speak to the the slides and then we're all happy to answer any questions for you. All right, awesome. <v Speaker 14>Thank you so much for having us guys.</v> Can you hear me with my voice? Okay, that's all right. <v Speaker 15>I can,</v> <v Speaker 13>Is that, just press the button? Yep. Oh,</v> <v Speaker 5>You</v> <v Speaker 15>Go.</v> Well that's a lot better. Much better. Now you can. So thank you very much for having us here tonight. We're very excited to share this information and the work that we have been doing at this table and then our teachers in our schools for our students as well. So we are gonna jump right in at the beginning of the year. Dr. Bash gave us this book and justice for ELLs and in this wonderful book there are eight guiding questions that we have used as our focus of our work for what we are launching and implementing at our schools this year. So in this PowerPoint presentation you have, each slide is a question and then the response and the data that goes with the response to the questions are the answers to all of these questions that we have here. So we will not sit here and read all the slides to you because we'd be here all night long. You can go back and access this PowerPoint presentation and look through the data and the numbers in a closer manner at any point. You're welcome to do that. Next slide please. So for today, right now we have, or when we wrote this presentation, we have 265 English language learners in the district. Over the past three days that we've been in school, we've had eight more students arrived to our schools. So we are very much keeping busy here in Natick. And our first slide shows ELL students by district percentage in a measurement compared to our kindergarten students. So we started gathering this data in 2022 when we saw a very large spike of kindergarten students to show the initial enrollment numbers and how this beefs up our numbers at the start of the, their educational experience and how students phase out of our program over time. Next slide please. Here is a little bit more of an in-depth slide on the percentage of ELLs at each specific school. You'll see the numbers vary differently within the Brown school. Brown Elementary is our highest percentage point right there. This is mostly geared to students at one point really being pushed and funneled to Brown and Kennedy Middle School for their ELL services. This data is now swaying and changing for the better because we are allowing students and having programs at every school for children to attend for their English language learners, English language learners services. Next slide please. This slide highlights the true numbers in comparison from this year to last year. So you'll see every school has a percentage of growth except for Brown. And the only reason that Brown is not showing a growth in that number is because our students are, are going to Lilja and Ben Hemp for their English language services. So we are continuing to see a very large enrollment growth in our program every year. It just keeps rising and rising. <v Speaker 13>I think it's important just to mention,</v> I just wanna give the distinction about Memorial School. So while there are students who are eligible for English language services at the Memorial School, Memorial is the one school that we do not have, we do not provide services there. So some of our students who are at Memorial, if they are receiving services, they go to other elementary schools. We will talk about the, the, the plan to have Memorial Memorial. Our hope next year is that memorial will be a school that will be servicing EL students and then every school in our district will be a servicing, will be servicing EL students and allowing students to stay in their neighborhood schools. Everyone will be going, you know, the trajectory will be, they'll be following their neighbors and their, their, their siblings and so forth into like, like all students are in, in Natick. The other piece I should mention, one of you might wanna speak to this more, but there is a distinction when you get to like the 5%, the fifth percent, 5% of your student population. You know, there are implications in the state of Massachusetts for that when you get to that level. So for example, one is a mandatory elpac, so I should, I do wanna mention Kaitlyn led, we were in a DSI audit this past year. Kaitlyn led that work and i, I can't com commend her more on the work that she did with that. We are awaiting our results from that and we will get a more thorough report on what, on how on what that audit looks like. But one thing is, you know, and we can speak if you, if there's anything else about the, the 5% of our students, but there is an implication now that we are a growing district in EL and what that looks like and our requirements as a district for that. <v Speaker 15>Yeah, that's a great point. Thank you Erin.</v> The change in percentage changes our, our terminology around our, we are no longer a low incidences district. We are a mid incident district where our numbers dictate, as Erin said, the responsibilities we have to do by number of students has grown a little bit this year and we will find out more of the spec, the specifics around that this spring when we get our audit results back as well. Next slide please. Thank you. So this is a diagram or a graphic of all of the languages that we have represented here in Natick. I've heard you guys use the number of 60 and other select board meetings and school committee meetings. So you're right, we currently right now have 54 languages spoken in the, in the district of Natick public schools. So that's a lot. If you think of a language, we, we have a family here who, who speaks that language at home. Our top five, six languages. I'm saying that because two are currently tied are Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew are tied right now. And Mandarin are our top five languages spoken in our public school system. <v Speaker 14>Okay,</v> <v Speaker 16>Next slide please.</v> So the answer to number two in which grade levels are your English learners? Next slide please. Thank you. As you can see, a majority of the language learners are in elementary school. This is because most students start in elementary school and typically exit services or the need for services by the time they are in middle school. Middle school and high school numbers usually reflect students that have moved in to the school. Next slide please. So of these students, what are their current English language proficiency levels? We do access testing every January. We currently started today. So these numbers reflect the proficiency levels last January. Next slide <v Speaker 13>Please.</v> Maybe just give him a little context about the proficiency levels. Sure, of course. Just that's <v Speaker 16>Proficiency level is one through six.</v> Six is a native level Speaker ones and twos are newcomers. Three and four, intermediate and above four would be reaching, we exit at a 4.2 overall. Next slide please. Oh, I'm sorry, could you go back to that? This would be the current levels from after January. So as you can see there's an increase in newcomers. <v Speaker 15>So when students take access testing, as Jamie and Dr.</v> SP have mentioned, they take four assessments in total. So they take a speaking, reading, writing, and listening assessment and the state calculates their overall composite score, which is how we use in these charts here for the current ELL breakdown and then for the access score breakdown. And that's how we place our English language learners into specific groups for their service minutes in school. <v Speaker 16>Thank you. Next slide.</v> So how many, if any, English learners are duly identified? <v Speaker 15>So this is an area we're watching very</v> closely this year as well. You'll see we have the number of students with current IEPs listed here as well as the students who are in the initial evaluation process. The students sometimes do come to us with former IEPs written in different school districts and if they don't come with one and they are in the process of needing one, we've really tried to hold off for initial testing for students in their first year studying here in the United States. Most of the numbers you're seeing in the initial eval process column are students who have been here for two or more years that we are now looking to evaluate for their needs outside of what we can do outside of language acquisition here as well. <v Speaker 13>And I think it's important to just emphasize, you know,</v> some of the unique pieces to the of a dual identified student. So one thing is that, you know, we have to often look for evaluators who speak the students' language. So that is something that the district right now we have engaged in a number of bilingual evaluations. We've done evaluations in in Hebrew, in Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, you name it. And so that is, that is something that is an increasing need in the district is that we are, and those evaluations we have to, to first figure whether or not the student can, will, should be evaluated in English or their primary language or their language spoken at home. We have to identify whether they can use that with an interpreter. We also have to, I then identify the evaluators and that's, that's becoming increasingly difficult across the commonwealth. I will tell you that's a common conversation with my special, my director peers, is that we are often writing to each other saying, can anyone give me an evaluator in Arabic who does an ot, an OT evaluator? 'cause it's becoming, so there's, there's maybe one, one OT in the, in the state who's able to do a, you know, a, a Hebrew speaking evaluation right now. So we're all using the same people. So those, those are unique challenges, you know, and then also thinking about what type of evaluations we need to do for these students, whether or not we need to look at speech and language and so forth. Another piece is that there is a, in special education, there is a exclusionary factor regarding being an English language learner. So that is sometimes difficult to discern whether or not a student has a disability or not, because you have to look at, there's a, there's a, there's a strict criteria to go through to determine whether or not if an EL student, you have to be very careful about not calling because a student doesn't have language acquisition disabled, right? So there's a, it's, there's a lot of, they call those exclusionary factors that we have to contend with. So it's just a, it's just important to emphasize that we are seeing far, far more evaluations for our students. And it is a, it's, they're, they're complex evaluations at that <v Speaker 15>They are, fortunately we are still under the total</v> percentage of the state. We are hovering at around 14.7 and the percentage of the state is 16% who are duly identified students. Next slide please. So this is our grand total of our teachers and how we are split among the buildings in our schools. We did cha make some changes this fall? So this is, you know, a little, a little complicated because we look at the students and the need by each school. And then unfortunately sometimes we do have to adjust staff to be at specific schools for services. So my co my coordinator role covers pre-K through grade eight and the elementary realm, we have two teachers at behem, three EL teachers at Brown, 1.5 at Lja. And Memorial currently has no English language teacher because there is no active EL program there. Currently at the middle school for Kennedy, we have four teachers. Wilson, we have one, we just launched our grade five program at Wilson. So we have a teacher servicing grade five Wilson students who are ELs only. And then at the high school we have five ESL teachers in total. And then the department head is split as a, a part of that role as well. <v Speaker 13>Just to clarify that there's, there's two actual teachers,</v> which, which, but they're dispersed. There's two FTEs but there's five people in the role that, but they're not full-time. Oh, <v Speaker 15>I'm so sorry.</v> <v Speaker 13>So just, just, just a clarification. So for</v> <v Speaker 17>Example, one of our history teachers teaches,</v> she mostly teaches four history courses and one newcomer class four history. Another teacher teaches four history classes and one beginner class. I teach three AL classes and two AP courses. So yeah. <v Speaker 13>And just for context about the middle school,</v> obviously Kennedy has far more teachers because Kennedy was the only serving middle school prior to this year, we, we allowed students to stay, stay at Kennedy Middle School and not, we didn't have students move to Wilson because that might've been their homeschool. We, because they've developed relationships and they have, you know, that's, that's become their homeschool. So, but we in anticipate that over the year those, those services and number of students will level out and become more commensurate with each other. <v Speaker 15>And then you'll see some data over in the side</v> that we did submit for our focus review audit, which is the total percentage of teachers in the district who have their endorsement and as well as their administrators who have that endorsement as well. And endorsement is an add-on to a license. The teachers who are English language learning teachers have a specific license in that category to teach. So those are two different things that are worthy of note. And then Jamie's gonna talk to, oh nope, I'm starting, sorry. So this is our primary model and our program model for our, how we separate our students based on their levels for their English language learner services. So every student, when they register into the district of Natick, they have to complete a state required home language survey. And we have to either have an assessment or a conference with every family who lists anything in addition to or other than English. So we work by teams to assess students if they have a different language listed here on their home language survey. We can get information on previous testing on access scores from other districts if they, if they've done it at a WIDA partnership before, we can use that for placement. And if we don't have that, we would give them an initial screener to test them to then place them into their appropriate leveled courses. So we highlighted the difference here between newcomer and transitional level EL students. It all goes by their composite level. So again, that's their calculation of their speaking, listening, reading, and writing to get an average score. So our newcomer ELL students at all levels of instruction, if they're a newcomer, it is recommended instructional minutes that they receive 90 minutes of ESL service time. Anybody who's over that 2.4 level is the transitional EL and it is recommended that they get 45 minutes or more a day. Currently we are not servicing anybody at kindergarten because kindergarten is not required due to the universal language of a kindergarten classroom. We are only servicing students who are brand new newcomers in kindergarten. So students who have that 1.0 or who are brand new to the language of the country. And then students at Memorial School, CU Memorial School currently, if they opt out, they do not have any direct EL instruction daily at the elementary level. <v Speaker 16>Next slide please. I'll speak a little bit about</v> the middle school program. Currently at both Kennedy and Wilson, we have one teacher per grade that's able to fulfill those required minutes. Newcomers all levels one through four receive a 45 minute English language development class combined there together during that class. And then in addition to that, level ones and twos receive a small group modified l and l curriculum and we work closely with the l and l teachers to modify the current units. We have worked with Eric Freeze to modify rubrics. So there's a lot of collaboration happening at both schools currently. <v Speaker 17>Next slide please.</v> At the high school we have the newcomer and emerging, or we call advanced beginners. We have four courses of ELL. So we have the English language learning class, but we also have math, ELL, science, ELL and history, ELL, so that students can access the content. Students also will access some other gen ed classes, for example, health or depending on the level they come in for math and science. A lot of, some of this was dictated too by the MCAS requirement. So some of this might change a little bit developing and expanding. They take one ELL course, that's an English language development course. And then all of their other courses are gen ed courses. And we also offer a skills workshop for our developing and expanding owls to help them with their gen ed courses. <v Speaker 15>So for this slide, I want you to think</v> of two things a little bit differently here as well. So we have progress and then we have students meeting the language requirements to exit. So this graph shows the two comparison points in one bar graph, students who exit English language services meet the requirements set forth on access. So they, they just meet the requirement, they have met the literacy score and the composite score to exit the program. So that is where you're seeing the green color. The light green color is the students who have achieved their progressed goal. So for students who have been enrolled in the program for more than one year, the state sets a benchmark target that students work to meet every year. And if they've met that target, that is where we see the expected growth target has been met. Next slide please. Once they exit. So that's the students who have truly met the exit criteria, although we're happy with progress, once they truly exit, we put them on a monitoring cycle and we monitor students in their academic perform performance in school for the next four years. So you'll see a, a bit of a calculation here for the students that we've exited. Our total number of students we're monitoring now K through 12 is 202 students and we traditionally e exit around 40, 35 to 40 students every year. <v Speaker 17>So the key takeaways,</v> I think obviously our population is increasing. We have many students from many different parts of the world. We're seeing an increase in special education referrals. But I think what I want to stress the most is how complex the experience is for a multilingual learner. So you have language, this language barrier, you have a cultural barrier. Mo many I would say, I don't know what it's, it, it is at the high school, I mean at the middle school or elementary, but I know all of our owls and most of them have had some significant trauma. And so there's a lot that goes into really educating the whole student and caring for the whole student and really taking a nuanced, individualized approach. And I think a lot of, as more and more gen ed teachers encounter ALS in their classroom, this will require additional professional development because it's one thing to learn it in theory, it's another when the students are sitting in your classroom. And then for next steps, I don't know if you wanna talk about the elpac 'cause I wasn't. <v Speaker 15>Oh, sure. So ELPAC is,</v> we're launching our first meeting. Oh, actually, sorry, next slide please if you don't mind. We're launching our, our largest meeting of the year on January 22nd. So we're gonna be reaching out to our parents to have a community night where they come join us at Kennedy so they can get to know us and they can connect with us in a, in a different setting than sometimes I think our families have seen us. So that's our big, our big event. We're very excited to try to get that going and to establish our ELPAC board families in our program frequently come in, come out, they move a lot. So we are required to have a board in our elpac and unfortunately currently we do not have a board because our families have all left. So we're really hoping that this can get some excitement and we can see what our community also needs as well. <v Speaker 17>We also are working on creating a, a class,</v> an evening class for families, for parents of students. And I think we're gonna have a very exciting reception to this. I think parents are very eager to become involved and I think it will break down some of the barriers that we have. So I'm really looking forward to that. And do you wanna talk about access testing? <v Speaker 16>Oh, sure. We started access testing today.</v> This will usually it's a month long process. We will test all students in four different language domains. Each test can take about 90 minutes per per student, sometimes longer. We are grateful for the support at each school amongst faculty. They really sort of rally behind us and allow us to kind of take precedence over, you know, different activities that are happening. So we kicked off today and it was a great success. All of our technology worked. Did you wanna speak about the summer academy? Oh, I'll, oh great. <v Speaker 17>Okay. So also the parent conferences</v> we talking points and Laky we've trained many, many more teachers and administrators. We reached out individually to parents and offered additional times if the designated times did not work for them and made sure that they were aware of this opportunity and we had really good reception to that last year. So I am in this unique position of teaching English language learners and AP courses. And one of the things I've noticed is that some of our English language learners are reluctant to take higher level courses either because they, they think they're not ready. Teachers might think they're not ready yet. And I think there's this idea that language proficiency sometimes equals cognitive ability, which is absolutely not true. And so I launched a program, which was, Dr. Nolan encouraged me to do this whereby I overrode some ELL students and some students of color into my AP Lang and AP lit courses. So there were nine total last year. And now this year in Lang I have nine and in lit I have nine. So I have 18. And it's a cohort of students that I offered. We did a summer, some, some summer preparation and some celebratory team building. And out of the nine last year, six, so a, a highest score on an AP exam is a five, what is considered passing is a three. So six out of the nine students pass the exam. And it's really important I think that we do this work because parents might not, the students who I sent, we sent letters home congratulating parents and I said, what did your parents say? And some of them are like, they don't, they don't really understand what it means. And so the parents for these students are not necessarily gonna override their students into these courses. And so we need to be advocates for them. And I think as we continue to gather this data, hopefully we will change hearts and minds around what it means to be an AP student. And I'm gonna be working with, I am working with Jay Palai who's now the math department head at the high school in creating a similar pilot in for math. So that was one program and something we're looking at for acceleration. And then another was a summer academy that we began last year we had about 30 students and we did it for two weeks. It was project based. We had a English, math, science and social studies and the students didn't even want, they're like, can we go longer next year? So we're gonna do it three weeks this year. And it was, it was amazing. And also we had high school students who came and volunteered to work with the younger students and the experience of seeing former or current, actually ELL students working with younger students and empowering them and going back and forth if they shared a home language was just so heartwarming and empowering. So this is some of the work that we're doing and then we're all providing additional professional development to all of our gen ed teachers to help them modify and scaffold and embrace our, our multilingual learners. So I think that's it. <v Speaker 15>Yeah, I think we wanna just highlight at the end</v> that we know for our teachers and we know for our students that this, it's not easy work. It's very hard having a student who's learning a new language changes the dynamic of your, your classroom. So we are happy to continue help, to help in any way we can. And Sorry Erin, go ahead. No, you go finish. I was gonna say, if you guys have any questions, please let us know. <v Speaker 13>I just thought I'd mention one thing about a next step</v> as well is that, you know, I think it's important for this group to know that with our growing, our growing numbers and needs and you know, I think that, you know, there is a conversation right now in talking about budget. We're looking at whether or not there's a proposal for increased staff. I think the department, the, the EL department itself, you know, I think we've been fortunate as a district to be able to work under the Office of Student services, which is, is the right place to be. But we're seeing greater need for, for more targeted leadership in the area as well as many of our districts now have EL directors or I should keep, I, I do wanna emphasize that we are also as a district recognizing that we need to go from the EL distinction of English language learners to ML distinction. And that is something in the next year that we just talked about as a team, we will be updating all of our documents and all of our, you know, publications to, to the community and changing our department to the multilingual learner department rather than the EL department. So I just wanna emphasize that, you know, I think that these folks here and the teachers that are working with these students and our principals, they are doing a fantastic work. But this is a growing population of, of student students in our community that we need to make sure we are emphasizing the need for, for the increased supports and services for, for, for these, for these folks. And like I said, making, bringing, making sure all of our schools have our, our students can access the, the schools that they, they in the neighborhoods that they live in. And you know, I just think, and I also think about kind of removing some of the barriers. I know Michelle and I talk about these things a lot from a social emotional learning perspective of, you know, thinking from a strength-based perspective. And I think that's what Michelle was talking about when she was talking about having students. Just because they might have a deficit in one area does not mean they don't have strengths in our other areas that students that can then participate in higher level courses and, and, and increased rigor. We need to be mindful that we need to be asset based rather than deficit based when we're thinking about our, our students thinking of different groups of students. So thank you for presenting. So any questions for these folks or myself? We're happy to answer <v Speaker 18>Mr.</v> Brand and thank you for the presentation. That was great and I appreciate the style of presenting my questions about data, but ultimately, and Aaron, you just hit on it a little bit As it relates to budget, do you have data, and I know that it's probably fluid, do you have any sort of rough data on like the average number of students or, or what percentage of students exit after what rough number of years? And the reason I'm asking is, is there any way to project or forecast even loosely next year we're gonna need this many teachers more or less whatever it, whatever it is. Like how do you, is there a way to measure, I know new students are arriving and some students are leaving at all, at all times, but it takes 75% of the students exit after five year, you know, whatever. I don't know what what it would be. <v Speaker 15>Yeah, I think yes and no. That's a great question.</v> The data shows I think by the state that it can take between five to seven years to establish academic fluency in a language. We definitely can pull the data that we've had of students who have exited in the past, but unfortunately to predict it, we can use it, you know, as a, as a tentative number. It does kind of come back to student performance on the test where unfortunately we might look at a student who were like, yep, you're definitely exiting this year. And they were sick with a cold the day they had to take the test, so they didn't meet that benchmark unfortunately. So I think we can look at some projections, but I don't think it's gonna be as definitive, as definitive as we sometimes are looking <v Speaker 18>For.</v> Yeah, I mean I wouldn't imagine that it would be, given the the number of variables that it would be incredibly, it would be really easy to put into concrete. But I wonder if you looked at a large enough data set over a large enough period of time, if there would be enough trend to be able to at least say the volume, we, we think we're gonna need two additional people next year or three years from now or whenever it is. <v Speaker 13>We are, as part of our proposal for Dr. Stash and, and Mr.</v> Gillis, we, we, this team has looked at serviceable minutes and so forth for each student and how they're able to, and what that might be for implications of staffing. So they have some data to, to support what the, our proposal for the additional staff. Great. <v Speaker 16>Can I also, sorry. Hi,</v> can I also just speak a little bit to what you were saying? Thank you for bringing up that point. I think it's also something to remember is that as students come in an elementary school, the gap between language and academic proficiency is not as large between the gap between a, you know, a ninth grader moving in with, with, with no, you know, want a level one. So in the middle school for instance, not only are we pulling these students twice a day, but we are also pushing into their gen ed classrooms to offer support. So the number might not be like a lot, you know, you might see a small number 45 kids at, at Kennedy and think, why are there four teachers there? But I think the need for support is greater the older the student is. So that's something to remember as well. <v Speaker 1>Did you have a follow up or a new question? Because,</v> <v Speaker 19>Just a question for, you know, my own knowledge.</v> So if you can test out of it. Is this, is, is the test the where kids can test out of it? Is this state offered or, or do we have a choice where we could say, run the test in April and then run it again and <v Speaker 16>No, it's state mandated in January.</v> The testing window is between January 6th and February 14th. This year it's always in January, we're part of the WIDA consortium and there are about 35 other states that we're, we're grouped in with. And so we all test at the same time. Thank you. Across the us You're welcome <v Speaker 1>Ms. Collins, then Ms.</v> Flas just, sorry, Ms. Collins and then Ms. Flas. <v Speaker 6>Oh, okay. First my colleagues know this about me,</v> but I can barely do it in English. So I have great respect for anyone who is trying even to do this in more than one language. But I have a couple questions. Well, first to comment the elpac, I'm glad it's getting back it, it started just before covid and everything in the world fell apart. So I'm glad that we're getting back to our responsibility there to connect people. Is the access testing individual or do you do that as groups or <v Speaker 16>It's, it depends on the test For speaking,</v> it requires no more than six students in a group. For the other domains, it's, they're tested by class. <v Speaker 15>Kindergarten, however, is all individual.</v> <v Speaker 6>Okay. So does leads to my next question</v> of we're not offering services in kindergarten, I think is what you said. <v Speaker 15>So legally we are not required,</v> <v Speaker 6>We're not required</v> <v Speaker 15>To offer services in kindergarten.</v> We are offering them for brand new English speakers this year. Okay. <v Speaker 6>That was, and my question then was if we're not, how,</v> who is responsible for notifying first grade that these kids are coming, if we're not already providing some services and have some idea of what they're capable of? <v Speaker 15>Oh no, that's a great question.</v> So we have, we have a list of our full kindergarten students by each school. So we're providing services to the chunk of students who are at the lower English proficiency level. But we still monitor and we still work with the other students who are at that transitional level of English. So come time for placement, I usually work with most of our principals with our EL teachers to place students in accordance to their best placements for their upcoming first grade year. So those first grade teachers will all know from our meetings and our work together, who the EL students are in kindergarten. They don't, just because we don't service them, they're not kind of forgotten. We are pulling them into the meetings in our conversations for placement. And some of our teachers in kindergarten are also doing push in where they work directly with the content teacher to help just that target audience that we're not pulling out of the room every day. <v Speaker 6>Okay. And are we at two or three questions?</v> <v Speaker 1>Yes. No</v> <v Speaker 6>One then I like two that I'm, I'm debating</v> between, so the progress goals and on slide 22 in middle school. Yes. Seem to, there seems to be a lot more that where the progress isn't made. I can see those are students primarily who are new to us in middle school or they kids who are coming out of elementary school or, or is it a combination? <v Speaker 16>I'm happy to speak on that. Sorry.</v> We did have a, an influx of influx of students from primarily South America and I think what you will notice is that there are large gaps in learning, particularly in math. So we have been working hard to provide targeted instruction, but you might not see those scores reflected here. And I will also like to mention that it's four different tests and they can take an hour, hour and a half. And these are middle schoolers, so they're not always <v Speaker 6>Top of their game,</v> <v Speaker 16>At the top of their game.</v> So it, it depends on, it depends on the day we're coming off a vacation. I, I was surprised to see them as well. I will say that their classroom performance is an indicative of these access scores from last year. Is not indicative. Is not indicative, <v Speaker 15>No.</v> Okay. For students in this category too, we also have, in accordance with our guidance, we have a a plan, we have a benchmark plan for them to meet that progress target set forth. That plan is very complex. It has us working with goals, working with parents, and really like seeing what other avenues are causing you to not meet that proficiency set forth for you. The data shows it, but we do have students at every school who are not quite meeting those progress targets. So that's a big area of our future work this year or this year and next year as well. <v Speaker 16>And also in, in terms of Kennedy, these, we had a lot</v> of students last year who were just sort of in that level three, level four zone. So I think the green that you can see of the students who made progress were our level, our newcomers, level ones and twos. And then once you get to, a lot of our EL students at Kennedy are in advanced math. So again, this isn't necessarily indicative of their performance in class <v Speaker 6>Is fathers.</v> <v Speaker 12>I think my questions mostly got answered just that one</v> because I really appreciate the work that you're doing, the high school to identify motivated students and had that question about the middle school. Like we don't really have a gifted track, but the, the question on the slide with the number of IEPs, like what kind of looking for students that might need extra challenges is happening. But it sounds like you're identifying at least for kind of the accelerated math kind of track students, which is great. You answered the question on the Kennedy side, so Yeah, I think I'm good. The only other comment is I am the school committee liaison for elpac, so Ah, <v Speaker 15>Excellent. Nice</v> <v Speaker 12>To meet you. Please includes me.</v> <v Speaker 15>That's good to know. Thank you</v> <v Speaker 1>Ms. McDonald and Ms.</v> Cor or I can find out. <v Speaker 20>So thank you for the presentation.</v> I don't know that we've had like a whole ELL presentation and in quite a while, so I appreciate all the data, everything that was presented. I have some questions about supports at the elementary level. So when did we start with programs at the other schools besides Brown? <v Speaker 15>So I don't, I didn't work here then.</v> <v Speaker 13>So what I'm familiar with</v> Behem is the most recent Ben Behem. We added LA two years ago and then that's why Wilson started last year because the list this this year, this year because we started fourth grade at Behem two years ago and then Wilson this year so that the students are going right up to Wilson and then Brown Lja Brown and Lilja work have been longstanding schools to provide EL services. <v Speaker 15>Lilja iss a little relative,</v> a little bit more relatively newer than Brown or I'm sorry, I'm saying that backwards Brown has been providing services for a little bit longer than Lilja, but Lilja was, was established right after Brown. <v Speaker 20>So I'm just looking at the staffing</v> and it looks like Benham has more staffing than Lilja and just only one less than Brown, but has the fewest number of EL students. <v Speaker 15>Yes, that's a great question.</v> And actually the, I had moved a 1.0 FTE from Brown this October to behem to service the needs of the, of students there. And unfortunately I think it, it's, it's because of the duly identified students and the high number that we're seeing there because it's so hard to pull students when they have their services from ELL and then they have their services from their IEP minutes with one staff member at Benham this fall for 31 students, we couldn't figure out, we couldn't meet those minutes to be serviced. So I did take the 1.0 from Brown to Behe for the rest of this year. <v Speaker 20>Okay. So it'll be interesting to see</v> what your staffing proposal is for next year to sort of accommodate the, those numbers. My other question is, I, I have two more, but I can either, I can hold the third one but I do wanna ask it in addition to EL supports, for example at Brown, that is a high percentage of students who are in the EL program. So do you provide additional supports to the community to ensure that there is a solid partnership between the school and the home and that those students and families are integrated into the community? <v Speaker 15>Yeah, I think there's a lot</v> of different areas that we do that work. I know our guidance counselors reach out and work with our, our newest families, bringing them into the fold and sharing all of the information. Our, so our guidance counselors reach out, our English language learner teachers reach out. Our front office is very good and very strong with working to help parents get their Lexie translations, their talking points if they need them, especially at the beginning of the year to help with the yearly required forms and really making that home to school connection in, in our events that the PTO has done at Brown this year. They've been very successful and very highly attended by our ELL families. But we're not done. We need to continue that work and we need to get that increased at all of our schools as well too. <v Speaker 16>I'd just like to make a comment on the culture</v> that I've changed and and mindset shift since I've been working in Natick. This is my seventh year. And I think just to add on to what Caitlin was saying, when I, when I first began in Natick, a lot of it was on the EL teachers to reach out and make sure everything was translated and schedule conferences and you know, registration, all of that. And that has shifted and now the responsibility is on everybody and the mindset is that this is, this child is everybody's student. So the guidance, they're really independent with making schedule, you know, schedules and reaching out to parents. And I, I think that when you go to an open house or if you go to a course concert, you will see the parents of our, our English language learners as well. So <v Speaker 20>I have a question about the Lexie and talking points.</v> Do you want me to hold it or, okay. Okay. So you mentioned that teachers have been trained on that. Do all of our teachers have access to Lexi Qui and talking points that they can use? <v Speaker 15>Talking points? Yes.</v> Talking Points is a system that anybody can set up where they can go in and make a free account. Lexit, no, Lexi is managed by myself for the district and we have administrators, nurses, guidance counselors. It's kind of a, a hierarchy of who needs access to that oral translation services because that's, we pay for that service. <v Speaker 13>But, oh, I will say though that, so Lexie, so the trading,</v> we actually realized early this year that there was a missed opportunity on, in, in, in some cases that we realized that we needed to do a retraining. So all of our, our folks here and as well as some teachers at every building recently did Alexa key slash talking points training to make sure that people were aware like I mean parents, parents, the the people, the the parents who are accessing talking points. I will tell you they get back to you right away. You know the parents are great, like it, it's really an massive, incredibly accessible tool and parents really appreciate it 'cause it comes in like a text but it's not, it's web based though so it's not like on your phone or anything. And I think it's a game changer. It really is in terms of like that quick conversation you need to have. So we did a gentle reminder with all of our staff to say, remember this is something that you sh needs to be utilized. Lexie is a little bit more, you know, meeting specific. So for example, there are thing you can get Lexie on demand. We could, we could meet, we could call, we could just go into Lexie and all of our administrative assistants like Caitlyn said, all have access to that. So at any time if you need that you can just go to your, whatever your admin assistant say, can you get me on Alexa Keat? And we can get an on demand translator. But most of the time it's used for planned meetings or the, our challenge right now is we're trying to, we're gonna, I think we're gonna start looking into piloting some software systems where families can wear different earphones and get beran like kind of when you, if everybody went through an amusement park recently that you can wear those, we're gonna see if we can pilot something like that. Like for our engagement, our, our upcoming family engagement series so that whoever's speaking the family can get the translation directly. 'cause that's a challenge sometimes. How do you get, Kaitlyn worked on this last year she had an evening event and we had to figure out a way to have all the different translators going at once and it's challenging and, but we can make it work and there's lots of new technology out there to, to do so as well. <v Speaker 15>Yeah, our translation, oh I'm sorry I'm No, no it's okay</v> with multiple languages at one time is is hard. <v Speaker 13>Yeah,</v> <v Speaker 17>I was just gonna say at the high school we,</v> Lauren and I request that if a teacher has an L and the L is struggling that we're copied on an email and then Lauren or I, we set up a meeting via Lexie with that teacher and with the parents. So we try to like make sure we're, we take a team approach. <v Speaker 20>Thank you. I'm glad</v> that talking points is being used more. I would like to see the district move towards an integrated tool where there teachers are kind and staff are using one software system that auto translates because I feel like then you're not having a separate system and you will have families whose students either never were in EL but prefer to receive it in their home language or have graduated out of the system, but the families still need the language translated and the teacher or staff member may not know that. So I think that's something that we should consider for the future. And there's definitely software tools out there that can do that where all of our communications is integrated into one. <v Speaker 15>So the, the quick reason why they're separate too is Lexi</v> is an oral translation talking <v Speaker 20>Points.</v> Yeah, I meant more like talking points integrated with our, the school messenger. Yeah. Oh gotcha. It's more like all of those things that I think we could do a better job of integrating it so it's more seamless to both staff and families. <v Speaker 13>Yeah, I mean I'll, I'll to, to be totally honest,</v> one thing we've realized as well is like even PowerSchool isn't, it's just, it's such a barrier for families and we recognize that and it's so you can't translate, you can't click a button in PowerSchool. So that's a, that's a barrier, right? So these are the things I, I appreciate that because I think we, we, we do need to look at whatever we can to make things as accessible for all families. <v Speaker 8>So Julie asked a couple of my questions</v> but I have a question. Thank you. But I have a question about you. I was struck by what you said about like not only are we representing 54 languages, we're representing multiple cultural backgrounds to families and I'm wondering if you do any assessment to see where families are in sort of their, just their experience with their understanding of how the American education system works. Like you know, college prep, you talked about AP classes and how some parents don't even just don't really know what those are. You know, I'm Canadian, I speak English. I didn't know what an AP class was until last year. So I I is that being done to kind of evaluate where the families are, to figure out what information they need to support their students? <v Speaker 15>I think that's one of our big goals currently</v> that's not really being done because I think we are still hopefully like at the point where we're establishing the re relationship that they then will tell us what they need. I don't think families, right now we're at a point across the board where families will admit that this is something, I don't know, this is something I need help with yet I think yeah we need to do a little bit more work to build that trust to get there. <v Speaker 16>I think at the middle school it's being done</v> by grade level by the teachers and that's, you know, most of our families use talking points and you know, they'll text you at nine o'clock at night, you know, do we have school tomorrow? You know, things like that. And so we're constantly reaching out to our families in that way And preparing them for what conferences are and what access testing is and what MCAS is and, and what, what high school is going to be like. I think the challenge that we face is that many of our parents are coming from cultures where they don't want to be involved in in the school, you know? And so it kind of feels like we're burdening a lot of families with the messages. So yeah, I think finding a balance maybe during registration, but I think it's an building, an ongoing relationship with the parents. I think over time. Oh <v Speaker 17>I was just gonna say I think</v> that it's also something we could do in the adult classes, right? Is really talk about what that looks like for their different age student and then if parents come to open house, that's another opportunity where we walk them through PowerSchool and show them materials and look at a schedule. But I think the adult classes could be a great place to, to be able to empower families in that way. <v Speaker 8>No, and I was excited to hear that you're offering</v> that too, the adult class. I think that's great. Yeah, sorry. <v Speaker 16>Oh no, I was just gonna say it sounds like a great</v> initiative for the gentleman behind us <v Speaker 5>Volunteer</v> <v Speaker 16>Opportunity. I,</v> <v Speaker 5>I wanted to add to that, I mean I think a lot of</v> what we're talking about is kind of that scale, that tipping point of scale. There's a reason why there's some new things that come about with 5% and really it's elpac. I mean ELPAC is the forum where not only are communities of of folks going through the same thing, able to be present network, get to know one another and make a community. But also it's an opportunity to give all sorts of kind of talking points and professional development. I've seen really vibrant ones that are massive and very parent run. That's a big piece. I've seen a, I've seen a district go from a really low functioning ELPAC within a year to a vibrant ELPAC that was, they were at every single school committee meeting. And it can be, it's what we wanna build and how we wanna collaborate with families. But we're kind of at that point now where many of the things we're talking about I think can be served and grown through our ELPAC and we just need to listen to parents and just to build on something that was said, you know, we sometimes may perceive that parents want less involvement and I agree that's what it looks like sometimes it's that there's cultures that have a great amount of trust for the teacher and that's kind of part of, of the dynamic here. So the only other thing, this was amazing and I'm so grateful for giving this this very wide and broad and deep window into L thank you, the world of LS in Natick and to bringing the students and families alive in the way that you did and with the data, but you made it so much more than the data. So thanks for kind of that blending. The piece I kind of get stuck on and, and one of you were kind of going there, slide 22, the, there's no secret that DESI makes kind of aggressive targets, but those are incredible and if we look at nothing else, that is the thing to look at because those numbers weigh into our accountability numbers and that is critical sometimes when you don't have enough LS in a school, it's not statistically significant and so it doesn't impact. But as we grow, it absolutely does impact. And so growth kids meet in those targets. To Matt's point about Mr brand's point about like how many kids come in and how many staff, we have a little bit of flexibility with our staffing because our department heads can teach 0.6 or they can teach, you know, whatever. We have a little bit of flexibility, of course we're gonna have to hire as we grow. The bigger thing is we move people through the system 'cause they're meeting their targets then that's bigger work that's adaptive as well as tactical work. So I spoke a lot but like this is so exciting to me 'cause it's gonna make our whole community richer. It really is. <v Speaker 12>Ms.</v> <v Speaker 16>Fla and Ms. Collins,</v> <v Speaker 12>Just one other quick question is what kind of programs,</v> particularly thinking middle school, maybe high school, 'cause you have a small elementary classroom, like for what kind of programs are in place for social integration? I think back to my daughter came home one day and said there was someone sitting alone and I tried to invite, don't, probably tried to invite the kids to come sit with us, but he didn't speak English and so he didn't feel comfortable and so we didn't, but like, so what kind of programs are in place for that kind of, <v Speaker 17>I can say one, you can say, oh</v> <v Speaker 16>Okay.</v> We do have the guidance counselors will host a lunch for new students and that's one program. We also really try to have our students involved in town clubs and sports. So we work with Natick soccer and try to sign our students up for soccer if they're interested in that. And then we have a rigorous afterschool club clubs at Kennedy and we really work to have match our students up with afterschool clubs that, you know, fit their interests. <v Speaker 17>So we, one of my ELL students started a club this year</v> where she has native speakers. She invites native speakers to come in and then ELL students and pairs them to practice. And so they, it gives an opportunity 'cause a lot of native speakers are like, I didn't know we had all these students here who spoke all these languages. I didn't know like that this was happening in this part of the world. And so they're really interested. And also I like to have a lot of volunteers in my class, so they work with students and then hopefully they develop ongoing relationships. So that's some of what we're doing. But also like you're saying, the sports and the extracurricular and, <v Speaker 13>And, and I will say I think that is one piece, you know,</v> all the things that everyone's brought up about the family engagement and the ELPAC to Dr. SP's point, like this is the work, the family engagement we wanna do because it, we wanna be proactive rather than reactive. Like for example, athletics, sometimes there's a lot of students who wanna engage in athletics and maybe they register, they're not aware of the registration process, right? There's a, it's and there's a timeliness of it. Yeah. So we wanna make sure that we're reaching out to families like when, as soon as they register, listen, if your child wants to do a fall sport or whenever time of the year it is, we wanna make sure they get those, those translated documents that someone's speaking to them because those are the, to be part of the community is so important during this, this, this imperative time when they come, when they are new to us and we wanna make sure that we're, like I said, we're being, being proactive. We're not realizing, you know, three months into the student being there that they're saying I really wanted to play soccer. And we're like, oh, if we didn't, we we wish we would had had that conversation prior. So it's things like that to be really thinking about how can we set things up so that we're kind of thinking of all the different things that may we need to make sure that are, you know, like I said, translated documents and access and those things. So that's, these are all good points to that. <v Speaker 12>And I think it's good for our every kid to just try</v> to exactly make it happen. You <v Speaker 17>Know, I mean I think that's been one</v> of the most amazing things too about the, the AP classes is that students who also are tracked in a certain way now have exposure to students they never would've had exposure to before. And they will come to me and say like, I, this is like a really important part of the class for me and I just feel so, it's just so amazing that they recognize that <v Speaker 1>We also need to make sure that everyone knows</v> that when we say soccer, we really mean football. The rest of the world calls it Ms. Collins. <v Speaker 6>A no, we don't. I'm glad</v> to hear about the responsiveness to the translation services and, and are they ideal yet? No, but are we going in the right direction? I think so, and I think we're able to capture many more students, teachers, administrators and families. And I was also glad to see Dr. Pash writing furiously throughout this conversation. But I do have one last question on slides 13 and 14. 13 asks about dual identified students and slide 14 talks about students on IEP, but we don't say anything about kids who are gifted. So I was glad to hear that we're doing, you know, encouraging them in the AP side, but I, I just don't want people to walk away from the, with the idea that, 'cause I thought, and I maybe I misheard. I thought that I heard you say, well we hold off for a year or two before we do an IEP val, which is different than we're providing services along the way where we think they may be needed even if we don't have a formal IEP eval process yet because the student's so new. And I just wanna make sure that we're not giving people the idea that, well, you know, the first two years of the students' time here are pretty wasted because we weren't giving them the services they need. And I don't think that's the case, but I just would like them to hear it from you. Goodnight gentlemen. <v Speaker 13>So Students are, have access</v> to intervention like any other student. So whether that be through work with our interventionists through a tier two or tier three approach, whatever it might be, we have many students who are EL students who are engaging in our R-T-I-M-T-S-S process prior to being evaluated. So absolutely like any student who's gonna be like that, that pre-referral process is engaging in, in different interventions in, in all schools. So absolutely. And then at some point when we make, just like any student, we would make a decision whether or not those interventions are effective and whether or not we need to then look at evaluation and that's typically what's happening right now. <v Speaker 6>That's what I thought you meant,</v> but that's not what I heard and that's why I wanted to give you a chance to <v Speaker 13>Clarify. Sure, thank</v> <v Speaker 15>You.</v> Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. <v Speaker 1>So actually I, my, one</v> of my questions was to clarify that. So just as a follow up question, so I'm assuming that if you're a parent of a child, an ELL student student and you want them to be evaluated, like your concern as a parent that they might be dyslexic or that they are on the ISD continuum, would you test them the first year if they <v Speaker 13>Absolutely.</v> Okay. Yeah. That, that, if there's a referral, whether it's a school referral or a parent referral, we will, we always have with any student, we have the conversation of whether or not that student should engage in RTI and we should wait for the evaluation and we should do that and or do a concurrently, right? So absolutely, if people want evaluations, we're not gonna, we're not gonna deny an evaluation and say, let's wait a little bit because, you know, they're, they're, they're new to us. No, we, if a parent or, or even if a, if a one of the EL teachers says to us, I really, I I've encouraged some of our EL staff to say, you need to write to your special ed coordinator and just request an evaluation as a, as a, you, the, your our school staff are entitled to do that as well. <v Speaker 15>And I think that's a really good point.</v> Like that highlights the work that we've done with the special ed teams this year. I think having Erin as our supervisor to kind of, you know, bring the, bring all of us together. There's not an evaluation meeting on a student happening without special ed and ELL present. We are always in a, in an ideal world, we are doing it moving forward collectively to make that decision together about the next steps for a student. And we have evaluated for students who need something where they haven't met that year mark, but we try to balance it as much as we can to allow them to have the exposure while they're here. <v Speaker 13>Right. And, and it just to emphasize a lot of the students</v> that we're evaluating for, for our current EL learners, it might not be due to academic needs. They might be social emotional needs or behavioral needs due to some of that. You know, I mean, it, it's, it, it can't be easy to be a student coming into a a, a brand new classroom where, you know, you're not, you're not understanding what's being taught, what the teacher's saying. And you know, we recognize that sometimes you might need some, some different supports that are not non-academic supports. So we're evaluating kids for social emotional purposes as well and we're finding kids eligible to get them the supports they need. And the other piece about special ed dual, dual identified is, you know, I think I'll, I'll be vulnerable and admit that at one point there was this kind of perception that special ed services sort of trumped EL services. We've been quickly reminded that they don't, they both have to happen. So this is another thing that when we're identifying students, we're making sure that, that that student is going to have EL services and special ed services and therefore the collaboration amongst those, those those teams are, are essential for the student success. <v Speaker 1>So I had a couple of other questions.</v> One is, where were you when I was in third grade when I, I needed all these services, but I remember years ago when I was in grad school reading a fascinating study and I'm curious how this works now because you talked about gifted students. This, this woman, this researcher who spoke Spanish herself was Native Spanish speaker, translated the gifted testing assessment, this was actually in Connecticut and identified all these students who were ELL students and gifted, I don't know how she managed to bypass the ethics board, but she basically followed them without letting that school know that she knew they were gifted. And she kinda followed to see what happens with the gifted students who don't speak English. And it was fascinating how awful the system failed these students including, so how many of those students were placed in special education when they didn't have ELL classes, even though they were in fact gifted in their own language. I'm curious now how, you know, do we have the assessments to determine when a student is gifted when they don't speak English, they don't speak English well And do we ensure that they're able to be challenged and grow intellectually even while they're learning English? <v Speaker 13>So yes, so Ms.</v> Baloni and I worked together on the gifted classification. MS B identifies students who have met certain benchmarks with their MCAS testing, with their, their in-school benchmark testing. There are different criteria to be classified as gifted. Once you are classified as, as potentially a student who is, who should receive gifted and talented services, then we evaluate them with our, our district psychologist. And at that point, yes, we would evaluate them in their primary language if necessary. <v Speaker 1>Okay. And then my last</v> question is a question that actually Dr. Special and I received a few weeks ago from a select board member. And you talked a little bit about strength based and asset based thinking. No pressure, not to put you in a spot, but what are the benefits to this na public school system to our culture as a community of having the students here? 'cause we always talk about what they need now, what they offer, and I'm curious if you'll have thoughts about how do the rest of the students benefit and our community benefit from the fact that we have students here from different countries and cultures and linguistic backgrounds? <v Speaker 16>Well, at the middle school, you know, in sixth grade,</v> they start to take a cultural language as part of their specials rotation. And what I notice is that, you know, the native speakers, there is a great enthusiasm and excitement to learn as many languages as they can and then try to speak with the students that are, you know, English learners. So I think that there is just that in itself builds a stronger community. They're very excited to learn about different cultures. You know, in sixth grade in at Kennedy, we have six different cultures in one classroom represented by the EL students. And then what you'll have is other students saying, oh, well actually I'm from, you know, so and so and so and so, and my dad is from so and so. We have this sort of building of a community that's that's greater than Natick. And I think it just makes it special. <v Speaker 17>I was just gonna say in, I mean in the</v> like a student who has had a very difficult journey here and is still, things are uncertain, like shared her experience and is students were mesmerized. I mean just, you know, in the fact that she would share this and they've never met anyone who is living what they're reading. And then another student is from Ukraine and we were looking at visual rhetoric and interpreting visual rhetoric and then she talked about what it was like to be in war and what she saw and what the implications of this picture could be. They would've never heard that perspective. So it's it's, it's incredibly rewarding. <v Speaker 15>It's built in social and</v> emotional learning for you right there. Yeah, yeah. At the, at the elementary level, we have Brown school has the flags from around the world where students can put up their flags and they can talk about it. And then I actually was invited to a classroom right before Thanksgiving break where a student, she had just gotten here in September, right from Israel and she got up and taught her whole class how to fold origami with the Hebrew video in the behind her playing. And she walked around and she pretended that she was an ESL teacher and only told them the Hebrew responses. And it was precious because all of the students kind of jumped in like, wow, you do this every day. And the teacher, and I didn't foster that, we didn't build that for her. It was just very organic for them to share their emotions and their feelings and it was wonderful. <v Speaker 1>Okay, well thank you for not only sharing those stories</v> but sharing the data and, and obviously all the work that you do because yeah, these students are, are students and they provide great benefit to our community. <v Speaker 15>Thank you so much for having us guys. Thank you.</v> We appreciate it. Thank you. <v Speaker 16>Thank you.</v> <v Speaker 5>Awesome.</v> I'm not sure how to make the right segue to the next topic after that, which is just as worthy, but that was just an, you know, it's rare to have students come alive so well in a meeting like this, so appreciate it. Okay, so we're gonna shift to budget and Mr. Roach is here, our chief technology officer to bring us through his proposal and budget request for next school year. Welcome. <v Speaker 21>Greetings everyone. Dennis Roach,</v> chief Technology Officer. That's the next slide. So we're gonna talk about three things here briefly tonight. We're gonna review the technology annual reports, which have a large impact on parts of the budget I'll be presenting on. We'll go into the operating budget request for fiscal 26 as well as the five year capital plan. Next slide. And you may advance the next one. So this is a quick summary of our inventory. We ended the year at 8,304 devices last year and now we're at 82 47. So we've gone down about 57 devices and the iterations of how that we arrive to that are documented on the slide as we do every year. We audit our findings. We found three errors that we corrected that we added back in here, but we added 1398 devices, we retired 1389, we have an additional 69 we're retiring. And three we covered in our verification process how we get to that bottom line Number next slide please. And as I do every year, I give you two slides. This is the first of the two slides that show a summary of all the devices amongst all of our school locations. This is a report by location, broken down by device type at the top and locations at the bottom. The next slide we will go into the same type of data but basically organized in the year that was purchased. So we get to track, I think we're now tracking eight years of use across the board. So you can see that again by device type and by location. And we refer back to that if we have questions at the end. Next slide please. This is one of my favorite slides to present on because it just shows you the trends in our number of devices in the district. And obviously we peaked during the covid times. If you look at the top, it'll give you the actual numbers by year. And we're tracking the last eight years and we're at the lowest level we've been at for that entire period. We went down, I said 57 devices and it's really a tribute to the team's. Hard work on making sure that we do a good job rooting out equipment that is no longer supported by vendors. That would be points of frustrations for teachers and students. And we, we really just, we need to keep effective technology repaired and in service and we, we try to do a good job of that. And I hope that comes out in the slides I'm presenting to you, but that's, that's the main focus there and that has never changed. Next slide. And so here is the budget request for fiscal 26. So the request goes up by just over $19,000. Overall, almost every single account has a decrease in it. There's only one account that went up this year and I'll talk about each of those. But before we move on, most of the cuts on this particular, and I'll, I'll go through this again, are tightening up on our budget estimates. There's not a lot of fat there to cut to begin with and I want to go into the next slide, which actually is where the most of the adjustments were made. It's also the most difficult slide to read. So I'm gonna pull up so I can see it in detail on my laptop too. This account only went down 82 72, but it's an account that's very variable. So it's based on when we bought things in the past and when we need to buy them in the future. So it's not something that's a level set type of thing. Everything on this particular line item has direct impact in a classroom. So these are the types of things that we really have to be careful and protect without having impact on our students. One of the things I did here to make these numbers better is extend the life of the equipment. Most of the useful life for four years and I extended a lot of them to at least six years and also mapped out when they move where they're going to be swapped and used for. So a good example would be in all the computer labs we made a notation of if it's gonna be used in a computer lab at the high school for three years, where's it go for years four through six. So it's got a clear destination that allowed us to not have to double purchase. So basically we have a way to extend the life of those assets for a six year period and not have to purchase as much. The request for fiscal 26 went down about $8,200. However, when you looked at last year's budget presentation, I had projected we would be asking for over $900,000 on this one particular line item. So I cut about $350,000 at just this one line item to come down 8,200. So it's pretty significant. The other thing I did at the bottom, when you look at the teacher laptop section, we had aggressively budgeted to replace teacher laptops every three years. And we simply did that because we had a fleet of teacher laptops that we were playing catch up on for a number of years because in previous fiscal years we've had to cut that budget due to budget constraints. I was trying really, really hard to make sure we don't do that again because it takes multiple years to recover from that. So what I decided to do there is extend the life of a teacher laptop to four years rather than three. We're just about caught up now based on what we're trying to do to keep teachers with devices that are supported. And if we go back to our slides, if there's further questions on that, we can see the majority of the laptops for teachers probably range in the four to six year range, which more than probably in the one to four year range, which is really, really want to be. But by doing that I'm still paying for teacher laptops over a three year period. So there's a a year where, you know, I, I only have three leases in play at any one time. So that gave us a way to extend our purchasing power and and cut down our annual cost. Other things I also did is I, I moved out some of our lab upgrades where I could as much as I can. So it's all about trying to make sure that we're maximizing the life of the devices that we buy. With that being said, I'm also wanted to bring your attention to fiscal 27. It goes up slightly over fiscal 26 and I was determined to make sure that I could do as good a job as I can. We still have more work to do in fiscal 28 because that's when a lot of the elementary devices were are going to be due for refreshes. And what I would say to you there, there's more work I can do there when we get closer to that point in time because I'm gonna be looking at more rotations that might also help the elementary schools out as well. But this is a good start to put us on the right path and be more efficient. Next slide please. So this is where I was talking about. So items one through six on this list we talked about item number two, but items 1, 3, 4, 5 and six didn't have any line items removed from their budgets. But basically I had to tighten up on all of my estimates. So I might have a situation next year where I made an estimate that's aggressive and a vendor might not be able to meet that demand. So I'm gonna have to either renegotiate or there might be some things I have to forego. But for all those different accounts, I cut the budget down about $80,000 collectively. The last account is our copier account and that account I classify of us being the victims of our own success. There are two things we pay for copiers, we pay for the hardware we pay through three year leases and we have a laddered lease approach there too. And we also pay for meter reads and what's killing us there are usage people are using it consistently. So it's our standard for printing and scanning throughout the district and it, it works consistently everywhere. So things we can do better in the future is look at our usage on the copiers and to make sure that we don't have any low volume devices out there that we can prune away. So we could cut down on some of our leases potentially and also train people on some of the advantages of the Canon uniFLOW solution. And you can distribute content electronically, you don't always have to print it, it's the printing. That's what's killing us. And I think as we've been expanding, student device use printing's gone up, hasn't gone down. So we just have to be mindful there's other ways to do it. And the other thing I'm looking at is are there any options we have for renegotiating the cost of the meter aids and being more competitive? So those are other things we're looking at. So it's the only thing I see that's really trending up that I had it increase and it was a pretty significant increase, but I haven't had to increase this line item in the budget since it's been added to the budget since like when the high school opened in 2012. So it's been a long time. So next slide please. And we'll move to the capital budget and that's also a little bit difficult to read so I apologize for that. So the capital budget, this is a five year recap of the capital budget. The color coding you see is relating to E-Rate. So E-Rate works in a five year schedule. So the yellow indicates the last of the five year window that we're currently in. And I've highlighted projects in it that potentially qualify for E-Rate. E-Rate gives us a 40% discount for things that get approved. And one of the rules for E-Rate is that you need to budget for the gross amount. You can't budget for the net amount just because there's no guarantee the funding's gonna be there when you apply. So projects for fiscal 26, we have building routers that are due to be replaced. They have a useful life expectancy of 10 years and that is up for fiscal 26. We have firewalls at Kennedy with a useful life of seven years for a hundred thousand dollars that are also up. And we have switch replacements for all of our schools. We replace switches. The only exception being Kennedy being that one of the newest buildings we've opened that does not need that done for a hundred thousand. And we have an, the audio system at the high school, which is the audio system in each of the classrooms is beyond its useful life and that's about a $200,000 investment. So out of all those projects, it's only the audio system that does not qualify for E-Rate, it has to impact wifi for either our school or library to qualify. And then in the blue section just indicates the new E-Rate schedule that starts in fiscal 27. I won't go through all those line ends here, but just to know that anytime we do a capital project, I evaluate whether it qualified for E-Rate. Natick also gets what is $800,000 budget for E-Rate based on our reimbursement rate. So that's the gross part of the project. So we net a 40% savings of that if we maximize that. And so far in the last couple cycles we've maximized that, that benefit. So my goal is to take advantage as much as that as we can. So that is the budget presentation. I'll be happy to answer any questions. <v Speaker 20>Ms. McDonna. Thank you Dennis.</v> When you trimmed the budget by extending the useful life of some of the devices Yep. How did you determine that that would then not impact the functionality for students and staff? <v Speaker 21>So I had a look at how the devices are being used,</v> what kind of software, and also making sure I didn't violate the one rule I talked about is making sure the vendors will still support it. So in other words, they're still supportable by the vendor, then I can support it. If the vendor can't stand behind it, then my team and I can't. What I also did is I prioritized where we bought the new equipment so the high school labs would get the new equipment, the middle schools would get the equipment in year four through six. Not ideal for everyone, but it's a way to extend our budget so we don't have to double buy. <v Speaker 1>Any other questions? I had two.</v> Well first of all, thank you so much for your work to save the district money. I mean that's obviously really important given all the conversations we're having about the budget. Out of curiosity, I see you projecting prices over time. I don't know much about inflation and technology, but people are talking a lot about, you know, the infamous doesn't have doesn't eggs, price doesn't eggs going up. Is inflation impacting technology? Our computers, especially since they're mostly monopolized by Apple, <v Speaker 21>Absolutely.</v> What a lot of vendors are doing now is moving to subscription based models, which are driving up their annual revenues and really putting pressure on budgets like ours. And I, I think what we have to do when we look at partnering with vendors and this is what we do, we tell them we're a school and we can't absorb 10%, 8% increases when we're relegated to prop two and a half. Like, you know, that's the reality of it. So sometimes I've had a tell aveor, I, I can't renew your services, it's just not gonna be possible. So we're always looking at alternatives and how we can be more efficient. I wish I could say I had a lot of things in the budget that we don't need that I could just cut out. I unfortunately, I've been doing this a long time and there's not a lot there to cut from to start. So I've had to make my estimates much tighter. I'm hoping I don't run into a lot of surprises next year, but if I do, I might have to make some tough decisions about things we can keep and things we can't. That's just the reality. <v Speaker 1>Okay, thanks. And then I,</v> I don't know if I have a question. I'm just surprised about the comment you made about printing. Printing is going up. I'm assuming the volume of printing is going up at a time when we're becoming more and more aligned and able to communicate the technology. I dunno if we can, I don't have any advice or any question. I just, it just sur surprising. <v Speaker 21>It seems counterintuitive.</v> And I remember when I was, I'll date myself a little bit. When I was in the financial services industries back in the nineties, I was automating an, an optical imaging system to basically digitize everything. And when we did that, our printing volume went through the roof. Why do you need to print things out if they're scanned and right at your desk on, on your monitor? You know, most people still like that comfort level of paper, you know, so we just have to know when is the right time for digital distribution versus paper. And I'm still one that I work, I live in both worlds, right? Sometimes I like to get away from the screen and see it. What we do need to look at is why is it, is it color printing? Is it plaque printing? Is it on a high volume printer? Do we have too many printers in the same location? Do we have devices and locations for convenience that maybe we can cut off? So there's a lot of different options we're gonna look at. This is a a, a good thing to do anytime and you know, the time to do it is now. Yeah. <v Speaker 1>Okay. Yeah. Well thanks for looking into it, Ms. Collins.</v> <v Speaker 6>I encourage you to look at it,</v> but I would be very, very upset to find out we're cutting out most printing because some of us cannot read on a screen for more than five minutes and there's nothing you can do about that. So it also would've been more helpful in your presentation if the damn system didn't throw me out three times during it. <v Speaker 21>I'm sorry</v> <v Speaker 6>If the system didn't throw me out three times</v> during your presentation. Oh, just, you know, and it's the wifi. Yeah. So <v Speaker 21>I'll get someone look at that. Yeah. But</v> <v Speaker 1>I was gonna say here's,</v> <v Speaker 6>But it, this is always one</v> of the budgets I actually look forward to because I, you use such a fine tooth comb and I appreciate that. <v Speaker 21>So thank you. Appreciate that too.</v> <v Speaker 1>Any other questions or comments?</v> Well, thank you for coming in and again, for Yep. The care you take for our budget. Thank you. And our systems. Thank you. <v Speaker 5>Thanks, Dennis. I also wanna just say,</v> I mean he's a great model for zero based budgeting. He built that budget from the bottom up and made some strategic choices, which when he first came to me, he made sure he sat down with me for half an hour to make sure I understood it. And it was nuanced and and complex to do so. Thank you very much. Thank <v Speaker 1>You.</v> <v Speaker 5>Okay. The ongoing superintendent report</v> that looked really short but ended up being a little longer, but this is exciting. We are gonna have Mr. Gillis bring us through the earmark recommendations that we gave to our folks, our representatives and senators says, who may wanna give us some money. So we wanna kind of go through what that ask was. <v Speaker 19>Right. So on behalf of Dr. Ferguson, who did most</v> of this work and, and put the memo in the packet, would like to thank Senator s Spiller's office and rep Lindsay for getting us the earmark again. You know, we shared along with Ashlyn Holliston, Hopkinton, Medway and Framingham, and we'll be using it, it it, the earmark is basically to address mental health needs in the schools. So there'll be some professional development to help a staff be able to help kids cope a little better when they're going through some mental health issues, some intervention materials for them to work with, some compensation for training, some adapting and some equipping of spaces to help things and to help kids sort of self-regulate and recalibrate. And last but not least, not in there, but a a little bit of a continuation from last year is some money for some transportation in support of Medco to make sure that we have equitable access to our, our, all of our programs both during the school day and after for all of our students. And again, it just a thank you to, to our elected representatives for making sure we get to see a mark. It is very much appreciated. <v Speaker 1>Any questions or comments? Okay.</v> Well thank you for the work with that. Definitely an important two important areas of focus for us mental health and the MECO program. <v Speaker 5>Do you wanna move into the finance section? Sure. Mr.</v> Gillis, do you wanna go to the preliminary budget report or do you think I should do MSBA first? <v Speaker 19>I can do preliminary budget report quickly.</v> So little bit of an aggressive schedule to get everything in. Closing out the second quarter and did get revenue figures updated today. Wasn't able to, to put, put the report together and I didn't want to give you something that, that didn't have my usual analysis. So you, you'll get it with the usual detail in the next meeting. But you know, as it stands right now, we and I haven't finished the analysis, we stand to end the year with somewhere between three and 700,000. And the reason I I say that is because I haven't haven't finished it yet, but it, you know, it, it's always easier to do the analysis when all the pieces of the puzzle are in place and wasn't able to get that until this morning. But I, I appreciate the town for working with me to get the, to get that stuff done. And I guess you'll get, you'll get the second quarter report early, so you'll have plenty of time to formulate questions for the next meeting. I guess we can go to MSVA. <v Speaker 5>Are there any questions on that or any questions? Okay.</v> We, we really, this is just a little bit of framing. As we learned previously, we were invited into the eligibility phase. So we thought it would be helpful to share the timeline. Luckily we got it right because we got a memo that I didn't include here to literally this afternoon that matched these dates. So we did it right. So our eligibility phase formally begins on February 3rd and we can't hand in anything earlier than that. That's the date they roll people in. So there were like 40 plus schools that were rolled in and that's our date. 30 days later or on March 5th, we owe a piece of paperwork called the initial compliance certification due. It's essentially a list of agreements and myself and Jamie and Shai I think will sign that. So we can do that earlier, but that's when it's due. We're gonna try to do everything as early as we can by April 4th. We need to hand in a recommendation, which we will bring to you in this meeting setting a recommendation for who would be on the school building committee. It has a template with the composition and we link the template here. I'm not gonna go over it right now, but just to let you know, this is not new to Natick. We've done these teams before and we have so much talent in the community. So we will come, we we're gonna, we have a few meetings set up. We'll come with a recommendation to this team to receive your feedback on that. Then by May 5th we would owe the education profile questionnaire. We also received that today I saw Mr. Gillis already sent it over to Principal Holding, so that's underway as well as with the help of MSBA enrollment assumptions and methodology that are due in May. Then by August, so now we're in the summer, there's a meeting called the enrollment meeting where we work with MSBA to determine either a design enrollment or a study enrollment. And then we do maintenance and capital planning where the, the facilities group DPW and this facilities group will go through and kind of make commitments to how we maintain our buildings. And then by 10 31, that's the end of the, the eligibility phase. And by then we have to finish all of these things with MSBA in order to move to the next phase, which would be feasibility study after we sign the fee feasibility study agreement. The next slide, we tried to put together a list of kind of anticipated local vote authorization timing. So based on this eligibility phase starting on February 3rd, we rolled out when the timing would be for sort of formal votes by the town. Because one of the main reasons I personally wanted to bring this up here is as we talk about a potential override, to really distinguish that this should not be conflated. These are two separate votes, two separate time periods. We wouldn't even be voting until the fall meeting. We estimate 2025. So next October, that's when we would ask the town to vote whether to appropriate funds for the feasibility study phase. That's not saying we're gonna build everything that's just saying we're gonna do the feasibility phase. The town has assured us they don't anticipate needing a debt exclusion to fund that. There will be a meeting that would go forward in town meeting, sorry, a vote that would be go, go forward in town meeting to reallocate an estimated $2 million that were potentially using savings from recent Kennedy project cost underruns. So there wouldn't be an ask for funding at that point. So that's a really important distinction and if anybody else who's more familiar with town meeting or wants to kind of weigh in on and expand upon that, I wanted to make that point very clearly here in the fall of 2026. So an entire year later that would be where we would enter into or asked the town to vote to decide whether to authorize, authorize funding for the design and construction phases of the project. And it, that's happened in the past, you know, where school construction projects, this does expect to have a debt exclusion vote that would be put forth to the town. And then the project bid award would happen in the late fall of 2027. We're already into fiscal year 28 there. And then summer 2029, is that anticipated? This is all estimated right now. Move in or project close out begin. So hopefully I made that clear. But we really wanted to help make the distinction, not only did we get this information from MSBA today, so it's timely to share, but also to really be clear with folks listening and the community that these are two different votes. It's very staged and intentional with a lot of information behind it. And it is not to be confused with anything to do with a potential override. <v Speaker 1>Any questions or comments?</v> So I have one comment and one question. In terms of the town, sorry, in terms of the building committee, you'll see in the list the, I guess from the MSBA, the specific roles, it does talk about one to two school committee members. So this is a, a minimum of one. So we'd have to have at least one. The decision we made, or at least that I'm proposing, is that we wait until March 31st. We will have a reorganization meeting at right after the election. We usually do. So we're scheduling that additional meeting for just for the purpose of your organization to choose a new chair, vice chair and clerk. My recommendation is that we also then pick the one to two members for the building. 'cause by then we'll know the full composition at least for the next full year of the committee. So if anyone is interested in being on that committee as a school committee member, think about you have until March 31st to think about it. And then my question about the slide, the last slide, the feasibility study approval, it says that town votes on whether to appropriate funds. I just wanna, and then the next column talks about town votes to decide whether to author arrest funding for design and construction. I just want to just make sure I understand and the others understand distinction between town meeting voting versus town, the actual town voting. Yeah, so I'm assuming the first column is town meeting. The second column is literally the whole town. <v Speaker 5>Matt, you might be able to weigh in on that better than,</v> I haven't gone through the process at that level before. <v Speaker 19>So fall of 2025, the feasibility study approval,</v> that would be the, the town meeting to vote to transfer money from the Kennedy project to cover the feasibility study. Since we wouldn't have to borrow it. You wouldn't have to have a, a ballot vote the to go forward with a project after you have studied it and you have selected kind of which option. 'cause when you study it, you look at a bunch of options, which option you want to go forward with and you get a rendering and you know basically how many rooms it's gonna be and what it's gonna look like. It's basically about 20, 25% designed. That vote would would be for the debt exclusion to finish the design and the construction, the project bid award, something the, the school building committee would approve. And then, you know, the actual move in the closeout of the project, once we get a certificate of occupancy and it's safe for people to, to start using the building, it becomes ours. And then we really need to, you know, finalize paying for it. But there's no, there's no more town votes A after the, after the, the fall 2026. So there's only really one that goes before all the voters. So town meeting handles it and the voters handle it and the building committee handles it until we move in. And then it becomes just like everything else in town, all <v Speaker 1>The other buildings.</v> So a town meeting vote in the fall, next fall. And then if everything goes well a ballot vote in the fall two years from now. Ms. McDonough, <v Speaker 20>Correct me if I'm wrong though,</v> but the money that's put towards the feasibility study is reimbursable through the MSBA process. <v Speaker 19>Yep. Part of it is, yeah. Okay.</v> They give us a project, they call it project scope and funding agreement. And so, you know, whatever that number is, that's the maximum amount that's reimbursable. And then there's always things that, that are costs associated with the project that are automatically excluded by their rules. But the, the study option is typically included but like for example, they won't pay for anything for site costs and they won't pay for legal costs, but they will pay for, you know, most other things related. That's right. <v Speaker 1>Any other questions from the committee?</v> I do see there's a hand on, well first virtual and then in person Ms. Dorin, <v Speaker 3>If</v> <v Speaker 5>You have to unmute her.</v> <v Speaker 3>There</v> <v Speaker 22>You go. Hi, I had gotten a message,</v> I wasn't being allowed to unmute myself. Sorry. No <v Speaker 3>Worries.</v> <v Speaker 22>You can hear me now. So I am trying my hardest</v> to wrap my head around the proposed override and I know that, no, I'm talking about that here, but I am trying to figure out in the second column, the gray area, what like a debt exclusion might total and how many years that gets spread out because I'm only learning really minute by minute today on Facebook how the override even works. I didn't realize that if we pass the override, the eight to $9 million one, it's not just for one year. It gets added on permanently to subsequent years. So then I'm kind of overwhelmed in my head thinking and I knew this was gonna happen. Just the timing is bad. So say that passes, so we're already up eight to $9 million a year and then in another couple years we're gonna have this huge bill to build a new school. And I did look into Hardy Elementary School, that's my alma mater. So Shai, you know, like they built a beautiful new school for far fewer students. They opened this fall to I think 244 students and I believe I read it cost that 10 about 60 million. And I believe the town paid for 75% of it. So my brain is kind of spinning thinking about the numbers that will be, you know, asked of taxpayers. And I know you can't like, 'cause you don't have the plans and you don't have the construction cost, but do you have any sense, like a guesstimate of a range for a building of the size we need at the site of Memorial and how many years that gets spread out or is it all at once? 'cause I'm a little concerned, I'm curious <v Speaker 19>Mr.</v> Gillis, so you, you do understand, you, you had kind several questions rolled in there. So the first one, you do understand it correctly that an override is, is a permanent increase to the, to the tax bill until an underride is voted. Like you can always vote to increase the levy limit or lower it and you know, those are options and it's, I believe it's $8 million, not eight to nine. I haven't heard anybody besides you saying it was going up. So I'll just put that there. For a debt exclusion typically for, you know, a large debt exclusion that most towns go through, they bo they bond it for 20 to 25 years. You know, there's it. So, and the debt go tends to go down each year and then the, the the, the cost of that comes off the tax bill as, as the payments go away. So that's the big difference between a debt exclusion vote, the debt goes away when it the, or the cost goes away when the debt is paid off in an override. It just adds to the town's capacity to do so. So we don't have a, a firm number, but the feasibility study would help us quite a bit. We'd, we'd know, you know, how much we'd have a, a really good cost estimate and usually two or three cost estimates through that process to make sure we get the number right to bring it to the voters. So And where's the Hardy school? Is that in Lexington, <v Speaker 22>Wellesley, Wellesley, Western Road.</v> Yeah, it's beautiful. <v Speaker 19>Well, we're natick,</v> <v Speaker 5>I can say that in the capital plan currently</v> and it could change is $70 million <v Speaker 22>For the Natick school.</v> <v Speaker 5>Yeah. But that's just in the</v> capital plan as a placeholder. <v Speaker 22>Okay. I'm, I'm just like,</v> this isn't my strength town economics and finances and I know I'm not alone. So I have been learning a lot in Facebook posts recently and I only learned today that there could be an underride. And I did then ask, well has there ever been one since 2008 that was the last override? I haven't gotten an answer. I do really wanna learn about this and I do care about it. And so I appreciate all this information, but like, kind of like you have to speak to the lowest common denominator in terms of, well for me, because I've never really paid attention like this. And so I think sometimes people assume that the public understands and I'm like clueless about this. So it's very helpful just to get this information. And I didn't make up the 9 million, someone maybe a select board member or something phrased it like that. It could be eight to nine. So then you kind of pick up on it and I'll stop using that number. But I didn't, it wasn't something I just decided on my own obviously. But thank you for this clarification. <v Speaker 1>Thanks. So we have several hands on the committee.</v> So we'll do Mr. Brand, Ms. Collins and Ms. McDonough. <v Speaker 18>Mines you real quick. I believe,</v> and I could, I don't have the exact year right. I believe that the debt exclusion associated with the community and senior center and the high school come off, I think we're done with them in 29 or 30. So the, and again, I could have the date wrong or the year wrong, but for the 20 years that we've been paying off those, that will end right around the same time that this is proposed to. So, so that, that's it. <v Speaker 1>Replacing one debt with another. Great.</v> That's what you were gonna say, Ms. McDonough? Yeah, <v Speaker 20>That is, that is what I was gonna say.</v> The other thing I would say is that the reimbursement rates vary by town. So Wellesley is likely to have had a higher, a lower reimbursement rate than Natick will. So in the Kennedy project we had like 36 to 40% reimbursement rate, whereas Wellesley would not have had that. 'cause it's based on the socio, not the wealth of the community, socio economic. So that's just important to know and that the debts will come off as they go. Thanks. <v Speaker 1>And the Kennedy project came under budget anyway.</v> Yeah. Collins, <v Speaker 6>There are also other costs that the town has incurred</v> that are supposed to roll off in 2030, such as the pension. Yeah, we will be funded at that point. And so the, it's not just a plus, plus plus game is all I'm saying. Yeah. I, I don't have exact numbers. It's way too early to have exact numbers, but just it's not an, everything is added. Nothing ever comes off and no, we've never had an underride. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Dr. Mackenzie,</v> <v Speaker 2>Donna Mackenzie, I my question's much more modest.</v> When you said the vote would take place in November of 20, did you say 26 <v Speaker 5>For the schematic design and project</v> <v Speaker 2>Approval?</v> No, for the debt ex. For the debt exclusion <v Speaker 5>Override, yeah, for the debt exclusion.</v> Our projection would be yes, that fall. <v Speaker 2>Okay. And I guess I'm just really frugal</v> and cheap about things that I can be really frugal and be really cheap about. But does that mean it would be a special election just to decide this debt exclusion and that's like $30,000? Or can this be rolled into another election? <v Speaker 5>Honestly, this is stuff that we haven't thought through.</v> We're trying to give like the anchoring points and I appreciate the question and we'll make note of it and maybe somebody else here could weigh in on that. I think our point was to try to show what's happening in the future allay the fears that this is somehow a double decision right now. And these conversations and much of the information in our, my colleagues have shared, we owe the public a deep analysis that really explains all of this. And so we're, it's early days as my British cousin would say. And so I, we don't have that prepared for you today unless somebody else can answer it. <v Speaker 1>Ms. Collins,</v> <v Speaker 6>Assuming</v> that it were done at the November election, it might be a separate town ballot for this, but it would not be an entirely separate election. <v Speaker 1>Oh, the midterms, national midterms</v> <v Speaker 6>And national midterms.</v> State races. Oh, that's right. The government. So it's just, it might be a separate town ballot. Okay. But not a separate infrastructure, if you will, around elections. Well, <v Speaker 2>And I just wanna say, I, I think this is really helpful,</v> so thank you very much and I don't want us all to get, I, I'm really excited about this possibility. It's a big deal that we were invited into this period of eligibility and it continues some of the educational hopes that we had for our elementary schools, which have yet to be pointed out. I mean, maybe as Ms. Lather said, we need a whole philosophy of elementary education as we embark on this, but I, you can't worry about everything, right? You just take a deep breath and you just go on. And when you think about these overrides, sometimes you just think, okay, what is this override? It's a 4.9% increase or you know, you, you have to bite things off in little pieces. I come from a family, my father never voted down an override. Could we afford it? No. But we made it work. So I think we just have to have hope in this process. Thank you. <v Speaker 1>Thank you. Any other questions</v> or comments about the MSBA update? So the last item on the agenda is any subcommittee or liaison updates? Anything from any Yeah. Ms. Goza? <v Speaker 8>Yep. So Julie</v> and I are meeting to summarize the survey results about the calendar and we expect to have a presentation that we can bring to you at the meeting on the 27th if there's room on the agenda for it. Short presentation. Yeah. <v Speaker 1>And just to clarify this, all,</v> all this work is geared towards not the 20 25, 26 school year, but the following, <v Speaker 8>It's really to evaluate the impact</v> that the changes we made previously in the calendar and to understand community priorities and whether or not the changes we made are supporting those community priorities. Would you say that's correct? <v Speaker 20>I would say yes and I would say it's just up</v> to the committee what they wanna do with the information. It could be used this year or next year. <v Speaker 1>Yeah. Just because I know we'll</v> coordinate it with the administration. 'cause I know you're working on a calendar as well. Yeah, <v Speaker 5>We were planning on the January 27th agenda to present</v> to the school committee a recommendation on the calendar for next year. So if you want to meet ahead of time as part of the subcommittee meeting, we're happy to, but we do have a fir first draft. <v Speaker 8>Yeah. And I don't, I don't think there was anything</v> so startling that we were gonna come with a recommendation. It was more bringing the information to the committee for their, your, our cons consideration as a whole committee <v Speaker 1>And the three of us can touch base on Friday.</v> Yeah. Mr. Brent, <v Speaker 18>Just a quick announcement.</v> The policy subcommittee's next meeting is this Thursday at two 30 and we are likely on the, the agenda we'll likely have the public participation policy and I don't wanna predict what we get finished, but we have that. We have, we're gonna talk about Title IX and we're gonna talk about the cell phone policy in that meeting. And we will also need to be on the agenda probably, I'll let you know for the 27th, <v Speaker 1>The policy subc committee.</v> <v Speaker 18>Yes. For a meet.</v> Perhaps for perhaps first readings of things. Maybe first readings. <v Speaker 1>Great.</v> <v Speaker 18>That's it.</v> <v Speaker 1>Any other updates? See none.</v> I'll take a motion to adjourn. Adjourn. <v Speaker 18>Second.</v> <v Speaker 1>All those in favor? Anyone against? Anyone?</v> Really? Anyone abstaining with that? The meeting is adjourned. I hope everyone has a lovely evening.