1.20.2022 Fall River School Committee - Special Ed, Alternative Ed, Early College Sub Committee

okay i'd like to call to order the special ed alternative at subcommittee meeting of thursday january 20th 2022.

can you call the roll please mr again here miss larabee here mr rodriguez here we all stand for us hold up to the flag please and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you chris went to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium

attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible first item on the agenda is the citizen's input came in via email i'll read it madam secretary good afternoon members of the school special ed subcommittee i want to take this opportunity to ask the committee to take

and to continue to take the stance of integrated classrooms uniting those who have learning disabilities into the classroom with everyone else that should be a major goal of the school committee for the start of the new term and moving forward my brother who attends different is doing quite well in such a classroom the goal should be to not only provide additional services into the classrooms

for students who may need extra resources and support however to also provide support outside the classroom mainly with test prep and homework and to develop life goals with students we need the school district to have more of an outreach to the homes of students and in this new age of technology it should be very possible to do so we need to start this by evaluating the roles and responsibilities of the family

support specialist position making sure adjustment counselors and attendance officers are well equipped and that we develop new programs to see that students who need need it have the support at home for homework test prep as previously discussed thank you very much respectfully submitted column dies 560 race street thank you mr dice for that we're going to jump right into the agenda the first item on the agenda

is a discussion on the evolve academy update okay hi everyone um my name is jan but i'm currently the director of evolve and we're a very small pathway of durfee high school for um off track students we have right now 60 students in our pathway so just going to walk you through a brief update since i gave more of a comprehensive update in our last meeting so for our competencies just as an update

in term one we had 40 percent of our students demonstrate one or more of the competencies and we are happy that now we are at 55 percent of our students demonstrating one or more 55 demonstrating one or more competencies for term two so we are seeing growth in academic performance of students mean competencies it's just so far this year term three we have some new tles that we are piloting that springpoint has helped

us collaborate with um those are listed below and for an update on our attendance we are currently um at 70 or we're currently at 70 for our year-to-date attendance um and i broke that down by months you can see that in the winter months and most recently we've had our lowest attendance um mainly do a lot of students with provis and their families one thing that we do want to highlight is that 71.6

of our students have increased their individual attendance as compared to last year so for example if the student last year had a 50 attendance now they might be at a 70 attempt so that's a large number of students that have increased individual attendance that we're very happy about we still have a lot of work to do with attendance but we are celebrating a lot of the growth individually the students are

making we have some incentives coming up with the granite grill we have a lot more home visits and we just start utilizing the district's attendance card to be picking up students in the morning that are hesitant to come to school and struggling with actions in terms of our advisory we are implementing a different strategy called differentiating support and it is a matrix that each advisor

uses to kind of tier each student's level of support that they need in the advisory system and we kind of tailor our outreach and work with each student's goals based upon that matrix that we're working with each students still are getting weekly goal setting and they are approaching their competency portfolio review as we enter two we're still also offering a lot of incentives incentives with

uh core value awards student of the week awards competency awards especially as we finish on the second page here's an update with sel we have 16 out of our 60 students so far this year that we have connected with outside therapists and they are currently engaging with therapists now so that's something we're very happy we still have a lot more work to do especially due to the availability of therapists right now

for students but we're very happy we've been able to fast track several several students so they've already begun their services in terms of our enrollment when we started this school year we had 36 students we are now currently at 63 we're looking to almost over enroll what are what we originally intended this year due to the attendance we feel that we could service even more students if we're seeing our attendance

is a little bit lower so we are moving up to 65 for term three since we just put this up we had two more students that of applied started and you'll see right now we have 14 out of our 60 students on ieps seven with 504 plans we have two l students just an update on our grant application we are in the process of currently collecting artifacts in the reapplication process and last we

spoke we were looking at options for space and the number of students that we would be serving under this new grant we will have to build our capacity to serve up to 100 students by the end of this upcoming grant period so within three years it would be up to 100 students and given the current attendance and program needs that we are building we are looking to remain at dorothy high school

for this upcoming school year and we will consider looking at other places for the following year so we're hoping to remain at dorffy this year and then next year coming but we are on schedule to submit our portfolio of our artifacts by the end of april for the next upcoming grant any questions i do thank you um working to build cabasque capacity for all students and therapists on site now

did you mention the weightless i was kind of coughing seeing if there was water so you were speaking at that point now is there a current wait list for for the students involved so so there is could you just kind of touch on that a little bit so do you mean for a therapist or therapist yeah so that's i think across the board there's a wait list very large and some of the students were

seeing that it's a six month wait just to get connected with a therapist but we use crisis um to come and evaluate students and then they fast track them for services so right i think that's what i was getting at do they get fast-tracked because of this specific program that they're in not because it's based on their their need based on their need all right thank you mr rogers um so you said that you were

looking to over over enroll because of attendance because it was sort of low but what would happen theoretically if all of those kids boosted their attendance and now you're over enrolled but not having the space to accommodate those kids so looking at our trajectory of what our attendance is currently we have a great need of students who really need this opportunity and i feel like if we do have the space physically

to have three to four more students in the classroom at this point our class sizes are still at 15 students so we would easily be able to accommodate five more students across the spread of four classrooms even if we had 100 attendance if i can make this response so um they currently at durfee have five classrooms and the capacity is 15 four classrooms so 60 would be the full capacity

last year when we came here in order for them to apply to the for the grant they had um the requirement was that we expand to 100 right we knew we wouldn't be able to accommodate that at durfee right but when we looked at the data and we met with the team i think that we need to work on attendance stabilize the program have better more stable data in order to make

a better informed decision in regards to next year and expansion of 200.

it's hard to say we're going to expand to 100 when we're getting 70 of the kids coming in right so we need to have a solid system in place work it up with our kids and with the staff in order to create that kind of environment so that we can um create a solid program so that then we'll because that's a much deeper investment than just saying we're going to expand

to 100 students that's going to involve space staffing expansion etc so that's a huge investment from the district which the district's been really good about investing in programs but we want to make sure that when we dive into that kind of investment that we're on solid ground yeah i wanted to better understand the physical space like do we have room if everybody were

one other question about uh mental health so how many kids are waiting for a therapist right now we have identified eight that would be that are next the next tier of students who would like therapists and we're currently working to connect them to services um and we were going back and forth with another therapist that we used to see last year to do on-site maybe even telehealth one

day where they see students and they can do telehealth on site okay okay i yield yeah has anyone been denied a student has there been any students denied membership or enrollment so the only time we have we haven't denied a student enrollment we have just not been able to fully service their needs in our setting so for example we're not a subs we don't really have the services to provide a full sub separate

setting for students in all of their courses so students who have applied that had those needs we haven't been able to meet those needs so that is why those students have not technically been accepted but we just it's two years it's also a two-year commitment and it is also a two-year commitment so anyone that applies who is a senior per se since it is a competency program you wouldn't have enough time to really

demonstrate the competencies within that duration of time so that's why anyone that's not in that 10 through 11 parade yeah so i would say the ones that we don't have the services that they don't even apply in fact they never even would apply in my mind because they didn't meet the threshold to apply but um what are we doing at durfee high school for 12th graders that have the needs that you

i'm still concerned i've been concerned for a long time over what are we offering for services for children that are behind credits not meeting with success in the regular classroom what are we doing now they just going rpa are they not like what do we do so we currently have some credit recovery through the edge annuity platform going running through the day and that's with some of the student support counselors

kind of facilitating like a class period during the day to help students catch up on credit uh in term three which is monday we're launching a three day a week after school credit recovery program for students with a priority to seniors but open to others students who can't fit in credit recovery during the regular school day will have the opportunity to go after school to go either through the agenuity platform or a

teacher-directed google classroom kind of project-based learning to earn credit for a class that they previously failed we're really focusing on students who are less than 1.5 years behind who are close but not on track some students transition over to rpa if they're further behind there's a meeting set up this month for another group of students to transition to rba because they have significant credit

needs or that can be better served over at rpa how many is that how many kids are more than one and a half grades behind how many um i don't have the specific numbers but i can get them to you yeah roughly like yeah is it 10 i would say 100 probably not 100 but i would say like probably more around like 30 or so 25 to 30. and those are the ones who are being recommended

for art for to transition to rpa because partially students came into the school year maybe a year behind or maybe half a year but if they're not making progress this year they're falling as seniors they're falling further and further behind so we've identified that and prioritize them for a transfer we can get those numbers to you sure yeah has it been a lot of students moved from durfee to rpa

yes we have we so uh we did it at the end of the term uh i would say we probably transitioned maybe around 20. i don't i can't give you the exact number but there were we waited till the end of term which made that number high so we have since met with the team i i think ideally they thought okay that's an a natural transition so we'll wait till the end of the term

but that doesn't make sense because you're not going to transition all these kids at once um i think that now there's a rolling transition if students um are requiring to be transferred over there that that would be um in real time so you mean term quarter yes by quarter yes yes halfway through thank you um my question is uh actually maybe but transition so if they transition to

rpa do they have an opportunity if they catch up and say they're a sophomore or early junior and behind do they have an opportunity to transition back to durfee at that point always always always once i mean that that's the mentality that we need to make sure sometimes the students sometimes students go and they don't want to come back to durfee and sometimes and if students proving success and they're ready to

transition then we create a transition plan that that's part of the intake process that of when they go and how they would uh transition back thank you i just had a question on the um so we if you had 65 you're five over already and then now are you capped out is there like a drop dead like uh you know four rooms times uh like i don't know the rooms

is it we can't fit 20 desks in there that would be 80 80 students so our model caps the classroom size at 15 due to the high level of needs that each of the students present and enough the level of support that they need and with the capacity and the size of those classrooms i think 65 is going to be a our class sizes would be too large which is where you're at now yes and

the high school administration knows that so they they know they have nowhere else to put 10th and 11th graders that are in this yes at this point the um when you i honestly the last time you talked about that kids go out to classes as well they have the option we have a handful of students that will opt in for a period one elective or period six elective and most the students we see are in our

pathway because they need that smaller setting and the larger class sizes are too overwhelming and a lot of them have anxiety disorders so it's very overwhelming for them to push out into the larger school some of them are ready to handle that so we kind of individualize which students take electives in the beginning or end of the day with the regular mainstream jerky population any other questions yeah

i think um the students enrolled in evolve do they have an opportunity the same opportunity to be involved in the extracurricular as well okay thank you that's that was the answer i was hoping we have a lot of students who are doing the after dark for culinary that just start this week so we have um out of all their six students who are doing it after dark culinary so they stay from these three to six

three days a week right and then we also have two students who are in the cosmetology after dark program and then i would say about seven or eight that are really involved in the game club at turkey high school which one of our of all teachers helps um sponsor and runs after school so they will go with him because he's a familiar person to them and they really like the game club yeah i think these

students that just the ownership part of it being in the school and then uh partaking in a lot of these extracurricular activities hopefully you know that could be an attendance boost as well so i'm glad to hear that i was going to ask about how many but those answers were perfect thank you i hope those numbers start increase as as uh they stay in durfee i know we're thinking about transitioning out but

that is good news thank you we're looking at options right so we also will look at we we discussed with the durfee team if we do a smart growth let's say next year we decide oh we're gonna go to 70.

is there another space in durfee that we can say you can create a wing and swap out the space the physical space to give them also that opportunity so we're looking at the options that we have thank you are you do you have any kids graduating so you have it's going to be a two year program but theory being 11 and 12. so assuming you're gonna have students graduating yes we have six

right now uh they are students that we had last year we have six right now that are seniors and all six are on track to graduate this year i think you get to running programs as well like especially in this day and age kids are sometimes ready to move on you know whether it's i've always talked about the ged program you know kids are ready sometimes they they go get their ged they're in college classes sooner

and even kids in your population i'd like you to maybe explore some of those options as well because to me it makes zero sense sometimes where they tell the state tells us to have the kids drop out so they can go take a test so they can go to college right away or a trade school and we have them sitting in here for the whole year sort of like you know they're ready they've probably already taken

five years of school or whatever so just if you keep that in the back of your heads and let us know there's things that we can do to help that we are connected gets a dual enrollment for those seniors because we want to help give them support as they're going onto college campuses and taking like one course at a time now so we kind of build that in their schedule so they're kind of transitioning and using

this here to transition nice and my only request would be to explore a little more of the durfee credit recovery programs that mr you know those all sound good but how do in reality what are they and you know is it robust enough can we be doing more for for those pieces you know that's always been a concern of mine but if we can just get some data around that would appreciate it any other questions will

this scope i don't know my only other question it's not really a question it's just a what are we doing about prevention so we've got all these kids that are in need of credit recovery but what are we doing to prevent some of that right because if we're preventing it then we're not going to have this issue so that's i'm just putting it out there as a point that it's great that we focus

on this piece of the recovery piece but what are we doing about the preventative piece so and that's not an answer that we can come up with right now but it's just something really fun to keep be mindful of be aware we're preventing people kind of what we do all right well thank you for your presentation feel free to uh just get up and go i know you had a long day already so thank you

thank you any longer thank you very much mr edyard do you want um this to go before the full committee or an update so that we can inform the committee or do you want us to just inform the committee via a friday memo i would say until uh until leadership comes up with a formal process for reporting out of subcommittees we'll just keep it as is okay so if we change it i recommend we

change it but i'm not in leadership but if they um we can summarize basically what we're talking about at the full meeting with the one page about we'll need to be here i guess okay thank you all right thank you thank you next on the agenda is a discussion power school conversion update is this the notice we just got is that is this but sort of uh all combined in the one yeah i'll

combine another one if you look on the first page in the final paragraph it just kind of details our most recent meeting with power schools that brian was present at um and you know as part of that meeting brian and i kind of just uh both you know voiced some of our displeasure over the fact that we kind of discovered that excuse me one second sorry sure sarah had the updated one so yeah before

it went out it should be like a two pages that looks like this yes i got a new one that's all yes i gave you and mimi a new one we're all on the same page so at the last meeting we both you know expressed our displeasure to them that they you know they informed us that uh all seven years of the data that we're going to be transferring over was going to be in pdf format

which honestly you know i probably should have caught beforehand but i was shocked at it because nobody does it this way when you're converting over typically to a new sis system or a special education management system at least your most recent and active drafts and ieps come over as live documents uh so we both expressed our displeasure to them and asked them to please go back and review this we also

were very you know adamant with them that this should not be at a large additional cost of the district because this is the way everyone does this like i said this is something i definitely should apply caught earlier but it wasn't something that was really necessarily on our radar because i've never seen anybody do it this way so we were surprised by it their team would said they are meeting

internally to review how they can look to fix this we both stress to them that you know this level of data migration is not complicated because the massachusetts state forum is standardized across all systems so it's literally uh like you know a one section one section transfer so it shouldn't be something that really is that complicated to facilitate so they said they were going to come

back to their team and let us know at the next update meeting i think actually did joe say before that brian i actually have an update from that meeting that i got yesterday so oh okay um so well we're waiting to hear back from then and then we have the kickoff on uh january 26th which is supposed to be kind of a kickoff and as well as a business review

to look at the way our forms and formats worked and processes for what we currently do versus power schools mr michael azar yes would you like to share oh i'm saying i'm regarding the update i will say that um the only part of this conversion which is you know it's a huge i'm taking to begin with that was sort of we started three months later when we picked it but we moved forward with every possible

meeting we don't know about deadlines on time if not early and i've pushed them to keep up with you know we're trying to keep them keep up the pace with us because that's why i put that we haven't inside the health yet that's the one thing area i can sort of live without starting right now in terms of the core sis we're having meetings like three or four times a week

at a minimum and then we add on one or two for like the registration stuff where cindy kudo and i have been working on that and then she has her staff uh checking over the documents in english that now being translated in spanish in portuguese so we get it up and running for the registration season on march 1st that was one of our absolutes we wanted with them so we're going to hit that

benchmark i think because we literally have the spanish portuguese to translate uh now which is like ahead of what i thought it would be so that looks good the only area constraining here constraint is the special needs stuff as michael said it was very eye-opening when they said that it was all coming over as pdfs and i'll say as a district we did a poor job vetting the proposal because it wasn't a proposal

and i was never part of several parts of this process at various times when it started and towards the end so i did not see the final proposal but it wasn't there and they pointed out that it was in there and that their thing of going back to their team discussing internally trying to get us to do this um the way we wanted it at least having the active ieps and the draft ieps which

consists of about 2500 different uh documents to come over the reason why it's important is because if we had to go with pdfs only it's going to be iep i started today it's going to be a pdf in power power school for the next 12 months until it gets renewed a year from now so they work on the draft so every time i'm using a pdf there may no mention how

they're going to do the progress report which is a big thing which happens four times a year as well as um the draft will have to be copied by this teacher from the pdf into powerschool which is uh usually it's copied from from draft from um like an aspen or any system it's copy makes a copy of it and you sort of make the changes do different evaluations update as needed now we're

going to have a teacher that could have 25 inclusion kids which is the maximum load they sort of have doing that for 25 different kids and like a self-contained person would do you know for a dozen or so kids if they don't have a case of their class so it took me a huge time consuming task on their part never mind the part that the administrative people on the back end of michael's team

have to worry about doing and so we started off that meeting mean that they would do the live and the drafts it turns out when i got into the meeting yesterday with them over this that they're they can't do that they've never done this and it was almost like it was a strange request somebody said well it's not a strange request because they said every system does this sort of thing

and they want to charge me hours to research if they could do this out of the house would happen the project and i finally said you know what let me tell you for the project just put it in there and i'll fight it down the road i want you to give me the answer you can technically do it as of today they technically can't do it yet and i said i'm regrouping with them they asked me

to provide some data some stuff to them i've asked which i did to give them a second look so i've complained to the salesman i complained to several different people that work on that power school or conversion team for us and i'm trying to get them to see the error of the waves because this is something that should have been done we should have caught it we didn't and i think it's crucial to have it in

place and i'm sort of you know um actually you actually have the official kickoff of special needs which involves setting up a training schedule how we're going to do things because we're going to be registering kids both in aspen and empower school over the next six months so we have to worry about doing ieps and both systems and so the training of 150 different teachers as well as 50

plus the support staff and counselors is a huge undertaking that i'm trying to get that project up and running so and i'll worry about fighting the data part in between there as we go along but you know i'm kind of disappointed kind of like i would use other adjectives but it's just not what i thought it would be any questions um yes one so for 12 months it's gonna have to be like

this is that what you're saying 12 months meaning that if someone's iep starts today which is an aspect it's going to be re-evaluated or renewed a year from now so i have to be that way for 2 for a pdf for 12 12 months from now today obviously if it start if it starts and ends the start of like uh november the draft will start for the new one

will start in the fall and so it'll be less but i mean ieps now start and then at all given days of the year it's no longer a difficult thing where it's and started the school year at the end of the school year so it's gonna be a common thing that and i say i don't know for example it's the pdf most common thing our teachers use out of aspen is that

you click the icon and the the accommodations put in for testing that people put in that class music can see you just sit in the front you get up you know read them the directions that's available right off the bat i don't know if the teachers have to go and now search for that within the pdf to say michael needs to sit in the front and have his test read to him and he can't go

you know to the bathroom when he's taking the test that i think is going to be a big thing because teachers uh spoon fed that now they'll be spoon fed that in power school in a similar way when it's the actual power school iep but they're not i don't see it being that way with this a pdf i just don't know how they would do that teachers have are expected to review

each iep from front to back for students every year so it's not that they're just going to be handed accommodations they need to review entire ieps now i understand that many teachers after a while they'll understand what each each kid needs but there's always transition to everything here and you know i'm just saying that's a thing as being a former teacher that would be troublesome to me that i don't

have access to that like i do now like look it and i see it it's more work yeah they review it but i can't say that it's ideal but they'll have to live with it so one of the other pieces that we're looking at this is that you know if this does have to become a reality that it only comes in pdf form is that our clerks will be doing we'll do input over the summer

our clerks you know they work extremely hard during the school year but summer is a light time so this is the part where we will probably start to look to create an equitable process of kind of going through each school and starting to do some of the conversion over from aspen or the pdf format to a live draft format within power space as well so we will have capacity to start doing this

for a lot of schools and take some of that burden or lift away from our you know our classroom teachers and whatnot uh throughout the summer months and if i could chime in just i i sent out something to the mass tech director's emails you know list and they said that some of the districts that are transitioning over from power school have actually taken the pdfs scanned them into a word document which

we have the capability of doing and then their clerks like mike was saying we're copying and pasting information in if we have to get to that point i have a call tomorrow with danny davis who has been very receptive to me on the phone um early in the project they gave brian a hard time about some translation pieces that they actually sent us a bill for and said that we were going to have

to pay them for i got on the phone with him we had a conversation and i said listen we're not paying any extra money it's in our proposal he didn't see it in there he did some diving he got covered i got kovac he came back and said here is our official letter that it's free of charge we apologize for this so they are working with us um what brian's talking about

mike's talking about the special need is of concern but i do think that at a certain point they're either going to bend and they're going to figure it out or brian's going to explain to them how we want it and they're going to have to do it they're already using our district to shop other larger districts in the state of massachusetts so it's not going to look good for them if they start calling

us a marine and say hey we want power school you guys are going to power school but we're only seeing pdfs of ieps so we have you know mike talked about transitioning clerks in the summer to do that work we can actually technologically wise take a lot of the legwork out of that by taking that pdf converting it into a word document and his clerks can copy and paste where we

need to but brian wants to be at a point where it's live all the time so everybody's working together brian's frustrations are he knows the ins and outs of the sim system very well and he wants it to work like he knows that it could work we're just having that butting heads with powerschool because i don't think that they've ever taken on a district of our size with the amount of ieps that we

possibly you know we have to go into the system so it's a little touch and go right now but i'm confident with the salesman and with joe our you know one of our lead engineers that they are going to find that happy medium and like mike said we're ready to pivot on our side internally to make sure it works so i i hear what you're saying mike about how we're going to eventually have this

equitable system but right now we don't have an equitable system that's going to service our kids with ieps within powerschool our kids with the ieps right it's a ton more work for our teachers given the way that this is developed right now for them to be able to access that information i'm not this isn't your fault this is a concern i have just with powerschool so i'm not coming down on anyone here about

that but you know if we talk about equity i think that's part of the conversation so we've got a system where the information is readily available and the gen ed teachers aren't having to do the same process that our special education teachers are going to have to do and yes they do need to have the information about the kids ieps front to back of course but you know if we're providing if power school

offers that same opportunity for gen ed teachers to have that information readily available it's a concern that our special education teachers don't have the same thing so i'm just pointing at this not a question it's just a point that if we're going to talk about equity that we've got to look at it from that whole point i think that might be part of the conversation that you have with i mean everything we do

being a former teacher is how it affects the classroom feature whether in special needs or typical yep so that's always a concern because i want it it can be done easier yeah i made it available easier i want to do it that way and like i said i somewhat confident the what's got to talk about will work out with them it may not it doesn't work out we'll come

up with a happy medium to get as close as we want to that to our goal but um as of now we're actively working with them and we're still earning up the process where you know um they may decide to just you know do the right thing and do it well i will say this um i've been here a long time brian's been here a long time we've done network infrastructure upgrades we've done fiber

optics through the city this by far is the biggest rollover that that we've ever taken on collaboratively through the district so in a perfect world we would migrate the data over and everything would be fine um we had our data done as soon as they asked brian ford it was done they had never seen a file size that large brian actually had to split it up into four separate pieces because they've never dealt with

something that large so i do feel a lot of this is is learning curve for them as well because they've never taken on some you know someone's so as big as we are but i'm confident that like i'm on the phone with the sales rep a lot on the phone with junk joe i can tell you that brian is really dedicated i'm sure probably 40 plus hours a week right now with his team in

the data par so this is like brian said this is our biggest area of concern but i'm confident that they're either going to make right by it or they're going to figure out a solution or we will internally figure out a solution so that everything is in that one product and i'm making that clear i'm not i'm not my frustration is not with anyone here it's in the way that this is developed like

we're going to have classroom teachers that i can appreciate that you're going to have clerks doing this over the summer but there's a lot of room for human error there and if we can make that process easier if we can make it a more equitable process across the board i think that's what we all want and maybe that's the argument part of the argument you know if you want to shop us

around you use us for leverage then you've got to do it right i've already said that to them so and they've and like i said when we leaned on them with the translation piece it took about a week but they finally came through they were very apologetic and then i've had a couple of conversations with the sales rep in the last 48 hours and they're already starting to lean towards a different direction

to the point where they told brian that we're going to be charging some of our support hours for that they're not they're going to probably end up refunding us that um because they know that they've told us something and we're not happy with them so thank you are there any other concerns outside of this issue no i mean like there are some things that they do differently than how we do it now and we

sort of have to say okay fundamentally we have the district we've got to change something how we do it but they're not they're not things that are going to be uh outrageous that our ways to do just like we're used to doing this now this way in aspen um and they'll do this way in power school and what a few of what might call them there's like things that are normally

the same like it goes the same investment in bowel school just different places some things we call that's like a cherry on top with a thing we want to have but we can live without it another things are like true absolutes and one of those like in the conduct here i teach the conduct that's one that i sort of put together with them they're working on seeing if they can mimic what

we do in aspen because that's how teachers and administrators are expected to work in the power supply so i may cost some of our support hours out of that from this project which we have talked about anyways because that's one of the things i think of that's a wishlist absolutely to have to make our teachers and administrators who do conduct uh happy because the way they have now they're gonna be like

ah that's a step back and i agree with it that's why i said i'm gonna fight for that to be the way so it seems as if we're given power school run for their money right now and i think i think the outcome is going to be what we expect right we're used to one way we're doing something different to try to encompass all these different solutions and programs into one area

that everybody can go to i do think internally the biggest thing for us to have success with this is going to be the end user pd maria and i have already spoken we're going to use some of those last days in the school year for pd we'll offer some power school trainings throughout the summer at the admin institute so that we make sure that our teachers are familiar with the you know

the uh attendance taking the grading and all that stuff as they get in there we'll also be able to do some of the same stuff with powerschool as far as transmitting grades from google classroom if we had to into powerschool so all of that functionality is there but we are literally taking this permit and going from the ground up we're taking 20 years plus of historical data and dumping it into this new system so

at any point there could be a bump in the road but they have been very responsive it's not like you know brian and mike have talked to them and it's not like they're saying oh no you're getting pdfs and that's it they're they're looking at it now so they're being very receptive to our concerns and and like i said to the sales rep i said you know you want to use us as a

as a piece to try to get into the attleboros and the you know the other areas we're going to be very forthcoming that we're not thrilled with this piece of it but up until this point the rest of the pieces i mean the gap analysis and everything that brian and his team have done have been spot on the the salesman and joe have said hey listen this is excellent stuff like they're

very happy with that side and i do think that the lines of communication it's not like what we had with some of the issues that we had with x2 over the last year we're trying to get some information technically they've been very receptive in that regards so that takes a big weight off my shoulders especially for the district because i know that we're getting what we're paying for

is there a uh a training resource at our fingertips for instance it there is i can't remember they actually have something that they've already created that they use for all our districts it's called power school i want to say it's like live school or something once we get to a point where brian is comfortable that the core sis is up we'll actually be able to send out an email to everyone and teachers will

already be able to start accessing that well before we go live available 24 7 24 and the thing that i like about it is i started doing the videos myself and it retracts it tracks you yeah so if we have a teacher at a building that says i never received any training i logged in yeah you didn't do the training you didn't show up to the training so we'll be able to track all that and have

everyone on the same page for september and again like we talked about at the school committee meeting we will be simultaneously running aspen and powerschool for a year right because brian still has to do state reporting out of aspen for october and then we will phase it out at that point my only concern is i don't know the piece where we missed we missed it and somebody said we missed that they put in

there with pdfs only so if somebody could highlight that and send it to us i'm curious to see what it says but i recall very clearly that the folks from power school that wanted us to purchase this product told us in a public meeting that everything was going to be seamless everything including all of these things so i want you to say it to the camera show them the video

as far as i'm concerned i have no use for this of well the fine print said x y and z they came to us and said we want you to change which was a big vote of this committee so you can feel free to go back to them and tell them on the 26th of january the next meeting that's here if we don't get the answers that we want i'm going to

make a request that we put it on the full agenda and those same gentlemen are going to come back in a public meeting and we're going to call them out on it if they want to get it straightened out the 26th is the time as far as i'm concerned because i think it's not fair it's not right and we want to do this right but this is not fair that anybody sitting at this

table all the teachers to like it's actually pretty absurd even for them to tell you mr cabral that we they never had a district this lodge we'll run the tapes because when they sat in front of us guess what they told us we have we've done all bigger school systems and all this stuff so they sold us a pillow goods and uh i'm not going to belabor the point but i

don't think anybody on this committee is going to be happy if they're going to keep on you know don't come to us and tell us one thing we've done bigger districts we're going to make this all work no worries as long as you give us the info we'll we'll make it work for whatever the needs of your staff and your kids are that's what they told us so if they don't do it on the 26th

please get an update to the committee and then we'll put them on the agenda and have them come up for us absolutely any other questions i do think it's important to this is a huge undertaking right 20 some years 20 years of data to be migrated etc i agree if they sign up for something they need to follow through on it but we are going to run into challenges and we're going to have

to problem solve and fix them if they say no we're not going to do it that's when we will have a problem but i want everyone to be aware that as we continue this process we're going to run up against challenges the important piece is communicating so that we're all aware of what those challenges are and what our workarounds are what our plan is to work around i need to know all these challenges and

so is everybody at the table so that you're right we shouldn't have missed that and i want to see that too where we missed it so that we can figure out okay so how did that happen and how did because up until we heard because brian did approach me and say we have a problem with the sped piece because that it's going to be pdf and stuff and i'm hearing that oh it was in the

proposal i heard that today that it was actually included in the proposal so if people have that information they need to come to me and tell me not at a subcommittee meeting or not at a meeting that i heard this morning so that we can get on the phone and say hey what's up with this yeah and figure out what do we do yeah i agree and i just

i just know for a fact that the guy they did tell us it would all be seamless so this seems like a very basic thing to carry over life you think you shouldn't have to do this conversions and it shouldn't and every other district in massachusetts is going to want them is going to want the same thing so uh i don't want to believe the point i appreciate your work on it and your

diligence we need to be on it that's why we wanted this as an agenda item but as far as i'm concerned the school committee has your background let's get you that info okay thank you very much thank you part two of mr losh's presentation uh 3.03 iep services across the district mr luke yep so as i know this was brought up as a concern as part of the last full committee meeting um you know one

we we definitely know where uh some of our current holes are in terms of related services we've had some unplanned resignations that there's just not a ton you can do about that in the moment but we are thankfully very close to being fully staffed we have issued any necessary interruption of service letters to note that we're going to provide compensatory services as appropriate moving forward

in addition you know our office is actively working with two different staffing agencies to make sure we have any paris as well as teacher positions that need to be fulfilled throughout the district and really just trying to support our schools as much as humanly possible throughout that process i know my team specifically has taken on the majority of the interview process with most

with both staffing agencies uh make sure that we're sending so appropriate candidates over to schools as well we recently you know communicated out with principals that one to please notify us if they have any service delivery concerns uh that we know that you know we are facing some district-wide coverage issues at the moment we know that is you know an unfortunate situation that i think is

resulting as the current surge in the pandemic that we you know have a lot of classrooms without teachers in the moment just due to temporary you know short-term businesses that need coverage but they need to be tracking those services if they are missed and we need to provide a plan moving forward of how they're going to be remediated throughout the remainder of the year our special education supervisors are

connecting with each principal and administrative team to make sure that that is happening and just you know being collaborative and how are we going to address this for the remainder of the year thankfully i think we're seeing kind of the downward turn in terms of omicron which hopefully will help us in terms of our staffing across the district to make sure we have people consistently within schools and more present

so that we'll be able to develop some of these plans and i'm sure you know with kind of the recommendation as i'm last meeting to add more school adjustment counselors will help bridge that gap um and i know ms costa joined us tonight as well she has some data regarding school adjustment counselors and services throughout the district which we collaborate pretty consistently uh regarding sacks and just what they look

like across the district and services provided yeah before i open it up for questions my main concern or one of my main concerns was related to adjustment counselors or counseling on ieps and i'm going to make a statement that since the start of the year i don't believe that we've with fidelity provided services as listed for all counseling across the district does anyone feel like that's a wrong statement

at the table that we have missed some of obviously things go on so it's just my belief that that's happening based on calls i'm getting from parents and i just i want to just throw that out there as not let's not beat around the bushes i believe that that's happening if anybody disagrees please now's the time to so i can't necessarily i can't say i disagree but i also we've really been explicit

that they need to alert us if this is going on and nobody is raising a red flag nobody nobody's in our people in our schools as well who are providing the services who are very familiar with the folks from my office who support their schools are raising the red flags to them as well i know i've heard from from claudia that she definitely has had some people on her end

which i'm sure it is because like we said we've had these staffing shortages across the board but nobody is communicating this why i don't know and i don't understand when you say that's the case they've been told um to do you know to communicate that is that via memo is it you know yeah our executive meeting where we reviewed this piece and then also it's just a general practice if you have a one staffing shortage

or two if things are being missed here and there they need to let us know we've made it pretty explicit we put in writing to them via email as well like please communicate this so we can help you address if this is an issue and make sure that you know all kids are getting their needs met because i mean this is this is our job and responsibility but we need to be able to know and

you're referring the same to five like a student guess five times thirty um counseling are you referring to that same thing as they should be notifying the special ed folks yes so if i'm in a yeah iap says that i'm the council and i have to service michael for three days a week 30 minutes and i don't i am not able to do that because i'm doing lunch dude who what is the process and who would

they actually go to under what you're you're saying it would be one they really need to make their building principle over there right because under head reform now the building principle oversees all aspects of the building both general and special ed and they also need to be alerting their special ed supervisor the liaison also should know because the liaison is the one who um develops the iep with the family and

with the team at that meeting so that liaison we have cluster coordinators now we're also supposed to be overseeing that so they should know um so we need to have all of those layers and every of accountability in place so that um you know i'm not going to sit here and say we we all know that sacks are providing lunch duty we need to fix that issue so that we can pull them out do i

think the sac needs to do lunch duty yeah they might they should do one so they can um build relationships with kids should they be tied up for three hours absolutely not in no school should they be tied up for three hours so we need to have a better system in place to make sure because we talked about the need for more sex right and i think there is a need for

more sex but there is also a need to for that layer of support so that we can free up the sex right so that they can be doing the lunch duty so we need to look at what is it that we need at all schools so that people can be doing lunch duty supervising adequately so that we don't have to use our sacks there for three hours i'll open it up for questions anybody

mrs rogers uh so you kind of stole one of my questions about who who does the follow-up to make sure that those services are implemented so that question was already that question was already answered i saw that we're looking at one speech and language pathologist this is kind of away from sax and if you want to hold off on talking about that that's fine but we were talking about hiring one slp one slpa

and an occupational therapist yeah so when i was a pt in a pta so when i was looking at the the meeting notes from the last meeting and i'm just trying to understand so it mentioned that we were looking to hire an ot specifically for two years yep is there a plan to keep an ot after because the way it's written here it looks like we're going to have an ot for

so it's part of um the american recovery plan funding exams for specifically specifically for special education services uh we wanted this person really focused on providing the support within the classroom the students and addressing sensory needs things like motion motion breaks accommodations in the classroom to help you know keep kids in school keep them in class and keep them regulated so the plan was

to look at it for two years and then evaluate at the end of that two year period if that occupational therapist is still needed when we examine case loads and what are we looking at for people in terms of needs but we put it for the two year period because that was the length of that grant funding okay i'm just trying to process that information um another question just about one of the

comments from the last time you talked about purchasing ipads for all asd and communities classrooms there's a piece in there about using them as communication resources what do you mean by that i think just for ongoing pieces especially like when we have one of we have one to one for every student it's much easier just to trial apps that are gonna better meet their needs on a daily basis and it's

not this situation where we necessarily have to wait to go through an iep process for a student to have a communication device and then let's say in the form of an ipad so it's there and it's available and we have it on hand especially for a lot of kids when they go through their atfl sometimes this is the recommendation and we have to relate to trial because we may not have it

directly on site we have to water but if we're in a one-to-one situation that takes away that barrier we've actually assessed the needs for those and it is a sequential amount of ipads but we're looking to put that order through very shortly i do anticipate that these probably will not be ready until the beginning of next school year just because we've experienced such shipping delays in

terms of things like frankly the ipads themselves the screen protectors and the the cases because we gave some pretty heavy-duty cases for our kiddos so that we can keep these ipads in good working order um but we're in the process of putting that together now and should be submitted so when you're saying that you're going to trial apps in the classroom how is that going to be implemented in the

classroom so you know kid gets an a um an etf it's determined yes they're going to need this thing we're going to go to an iep meeting and we're going to write that in and we're going to determine which app we want to use which is going to be best and then we order moderate and all that how are you going to implement that on a trial and error basis if it's not in

the iep already so many times rit people recommend trials for students with certain apps right so frankly i mean one we can start it it's the main thing it takes away that the initial delay in start time yep because the device is already there we have a line item for those apps within our technology section so we're able to purchase those right away we also have a certain set of mount typically that we

can reassign to students as as needed and as they're using it as you know like we have a lot of students who will change apps over time because we determine one may not may or may not be appropriate through some of those trials so it just takes a lot away a lot of the delay in the process to be able to put those in place get them going and just have it available for kids at all

times so i get all that but i'm just thinking of the iep process itself right so if we're talking about the kid gets the atvl this is the recommendation we haven't had a team meeting yet to talk about that right it would be i'm saying after the team meeting okay that's what i'm trying to understand yeah they would make the recommendation to do a trial of let's say um they would let's do that let's do this

trial and you know that's the situation where then we can pretty much start it like the next day okay uh instead of having to wait like you know get the ipad get the app and this way um we're able just to really kind of originate it put it right on the kids app and have it ready for them right away especially train your slp on that particular app because not all

slps or slpas are trained in assistive tech or in specific well our two folks well yeah our two folks from south coast typically provide ongoing training to all teachers i want to say the majority of our sub-separate folks get training in most apps just throughout the natural process of students coming into their classrooms and starting off the year so typically a lot of times it's already

addressed just because we have students who are already using it when they come into rooms and our folks who we have through south coast are absolutely fantastic they are they are wonderful they do an amazing job and they run around this district like no other is something to see uh how much work they get done um but they do a great job in service in our folks but i just go back to the process right

so because if there's a glitch in that process that's where we're gonna screw up the service for the kiddo and that's obviously not what any of us want so i'm just asking about if we have these things in the classroom they're readily available that's wonderful we're using them as communication devices that's a big undertaking for the slp or the slpa the classroom teacher the powers in that room because all of those

people become communication partners for that kid so that's the stuff that i'm asking about how are we going to make sure that with this stuff readily available without necessarily a concrete plan to make sure all of those folks are caught up because we know that staffing changes but that's typically addressed within the steam the team process when we're putting consults in the iep right so

usually assistive tech will be there to consult and train folks they note it as a part of the iep process that they're going to train the classroom staff as well as the school-based slp if needed and teach that that initial process and then just having that consult in place so they're able to be available to provide any any clarifications work through any you know issues that may happen in the process

but also to get feedback especially if it's a trial of how it's going from that team to see if that's going to be the appropriate app to have in place for that student and that's the stuff that i'm asking about because i personally have never seen an iep with a trial written into it as a plan and that's not to say that that doesn't happen right but i just want to make

sure that we have a solid process because you have all of these available and you know making sure that kids have communication partners that can work with them that's going to be the key to their success right if they don't have a communication partner that's aware of how to do that then we're going to have kids that aren't it's going to look like it didn't do well with this particular

app but that may not be the case well part of what we've discussed with our folks from south coast because they're aware we're going to do go go one to one in this area um is really going to be also to provide general training to this to the classroom staff on really how to really utilize an ipad you know that's what i'm talking about yes because the system how do you utilize an ipad

how to access things how to you know how do they make the necessary changes and move from app to app that they may need to do how do they help what are the best practices to assist students in that process um so they're very aware of it they know that this is coming they're planning for it already i told them that you know we hopefully probably have about six months in within this time period to

plan and prepare for it so now they're definitely uh aware and they're or they start in the planning process in order to get it over i won't i won't beat it we all know that that's something that i feel very strongly about i make sure that kids have solid communication partners so without a doubt i yield for now can i just follow up on that to just ask for as we proceed

it almost sounds like as if there's a if an iep let's get done and there's a certain app that's required what would that trigger i think we all say it would trigger you five are going to be working with this child so you should get training on the following app is there a mechanism that's put into place to check that so we have an iep meeting today and this child gets a certain app that

needs to be done so then somebody on the iep coordinator or whoever would now therefore say we need to make sure all the partners that are going to be working with this child are trained when do we get or do we get or do we have to create a system to say within one week we need a notice to say who's going to get trained and how they're going to get it is there a

process so like that so typically right with at this point where we're having students with a trial a device or an app um it becomes it's pretty much just part of our natural process that when the recommendation is made our folks go out pretty much within that week and train the classroom staff there's very small minimal lag time in terms of training piece like i said even with now having these devices on hand

it's going to probably be even less when you say oh folks you mean south coast when you said something our south our south coast staff as well as we have one uh at slpa who is our own staff who goes on does some of that portion as well as well as the fm systems right here all i'm suggesting is maybe formalizing that process so that everyone that's involved with that child will now know

yeah it's a small lead time but so then if that's happening naturally within a week or two weeks we should everybody that's on that team says all seven of these folks are all been trained on blah blah blah whatever the device is so what the app is then it'll just make it so that we make it a priority so if a parent ever said who's working with my child are they up to snuff on

these apps that we have we would be able to go to the sheet and say yep every single one of the people that have been trained and you know it's sort of like uh it's it's committing to a system on paper that as we're growing now before we do it piecemeal one student at a time but as we commit to a one-to-one in a large scale so we commit to a system so that everybody follows

the exact same system so that when we are at the table we can say yep this is the process that so it's committing to that in writing so just by rv thank you um i'm not i know what i ieps are i know how they used why they used everything about them what i don't know is the process in the district uh from the from the second a child is their need who do they contact

who are the people who do they meet with what are the timetables everything i would just like that information for me as i sit on this subcommittee so i can get a better grasp of uh i mean i'm sitting next to almost a professional in special needs here on the civil committee i want i want to i want to know what everybody i mean i absolutely know what an idea is but i would like to um

better get a better uh grasp of the process in our district if that's not too much to ask if you wanted to send it to me if you want to send it to the committee an update i but i would like to know because i have some opinions process to what happens everything i do i would like to know that um i i think it's important to understand the whole process

i mean a little bit of the process but you need to know that we need to know the whole process and from what i gather this changes that changes staff changes policies change i just want a better grasp on certainly from step one to the child getting services thank you i appreciate it i love that you asked that question because i think that's what every single person who's serving on a committee i am

by no means an expert in any of those you know no it's just what i happen to do for for a living right but i i i absolutely value the fact that you asked that question because we can't be effective if we don't know what the process is right so i really appreciate that as a mom well we keep talking about systems i think that that's we have half of our

committee is new i think that those are systems we need to put in place of how we provide information to the committee so that everybody's prepared and ready to ask the right questions if i could just switch to the counseling piece because i still had to it's still on my uh radar and my radar my question is about how pervasive is the counseling shortfall on general terms they're not specific hours

or anything like that but is it across all schools are some schools different and if they're different my question would be why so it's definitely not across all schools and we do have some schools that have higher needs i could tell you that the middle schools right now have staff shortages and the staffs are helping out in the building in any which way they can not all the middle schools either but so again

they're doing the best they can and still making sure kids are getting seen but they are covering classes there are subbing and doing duties as well too because of the shortages and i think what maria mentioned as well earlier too is you know you do have some schools too where they're doing duties for a lot longer so it's not necessarily more sacks it's just the duties that they're they're

doing such as lunch and recess and what have you as well too it's not across all schools um we have many of our schools that that's not an issue at all but there are some that that is something that we need to get better at and address so what do you say they're subbing are they volunteer into subclasses and sometimes yeah so sometimes it's volunteering yes yeah what do you mean sometimes sometimes they get paid yep

it's in their contract that if we ask them to cover then we have to pay them for the hour yeah i i will say um in regards to sac services right so we had a school committee meeting there was that motion to add sacs etc we've been looking at our data looking at the needs for instance one of the things that we as we looked at data we said okay so

morton for instance i'll use that as an example they have three sacks already right and we're like okay do they need a fourth sack but when we looked at that we also looked at the data how many kids at each school have services in their iep stock services and their iep they have 62 students so it looks like okay they have one for a grade level they have enough sax services but no they need an addition

sack because there's no way they can provide all the sac services to those students that have it in their iep as well as we all know that students don't have in their ip but also need to be in groups etc so that's what we have to look at look at the needs and look at where students are in regards to the iep and do we have enough enough support at that school or

do we need to add an additional sac in there to support that need to just piggyback to the piece about getting paid i i'm personally to speak for myself if we don't have enough sacs school adjustment counselors professionals to do what we need to do for services they shouldn't be allowed to serve and get paid to go supper class in my opinion because they can't you usually do that if you are able to still perform

your normal duties you can't be getting paid extra to do go summer class when we have children that need those services speaking for kevin again i don't see that as even that should be nixed yesterday um the piece that you talk about for the equity and the you know data is good to look at you know as you were saying that in my mind i kept saying well what is the percentage

of kids that have that in their iep at morton versus the other schools because i guarantee you it's not the same no so we have systems in place that are not necessarily working in the same fashion we all three have three different schools yeah there's different kids but when you look at the whole you know it should be relative in some ways are people doing different things because

some person is you know the liaison does something different or whatever it is there's probably you could probably scratch the surface on that figure out that we might need some other uh you know pieces of that i keep looking at this sheet that when that my print is going out of ink but this one that we get for the whole school i think we need to take this one and throw it out

because the one that really matters at this point is the one that's very specific which yeah we're kind enough to you know the one that says what are we using for services for children under mental health needs so you got school adjustment counselors you got other people student support people whatever when you look at the matrix across the school but those pieces that's where you're able to find some of the equity

we have people on ieps for instance that i'm not sure if he's doing that here but the school adjustment council is the only one that would be on there for counseling to service an iep well we have 20 guidance counselors that also should be qualified to do some sort of services why can't they assist with these other folks so i might be a guidance counselor she might be an adjustment counselor that's

much more experienced with groups and heavy cases and i might be more experienced with something a little less of a need why can't i help with those things we have silos i think amongst the counseling staff they're called different things so when i looked at those numbers they were very telling you know look at durfee high school ten years ago we had two sacks there i said that yesterday on a tv show

now we have nine or ten we got ten guidance counselors we got two behavior therapists we got x amount of support people like the numbers are you know the credit of private school committees and they put the money there for the services but i don't know that we're getting the bang for our buck belong to all those you know that we want but i'm open i know i was passionate about

the counselors that the i just wanted the resources to get some services so if you as the people in the trenches feel like we can't hire 10 sacks but we'd like to hire these other positions that make more sense at lesser order i'm all game for that and i'll say it probably i i'm not stuck on it but for anybody to think that we don't need in this environment more certified people or counselors or

support staff to help these children there's it's not even a debate so whatever you're doing with it i think you're starting to get to the process of like somebody can hire or whoever if you just like kind of let us know an update on that the numbers should speak for themselves uh you know in a lot of cases so i do appreciate your your info on this uh we will keep having these meetings

quarterly at a minimum so that we can keep reporting out and anything that you need please come to us ahead of time so it doesn't have to get to the point of we're sitting on millions of dollars and we have to pull from the budget report to do it feel free to come forward and advocate for yeah we should spend this money and this is what we should do it on so anybody else on the

council piece mr roberts so it's always me with the counseling that's okay um can we get an idea of how many kids or how many hours of of sac services per school that we have because i think that might give us a better understanding of like what the need is you don't have that now i actually do oh wow i have some data so i had actually queried all of our

service delivery pages as a district had to break them down by school to figure out where the numbers were by school so i have the numbers by school um i can break it down to hours as well too because you have to think about some of them have consoles and under grade a and c so it's going to count look different and some of them are in the grids b as

well too which they push into the classroom i i don't have the hours i can get them i have the numbers per school for sac um services in each school i think that we could dr taylor and claudia could look at all that data analyze it and put something a one-pager together for the committee as to what the services look like and what the support is that we currently have and

what we're looking to add to it and then we brainstorm about what comes yeah absolutely yeah that'd be great okay can i ask about the um consultant slash person on retainer is there any update on that particular piece we've been doing a lot of outreach to uh folks out like at boston children's i've been calling all of the fellow directors in the massacre it's been a special education director's group unfortunately

very few of them have had consulting psychiatrists there has not been a ton of folks out there who are looking to do this we did speak with a couple individuals who said they just didn't have the capacity at this point but we are still pursuing it because we do think it is worthwhile i wrote it into that land for a reason because we do need a certain level of expertise whether it is for you know

whole school issues or individual-based students um but do think it's definitely needed so we are still pursuing it uh we just haven't had much interest in it unfortunately i think it's a valuable thing so i'd ask maybe offline we can get a meeting together to brainstorm sure and um come up with some ideas and and try to make that become a reality uh for our kids i think and i think

sarah would agree with this as well is that you have such a shortage like kids can't even get to see psychiatrists at this point yeah let's get dedication that um it's just it seems like there's less psychiatrists at this point than what they used to be i think we gotta when we meet i think we should look at it and say what are we doing for outreach to try to figure out what it is

because i think if we if we utilize both our resources and our our uh equity of knowledge amongst the table we can come up with a plan to get somebody in that's beneficial to them as well mrs reference comment on that so in the pediatrician in the pediatric world there's a program called mcpap so the mass child psychiatry access project and that is specific to pediatrician's offices but i'm wondering if there's an

educational like a similar system that's set up for education i think it might be worth looking i think a simple search exactly you know which is exactly you know but that's a quick search you know if it's programs similar to mcpap but in the educational program yeah no great all right so part two was the services a different program updates so we'll switch right over to that i think it's page two of

this correct yep so this is just kind of an overview of what the district uh looks like in terms of our sub-separate inclusion programs at the moment um i think one of the things i really want to highlight you know with the support of the committee last year of approving of the positions of the bcba cluster coordinators these folks have honestly made a huge impact they really are one raising the level of

support and oversight for our sub-separate programs at these schools and really you know creating growth for students we're seeing like really honestly better academic outcomes and less behavior for these these students um and they're really just i i'm so impressed with the folks we've awarded uh it did take probably until i want to say november of this year for us to get all of them filled

i'm not surprised at that but that is how long it took but they're all really diving right in into supporting all of their schools and programs and it's been impactful you've gotten some really great uh just individuals on board you know our two brand new folks at henry lord i'm thoroughly impressed with um they're doing a heck of a job overall you know we are facing some of the same staffing challenges on a day to

day for you know as we are with any other school as as i'm sure it's the gen ed is as well but our folks are doing the best they can i know i've had my supervisors out in classrooms covering as well uh to help meet the need along with our cluster quarter into the vcbas but kids you know are there are being serviced they're having qualified individuals in front of them if they're not we're actively searching

to make sure we're getting those folks in front of them and things are moving along we are currently looking at uh the makeup of our language base and our community-based programs we think we have a pretty wide range of student in terms of level of functioning in those programs so it's something we're taking a look at now to see if if it's something that needs to be adjusted just because we you know our teachers

are talented but sometimes we think that the range might be a little too wide we may need to look at creating something new that would also better meet student needs as well so there's one thing my team is looking at now we're just kind of diving into one ieps and past assessments for students and also seeing how they're currently performing to see if this is something like that we need to create and look at

and possibly propose for the 22-23 school year and like we said we just overall our main interest is to better meet student needs and support teachers throughout that process as well any questions

um the paraprofessionals in these classrooms are they identified specifically for those classrooms or are they being used throughout the building so i would have to imagine at this point in time some of them are being used to probably provide coverage at points however for the most part i think our schools have been pretty good about keeping them in the classroom to support students and keeping within the ratios

prescribed by the state as well so i can just tell you that i've heard from several parents that their children have been in classrooms that their child was supposed to have a one-to-one but that one-to-one is now being used as a paraprofessional in the classroom but because they're technically but they're not a ratio but in theory because you have x a number of students in the classroom they're they're using

that i've also heard from parents that those pairs are being um pulled out of the classroom for long periods of time and so when we go back to the needs of these kiddos right so if we're talking about kids with communication challenges and we're trying to make sure that there's some continuity and communication partners that's a concern because now we have you know slattery who's never worked with

you know little johnny before now in the classroom trying to understand this kid's communication pattern or understand what those kids triggers are because you know sponsor has been called to grade five so can we look at that can we have a certainly i also would really appreciate if we would direct those parents directly to the department and because and we do we do but i can't i can't say that

they'll follow through so i i'm just asking the question yep so i actually the first thing i do i don't direct them to anyone in administration i direct them directly back to their child's school um i ask them to go back to their child's teacher i ask them to go back to their child's principal and that if it's not resolved at that level then you bring it to the administration but sometimes

parents haven't done that and the role that i'm in the community makes for yeah oh no i understand i think you know our main thing is we always want to be alert of these things so we can address them as needed you know i'm sure there's instances of why this has occurred especially given our current circumstances but we want to make sure all kids have their supports the students are the first priority

without a doubt and our kids who you know have let's say a one-to-one in their iep it's for a reason right because they need that support on a daily basis in order to keep them safe in that classroom environment and making progress and that's not a current issue i just want to make that clear this is this is one example of something that parents have brought up um and we want

to make sure that kids are safe and i get that right now we are in a really tough situation and so there might be some we're going to pull a power from here because we can't leave this group of kids without right and i understand that and that's not okay for anybody but at the same time we can't have kids you know being left unsupervised or anything like that so i by no means yeah

and i and i think that you know kind of like the prime example of that we came last meeting we requested two pirates for the henry classrooms because they were of such high need they had uh folks out with a lot of consistency unfortunately um and we were made aware of that and you know we wanted to take action on it immediately but you know as soon as we do get word of this will certainly

address i you know looked up really problem-solving skills it's not a situation of you can't you know this is a bad thing you can't do this it's not how do we figure this out right how do we better support you to make sure everything is in place and needed uh so the kids are getting what they need and schools feel supported as well and your other staff in that class i would assume would feel more supported

if you have the same paraprofessionals in that room you know from my days working in residential care you always felt more comfortable if you had somebody in the room knowing that that person knew the kids you know knew the dynamics of that room so i'm just thinking especially with these groups of kids making sure that that continuity is there for them so you know what is the process in each

building to make sure that that's happening well it's it's it's very challenging to address student behavior if you don't have a relationship with that student you know that that honestly is usually a recipe for a absolutely oh it's an epic disaster and i think we all know that and can all agree to that so the more supports that we can put in place to make sure that our schools have what they need to

make sure that you know you have these two powers mostly consistent in classroom a instead of being pulled to go cover for a few hours in classroom b that makes a world of difference and can actually do a lot of preventative work again here we are right and so that's what we want to do because then our kids are going to be more successful yep proactive on all fronts i think that was the only question

what happens if and i know if a power is being pulled to go cover class that means there's no sub for the other class but when a parent if you have a paraprofessional in a classroom for like a any of these rooms here who is there so how do you request that is it uh if if on a typical day if somebody has to they usually if somebody

if you have a sub you call them a sub usually that's what you do sometimes there is sometimes there isn't sometimes they go with only one pair for the day sometimes the teacher and the other parent prefer not to have a sub in there because having uh someone that's unfamiliar with the kids sets off the class so a lot of times a lot of these classrooms have two pairs assigned to

them so if one pair is absent i mean i had three uh scl rooms at dawn uh three different grade levels and that usually the teacher would say no we're good the two of us are good we will tech team and do it we don't want someone because then it sets the class off so a lot of times that's what happens can they request a sub yes okay so is are

you doing it on the line front line where and where so the good thing about the majority of our classrooms too is that you know when we have two pairs already in a classroom sometimes three we're in compliance ratios if any one of them are out we also have two floaters assigned to green and silvia to help with absences cover lunches you know student support at times if needed specifically for

those programs because they only have one parent dedicated for each classroom but we put those in place just for for that specific reason over the last two years if you get a one-to-one that that is a different usually if you have a student that's assigned a one-to-one and that one that happens the one-to-one is out sick usually there's a back-up person that has you try to train someone up build that

relationship with that child so that if they're going to be out you know that that's the person you would pull and put in that classroom because that's the person that would have their relationship with that child it's very hard to just put a random person if they put it in front like they get to hire a full-fledged sub or is it a lower pay something they can they they can get a sub and we

assign them as a sub we assign them to the classroom yeah yeah because i think that would be helpful and not in all cases but some places have uh you know teacher assistant gets less money than the regular sub but if you have relationships as a school with people you'd be like no i have a teacher aid out but come in we're going to pay you full pay to be another you know hands on deck to

help us but they have the principals know they have the right to get a sub for those folks as well yeah they can get i mean obviously i will say that it's very very hard to get subs right now but yes you would call them sub we used to call in subs now they sign up

the only other request i would make is we were talking before about getting knowledge of things that we make decisions and then see what's good and bad or whatever mr lose talked about the cluster coordinate as being a good uh investment at the time maybe we could get a one page error in a couple weeks so what does that mean i for one i was a big proponent of that but i'm even confused a little bit

because the bcaa bcba in the cluster so i'm a little bit confused myself but i think for the whole committee knowing yeah we made an investment in these positions this is how we think it's working out it'll help us to in the future say well maybe we need another one of those we'll all know what they're doing and what the positives are definitely any other questions no sir anything else from anybody

this response anything yeah okay all right entertain a motion to adjourn motion second fall in favor all opposed so voted thank you very much have a great night everyone thank you