committee meeting from march 13 thanks sean he's like i see that gavl but i didn't hear anything thank you sean um we're calling the school committee meeting for march 13th to order it is 7 p.m and we have one remote participant so we'll do a roll call to order so
chuck here sarah here carla here aaron here sean here okay great thank you uh we'll quickly walk through the agenda and then we'll jump right in so after this call we'll open with public comment for anybody from the public who wishes to address anything that is not on the
agenda um we'll then move on to our focus on excellence and we are joined by some very excited uh lego leaguers here [Music] right not um we're we're going to hear about their
experience at both birch and kllum and apparently there was a little showdown last weekend so you know we'll see um we move on to our consent agenda from there uh and then we'll move on to reports uh where we have our student our assistant superintendent for learning and teaching
i don't see the other one on the call yet so our superintendent and liaison reports um we'll then move to new business including the acceptance of a new scholarship that's been funded by um miss savio in honor of her uh deceased husband um we'll then move forward to
announcement of a new school resource officer um primarily to be based here at the high school um and the high school counseling annual update an esl curriculum update and then we get to the real exciting part of the night which is a bunch of policies right i know
everybody's here for that right policy reviews so we have a bunch of policy reviews um five that we can accept tonight potentially one that we'll have a first reading of because it's a new policy and then we'll move on to updates of potential policies for our next meeting and from there we will close
okay so with that said seeing so many in the audience is there anybody here who has public comment so many so much excitement okay so we'll move on from public comment and dr milesky will you introduce the lego league and their team coaches and team
yeah we are absolutely thrilled tonight to be joined by so many of our lego league stars here tonight so before we invite them up to recognize celebrate them and hear directly from them a few people we want to thank uh tonight uh first we want to thank our two coaches uh tiffany lynch who's not here with us and then mackenzie bido who is here
you'll hear from shortly uh fun fact mackenzie also works in our central office which is awesome so after school heads over and supports the killum team which is awesome uh we also see our extended day team who uh were you know after a little bit of a break from lego league were able to pull it together and bring it back as a strong offering for
our community for our students we have leanne egamman here but uh mackenzie irwin chris nelson not with us but just like to thank them for their leadership and bringing this wonderful opportunity back to our students and would also like to thank our school committee this is something our school committee had advocated for for several years and we're thrilled that now we see sort of
the uh the fruits of all that advocacy and work behind the scenes too so enough of that we'd like to say congratulations to all of our amazing students for your work this year the community is super excited to hear from you to hear what it was like to hear about what made it so fun and as we shared you're about to be
famous you will be on live tv yes and there'll be a recording of this so i will invite up coach bilo who will give a little bit more on like uh what happened for the teams this year and then we'll get to hear from some of our students coach if you'd come up here next to chuck that'd be great
there you go hello so i had the opportunity to coach at kllum this year and i was so excited to hear that they were running lego league because i had some experience with it at the center i was at prior to coming to reading and
i'm just so proud of both teams um both teams were quite large this year so at kllum we had nine and there was also nine at birch which a typical team is about four to five so the fact that we were able to get nine is very impressive
um most of them are third fourth and fifth graders some of these boys it was all boys in both groups um had never done any coding before they had never worked with the robots that we worked with um so it was a learning curve for
everyone we met from the beginning of october all the way until last weekend when we had the competition and they just put so much work in for those of you that don't know the different aspects that go into lego league most
people think they hear legos it's just building it's just building legos but it's not there's coding of a robot there's building the missions which they're all on a table and they change each year and you can pick as a team which missions you want to comp um
complete so you get different points for completing different missions there's also a research project aspect to this so this year the theme was submersibles so you had to pick a topic that had to do with underwater so both teams did research
they found out facts about that and then they presented that in front of a whole group of people at the competition um they go over core values which are kind of those key points that first wants to instill in everyone that participates so
there's a lot of different things that they did to get to the competition it wasn't just building legos and they did such an amazing job i'm so proud of them awesome great so we would go ahead yeah so at this point we'd like to actually invite everyone who participated to come on
behind coach bilo here and then we'll invite anyone who wants to come up to speak about their experience you can share something that you thought was fun something that you learned anything that you would like to share with the community and tell us your name your school and your grade too um i'm charlie
i am in fourth grade and i go to birch meadow um something that i learned is that like most people that join this probably i just thought it was like coding a robot to do some things and
then building legos but turns out it's a lot more so i like it a lot better than i thought it would be awesome even though i would love that so yeah that's pretty much it awesome great job um my
name is will i'm in third grade and my school is killum and one thing that i learned is it's it's very hard to do all these things in just a couple weeks so that's why we got a ton of time
thank you well um i am ben i'm in third grade and one thing i learned was that i i could do a lot more than i thought i could do awesome
awesome i did a lot more than i thought i did it all i did all of it thank you great job ben it's awesome hi i'm patrick and i'm third grade i go
to killum and i really loved it this year and it was just really fun hi my name is ben i'm in third grade and i go to kllum one thing that i learned is that it was like it was very hard but
we were able to pull through we were we were we were able to get a few missions not as much as we liked but it was enough so yeah we're very proud of ourselves for at least getting a few missions done at least making it to the
competition nice job thanks ben my name is gon i am in third grade i go to killum uh one thing about lego league is that um the coding was hard at first but then
after a couple weeks i got to like learn it and i got to do it thank you gon thank you brian um my name is brian williams and i go to the birch meadow um so i would say
one thing about lego league is you might think it's like easy to make like it's like making a robot go in a circle but like it's a lot more complicated than that it's like pretty hard to learn coding so it was pretty hard to do the
coding to like complete a lot of missions so it takes a lot of time thank you my name is james i'm in third grade i got to kill him one thing that i
learned is it's harder than it looks thanks james thanks james that is true hello my name is owen andred and um i'm in fourth grade one thing that i learned is
that even though that my team did not win it was still very fun to compete and just very fun to participate awesome thank you um my name is will um one i go to birch
meadow and i'm in third grade one thing i learned about loging is that um it's like not as easy as it seems to code a robot to like push something or
like or bring something up it's like it's way harder than it seems thank you hi my name is sebie i'm a fifth grader at bears i think the funnest thing was building the right attachments and
coding at the right time to do the right things um my name is cormarmac i was i go to kill them and one thing i learned was it's just more than doing legos and i hope to do it again next year awesome
thank you wow i just have i have one question for someone if someone wants to answer too so i was interested when a couple of you said there was harder than it looks i don't know if can someone could give me an example of a time where maybe i'll call on someone in one second let me where maybe where maybe things
were hard right where maybe things were difficult and you figured out a way to get the job done i don't know if someone could help tell a little bit of a story of something that happened all right brian you want to come up tell me a little bit of a story of something that happened where your team had to push
through um something that was pretty hard for like the lego league like is where we did the mission where you're supposed to lift up a bud of quirrels and put it on a little hook um we were working at it
so long and we didn't really get much done because it was a really really tough mission so then we completed the boat mission and then we went back to the that one and after like more experience like coding for the boat mission it got a bit easier nice nice
great going back and refactoring i like refactoring that's great anybody else want to add want to do another example of those cormarmac you want to come forward again um like when we were trying to even like get the robot to like just move a
certain way it was still like hard to get it to like turn the right way and amount cuz it wasn't just like you put in a number cuz there was a lot of specific amounts you had to make it like move and turn
i'm going to ask one more different question i heard a lot of third graders a lot of third graders which means we have a chance that you guys can come back in fourth grade and fifth grade and others who i heard cormarmac said he's coming back next year is is everybody else coming back next year
uh maybe but that's that's still a pretty good return you guys that's awesome any other questions for anybody in the committee nope all right we have we have one tradition we do when we have our school our focus on excellence and that's that everybody comes down front in here and we take pictures of the school committee
so parents can have their pictures as well you guys did awesome that was great great job [Music] back up guys what do we want to say on 2
[Music] [Applause] build it no problem i know it just sits there that was the best an enthusiastic fruit i know so well spoken
okay while they filter out let's move forward to our consent agenda and aaron do we have a a motion motion to approve the consent agenda second second all right any discussion topics or points of concern john anything
nope okay so we'll vote then um chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes sean yes tom yes the consent agenda passes six to zero and we'll move on to reports you want to start us off sir sure um
first of all it's great to see lego league back because actually i think when i was in fourth grade was probably the last time that it happened at birch meadow and i was on that team still remember that we did um it was called like water systems i think was the topic that year so it's great to see it back
because that really sparked a big interest in science and i'm so glad that other people are able to share that experience now um so rmhs specifically has had a lot going on this month we've had a lot of winter sports and
activities closing out um and a bit a lot of huge successes um so starting out the drama club two weeks ago just advanced from the preliminary round of our drama festival um and we'll be performing in andover this weekend on
saturday in the semi-final round um we also got seven awards in the last round including the stage managers award which was given to like the school with the best spirit and overall technical excellence um an award in assistant direction lighting design and three
acting awards um so those are huge accomplishments for the drama club in only our second year back in the meg competition um and so yeah we're so excited to compete again this weekend and share an unoriginal original um and then in the school the past few weeks um
barbara best a fellow from harvard has been interviewing and like working with different groups as part of an affinity group study um for her doctorate in education leadership um so i had the privilege of speaking with her on tuesday and it was really a great
experience to hear what she had to say about the school community and what she wanted to know um in terms of what the school and the whole um reading public schools can do to improve starting in kindergarten and first grade and moving all the way up to the high school just
to build a better sense of belonging um it was great to hear other people's perspectives and just know what were the most valuable points in the school system um and the reading coalition was also there helping facilitate a great discussion and they were talking about um different leadership opportunities
and ways to make a lot of these um decisions and ideas that people came up with a reality um then last may was the college fair here in the fieldhouse where over 120 different colleges had um representatives here to talk to students
and it was just it was full of people from rmhs and surrounding um towns and it was just it was busy all night i was there for a while and there were just people at every booth um a lot of great information some really awesome opportunities to fill out interest forms
and ask questions of different schools to get an idea especially ones that are further away um and harder to visit um so that was a huge success and guidance put in a lot of work over the last few weeks setting that up and making sure we had uh schools from all over the country
and then so next week is the start of spring athletics and tryyouts um on monday so all the spring sports baseball softball tennis outdoor track and lacrosse are all starting up again um and it's a huge time for all the tryyous
um people are getting super excited and it's just a buzz in the halls um and then also over the last few weeks school counselors have been meeting with their whole case loads about course selection for next year and i think those are pretty much all done now um people have
had opportunities to talk about all the different new courses there's a bunch of new dual enroll dual enrollments and a few new aps that have been seem to be hitting it off with students um people have been talking about all the new opportunities um so it's a great great
move forward for more advanced classes and then just last week or two weeks ago as well um the rmhs deca team had a huge success in their boston competition um where five students moved on to the international competition in orlando
florida in april um and two rmhs students also placed in the top six in their event of independent business planning um and miss rosenfeld has really been a huge support for this group um i've heard so many great stories about deca and how empowering it
is and how it's really helping people especially who want to go into the business field get firstirhand experience um and she's put in so much work this year to get the deca team to competitions and everything so that's a great uh step forward as well um then
also coming up this month sophomore semi at rmhs like every year on the 22nd um english mccast for grade 10 is the week after that and then the pto is inviting the speaker liz faria um who will present on when worry comes home um and
then junior prom is the following week on april 3rd at andover country club um and then right after that the freshmen are holding the annual progressive dinner at crystal community club in wakefield so all the classes have huge events coming up senior prom is just a
few months away and i know tickets are already going on sale as well that's pretty much what's coming up that's a mouthful jason thank you just a few things happening anybody have questions for jason nope okay i like hearing about the excitement about the ap classes but that
that was last last agenda's meeting topic as well so thanks jason you know the rules stick around as long as you want or if you have to run to do homework or anything else we have no problem so thank you all right thanks jason dr hardy i think we're on to you excellent well good evening everyone uh
two quick updates for you today we had our first meeting of the technology impact committee um mr grant is one of the representatives um on the team and we have four administrators and four members of the rta so eight members
altogether this is one of the committees um that's in our contract with the rta that we can call when there's a need recently um well actually beginning last summer when we had um our district leadership retreat with school committee we started digging into the topic of ai
in schools and there's been continuing work in the district this year for example here at the high school one of our professional learning tracks for teachers has been around ai in schools um in talking with jess bailey the president of the rta we felt that it was
time to launch a committee that could dig uh some more into the work that might need to be done going forward um at this point we're looking at establishing a vision for ai and that would be something that would be iterative of course um because as we all
know the technology of ai is constantly changing and we certainly can't nail down one point in time with it and um i think the work of the committee this year will set us up perhaps um for what next year might look like with additional working groups and um there's
a lot to be done but we have an exciting start to that the other um little thing i wanted to mention that was kind of exciting that happened uh last week i've talked to you a few times about the professional development we're offering this year through a desie grant for illustrative
math which is our k6 core math curriculum uh we actually had a visit from desie um they wanted to come and see the pd in action that was that's being grant funded by them and they were so impressed they've asked to have someone come out to another one of our
pds and even looking at um maybe interviewing us for um information that they will share with other districts about how to support teachers with high quality pd the day that they came we were over um at joshua eaton and it was
the third grade teachers at joshua eaton would end in barrows and um the model is that the teachers have some time to do collaborative planning then they go into the classroom different teachers take a portion of the lesson and our teachers were amazing as i'm sure you you would
expect um and really were able to show off um the features of our highquality curricular resource and also learn from each other the debrief after was also impressive to desessie the way our teachers are learners and reflecting and picking up on what they saw other
teachers doing and so it was really a successful day i just want to highlight that and thank our teachers who have been participating in that pd great thank you any questions for dr hardy i'll just make a comment that um how nice it is to hear that um the
strides we're making in pd because years ago it was a main complaint of the teachers that they're just not getting anything out of it so kudos and thank you i want to stop dr hardy was kind enough not to throw me on this bus i actually missed the majority of our
meeting we were supposed to get started but she she was kind enough to stay on the line with me after to catch me up i feel feel well involved very honest i never would have told sean i i know i but i did notice you looking
towards the camera with a smirk [Laughter] all right with that said now you have a tough act to follow dr just one uh one update i continue to be really encouraged by the work at the high school to provide real world authentic learning opportunities for our students
uh a couple of weeks ago at the school committee meeting there was a question around the anatomy table if it had arrived yet which for those in the community um who have been following closely this aligns we got received over $100,000 in grant funding to purchase what is a highly technical virtual dissection and virtual visualization
tool um and we're really excited that that aligns with our healthcare social assistance pathway it has arrived and now is in miss delby's room uh the teachers are now working through that to figure out how to best bring that to life in the you know the classroom for students uh but eventually we'd like to invite community members in to be able
to see the tool in action and again which we think is a a great representation of the type of learning experiences that we're trying to provide our students here inside the four world uh walls which truly prepare our students for the world uh once they graduate so very excited about that update it was long overdue but it's finally arrived it's here and we hope to
uh showcase it to the community very soon awesome any questions for dr milchesky no all right we'll move on to leazison on reports and sean we'll start with you uh no report okay chuck uh nothing
school related miss pickle ball miss pickle ball okay sarah anything no report no report carla um we had a meeting for the kllum school building committee on monday
our our main topic of that meeting was um that we granted um a further design amendment to our designer so we were granted $2.2 million for our schematic
design feasibility phase up through the vote which is may 13th we have pushed our schedule um back six weeks so we've gained six weeks on the schedule and we are way under budget
so um we granted a $500,000 design con furthering design amendment to our designer to to push forward um to further the design so what
what that means is when we vote on when the town votes on may 13th if we have a successful outcome the designer will be able to hit the ground running they don't have to wait a month to further their design they actually can um hand
it right over to their sub consultants which is huge um not many um districts have that opportunity to be able to do that so we were we we we had a lot of meetings and um met with msba and met
with our committee on monday to be able to do that so we're really excited about that um the the risk to that is if kllum doesn't pass on may 13th the these these funding dollars um
are not they are not reimburseable to begin with with the msba but um we would technically not be using that design work unless we decided as a community to to do something on our own after so
um like i said we had very thoughtful discussions with the town with um legal counsel with asba with the superintendent with the town manager and assistant town manager um about this process and and just in terms of uh
monetary savings or value to that an escalation 4% escalation on a $100,000 $100 million construction contract is $333,000 a month so we gained ourselves
back two and a half months in that respect and um i won't get into all the other benefits but it lines us up to bid the contract in march which is the optimal time to hand it over to a contractor and the construction market
is softening so yay for us great okay any questions for carla one more thing one more thing um kllumschool.com our website um has updates on it it has our may 13th um
date for debt exclusion election and um you can go and see updated designs there and hopefully by the end of this week we'll have a a one-page cheat sheet of just the details about the project
hopefully by the end of this week we will also have a calculator up on the um town website but we'll have a link from our website over so people can go in and put their home value in and find
out um what happens to your taxes j carlo thank you uh what do you with the savings uh you attribute that to the schedule or
what mainly or what is that from the being under budget we were um allotted $2.2 $2 million um we we got our work done um we didn't use
our our designer did a lot of work but they our designer's contract was lump sum so they had a contract for the whole time frame um the one variable is our opm's contract was hourly yeah hourly that's what i meant yeah the shorter
time so um and at one point in time you know about 3 months ago the opm reached out and said "carla we're coming to too many meetings um we're we're we're creeping up to to our allotted amount um
so we cut them back on you know meetings that they really didn't need to attend at that time um but we did extend their contract as well because we do need support during this phase of the project as well and that that's good news that
uh that needs to be telegraphed when you're talking about the whole project going forward i would think when you're asking for ahead of schedule and under budget yeah you're using the budget to stay even further ahead of schedule and save even more money essentially is what
it sounds like right and and and this work that will be done by the designer um comes off the designer's um budget on our next phase so it's not like we're paying extra um we're taking the chance that that we're passing this
vote is going to pass and the project's going to continue um but we will take it off of the end of that and in terms of like it being reimbursible or not it wouldn't be a reimburseable on the other side because there is a cap um msba has
a cap to their designer's fees let's say our designer's fee is $10 million their cap is like $700,000 so that portion of it wouldn't be reimburseable by the msp anyways um so for us with the escalation savings
it's a no-brainer not every district gets to do this um some districts do i will bet you that lexington will be doing what we're doing or putting up additional funds to keep their their momentum going the nice part about it
too is our designers um are not just sitting and waiting for the vote we have them engaged so it kind of keeps the momentum going so for these two months that they will be partially funded um they won't call in their entire team of
sub consultants but um we will gain back that one month of actual design time yep you're welcome any other questions for carla no that's outstanding okay no report all right uh just one quick
report which we'll also hit on the details of later in the meeting that we had uh two subcommittee policy subcommittee meetings on the 4th and the 11th and we continue to make progress on our 157 policies um don't shake your head at
me um all right with that said we're going to move to our new business um which is a vote to accept to approve the acceptance uh and the conditions of the david savio law enforcement scholarship fund and as part of that uh miss
michelle savio we'd love to have you come up and talk to us about the scholarship and david and and what you would like to do so no come on up next to chuck if you don't mind hi i'm michelle savio um my son who's a
high school senior class of 2025 is in the back row there in the comfy seat that's robert savio um i just wanted to say um thank you thank you to the school committee thank you to chief clark who's in the audience thank you to um lena
williams um the town treasurer uh diane morabido who really helped me um um really kind of create this scholarship uh my husband loved this community he
loved really everything about it um when he passed um and we were thinking of a way to keep his legacy alive um it was kind of a no-brainer for us um to create a a scholarship in his memory um to
support uh high school students who are interested in pursuing a career in law enforcement and criminal justice he loved his job excuse me and it's really an honor excuse me for our family to um you
know keep his legacy alive in this meaningful way so just thank you all for your support um i'd also like to thank all the staff at wood end uh coolage middle school and the high school um they've been so supportive to us and our
three children robbie katie and charlie and we're just so appreciative of this community for all their support so thank you thank you michelle thank you thank you thanks david for all his service to this community as well that shouldn't go unsaid
okay you have a motion um motion to approve right to approve the conditions of the david savio law enforcement scholarship fund second motion to yeah to approve the acceptance and conditions of acceptance and conditions seconded by
carla any further discussion no all right uh roll call sean we'll start with you yes aaron yes carla yes sarah yes chuck yes and tom yes and it passes six to zero michelle thank you
[Applause] um so let's move on to the next thing which is the announcement of a new school resource off actually michelle do you want to take a picture oh no that's nice okay i just wanted to make sure i
didn't i don't um okay so now we'll move on um the announcement of new school resource officer chief clark will you come join us uh with our new sro john can hear me you can you can yeah exactly he'll get on camera there
[Music] um first of all i just want to thank you for um accepting the grant on david's behalf um david is not not only a um co-orker of mine we actually went to the police academy together graduated reading high school together and met at
brush metal in fifth grade so we go way back and um michelle said is he truly loved this town this community and he was the definition of what you want a police officer to be uh an amazing human being amazing person amazing father amazing husband and truly there would be
no other police officer in the police force like him he was the best police officer hands down this department has ever had and it means a lot for us on the police department to accept this grant and hopefully have people that want to emulate him join the job and work and serve this community he really
did he was writing in and out so i just wanted to thank you for that thank you no um sorry um to go forward with this um we wanted to take the time to introduce our um newest school resource officer i
know i i was going to talk i think the superintendent wants to talk and then we'll have officer davis talk um so i'd like to introduce officially our newest school resource officer sorry school resource officer mike davis um he so we had a first round of
interviews with the candidates on february 24th um it was made up of school personnel and police department personnel including members of the coalition and then we had a second round of interviews on march 3rd which included the superintendent um the armed chess principal um callahan myself the
deputy chief of police the town manager and lieutenant detective a body and after those two rounds we had a great pool of candidates but after two rounds of interviews it was clear that um officer davis was in our opinion the um the best fit for the police department best fit for the schools um so we're
proud to announce him as the official um school resource officer officer davis was hired by the police department in january of 2022 he's been with us since um he is a member of the honor guard unit so he represents at us all sorts of special events funerals different things
um he's also a field training officer so a field training officer is a handpicked they are the officers responsible for training new police officers when they graduate the academy and making sure they're up to speed after graduating the academy and he is after right after this he is going back to go teaching the rad class he's one of our newest rad
instructors and he'll be teaching the rad class um prior to joining us he worked for the department of corrections and the department of youth services prior to become a police officer here in reading he has a unique background and we're not going to we're not delaying this at all he's actually going to be
starting monday um with detective lewis and detective cooper um and he'll be finishing out the uh detective lewis will be finishing out the entire school year with um officer davis there might be some trainings here and there might be out of school for because if we can get into those trains and get him
certified as a school resource officer in some investigations we're going to um but for the most part he'll be working starting monday through the school year and then we'll look at him have him starting the school year with detective lewis as well just make sure everything's settled the um whole plan is to have such
a smooth transaction that he becomes such a familiar face that it's when he starts the school year next year and he's seeing around there's no skipping a beat um he will be spending time with sro vatcher as well and working in the elementary schools and going around meeting everybody but we wanted to start right away so we're actually going to be
um starting him on monday so if you first like to thank the chief for putting together a very collaborative process that engaged a lot of our different stakeholders in our community throughout the process i'd like to thank the candidates who all put their names forward in the hat i thought it was a great pool of candidates uh and really enjoyed the process getting to know each
of them as well um a few things stuck out to our team i speak on behalf of principal countan uh also we had a couple we had teachers involved uh in the process as well about officer davis and what he would bring to our team first his experience which chief clark just spoke a little bit about but
someone who clearly is coming in with uh experience not only successful experience in on the writing police department but also his background department of youth services department of corrections he came across as someone who has the poise uh that is needed in the role i will say being in any sort of law enforcement role you need poise and
i would argue in schools you need some serious poise and i think that's what we felt that he would bring to the table two uh we feel that he brings a really unique and interesting perspective we think he's coming in uh understanding that there is a history and a legacy of a strong uh sro in the role and that's
based on partnership so we sense that it's someone who wants to work with the youth who wants to partner with the schools and really wants to be here to serve students and i think that that came across loud and clear uh the other thing that stuck out to us this is someone who really wants the job this is someone who's passionate uh he as he will describe in a few minutes his both
his wife and his mother are public educators uh he came in doing his homework and made it very loud and clear this is a role that he sees himself in that he can see himself thriving so we are really fortunate to have officer davis joining uh joining our team here we think that he will continue on again the strong partnership that we've had
and appreciate everyone who was a part of this process and really looking forward to throwing you right in the mix on monday and i think we want to give officer yeah davis a chance to be able to share speak a little bit want to say thank you uh chief clark and superintendent everyone u that was a part of the selection
process for giving me this opportunity um very excited to start i can't wait to start on monday um like the superintendent said i come from a family of educators uh my mom has been a teacher in the pb public school systems for uh over 25 years now uh my wife is a teacher in the lind public school
systems um so i admire and have the utmost respect for you know what educators do uh on a daily basis uh you know they have a lot of workload but you know at the end of the day they care for the kids and that's the most important thing um i'm excited to start i know i have big shoes to fill uh with sro lewis
leaving um but i look forward to learning from him and sro vatcher as well um and i'm looking forward to meeting everyone u being a familiar face within the schools uh not only for the staff um but also for the students as well thank you and i did fail to mention that um we last summer we ran our very
first youth police academy and officer davis was instrumental in getting that running and um then teaching almost every single day he did the physical fitness portion with the kids and um he was that was part of it for our decision too was his seeing him interact with the youth in in that role and taking a
leadership role but interacting with them really it was um great to see it was that program was extremely successful was a lot of teamwork behind it but he was instrumental in helping getting that was going as well thing to add to uh you had on you he loves uh kids working with the youth but also loves dogs i've got that
question just get that out of the way too so that was carla asked the question i've already heard the question so it's comment on that i knew you were going through the hair color come on we're getting another rusty colored dog is what you're going to say right uh and yes the plan is still to we want to get
him settled but in next year looking at introducing um a comfort dog with him um he i know he's very excited we put that as part of the job stipulation that um and he's very excited for that i heard your wife is a dog lover and so it's wife and daughter yep so um but it's something again that is going depending
on when his litter is born everything but it's the that is that isn't on the plan and getting another comfort dog back in here with him so great any other questions i was going to say that's the question i got when i when we've shared that detective lewis and detective cooper had gotten a
promotion they were "well that's exciting are we getting another dog?" so lovely to welcome you but the kids are really excited okay sean anything from you no i'm good thanks okay gentlemen thank
you very much thank you congratulations and we're happy to have you a part of the team welcome i just like to thank the superintendent um the collaboration as the chief of police and the superintendent um we've had a great relationship with the schools for years now and i'm glad to
see this continue on and it's um we're very much like on the same page with getting to keep that collaboration so it's great to kind of continue that and just thank the school committee for the time with us so thank you thank you for coming we very much appreciate it okay um moving right along and we will
have our high school counseling annual update uh principal kalan and director of school counseling miss lennena williams um please come on forward and dr milchesky has the presentation uh to do do with you right music to play
hi everyone see if it works over there oh thanks it's always great to see you you know this once a year coming back and being able to share all the wonderful things about the guidance department specifically around college admissions
so thank you for having us um jason kind of stole um my thunders as far as like sharing all the great things that have been happening this week it definitely has been a busy week um we had a really successful college fair last night um just as he said there was 120 colleges
that came but i think what was most impressive to me was the amount of students that were here so we're guessing it was over 700 just based off of the number of programs that we printed 700 programs there was just a few that were left over and most families didn't take more than one so um
that's a sign that we had a great turn turnout um as you know just from me talking about this in past years um we collaborate with 10 other schools we do all the work they advertise to their students um that's strategic on our part because the more students we can get to come to the college fair the more
colleges want to come so um every year we get um you know praise for um the amount of students and the preparation that we do um with our students and the questions that they're asking so there was a big push this year to get more sophomores to come and there was a lot
of resistance which is pretty typical um again that's another strategy on our part that we want students to go into the college fair just getting exposure of it and that there isn't this idea that we want sophomores to find their you know dream college but we do want
them practicing talking to college reps so next year when it's more real and they're in it and they they really have wrapped their head around it's not so intimidating so i was glad to see the amount of sophomores and juniors that were there so um that was a fun night for us we had sats on saturday we're
right smack in the middle of course selection both for the high school and middle school and here we are talking about college admission so busy busy never never a dull moment y all right so just talking about um this is um statistics that i put together
every year um pertaining to um last year's class so the the data that is here and the the numbers and the percentages are not too far off from what i was presenting last year there's just you know one or two percents um difference on many of the things so our
students went to 27 different states two countries um uh outside of the united states 40% attended private um colleges and universities 75% stayed in new england so this is pretty typical where students when they start the admissions
process they want to go far away there's a lot of kids who want to go to florida in california and then by the time they're in senior year and final decisions are made that's when they start coming closer to home so that's not too much of a surprise 49% of the overall class stayed in um massachusetts
and um of that 49% are attending public um univers colleges and universities um so this is always a topic of conversation every year when we're looking at the percent of students who go to four-year school two years
two-year colleges prep oops that's not what i wanted did not want to do that either here we go um prep school and and employment and so there's like a slight decline on the four-year college but with that i actually celebrate this
because i one of the things that we've pushed really hard um for is to have all students realize that there's so many opportunities out there for them and we have more students who are interested in the military gap year programs um going
into the trades i want to um applaud um principal kalan and katie buckley who have done a great job with innovation pathways and partnering with us to get more um people coming in talking to students about trades so they know about all different options so i think we're
at a point where more students are comfortable celebrating what they want to do and openly talking about options outside of college which i think is wonderful as long as parents are on board and this is you know what they feel is right for them and they feel
good about it that's what we want every student just to leave feeling good about whatever their plans are so to me the percentage of um you know a slight decrease in number of kids who are going to four-year college or two-year college
and stuff as long as they're happy and they're finding what's right for them that that feels good for us i i also think that in just in casual conversations with students and parents there one of the big driving factors well as we all know is cost um and the
cost of some private colleges is is rising quickly um and students are either deferring to uh state universities uh that are very that are very high quality education it's incredibly hard to get into amherst um
even with kids sometimes with a 4.0 or higher are not getting in um and also community college is now free in massachusetts so i wouldn't be surprised to see a different shifts in the coming years uh because students are more and more focused and their families on
graduating from college without debt um and so i i do think that that is that is something that's kind of shifting thinking um as the cost of annual cost of colleges pro private colleges increases dramatically
sorry go ahead yeah thank you um here are state um here are sat scores and um starting last march is when we went digital for
the sat so that has been a big shift um for us administering coordinating it i love it it's super easy to coordinate now um everything is right there in front of me i can pull things up pretty quickly it's very clear who needs to go
where and do what um but here are our averages and um and you know i know that you wanted to talk a little bit um about the scores um yes i mean i think that we are always
striving to have the highest sat scores um as possible we've made a lot of shifts uh in the last couple of years even prior to me um starting at the high school work with dr hardy and dr from milichesky in reorganizing the curriculum especially our math
curriculum really like k2 um and i think that we'll hopefully see a bo in the math scores shortly um we're still above the state average but obviously we always want to be better and we're going to continue to um encourage students to
make sure that they're in prep prepared uh for sats there is in some a lot of spaces uh devaluing of the sats and acts when kids are applying to college some colleges are test blind some are test optional now that changed a lot during
the pandemic uh some are coming back uh so i i'm curious always curious to see how that's playing out nationally uh and i do think that there has an impact on that the test is now an intuitive test that it's gone um online and so that
presents to be somewhat more challenging to students and uh it's sort of like um march madness brackets if you that as you go down you have to answer four more questions and get dig back out um that that are worth different points and so gre have been like that for a very long
time but now the sats are also um like that as well so that is the recent shift uh as the test went digital they changed over to an intuitive test as well and although i don't have the statistics um to share with you right now we still have a high percentage of our students
who are taking the sats and i think that's because we offer them here where many area high schools have stopped offering them um so that also means that we get a lot of those students who take the sats here but i like that students are still taking them because they can
choose choose um if they want to submit scores or not depending on what colleges that they're applying to so if it's going to help them we want them to submit if it's not going to help them and the school is test optional it's nice that they don't have to do that lindel said at one point this is
obviously one of the metrics that we look at in student outcomes that matter to us and how our students are doing so we continue to monitor i would say also the interventions or supports are not are not all high school here right this is cumulative for a student's experience right in the years before so if you talk about trying to boost you know math uh
sat scores it is not just a strategy that can look at the high school you all know that right but this is aligns with a lot of the other work we're happening across the district yeah this is eight years of math and focus coming to reality
um unfortunately so but now we're we we've changed course so we'll we'll look forward to seeing the improvements anything else to say too no all right here are our ap scores and i'm
pleased to report you can see a a nice increase from 2023 to 2024 with the total number of students who have scored a three or higher on the exams so as you can see there's a decrease in the number
of students between 2023 and 2024 but that's also there was a decrease in the number of students in the graduating class so that number does not necessarily surprise me um with that though with the decrease in the total number of students we still had a higher
number of exams that they took overall so um last year there were 278 students who um who took at least one yeah took at least one and then the total number of
exams were 650 and 231 students scored a three or higher um so that's a total of 83% um scored um with a three or higher which is a nice place to be
can i ask um on this one real quick um go back to it yep yeah um first of all this is one of the ones i love to see and i'm looking forward to now that we have more ap classes that number is going to go up um as we think about this next year i would love to see the breakdown especially now that we're
going to have more that are available for sophomores how many of them are sophomore students how many of them are junior students how many of them are senior students um and then use that three number not just for percentage of kids but percentage of tests as well right so are we seeing that we're able
to of the 650 is it still 83% or are we looking at more like 50% that's a big difference between those two things and making sure that we're able to do it across multiple subject areas so that's my next question is how do we then correlate this as well i'm sure you guys are already looking at
it and it is available on we have all of it exactly it would be lengthy to go into it today but i'm happy to sit down at any time to go over all it no a lot of it's available publicly too but it'd be good to have that as part of the greater conversation as well it's easier if you dig into the college board uh website uh but they it's not easy to
extract these charts from college board they are a little protective over them so these are actually screenshots but then we're able to call out the data and i i have a lot of those breakdowns so i'm happy to go over with it anytime okay do you mind speaking a little bit about
requirements or how you're navigating uh students having to take a you know ap test at the end of the the year i know that that's shifted over the years too because i know that plays a role in the data too and that shifted over the years so it's our expectation that students if they're taking an ap course they're
taking the ap exam they're not forced they do have to pay for them um but we just set the expectation that we want them to take the exam so a very high percentage of students are taking the exams what that means though is that
there are some students who they may be taking multiple exams and um by the time seniors are taking the exams they know where they're going to college and they know if the college is going to accept those exams or not so some students um
place an emphasis on certain exams versus others they still take all of them but um it's definitely interesting like as someone who's coordinating i'm in every exam and i can see who is really putting in 100% of their effort
versus some who are taking it hoping that they do well and but they're placing more emphasis on the on other exams i don't know if there's anything else that you want to say well i think that the shift in allowing more like 10th graders to take more aps and
hopefully encouraging 11th graders to take aps if more 10th graders are taking aps then um it's not the end of their senior year i have a senior in my home i know how hard it is to keep them engaged uh and i think that juniors are still
very locked in uh and our 10th graders that although it's a small number that have taken aps in the past couple of years have actually fared extremely well those are probably usually kids in ap chem uh which is a very challenging course but the kids work very very hard
and and traditionally do well in ap chem um so i i think that as we expand my hope is that we see kids pushing themselves um to get those scores and we also need to always emphasize the importance of getting a three or higher
or a four or five um and how if we're thinking about that financial aspect and it can carry over to high school or college um sometimes kids can go into college with having already met their first year of prerex uh and so it's just a kind of a shift in thinking sometimes
and and get a little push towards the end of the senior year if they are seniors taking aps to do their best um i do feel compelled just as the director of school counseling where i need to um take into consideration all different types of students and learners
and i do want to be very clear that ap exams are not required for all college admissions and there are many colleges that place an emphasis on ap exams but not all colleges and so i do just i want to emphasize that because as we have
increased um the number of courses that we are offering and also allowing sophomores to take some of the exams i just don't want the wrong message to um be given and all
students feel like the only way they're going to get into college is if they take ap exams so what we want is students to take courses that they're interested in and that are challenging for them and that they also are going to have a balanced life and they're going to enjoy school and they're going to
enjoy their extracurricular activities but we don't want students to overextend themselves is if it's not the right place for them or they're feeling like they have to take five aps because that's the only way they're going to get into their dream school there's so much
involved in college admissions at the same time there's a huge benefit to taking ap exam ap courses for many students and it's college level work that is truly preparing them but as counselors this is one of the reasons why we're meeting with every student um
during the scheduling process because we want to do right by all students so i just want to be careful because this is a public meeting and you know there's a whole variety of people who are watching it and i just want to make sure that um we're trying to do the right thing by all students so
but i still value ap i have an interesting role um do you mind going back to the other slide i think that slide is a really important one too the one we just had oh i skipped over that skipped one yep i skipped that one by accident so this is um the ap
recognition and so they give um our students um recognition for the number of exams that they're taking where they get a three or higher so out of there's um the first category is being an ap scholar and um you can see over the
years we've had many students who fall in that category where they are taking where they receive three or higher on three or more exams then the next level goes into scholars with honors where they score a 3.25 25 on all exams and
score a three um plus or four on no three plus on four or more exams and you can see that we've had an increase um over the years with that which is really exciting to see and the same thing for scholars with distinction so a 3.5 on
all exams um and scoring a three plus on five or more exams so it's last year was the highest number you almost buried the lead rankings what' you say i said you almost buried the lead if you look at look at that bottom line
and you total those up that is one of the strongest years we've had across the board right yes um that's great job by those that this only measures seniors too right it doesn't if no it's all aps anyone who's taken it well it's it's
hard to have had five aps by a junior i guess is my point so it's hard to there is there are students who started last year who had five aps um so they could be in 2023 and 2024 but the majority of them are seniors on this but there are
there could i would imagine over the next few years there's going to be an increase in juniors that might be in that category in the bottom category but there could be several juniors in the correct yeah yeah yeah
can i ask a clarifying question so is that when it says 3+ 3.25 3.5 is that the average of all their exams so they could get a a one and two fives or something and then or do they have to at
least get a three well i think on the second the two the second the scholars with honors and the scholars with distinction i don't know tom you're more of the math person a minimum of but i would imagine that they have to have at least a three there's a two there's an
and clause there right so in this case if they took four courses they would have to have all three of them have at least a three and then the cumulative average would have to be 3.25 okay right that's what i was trying to but if they had if they had five courses they could
have one one and then all the rest three pluses yeah okay right yep but that would drop their average pretty but that would drop well yeah sure i i'm just trying to wrap my head around it yeah exactly yep any other questions about that
and then the next slide is just talking about the current class where students have been accepted so far but i want to say that this is students self-reporting at this point um this isn't a like we
don't get notified from every college um where students have been accepted so at this point this is just what students have told us and there are some students who have been accepted to many schools but may not have put it in score so this is truly just me pulling from score um
what's available right now um and there's um what did i say over 1,500 applications were submitted in this year's graduating class and we already um with there's 649 acceptancees that
have been reported so far to 154 colleges which is pretty similar to where we were um in last year's class as well so the next few slides just show the different schools and this is in the packet and i think um was also made
public that anybody can see those but i think a lot will also be coming in within the next handful of weeks right prior to students having wellp [Laughter] march and april are big months for especially for some of our very
competitive schools yep yep and then the last slide slide just talks about some of the current and ongoing things that the school counseling department um is doing along with administration and so the first one is we had a career day that was really
successful this year so i'm um very excited about that i had this vision of what i wanted um there was a lot of work that went into making that day happen and the night before i definitely had this panic of like is this all going to
work out um i was blown away with the amount of students who um had positive feedback for us and that was just um really great to see they had an opportunity to u meet with three different um professionals we had so
many community members that were willing to volunteer their time and come in we tried to get a a wide range of people um we learned a lot from doing this our first time so um there will be some tweaks that we will make next year but what was really great is students saying
that it should be longer we wish we had more time with them and even now because this was in the end of january um in march we still have students like we're starting sophomore seminars and they're asking because they heard from um you
know the upper classmen about this day are we going to be able to do that next year and kids just talking about their experience so that was that was really wonderful um and i've been working with teens for a long time oftent times on days like this they kind of go through
the motions and like why do i need to be here and whatnot you know just being typical teens but to see them fully engaged asking questions um was really great so we did that and we will continue that next year um we did our first in-person college admissions panel
so this is something that we started many years ago um and it was virtual but we did it in person so that was um exciting and um i think the college reps really enjoy doing it in person so um that was good and we will continue doing
that next year i personally like doing things in person um i just think that has a little bit more of a personal touch and then people can go up and ask questions afterwards as opposed to when i was doing it online it was all me asking the questions and then and um people didn't really have an opportunity
to engage too much unless they were um typing in questions quickly um we worked really hard to improve our website this year um so i recommend everybody check it out i'm really pleased with what we've done our old website we just found really hard to
navigate um we found it hard to navigate and we are on it all the time so um we created a google site and it is much easier with a lot more information um for parents and students to navigate this is our second year
partnership with college affordable can't speak highly enough about this organization who has helped so many of our reading families with the financial aid piece and it's anything from people can um attend and watch webinars to meet
with them they will help them fill out the fafsa um and on the back end for seniors they will help them write any appeal letters to colleges to try to get more money and it's all free for our um for our families so we've had many families already partner with them and
then write to me just saying what a great experience that they've had and um the increase in money that they also found by writing the appeals um i already talked a little bit about the digital psats and sats so we're um we will continue offering both
of those the psats was in the school day so we have um all sophomores and juniors taking the psat so we will continue that and we will continue working with um administration on the innovation and career pathways and the dual enrollment
opportunities for students that definitely during course selection there's been more students who are really excited about those opportunities and um although the the senior fourth quarter internship isn't specifically a counseling initiative
there is a school counselor who is um helping administ ation with that and i think that there's a decent amount i don't yeah we're we're still some people are some students are on the bubble for their internships but they're we're going to make it we're confident they're going to make it uh because there are
criteria for them to participate in the internships with attendance and grades and so um i would say right now we're at least half to twothirds of the class are participating in internships um and uh
katie buckley and megan manos uh and brian scuffington are working on the internship program this year and they started it i don't know why we didn't think of this sooner but started planning very early instead of way in the third quarter you know uh an epiphany there uh but that has made the
program um run much more smoothly and we've built very strong relationships with our community partners and built in a lot of work-based learning opportunities to prep the students before they go out in their internships to include an internship boot camp um which we're running the week before
internship starts just to make sure students have the skills um to have a very successful experience chuck r so this a question may not be available but i'd be curious to know what college admissions think about
six and seven i mean the the the u innovation program and whether they look at that and that helps a student and then also the internship probably the internship's probably been around longer so maybe that helps but it'd be
interesting i don't know whether you ever get that kind of data from why someone got accepted or didn't get accepted or i mean i'm sure lena can speak to this better than i can but i think that colleges are looking for students with that demonstrate passions
and um initiatives and different things that set them out from their peers uh and a lot of these uh these and we also have a summer uh internship program through work-based learning alliance that some of our students have participated in uh and there there are different experiences that students can
then highlight maybe in their essays maybe on resumeums that they attach or embedding them into the application innovation career pathways really has an emphasis on pushing students um towards challenging classes that they might not otherwise think that they could do um
especially in junior and senior year uh and so i think that absolutely is um something that shows uh colleges you know that students can take challenging coursework uh because that the last two years are advanced courses however
that's define defined like the department of ed defines what those advanced it can be dual enrollment it can be um advanced placement obviously but there's also a handful of other courses that are considered advanced like principles of engineering um as well so
we want kids to follow their interests but i think we're also pushing them um to try more challenging courses but we're also providing support to make sure they feel like they can do it thank you and then as far as number seven um
it's although it doesn't necessarily help a student with the college admissions piece it is on our school profile that we have this program and i think it just highlights to the college the wonderful things that our school is doing so by the time the students are
doing the senior internship they've already been accepted but i think just knowing the college is knowing what type of school we are and what we place an emphasis on in the hands-on learning and things like that i think is helpful it really teaches them soft skills that are important that i think help them if
they're engaging in internships or interviews at their college as well um or co-ops or things like that sure c can you just talk about how paid internships and i think the percentage went down this year for oh absolutely um
so i would say in the past most of our internships were paid but we had those were paid through grants from the state and or federal government um they c came down through the state in different ways and we always applied for those grants there are none of those grants are available this year not for education
not for stem um i think the last couple of years we had about 30 up to 30 grants in each of those buckets um and they're just it's just gone um and so i have i'm really bothering a lot of people to try to find out if there's any possible way
but there's nothing um similar with other grants that we've applied for and received in the past like skills capital grants we still don't know about even the sustaining grants for innovation career pathways we're waiting to hear if those are going to be offered so it's challenging but i think the kids um took
that information well we told them as soon as we knew that and uh that they're still benefiting from the experience of the internships a few have paid internships that they secured on their own but the grants that we were using in the past um just weren't available this
year unfortunately um so first of all i just want to say as a as a parent of a college freshman of a student who successfully navigated the high school um he is at the perfect fit of a college and he is succeeding there
and he was absolutely very well prepared to take on the rigors and and the life of college so um we're very grateful to everyone at the high school um and i owe jen keiny a a note um but i'm curious um
two things are are you also tracking where students are not being accepted and are you what sort of trends are you noticing in college admissions so um you know for example a lot you
know we've been hearing a lot that like numbers are going up more and more kids are applying to more and more schools are you still seeing that trend or jess you touched a little bit on the cost of of private colleges it's gotten like astronomical are you seeing more
students you know steering away from that i'm just any sort of patterns that you're seeing yeah so obviously and we're looking and paying attention to where students have gotten in where they haven't one of the tricky things is that a college isn't going to tell us why a
particular student didn't get in so we don't necessarily know but we get a lot of information to see how many students are applying to a particular school and every year the number increases on all the schools which means that the
percentage of students who are getting accepted are lower i do encourage you to read the book um it's who gets in and why and it's a year inside college admissions it is eyeopening especially with the super competitive colleges um
because you can see um the behind the scenes decisions on why colleges accept certain students and it could be for um certain majors it could be because they're trying to increase something but they all want
their number of applications to increase um because it lowers the percentage of students who are getting accepted that helps with rankings there's a whole variety of things that go into it but for our students we we are paying attention because it's important for us to understand how our students are doing
um so we can continue to think about how we're advising students in the admissions process and if there are things that we need to to tweak um but it's hard to know for one particular student why they didn't get accepted here or there you know like take umass
amherst for example i mean we had students with a 4.1 um go on the wait list you know for early um for early action i mean that when i saw that that's crazy um psychology which um for
umass amherst wasn't so much of a popular major i mean it's a popular major but in the admissions process not as competitive as say business or engineering or computer science but last night when i was talking to the admissions rep she said it was crazy the
amount of students who applied for psychology which now makes that major really competitive so there's a whole variety of things that are out of our control and that's one of the things that we're always talking to students about you fit the profile if we can get
past admissions you are going to be wonderful at that particular college but sometimes it it comes down to that that tricky piece of admissions that we don't know who else is applying um from other schools what you're competing against and all of that stuff right and if a
student applies to 12 schools and they get into 10 of them and they're still right now debating am i going am i not going and so once they hit yes i'm going some kids withdraw their applications from the other schools and some don't so then other kids are waiting to come off
the wait list i mean it's a it's a wild ride you know um it is a wild ride it's a very wild ride that's a good way to having been through it a few years now as i know carla you are as well right so and yeah and you too right yeah that's
right very much yep yep it's fun college admissions is a whole roller coaster it is that is true i love my job as a school counselor but as someone who has a current sophomore i am so nervous about doing the college process with
him um but it'll it all works out in the end you know and just think back to where you were like when you were right smack in the middle of the process and um you know it it is stressful there's a lot of wonderful parts to it um but it's
always nice to be on the other side to know that it works out in some way shape or form i just want to do a general shout out for lena and her team um she really is the backbone of the school um and people don't realize a lot of the work that she's doing um from aps to
sats uh which is arguably outside of it could be outside of her job description but a lot of guidance directors or school counseling directors do also do that uh but she does it flawlessly um and even when college boards throws you a a curveball at the last minute which
happened last saturday uh the and and she's very creative in coming up with new and exciting opportunities for our students um that are big undertakings like the career day and that was a giant logistic so logistical shift of classrooms and everything like that and
we we pulled it off flawlessly i would say i mean there's always tweaks um but i'm there are many many things that linda does and she also is a great mentor to her staff um and i feel very fortunate to work with her um and she really keeps the best interest of
students in mind in everything that she does and and so i just wanted to kind of raise her up and highlight her and also katherine franetti who at the um college fair last night did a dinner for all of the college reps and they were so blown away uh because a lot of times they said
they get like trader boards or or nothing and they have to go scavenge for food at different places so it's just a very classy way for us um to welcome those people into our um community and i think that it really does benefit the students of students of reading and so i
just want to say thank you lena and thank you to katherine for all her hard work as well thanks i really like working with them um so just um although i would love to end on a very positive note like that and with a compliment to me but i do
just want to share a few other things just in the community um for number eight um particip this was our second year participating in the h.b.cu cu college fair and it's so wonderful to bring um a group of students um any rhs student who wants to attend um can come
into boston with us and we just work closely with them and some students received college um acceptances right then we also did on the spot admissions with salem state which was really a great experience for some of our students and we'll continue doing that and one thing that i um didn't think
about when i sent this presentation is is um every year we're always trying to improve our guidance seminars and think about like what's in the best interest of the students and um we did a shift this year we just started working with our sophomores and we're starting a new thing with them for um that all
sophomores will leave well they will leave high school with a portfolio and it will be online and it's very skillsbased so they um i will share like once we are like truly rolling it out we just introduced it to them um but i will
send more information out to the community um with information of what we're doing but we really want students to be focusing on skills and um what they're developing and the skills that they're developing that are going to help them in the future so a lot of the
things that we're doing from resume building to um keeping track of their community service to thinking about all the different activities they're doing and then um having them reflect on the workbased learning skills that the massachusetts um how what is it
massachusetts workbased learning plan we took those skills and now they can identify any clubs or sports or different activities that they're doing and then what are the workbased learning skills that they are getting from there so we want students to be thinking about
um participating in things where they're going to continue to grow and learn and not just do it because their parents said this looks good for college admissions because colleges see right through that but if they learn more about these skills and then we can develop a skills-based resume where they
can really feel good about what they're doing and not just a list of activities that they can't really talk more about um we're really excited to do that so that's just going to continue to grow over the next few years and then innovation pathway kids are adding um
information into that portfolio too so and they're essentially required to do that but we got working on it and decided well this is good for everyone so now um lena took that on to have everybody do it so it's exciting great all right that's all i got for you guys any other questions
thank you i looked at the presentation i'm like this is going to be quick and then a lot of good information and a lot of good back and forth conversation so thank you both i apologize that was fantastic don't apologize at all exactly thank you for all you're doing thank you both thank you both
miss kalan are you sticking around or you heading out i'm staying because okay i just i didn't know if you'll be here i'll see if i can arrange orders for that that i was going to say we could do that one first maybe um so next on our
agenda is our esl curriculum update and i think dr hardy you're going to start us off but we have some friends joining us as well we do awesome all right so as you know in the writing public
schools um we have a process for curriculum review which is when we want to update curriculum materials instructional methodology or assessments in any particular area and we will launch into those curriculum reviews for a variety of of reasons um when we feel
it's something that is needed for our students um in this case looking at the curricular resource that we have in place for english as a second language curriculum um there were a couple of reasons that we launched into this one we've had a change um over the past few
years which we'll um explain tonight in the amount of students that we have ml learners in our district and also with the particular needs of our students the curricular resource that we've had in place has been there for a while um it isn't it isn't based on the most
up-to-date weda standards and we also had grant opportunities um that were available and so kind of combining all of those things we decided um two years a year and a half ago now to launch into a curriculum review so tonight i'm happy
to have karen hall with us who's our ml director for the district and patrice dougen who is uh one of our esl teachers she's here primarily at the high school and they are both members of our curriculum council and they're going to walk us through sort of the process and let you know what program we've landed
on and um we're excited to share this important work with you great thank you welcome ladies thanks sarah thank you um so as you'll see in our presentation we put lots of information in there um we know that ours is a field that a lot of people don't know as much about so we
wanted to give you some background and also give you a lot of information about the curriculum review um but we won't speak in depth about all the slides because that would take a really long time um so we'll just highlight some things and allow you to read some others so an overview of what we're covering tonight um we'll start with the
welcome um then we'll give you a bit of the multilingual learner context in the writing public schools uh we'll go over our curriculum review objectives and the process we'll introduce the new program that we'd like to to move forward with um then we'll talk about the pilot and how we made our selection for that
program um we'll go through the feedback that we got on the program uh the costs and implementation and then we'll have time at the end for you to ask questions and give us some feedback as well uh so myself and patrice make up our curriculum council along with um melissa henry who couldn't be here
tonight um she works at both kilum and burge as an esl teacher um and we consulted regularly with sarah throughout the process as well okay so i will start with the defining of terms um with our ml learners there are basically three terms
that are commonly used when referring to multilingual learner education the first is esl which is the subject that we teach to our students who are learning the four domains of speaking listening reading and writing the second term is ml which means multilingual learner and
it refers to our students themselves and celebrating their diversity and then there is of course el which is a term that the federal and state government uses um for english learner basically to define these students who are acquiring english
um as you can see here with these charts um they indicate how many multilingual learners that we have at each level and school um you can see that it's a total of 86 ml students and here you can also see there is a total of 20 different
languages um with spanish and portuguese being the most prevalent wow i confess i haven't heard of some of these languages i didn't i didn't know where they all came from
pretty amazing i have one class of eight and there's seven languages that's incredible amazing so we wanted to share a little bit of background on the trends that we've seen um obviously that drives a lot of our decisions around our curriculum choice um so the first chart you'll see uh
gives you a breakdown of our total number of students in the blue bar and then the percentage of that that is beginners so students new to learning english um is the red bar you'll see in 2023 we had a large influx of students that came directly from brazil um and had um very little english and that was
really new for us pre prior we'd had a lot of students that had come to us from other districts and had spent some time learning english before they came here um or had parents that had taught them english in their former country and then came for a job um and the students had already had some exposure so it was really new for us to be dealing with
with newcomers as a department but also for the school district as a whole so um our teachers got called in for a lot of support for classroom teachers um and their students obviously as well um and then the number of service hours for a beginner are double the amount of esl service hours for for an intermediate
student so um we were able to hire some some new teachers thanks to all of you as well as part of that too um the second chart shows you um our access data access is the yearly test that we give to our mls similar to um mccast but just for mls um and the bottom bar the
blue bar shows the number of students that achieve proficiency on that test um and that that allows them to exit our program that process typically takes um between four to six years for students to get to that level uh so that's why we're only at around that 25% the state
figure for that is 11% um the other bar the red bar is the number of students meeting their benchmark uh the target that they is set for each individual student year-to-year based on their their prior year performance um and we've hovered right around that 50% mark for that um figure there the state's at
about 38% so we'd really like to um increase that and we think that a new curriculum will really make a difference to allow us to do that our curriculum doesn't really match the expectations on access at this point got one question here see if sean i see your hand in the air is there a question in particular
yeah yeah thanks tom um on the chart on the left just you know as we as we look at the number of of multilingual learners you know we've seen a little bit more growth since 23 but the number of beginners is staying more or less flat how much of that is attributable to sort of different profile of the new
students coming in versus us you know um growing some number of students out of that beginner category like what does that look like as we look at the data so the last two years we've continued to get more of those beginner students coming directly from um their home country and immigrating here um and
needing a lot of those supports so there is some of that number is still students that came in as beginners in 2023 um but some of those students have obviously still have moved into the intermediate category so um we still have continued to get more beginners than we had prior
okay so it does it does i guess just to say that back it does reflect that we are moving kids successfully out of that beginner category you know at least as quickly as they're coming in essentially correct and still continuing to get more beginners than we had in the past yeah
right okay thank you mhm um we're also seeing a lot more um students at the middle and high school level that are coming in as beginners um and obviously that's that's real challenging to take on the middle and high school um content with with limited english okay in terms of the structure of esl
instruction at rps uh throughout the school day our ml students are exposed to the english language in two distinct ways the first is through a contained esl class with their teacher like myself explicitly focusing on english language
acquisition and the second is in their sei classes which is sheltered english immersion um in which they're learning content like science math history things like so grouped both by grade level and proficiency depending
question do we have the same like 48 month or 24month limitation as we do with um special education groupings i don't i'm don't know what you're referring to sorry age what's that in terms of age in terms of age yeah like like the grouping can't be too too
heterogeneous of grade levels right is there is there a limitation like you can only do like 9 and 10 11 and 12 or students within a 24-month age period generally the requirements for um esl are not quite as strict as the requirements for special education which is nice for us um but they recommend
that it's a threelevel grade span so like six seven eight that kind of thing um the state is much more concerned about proficiency level than they are about grade level um because we're we're targeting that proficiency level it's much easier to have a second and a fifth grade beginner than to have a fifth
grade beginner with several other intermediate students understood thank you um so desessie has put out um a lot of resources about what high quality esl instruction looks like um i've linked um a a document there that you could check out but i tried to just highlight for
you um this graphic that shows some of the features that they're talking about um sarah and i were talking how it really mirrors what happened in world language that i know you all heard about um and that we've moved away from teaching skills in isolation teaching vocabulary and grammar in isolation but really looking at students using rich
language um rich academic language and having the experiences of learning the language through that through that process so our curriculum review process like the other um processes that we've gone through here at rps um we started back in 2023 um in the fall of 23 looking at
the the landscape we had to learn what a curriculum review was all about first of all um and then learn about um what what the expectations were on us in doing this process um this year with that knowledge we moved into then investigating and piloting some curriculum and selecting what we'd like
to um propose to you all tonight um and we hope in the fall of 2025 to launch with our new curriculum um fully and continue to implement and monitor how that goes so i won't read this to you but um you can take it in if you'd like um the the key um focus here is that we really
want our instruction to drive our students success um and for them to be successful in their gened classrooms as well so the rationale for our curriculum review as se as as sarah mentioned before was that our materials are outdated and not aligned to the the
standards that were updated in 2020 um weda is the organization that creates the access test every year and also puts out the standards for our field um and so we are um needing to align with that at this point um also with the growth in our students we don't have enough materials and have been photocopying to
meet the needs of our population um and then we don't have materials that are really suited to newcomers so we've been creating a lot of things for our newcomers um the new curriculums we're looking at are highly supportive of newcomers and i think we've touched on all this already but um we're in the
two-year review um and working to establish a high quality esl curriculum so a little bit of an overview of our process um i'll just touch on a few of these things as well um we had the advantage that desi put out um a curriculum module that we could
complete to learn what it looks like to go through a curriculum review and to to establish a high quality esl curriculum the other curriculum reviews that rps have has gone through haven't had that sort of a resource um so this was really helpful to us starting off to know that we were headed in the right direction and able to make some selections um as
part of that process desi put out a features of highquality instructional materials rubric um and we went through that rubric to assess our current curriculum to make sure that we did need to move forward with a new curriculum and we found it did lack in a lot of the areas on the rubric um we talked at one point about maybe we could supplement to
try and meet the needs but it didn't feel like it it would still um be up to the level of the standards um and we were able to use that rubric as well to evaluate the new materials that we wanted to try out um we began looking at the market and we found there was very limit limited programs that had the weda
2020 seal saying that programs were aligned with with the weda 2020 standards a lot of the programs that are still in the market are aligned to the previous version of weda standards um and we found there were hardly any programs that um were across k to 12 and
with us being a low enrollment district um most of the teachers work in several schools and with a lot of different grade levels so we wanted something that the teachers would be familiar with and also students as they move through the program would feel familiar with as they as they work through the program um so we found there were only two programs
that fit that criteria of having the weda 2020 seal and the k to2 um availability and that was uh national geographic and vista so we decided to pilot those two programs um and patrice piloted in um high school and melissa
piloted at kllum and birch meadow with our elementary school students um i'll go through a little bit more detail on the pilot on the next slide but um we ended up choosing national geographic and we'll um share those products with you in a minute as well um another great thing that we worked on this year that
we're really excited about is that we secured a $36,000 grant um to support the purchase of this curriculum as well as um stipens for staff to do work outside of school hours and professional development um in order to get that
grant the state was really looking for um collaboration so we collaborated with stonem and tritown um and my colleagues in those districts and we were far ahead of them in the the curriculum pilot and so they actually came to visit and watched lessons in patrice and moss' class and explored the materials that
we'd uh purchased so that they could see if they wanted to move forward with those materials as well uh i think that's it we've we have done started doing some professional development um and then we're here tonight to get your approval so that we can go ahead with ordering the materials as well
chuck go ahead yeah so 2020 i mean in terms of what's gone on over it might as well been 100 years ago and do we think that that will be
updated as we just get into this the standards will be more be updated again i think the update before that was 2012 yeah um and so you know there perhaps
will be shifts i do think the shifts you know between those eight years was significant as karen said there's been a shift just across the field of instruction in um languages and so um the other thing too is the field has been really slow to respond to it i
think because of the timing of the shift in those standards um and so uh it feels this feels like a really important time for us to move ahead with getting updated resources in the hands of our teachers yeah no i i'm sorry no that's okay go ahead i was just thinking
as we make this decision is it all of a sudden going to be outdated again yeah no it's a great question yeah sorry uh that's okay i think um the publishers also have are starting to go back and align materials to the 2020 standards so
some of them are offering supplements and things like that so it's not something that feels like it's already been been and gone at this point um i consult with weda um on a few things that they're working on and one of the things they're still doing is is still trying to build out the materials to go with the 2020 standards so they're
working on stronger proficiency level descriptors and a lot of other different things they're working on creating new can dos which is um statements that um classroom teachers and students can look at to see how they're progressing in the standards in more studentfriendly language they haven't created that for the 2020 standard yet we're still
looking back at the 2012 standards for that piece so it does feel like this it's a massive undertaking our standards have to be aligned with um all of the language proficiency needs but also with all the different curriculum areas so the standards are not just for language development but there's also standards
for science social studies math and ela too so the the curriculum documents are hundreds of pages um so it is something that takes a long time to to change thank you um so in terms of the program credential
credentials i mentioned before the weda prime seal um so both of the programs that we piloted did have this prime seal saying they were aligned to the 2020 standards um i think that's all i need to say with that uh so in looking at that um highquality
instructional material rubric um we did go through the rubric for both of the pro programs we piloted but in terms of collecting data we wanted to just focus on some key areas to collect the data on it felt like too much to think about all the criteria in the rubric as we collected um teacher feedback so we
selected the criteria that we felt like um would really make the curriculum um stand out to us it felt like a lot of the other features were standard across both curriculums so we picked out these things as being the things that were critical um for us to look at as we as we dove into the new
curriculum so as part of the program review um we gathered um data from the pilot teachers and also i went in and observed a lot of the lessons as they were teaching and gathered data myself as well um in addition to talking to students about their experience um and
what we found as we began the pilot um within a few weeks we all felt very strongly that national geographic was stronger the kids were more engaged the materials um were more interesting um more relevant had more um of a cultural lens uh world worldwide that kids were looking at different topics um and we
just felt like it it just really stood out the data we were collecting also showed the same which was that national geographic averaged um 3.7 on all the criteria out of four um and vista averaged 3.2 so we decided um to discontinue the pilot of of vista and
really focus on the national geographic materials and see how that went with our students um once we had made the choice of national geographic um to move forward with the pilot we gathered some data as well from the principles um in prek through 12 and um i included their
information in this chart that i've shown you here in terms of the feedback that we got towards the national geographic materials and i'll be going over a little bit more of that feedback in a in a few minutes um so some highlights of the net geo curriculum of course it focuses on the
four domains that i've talked about before um the focus is also on functional language vocabulary grammatical skills um we found that there is strong scaffolding um included especially for newcomers and beginners um instruction is multimodal including
visuals audio activities very interactive there's also a phonics supplement which we'll talk about a little bit for both k through 5 and 6 to 12 um this curriculum is aligned to the science of reading instruction in phological awareness to coding spelling
um the content like karen said is super high interest relevant draws on global perspectives relating to our students cultural and linguistic backgrounds um there are assessments embedded into it and the digital platform is super
userfriendly and very very engaging so the first one is our elementary curriculum it's called our world you can see some wonderful graphics up there um features as you can see include vocabulary even songs which i'm a little jealous of being a high school student teacher um because we
don't do a lot of singing but i do include some music a little bit um of course reading and writing um different projects lots of interactive features um buttons to press on for speaking listening recording um just um lots of help with
pronunciation and some very highinterest graphics too um i have been piloting actually the middle school curriculum as well as the high school called time zones um lots of focus on conversation of course grammar vocabulary lots of
reading and writing students listen to and practice model conversations you can see one of them on the graphic there um they often provoke cross-curricular opportunities like if you can see in that bottom um graphic um the question
asks students to create a pie chart of what do they do throughout the day and of course very high interest things so they have their cell phones there very relatable topics and issues and this is the program at the high school that i've also been piloting
it's called lyft um i love how the unit starts with an essential question um and i love the first unit as you could see um the first question was how important is it to have empathy such an amazing unit um lots of reading and writing
opportunities for artistic growth um i especially like how the units are thematically based um and they really reflect the genuine interests facing teens today not just in the us but around the world lots of social issues and we do have samples of the books that
you guys can look at when we finish the presentation if you'd like to as well yeah they're beautiful books um so back to phonics for just a second there's also a new phonics program promoted in this curriculum even for students in the upper grades many
students do not come to rps with literacy even in their first languages so there is a necessity for a phonics program at every level to enhance english fluency here we have some um awesome quotes from
pilot teachers like myself um principles um i won't read them all but i'll just share with you one of them um so fun and engaging beautiful real hosts as well as cartoon characters songs stickers games and more
i think am i reading the wrong one oh that's okay okay yeah and this is like this is for the um yeah and fullcolor student books they're amazing i we look forward to you looking at those um elementary school photos of
their projects and engagement with the books i love this quote i like the games because they bring fun and joy i'm obsessed i love that um by the vocabulary too yes i know right so cute
um and then the next slide has some of my high school students um really i've been asking them almost every day what do you think of the lessons and i'm really getting some really positive feedback um one of our 10th graders kaiiki said "i think it helps to learn about new things in interesting ways the
words and language help me to understand faster and easier." so they've really been enjoying it excellent so sorry i skipped over that um so in terms of cost information um as we said this will be entirely funded for
2526 by the the grant um and we'll even have some money for overage as well within that for future years um the curriculum material the breakdown of of um the amounts that we have for our budget are there for you um the student books are consumables um and i've listed
the cost of each of the books there um so like i said we'll order that overage to allow us to then um buy have some extra books for the future and for students as they arrive next year but we will be asking in the future to this for this to be included in the in the budget to continue to purchase those those books going
forward so in terms of um our plan for implementation um this spring we would like to place that order um based on our projected student groups and enrollment um we will we've already started doing some professional development and we'll continue to do that um we've been beginning to develop some lesson plans
um our pilot teachers are acting as mentors for the rest of the department so we've already scheduled some opportunities for the elementary team to observe melissa and our middle school teachers to come and work with patrice to see the lessons in action um and they're going to work together on some unit planning as well for next year um
at our august inservice days we've um we plan to hire a consultant to come and help us with um beginning to to do this work on on shifting to the new curriculum um and then in the fall of 2025 and beyond um we'll obviously be implementing the curriculum and watching
how that roll out goes um and be working together to create a scope and sequence across k to2 um and then continue to look for professional development opportunities as needed in response to how things go okay
yeah so we will you know open it up for any questions that you have and then we're hoping that there'll be uh that you'll be able to recommend the adoption of national geographic as our esl curriculum for k to 12 any questions carla i have a few questions the first
one's just a curious question how many languages are you fluent in i wish i speak some spanish and i worked on my portuguese when we had all those brazilian students start but i'm not fluent in in another language besides english i'm pretty good in french but i
wouldn't i don't know if i would say totally fluent i'm really i'm becoming a really good listener um you know especially portuguese and spanish in my classrooms i'm i'm getting a lot but i'm not fluent in spanish or portuguese i'm i'm kind of fascinating when you think of a student you know monday morning
walking into a classroom like what that means for that teacher right and and you have to deal with parents as well so i'm curious about that as well um who is funding this specific grant is it federal level state level it's a state
grant it's a state grant um and what has happened to our enrollment in like the last two months um we actually had um two new students enroll in the last month um no students leave and the month
before we actually had a family of three so yeah um we haven't had any students leave this spring we had students leave in the fall um so yeah we haven't seen much of a shift as of yet in enrollment thank you any other questions
are you interested in looking at the books oh yeah yeah um i i'll just um thank you for the process right and and the diligence in going through it um i like the fact that we use the standard rubrics i like the the the baselining of it against the the weda standards um you
know i love the fact that there's you know science and reading related tie-ins to it as well so um and the fact that i'm i'm also i was thinking can we use some of the higher graded phonics ones in case some some of our other students have not yet reached proficiency levels
that maybe aren't uh go ahead sorry there's i i read through a lot of those materials as well karen was nice enough to um share them with me and it's interesting the instruction does look a little bit different because you are teaching students the um you know the letter
sounds and the the parts of the word to a word they don't know yet and so there's sort of dual instruction happening as to what is the word what is its meaning and then what are the the um the letter sounds so it is it's a slightly different routine than we would
use for teaching a student who's coming to us already speaking english and knowing um the words as part of their language um so there's that added layer of complexity when you're teaching an ml student is it analytic or synthetic i would say
that it oh you're going to test me on that i would say that's a quick question i would say that it is um it's more of um teaching the letters then moving into diraphs um taught with like short vowels
and then long vowels so it's a little bit more of broken out in that way okay cara were you something else a quick question too um did did i get the right statistic of it a student who is a
beginner student who comes in who who doesn't know english at all do they graduate out of the program is did you say about five to six years correct just i'm just curious they're always mls but they no longer have to worry about
being in the pull out classes and stuff like that correct and we refer to them as former mls former mls yeah and we monitor them for four years after they leave the program to make sure they're still um being successful in their classes and to support those teachers and strategies they can use with them as well so um we follow them through most
of their school career usually so they've had to master english right and then be proficient at the grade level as well correct carla that just gives me the chance to i've spent some time in patrice's room if you want to meet some of the most amazing students in the district spend some time in patrice's room just to see
some of the students share like parts of their identity their stories their passion it is just a like vibrant dynamic place to be with some of our most engaged uh students so if you haven't i'm sure patrice would welcome you anytime to come yes i would love it like i said my intermediate class i have
eight students in seven languages represented which i love because they have to speak english like sometimes you get classes with just you know like three brazilians so the portuguese is flying but in this class it's just constant english constant inter interaction so i feel really lucky and
they're they're amazing pe people their stories um where they've come from what they've gone through and what they're experiencing here um they're resilient they're they're amazing my mother came from italy when she was
11 knew no english and they were just put into school like you have to learn yep y so no supports in that respect that's hard yeah interesting um so just looking at the
numbers it was about $141 when you added up all the consumables um but that's not you don't have to you don't have to buy each one of those every year because it's grade specific right so it's 29,40 and then 72 correct and the majority of our students are elementary have right
it's going to based on how many you're going to have so really it's going to be like probably $70 times number of students because it's split across them give or take right mhm um so it's you know consumable cost is relatively small here in the grand scheme of things
um like seven grand a year when we get to that give or take so and go ahead sir we currently have a material that we've been purchasing that's part of our old program that is in our budget that will also be suns setting so so net net do you have an idea what the net net
difference is i not that we're not doing this but i just yeah from eyeballing it it looked similar perhaps we would need to increase um you know by slightly but it seemed digital license component too though and i so i was already counting on that digital license portion um we're
not sure that we're going to roll out digital licenses for everyone we think that we we're not going to for elementary we feel like we'd rather them not be on computers when they had these beautiful books um but for our middle and high schoolers we do feel like the digital component um would be valuable um and that is about i had those figures
for you um it adds an additional $20 for the middle schoolers and $28 for the high schoolers still minimal grand scheme yeah it will be a little bit more than than the money that we have okay any other questions from anybody else sean you got anything on your side
okay do you have a motion for us uh motion to approve the esl curriculum the adoption of national geographic as esl curriculum for grades k through 12 do we have a second second was that sarah yep yeah
seconded by sarah any any further discussion by the committee no all right we'll start remotely sean yes chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes tom yes 6 thank you ladies great job
thank you so much thank you thank you okay moving right along um and we're now into section e5 um and in e5 um knowing michelle has five she has to stick around for i'm going to move that
we pull e5e forward ikf graduation requirements do i have a second second seconded by aaron any discussion nope roll call sean yes chuck yes uh sarah yes carla yes
aaron yes tom yes uh jess you want to join us up here um so in the packet we have um i guess i'll set the stage as we go into this um what tom will you stop the share
there oh yeah sorry um what we went through uh was generally as you go through the different policies um there's going to be a lot of you know masc alignment there's going to be some you know
administration updates and then you know ultimately we'll have a clean version that comes out of it that is our our final version um in the case of of ikf um jess and sarah i think sat down and went through it based upon the um
the based upon the uh mccast vote from last november um to adjust the fact that we will need a a competency um related standard uh to to be part of the graduation standard so essentially no longer will mccast be part of the graduation standard but this competency
standard will be we also took a chance there to do some other cleanup um that we noticed as we were going through it some of which frankly even for the subcommittee um jess myself and olivia were just doing over the last couple days um in alignment with our thoughts
of hey we're going to clean it up as we go through um so we'll start with that one as we go through it and um if we have any other further conversations or points um i'm going to share the one that most recently had jess's feedback
from earlier this week and then also some additional like grammarly related feedback i can also go back to the original one from just the packet if anybody wants me to u but this is the most clean version of the policy as it stands um
go ahead uh i can try yeah um so bigger and look at that i cleared them all out and there's 11 they're back um can't go bigger than that come
on there you go so in essence you know the red at the top is just basic cleanup um we started using i noticed as we were going through it we're using rmhs in different places and we set didn't we set it up at the
top but we didn't spell it out and then we spelled and then we spelled it out later and so we just try to correct that from an order of of operations perspective um what we did as well is this section on competency determination this is the substantive change the
biggest substantive change to the policy and this is in direct response to the as i said the mas uh the mccast vote from november um in addition to that um we made some adjustments to health it used
to say one semester of health x and one semester of health y it is now just two semesters of health um that is listed there and justin and sarah can opine into the the background of that you'll see that at the end of the graduation requirements the competency evidence of
earning compet determination replaces what used to be the mccast related requirement and then we've also added in some considerations that didn't used to be there so considerations for transfer students and considerations for out of district place students um was added at
the end of the policy as well um so open the the floor for questions comments uh concerns and jess if there's anything i missed in that that you want to add then we can do that sean jump right in yeah i don't um i actually don't really have any major issues with most of the
updates particularly the ones made to align the cast and whatnot but um it's just an observation curious what folks think this policy is a little unusual and it has a lot of editorializing here at the beginning versus you know getting sort of straight into a policy um and one one sentence that struck out to me
in particular was uh was the second one there says they're not best served by planning narrowly focused four years courses of study um i don't disagree with the sentiment or the premise behind that but you know there's like a judgment there's you know there's some some judgment into what determines a
narrowly focused fouryear course of study and as we move into like you know more students going into innovation pathways for instance in some sense that is a more narrow focused course you know course study at the high school and so i'm just curious what you know if there
was any discussion as you as you all evaluated this on sort of the necessity for some of the editorializing up front i'll defer it first to jess and and sarah to see if they even looked at that or not i know we didn't as a policy
subcommittee because we were focusing on these changes um but we did find that there was an error at the beginning of that paragraph as as jess in particular founded as we were going through which has been adjusted uh but sean your your point is noted and i did as i was looking through this um go back to the
masc one which just basically starts in order to graduate from blank a student must have earned blank right there's nothing to your point about the editorializing that happens at the at the top of it um and so yeah i i totally see your point
go ahead i can speak as a subcommittee i think that's spot on i i didn't review that then at that point either but i agree with it you know that maybe we shouldn't be editorializing in the beginning is there
any feedback from any of the educators i i didn't deeply pay attention to the beginning portion i was more focused on what the you know the meat of what needed to be included in terms of graduation requirements and the competency determination i just figured that was kind of how each policy started
so i did i didn't really fully hone in on that i don't have a strong opinion either way now there was a review of this policy a couple years ago um i think you were on the committee at the time it might have been it was your predecessor i think that did it with
lena um carla you might have been on that committee at the time as well do you remember any intent around this being part of that conversation again at that time i don't think we looked at that language we were talking about uh requirements and
and i can i can vouch for that because the first sentence which jess had found was weird um was incomplete and it was incomplete in the previous version at that point in time too so i'm not surprised you were all just like go down there yeah i mean and and to miss k's
point i mean this is this is um you know northstar vision portrait of a graduate type language like policy language is supposed to be prescriptive about things that must be done i just this policy is very much an outlier in having this and i i would i would advocate you know or
maybe i think formally offer an amendment um to strike the first two paragraphs i i think the third one is fine the third one feels sort of on point but third one is duplicative the third one is the third one is duplicative of all the materials below
it so i would i would even strike the third one just start with start with the reading school committee's policy is that the following are course requirements for graduation from rhs it's much more i just need to change rhs to be reading memorial high school and then rmhs in parenthesis at that point in time
so are we on the so sean is that your motion uh let me just oh can you move your mouse or yeah thank you um i will say that this references i don't know if
it's a good or bad thing this references this paragraph yeah this paragraph references the sort of like typical schedule of a student not what they have to achieve by the end of you know by the time they graduate mhm and i get that cumulatively it kind of means the same
thing but um i think there's a functional difference between what this paragraph says and what the rest of the policy does so i just i want to throw that out there before we choose to strike it i agree there's a functional difference but maybe it's not the right place we can also take it out and think if it goes in a different place but it's
not a graduation requirement really arguably that i agree with so i'm open to taking it out if everybody's comfortable with that i just wanted to clarify like i don't think that that paragraph is you know is duplicative with the rest of this but i agree it's not really relevant to a graduation policy either
okay i'm seeing jess nod as she looks at it too tom's nodding i agree i agree so the motion on the table to strike the that's i would move to a to strike the first three paragraphs okay so moved or seconded any any further discussion
okay just the motion is to strike the first three paragraphs real quick real quick roll call on that sean yes chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes tom yes so stricken okay so that means we're down
to uh and i'll make this as part of the motion without anybody saying it was but i think we are on the same page and i can type again these days which is progress all right um so then you have the basic requirements for promotion um
you have the competency determination which is the new language you have the graduation requirements um which are in particular four years of english four years of mathematics this starting with the class of 2026 is the
carryover from the previous review and it still is valid because we have not well we actually have finished that now everybody's post class of 2026 right well we're currently in 2025 2025 but the 2026 they haven't finished yet they haven't
finished but they did start already they will have to take a fourth year of math next year yeah exactly um and then the considerations for transfer and considerations for out of district just so we can see it clean i'll just do a quick clean view as well
um if i can get my screen sharing thing to move any somebody gonna say something i thought i heard a no i guess i just have a a clarifying question around the additional the new sections around transfer students and out of district
this is probably maybe a high school policy thing or practice thing of who and how we determine what equivalent course work is for each of those scenarios we assess their transcripts when they come in um and there's a lot of different
possibilities when students come in sometimes from other countries you know different types of schools um and so they are assessed by either name of course nomenclature or we talk to if it's not clear talk to the school
counselors or principles at that school to ask what the equivalent would be so that we can award as many credits as possible in the areas of that are required for graduation or the cds thank you okay anybody want to go through a uh
grammar grammarly review no no no i tried to go ahead sean go ahead yeah just one more thing and i apologize in advance for being anticipating school committee's policy
is um i i uh i think we should strike the word course requirements um let me let me let me explain what i'm about to say and then we'll you know maybe can implement but i would suggest regular course requirements and then and so instead i would say the following are
the requirements for promotion and graduation from ready memorial high school um it's a little odd for us to talk about graduation requirements and then immediately start talking about promotion requirements so um and the reason i would strike course then is because the promotion requirements are
about credits attained versus specific course requirements mhm yeah courses was a was a problem it was classes courses okay so course requirements for promotion and graduation is what your suggestion is i think he's saying take out the word
course so take the so just say requirements requirements for promotion graduation all right i'm just going to say is that a friendly amendment does anybody have any objections no that your that match your intention yes thank you
okay any further feedback all right um so this will be effective immediately um which is one of the things we'll we have the option of saying what the effective date is so this will be effective immediately is my suggestion um and i would i would suggest that be part of the motion so
erin will you give us a motion please motion to accept policy ikf graduation requirements as amended effective immediately seconded by chuck any further discussion
okay we'll do a roll call uh starting with sean yes um chuck sarah yes yes carla yes aaron yes yes and uh we
are tom tom yes thank you trying to do two things at once save the document so i can move on and do a roll call so we are we are final and we can free jess up to go home thank you thank you for the help with it
as well of course thank you okay so we move back to gba my computer will respond to me i can do that all right moving back to gba equal employment opportunity michelle would
you like to join us up here she's like not really come on we're fun all right so sharing gba she's like "you get me at 7 a.m you get me at 9:00 at night." yeah that is true we have been
working at weird hours for the subcommittee to move things forward all right so gba is one um is is one that i have to increase the size so people can see it again is one that we initially went through as part of an msc update um which was dated from
march of 2023 um michelle uh then took it clarified it made it better and everything you see is mr recommendation in the purple below um is the is the group that we uh adopted as a subcommittee or recommended for adoption as a subcommittee so the purple is the
section we'll be looking at in today's conversation as long as i can get my slider to work properly um i think that's good enough so once it catches up um so the recommendation is here in the purple uh it has been re-reviewed
also by legal uh and it is okay no additional changes by legal so the if we adopt this everything that's in the purple will go to the top of the policy and will be the policy going forward so open for any questions
comments or concerns on this one okay seeing none um let's take let's take a motion motion to adopt policy gba equal employment opportunity do i have a second second seconded by chuck um last chance for any
further discussion hearing none we'll do roll call um sean yes chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes tom yes and it passes as well six to zero
you took out the mr recommendation line what's that you took out just mr recommendation everything below mr recommendation will be the actual policy all right so moving on from gba uh and the next one is
gba um and starting with gba wish i could make this easier on myself here we go gba um this one i think there were less
changes if i can get my scroll to work i'm wrong no this one there were significant changes multiple changes sorry i was wrong um significant changes that michelle did and then was reviewed by legal as well for any further updates
and so it is in compliance with any legal related needs as well um the legal updates basically is just the blue letters inside the purple um okay outside of school or outside of school
time um so this one would be again we would take if we adopt it we would take everything below mr recommendation and it would be the policy and michelle since there is so much here i'll just ask you to spend a second to give the committee some background on what what done sure so what i did with this one
the conflict of interest um because the conflict of interest is um it it's we get a lot of questions about it and it can be confusing so what i did was i reformatted the content with headings to actually enhance its readability so it's out of that
paragraph form for consistency um i updated the language to apply to all employees not just professional staff because it is a policy that um all employees are bound by as municipal employees um this change continues
across all policies i added guidance on how to report conflicts of interest um when we feel like they arise or if we need any guidance around whether someone something could be a conflict of interest or not um and then i car i clarified key terms such as private
business financial interest what does that look like in practice because that shows up in the policy um but it's hard with the practical application of that um and then i clearly outline expectations enforcement measures and consequences for non-compliance and this
is in line with mgl and masc okay any questions feedback concerns um as we move it up to the top section assuming we adopt it we'll double check any other you know legal refs that need to be added although i think we did catch them um they're
they're referenced in the dock but if they're not referenced in legal refs we'll clean that up as well sean anything on your side nope okay uh erin can i have a motion please motion to adopt policy gba staff ethics conflict of interest second
seconded by chuck and we'll do a roll call um but we'll start here with aaron yes carla yes sarah yes chuck yes sean yes and tom
yes okay so this one is now final as well we'll clean it up before we publish it and we move on to gbe i believe yes yep which one were you going to gbe gbe
staff conduct yes staff conduct yes uh once again uh the purple section michelle has taken due diligence to update it um to make it more complete and correct well and just clarified u michelle there's anything else you want to add to that um in terms of the
updates for updates for staff conduct i did um specific examples of the laws and regulations to make the the section more tangible and relatable to the reader um i clarified consequences for misconduct explicitly stated that harassment discrimination violations of state and
federal laws and non-compliance will not be tolerated um and then i think that's the majority of those references and legal has gone through and re-reviewed the updates she made as well and anything in blue is from legal um so
that would be part of the policy update as well any questions uh from anybody else on the committee okay none um erin can i have a motion please motion to adopt policy gbe
staff contact do i have a second second seconded by carla all right roll call uh sean yes uh aaron yes carla yes sarah yes chuck yes and tom yes and that
passes six to zero as well okay so we are moving on to gbec and drug-free workplace so can i ask a question or are we do you want you can ask so when we talked about this uh in
the subcommittee we talked about alcohol yep and i don't see any we didn't pursue that any further with legal counsel or anyone that put that something in there along those lines we
didn't we did have legal counsel re it but there was no addition that they made of any sort of alcohol i didn't specifically ask that question though chuck in my in my email to her so that could be my my miss but i don't think we said we had to do that coming out of the subcommittee meeting either
i mean i just think that it's something that we should pay serious attention to in the same manner we would with with drugs i don't i don't think anybody's especially in the workplace nobody wants people drinking alcohol in
the workplace i think it would fall under the same scope too as the safety policy we're not reviewing that one tonight but i know under there we have reference to basically unsafe behaviors in the workplace um and i i think that
it doesn't specifically say alcohol but i think that would fall within the realm of that policy as well are you okay with the proceeding or do you want to table it and come back and have legal look at it for alcohol i mean i'd be curious i mean i'm not going to
you know hold it up just for me i just be curious what others think i think that uh okay so you know any thoughts from the rest of the committee on the inclusion of or trying to add some portion with the drug-free workplace to
add the idea of alcohol free as well just one thought um it could get just functionally very difficult to amend this to address alcohol because so much of it is about you know drugs as controlled substances as convictions
related to drugs etc um you know that wouldn't necessarily apply to alcohol which is you know otherwise legal for adults to possess and consume so um i think it would be a little bit challenging tactically to make this policy work in the context of also
talking about alcohol yeah no uh and can i yeah go ahead sure you know i didn't i guess i i thought we were going to have something that that had address
that before tonight so that yeah at a pay grade above me to write it so like that's fine i'm okay with not changing it as long as you feel like it's covered elsewhere and i agree it's sort of a
different beast like i i almost see it more under like like yes safety but also like the the addiction the mental health angle i don't know yes and and alcoholism would be considered disability as well so we
would address it we can address under staff safety when if we had any sort of allegation that a staff member showed up inebriated and then in terms of a dis in terms of alcoholism or staff member needing additional resources we would address that through um a potential
leave of absence or the employee assistance program the other thing about this one um is the reason this one exists is because there's a federal requirement for i don't know exactly what the stipulations are but it has to do with either grant
awards or certain types of employers or whatever but there's a federal requirement that we do this in and the in the context of the federal requirement the drug free workplace concept is about having a workplace full of people who are drug-free like broadly
not not literally just in the workplace um which is why you have you know federal employees or subjects in you know drug random drug testing and things like that right so um again for the same reason like i think it's difficult to wedge not to
wedge but i think it's difficult to put alcohol into the same policy um given that a lot of those um issues wouldn't apply you know people are welcome to use alcohol you know outside of the workplace yeah i mean in
that it is referenced in the policy at the bottom that 41 usc81 is is the drug-free workplace federal statute sir going to i think just really emphasizing the fact this is intended to be about controlled substances so i think it gets very say then we need the
we don't have an alcohol policy i mean we think it's inner inner we have a tobacco we have a drug we don't have alcohol but it it's it's not any less of a problem with drugs i think you're i think your point i
think we're more or less on the same page with um it's a little bit of a yeah i think we just have to figure out how we would address it if we do start to create one in that case and the cross references yeah right drugs and alcohol um drug and alcohol used by students and
then teaching about drugs alcohol and tobacco you would it would be normal to ask about alcohol right yep a policy for teachers being inebriated during work or drinking during staff period not
just teachers but yeah exactly okay okay so that's an action that we can take as the subcommittee or whatever um but let's take a motion uh motion to adopt policy gbec drug-free workplace
seconded by carla um all right any further discussion okay so roll call uh sean yes chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes and tom yes and it passes as well all
right right so now we will move on from our adoptions to our first reading um and that is the staff personal security and safety um item so the share will go to that
policy which is right here this is a new policy modeled after masc and edited um heavily by michelle to make it better and further reviewed by legal as
well so um michelle do you want to talk to any of the edits you made yes so i um at the the original date is not on this i think it's 2006 so it was originally the last time it was edited was 2006 so
i did modernize some of the language that's included within um i incorporated protections related to reasonable belief and aligned it with existing policies in our cbas i ensured language balances the district uh protection for staff with
staff comfort and safety uh and security and then i emphasized at the end that the aap is a voluntary resource um it does not impact job security promotional opportunities and we do encourage that staff to utilize the eap without concern
um it's not monitored and does not affect career progression here in the district okay um any feedback any questions any comments this would be the first reading we're accepting it's not a full
acceptance i'm just trying to double triple confirm that because i want to make sure my notes are 100% right sean no carla or sarah i guess maybe just a comment surprising is maybe there wasn't a more explicit statement from legal
around the conf confidentiality related to the ap but in terms of not sharing data back with employers but just a comment okay we can double and follow up with that between now and the second one okay
so you're you're asking about data sharing if we want just more if we want it says confidential services but i don't i wonder if we want a more explicit statement a few more words in there about how utilization of the eap is not there's no identifiable information shared back with the district or or down
okay i'll just add a note for myself comment check what just happened the comment box go there it is check with legal
on statement okay any other feedback or questions all right um then i have double checked and gbgb does not exist in our policy manual um so this is a first
reading um so we're just moving to accept the first reading then move to accept the first reading of policy gbgb staff personal security and safety do we have a second seconded by chuck okay any further discussion no roll call
chuck yes sarah yes carla yes aaron yes uh sean yes tom yes so that was first reading was accepted so we'll second read second reading will be at our next meeting wrong document all right so moving on
now is the last item go ahead sorry just one more just a quick heads up for the alcohol conversation y um policy gb d is tobacco use on school property by staff members that's probably an easier one a better sort of more logical fit to amend
to include um you know alcohol use or or you know being under the influence on school property that kind of thing yep yeah i was looking at that one as well as potential um option okay all right um so moving on in the agenda to our last item on the agenda
it's the notification of other policy items that we have reviewed and voted on over the last couple of weeks as a as a policy committee um subcommittee i should say um we have completed our review of policy ff um it is qual it
does qualify for a single review and adoption it will be on our agenda for uh march 27th um we also have done the same for gbbc gifts to and solicitation by staff and gbi staff participation in political activities both of those will
qualify as single amendment uh votes um finally there's a new policy gbge domestic violence leave uh which will go through its first reading um for that meeting on the 27th um okay any other questions comments
concerns before we close down tonight carla our um may 22nd meeting yes just as an fyi the senior senior awards night that night no senior proms that night oh okay but it
the kids may be off by then just putting it on our they better be off by then yeah they will have left but yeah yeah you'll be down doing senior prominade pictures and all sorts of fun stuff right beforehand okay there was one other one i think actually that i saw that there was an
awards night that had a conflict so i wanted to look at it i don't know if it was the 12th or something else but i'm going to double check some of the calendars in in may and see if there's anything else that we need to look at okay okay so with that said do i have a final motion motion to adjurnn motion by carla
second seconded by aaron roll call sean yes aaron yes carla yes sarah yes chuck yes tom yes and we are adjourned at 9:35 all right